The Goodbye Summer

by Sarah Van Name

  “Come on, come on, come on,” he says, bouncing on his heels. “I have so much shit planned for tonight.”

  “I have to close first,” I say. I’m unreasonably irritated with him. It’s just because I’ve been on my feet all day, and he’s been doing nothing. Less than nothing. Fucking around on his phone, the charge cord getting in my way after 2:00 p.m. when it died from too many rounds of Lawnmower. Jake moans about mowing the lawn when it’s his turn every other month, but he can attack killer grass and evil bugs in Lawnmower all day, apparently.

  I breathe deep in, deep out because it’s not his fault that I had to work today. When I turn around from closing the cash register, he has the sweetest smile on his face, cocky yet vulnerable, as if he’s waiting for me to come to him.

  And I do. He opens his arms and legs, and I walk right in. When he closes his limbs around me, it’s like the sun on my face after a long winter. We stay like that for a few long moments before I pull away and say, “Okay, seriously, I have to close.”

  He says, “Okay, go fast.”

  I finish the closing checklist, leave it on Jenny’s desk, and turn off the lights and lock the doors. We walk across the atrium hand in hand. The air hits me in the face like a tsunami when we take the first step outside. It’s a stagnant slush of wet heat that fills my mouth and nostrils.

  I grew up around this heat. I’m used to the South and how it feels. When my cousins visited from California as kids, they’d always have to go inside from overheating. Their faces got red as hot peppers and their foreheads crinkled up in confusion, and I was left alone in the yard, no one else to play house with in the elaborate rooms we had carved into the mulch. I would yell for them to come back out and curse the weather for stealing them away.

  Sometimes, that heat can be a comfort. The second blanket your mother pulls over you when you’re sick, even though you’re already a little too warm—a feeling of heavy, soft security, like you’re safe because you can’t move.

  This is not that kind of heat. It is the same in touch and texture, but it feels ominous. Like when the sky gets that sickly yellow before a tornado. This sweltering warmth has that same low hum of prediction.

  It presses on us from all sides, and Jake is just holding my hand and combing his fingers through his hair and squint-smiling out into the parking lot. I wonder why he doesn’t sense it too and think of asking him. But no. When he hears abstract questions like that, he wants to dig really deep into them, analyze them. Or he laughs and rubs my neck and doesn’t respond. There’s no in between.

  He opens his truck door for me and offers a hand to help me in. The car smells like smoke and french fries and this low-key cologne he wears that I love. He put it on once as a joke at a department store, and I couldn’t keep my hands off him. The next day, he went back and spent his whole paycheck on every bottle they had in stock.

  He gets in on the other side and starts the engine, radio blaring to life in the middle of an ad for a research study on pregnant women. He presses the off button quickly and looks me right in the eyes with this big shy smile.

  “So where are we going?” I say, both pleased and unnerved by this sudden onset of earnestness.

  He leans over and kisses me. “Not gonna tell you ’til we get there,” he says as he pulls out of the parking space. When he reaches the edge of the aquarium lot, he turns left. Which is weird, because town is to the right. Left is a few sad shopping centers, a wide swath of run-down suburbs, a retirement community, and past that, nothing but fields and forest.

  We drive in silence for miles. Jake’s hand rests on my thigh, and he draws circles with his thumb. I rest one hand on top of his and the other out the window, the air slipping past my skin like water and that sticky heat collecting in sweat at the nape of my neck. The shopping centers pass. The suburbs pass. We have to pause at the light near the retirement community; there’s a bus stop on the side of the road. Five elderly folks, hunched and gray, are sitting in wheelchairs in the dirt near the bus sign, not talking to each other.

  After we’re ten minutes into the country, I ask Jake again where we’re going. He shushes me peacefully. Fidgety all day, but now that we’re in motion, he’s feeling good again. I glance at the speedometer; at eighty-five, the country roads are blasting by, but they’re all so much the same that I can’t tell the difference between fast and slow.

  “Where are we going?” I try again. Jake laughs.

  “Do you really want me to tell you? It’s gonna be such a great surprise.”

  “I guess not,” I say. My stomach flutters. I used to think I hated surprises, but that was only because my parents did them really poorly. Jake always pulls it off.

  “It’s gonna be worth it,” he says, looking over at me with that big smile and squeezing my shoulder. “I promise. It’s gonna be so good.”

  Ten minutes later, we pull off onto a skinny dirt road speckled with potholes. Grass grows in a long strip in the middle. The truck rattles and rumbles its way down the line for one, two, three, four minutes before the track opens into a clearing filled with tall grass and wildflowers. In the middle is a house.

  My mouth drops open. “Jake, what?”

  His smile gets even wider, and he wraps his arms around me, snuggles my shoulder against his chest. “You like it?”

  “This place is gorgeous. God.” A strong breeze blows away that sense of unease in the air. A butterfly alights on top of a tall, rotting stalk of sunflowers and flies away again. “Where are we?”

  “Joe’s cousin’s…” He rolls his eyes upward. “…cousin’s cabin. Chick named Janice. Yeah, that’s it. So like a third cousin or whatever.”

  “Does Joe’s cousin’s cousin know we’re here?”

  He smirks. “Joe knows. I think the first cousin knows. Don’t know about the girl who actually owns the place, but hey, we’re not gonna mess it up. It’s just for tonight. Have to get you back before curfew, unfortunately.”

  House, I should say, is a generous word for the structure in front of us. Shack would be a little mean, but not incorrect. Cabin is probably most accurate. As we exit the truck, I can see some small gaps in between the planks, windows that look like they either stay open or closed but don’t give you the option to choose which. The roof slopes into a small overhang, but there’s no porch, just lush green vines and weeds growing right up to the walls. The door is orange, once bright, now chipped and fading to the color of an overripe peach. Even though it’s run-down, it really is beautiful—like something enchanted out of an old children’s book.

  “Can we go in?” I say, still overwhelmed by the fact that this place exists—just forty minutes from home—and we’re here. I thought the suburbs went on forever.

  “Yeah, yeah, absolutely,” Jake says, hurrying toward the front door. He pulls me lightly by the hand as I jog behind him. “Joe said the key would be…” He pulls out his phone and scrolls through some texts. “In the birdhouse.”

  He cranes his neck to look around, and