That Summer (9 page)

“Nothing wrong with that,” my father said firmly, as if someone had said there was. “Working is the best learning you can do, sometimes.”

“And that’s the truth,” Tony Trezzora added.

“Well, I should get going,” Sumner said. “My next shift starts in about fifteen minutes.”

“Here?” I asked.

“Oh, no, at my other job,” he said. “One of my other ones.”

“Now that’s a work ethic,” my father said. “Take care, Sumner.”

“Good to see you again, Mr. McPhail.” He turned to me as my father sat back down to his now-cold food. Tony Trezzora made his excuses and disappeared to the bar, probably in search of another audience. Sumner said, “It’s really good to see you again, Haven. Tell Ashley ... well, if it comes up, tell her I asked about her. And congratulations. On the wedding.”

“I’ll tell her,” I said. “I know she’d want to see you.” I didn’t know this, but it seemed like the right thing to say.

He grinned. “Well, maybe not. But pass it on anyhow. Take care of yourself. Remember what I told you.” He raised his eyebrows at the six-toed waitress as she swept past again, long blond hair shimmering. “See ya.”

“’Bye, Sumner.” I watched him walk towards the front of the restaurant and then out the door, onto the street. I thought about Virginia Beach and the ride in the back of the Volkswagen under the stars, so many summers ago. As I sat back down with my father I could have sworn I heard the soft putter of the VW, the theme music, curving above the noise and mingled voices of the restaurant, just as I’d last heard it outside my window on that night, long ago.

 

In the car on the way home I looked over at my father, his new hair fluttering in the breeze, and said, “Wasn’t it great to see Sumner again?”

“You know, I’m not sure I remember which one Sumner was. Was he the football player?”

“Daddy.” I looked at him. “I can’t believe you don’t remember him. You really liked him.”

“Oh, honey, I liked them all. I had to.” He laughed, taking the turn into our neighborhood just fast enough to squeal the tires a little bit. My mother said his personalized license plate should not read MAC, as it did, but MIDLIFE CRISIS. I tried to tell her that was too many letters, you could only have eight, but she said that wasn’t the point. He added, “They all run together in my head now. There were too damn many of them.”

“Sumner was different,” I said. “He went to Virginia Beach with us, remember? When you did that golf tournament and we stayed in that nice hotel?”

He squinted, as if it took great effort to reach so far back. Then he said, quickly, “Oh yeah. I remember that. He was a nice kid.”

And that was all my father, with his selective grasp of the past, chose to remember. He was skittish whenever I brought up the past, our vacations, family events. He was eager to start over—brand-new wife, brand-new house, brand-new memories, the old carelessly tucked away.

We pulled into the driveway, right beside Lewis’s Chevette, which was parked with the motor off and he and Ashley still in it. As we slid up beside them Ashley looked over, with a scowl that told me they were fighting and not to get involved. Unfortunately, my father is not skilled in reading my sister’s expressions: he was waving at her. She just looked at him; Lewis slumped beside her.

“They’re fighting,” I explained. “Thanks for dinner.”

My father sighed and put his car into reverse. “See you next week.” He kissed my cheek when I leaned over. I waited a beat for what I knew came next. “Need any money?”

“No, I’m fine.” I never took it, even when I did need it. Ashley always said she just couldn’t take any even though it had been a hard month and her credit card was due ... well, okay, just this once. She had it down to an art. I would have felt strange taking my father’s pocket money, a twenty slipped here or there to make up for his day-to-day absence. Besides, I had my four twenty-five an hour at Little Feet, no big deal but enough to get me by. It would have been nice to have an extra bit, but whenever I felt tempted I thought of my mother’s face and said no. The tether, stretching beyond my mother and out of the house, was always attached and I was ever mindful of where my obligations lay.

I stood in the driveway as my father pulled away hitting the horn twice, that happy beep-beep! as he turned out of sight. I started up the walk towards the door, Ashley’s voice now audible without the rumbling of my father’s car.

“Lewis, that’s not the point. The point is that you didn’t do anything to stop it.” I recognized the tone, the clipped ends of each word, like speaking right into a wall. “I just didn’t think you’d ever act that way. I assumed you’d defend me.”

“Honey, I don’t think it was as bad as you’re making it out to be. They were only giving their opinion. They didn’t mean it to be some kind of attack.”

“Well, Lewis, if you can’t even see why it was so upsetting to me, then I guess I can’t expect you to understand why it bothers me that you didn’t take the action that I thought, as my fiance, you would take.”

A silence, with just the cicadas chirping and the TV from our next-door neighbors, the Bensons, playing the theme song from “Bewitched.” I kept walking until I was out of sight on the porch, then took off my shoes and sat on the steps.

“Well,” Ashley said with the sort of finality she used whenever we fought and she was getting ready to stalk out of the room, “I guess we just can’t discuss this anymore. This is a side of you I didn’t know before tonight, Lewis.”

“Ashley, for God’s sake.” I sat up. “I understand you weren’t in the mood for their input, but they’re my family, flawed or not, and I’m not going to sit here and trash them to make you feel better. I’m just not.” It sounded like Lewis was growing a spine, finally, right there in the Chevette.

I expected lightning to flash, stars to fall from the sky, the earth to shake and rumble at its core, but instead I heard only the slam of the car door and Ashley saying, “Then there is nothing left to discuss. I don’t want to be with you right now, Lewis. I don’t know when, actually, I’ll want to be with you again.”

“Ashley.” And there it was, just as she was coming up the walk, the plaintive whine: Lewis lost his new bravado and returned to his old self. But it was too late. Ashley was In A Mood and he’d have to ride it out, like it or not, like the rest of us always did.

She came stomping up the steps, saw me, and stopped just long enough to shoot me a look. She was wearing the holy dress, and in the porch light she seemed to be almost glowing. She kicked her shoes to the far end of the porch and climbed into the swing, making quite a racket as the chains clanked before settling into a nice, smooth to and fro. Lewis was still out in the driveway, waiting in the car.

“What happened?” I asked after a few solid minutes of her heavy sighs overlaying the occasional yap of the Weavers’ dog from across the street, a fat little sausage of a dog that had a bark like a duck. There was something wrong with it, some kind of vocal problem. My father had called it Duckdog, upsetting Mrs. Weaver, who liked to dress it in sweaters, galoshes when it rained.

Ashley leaned further back in the swing and waited awhile before answering, like she wasn’t sure it was worth the trouble. “They hate me,” she said simply. “They all ganged up on me when we started talking about the caterer and they all hate me.”

The Chevette started up now, softly, and I wondered if Lewis was actually going to leave. I’d imagined him sitting all night in the driveway, sleeping upright rather than leaving angry. But there he was, pulling into the street with one last long pause in front of the house before driving off.

“I’m sure they don’t hate you,” I said, sounding just like my mother, who was too busy dancing with middle-aged men at the Holiday Inn to be here for this latest crisis.

“All I said was that I hadn’t felt like arguing with the caterer about salmon. If it was going to be that much trouble, we’d have chicken. I mean, by this point I have to pick my battles, right? But with just the mention of the salmon issue the whole table looks at me and Mrs. Warsher says, ‘If you wanted salmon, you should have pursued it. The caterer is working for you, not the other way around.”’ Her voice was high and nasal, spiteful. She still had it in her.

“You fought with his family about salmon?” Now that I knew the core of the dispute was fish, it seemed less exciting. I’d expected something major, something involving sex or religion at least.

“Oh, not just salmon. Lewis decided to tell them about Carol, too. Oh, and the invitations and how the typesetter forgot to put the date the first time around. And that’s not even counting what he said about Daddy.”

“Daddy. What about him?”

“Well, they asked”—she waved her hand around in summary as if it would take too long to explain—“about the family and all, and Lewis tells them about the divorce, which is fine, but then he has to go into the whole Lorna thing, and the TV station thing and how she’s a weathergirl and Dad’s a sportscaster and on and on and on. It was just too much.”

“Well, Ash, it is the truth,” I said. “Embarrassing or not.”

“But he made it sound so awful. I mean, there’s Lewis’s whole family all grouped around the table like the Waltons and he’s telling them about Daddy and Lorna and I can only imagine what they’d think if they knew Mom was out dancing with Lydia Catrell. I mean, these people go to church, Haven.”

“So? It doesn’t make them better than you.”

She sighed, blowing hot air through her bangs. “You don’t understand. You don’t have anyone you have to impress now. It’s different when you’re older. What your family does reflects on you a lot more, especially when it’s as twisted as ours is.”

“A lot of people get divorced, Ash,” I said. “It’s not just us.”

She climbed out of the swing, leaving it to rock empty behind her. She leaned far over the edge of the rail and balanced her weight on her palms while the holy dress, translucent, blew around her legs. Her hair hung down over her face, hiding her mouth as she said, “I know, Haven. But no one else has our parents.”

A car blew by on the street, radio blasting; a cigarette hit the pavement with a shower of sparks. Then it was quiet again, except for Duckdog’s barking.

“I saw Sumner tonight,” I said quietly.

“Who?” She was still leaning over, her feet dangling.

“Sumner.”

“Sumner Lee?”

“Yeah.”

A pause; then she righted herself and brushed her hair back. “Really. What’d he say?”

“We just caught up for a while. He asked about you.”

“Did he.” Her voice was flat. “Well. That’s nice.”

“He’s working over at Vengo,” I went on. “And some other job, too.”

“What’s he doing back in town? I thought he was in college.”

“He’s thinking about taking some time off.”

“Dropping out?” she said.

“No.” I spoke slowly. “Just time off. And anyway he hasn’t decided yet.” I was beginning to regret I’d even mentioned it. Ashley had a way of taking anything good and ruining it.

“Well, that sounds like Sumner,” she said dismissively. “He never was very ambitious.”

“He told me to congratulate you,” I answered, suddenly wanting to keep talking. She didn’t have to be so nasty. “He wishes you the best.”

“That’s nice.” She was bored with it already. She walked to the door, reaching for the knob. “If Lewis calls, tell him I’m sleeping. I don’t feel like talking to anyone right now.”

“Ashley.”

She turned, having already opened the door. “What?”

“He was really happy for you.” She had that look on her face, like I was wasting her time so late at night. “I thought ... I thought you’d have more of a reaction.”

She shook her head, moving inside. “Haven, I’m getting married in less than a month. I don’t have time to think about old boyfriends. I don’t even have time to think about myself.”

“I was happy to see him,” I said.

“You didn’t know him the way I did.” She rubbed one foot with the other, that classic Ashley gesture. “Just tell Lewis I’m asleep, okay?”

“Okay.”

I’d let it go now, just like I’d learned to let all things go that brought out that tired voice and impatient gesture in my sister. Being in her good graces was still important to me. I sat out on the porch for a long time, not sure what I was waiting for. Not for the Town Car, which didn’t come home with my mother tucked safely inside until much later, when I was in bed half-asleep, making myself stay lucid until I heard her key in the lock. Not for Lewis’s call, which came and I let ring, on and on, long after Ashley had pretended to be sleeping or was asleep. There was time for waiting, even if I wasn’t sure what to wait for. It was still summer, at least for a while.

Chapter Six

There were two homecomings in the first week of August for our neighborhood. One was little, not mattering much to anyone but me. And one was big news.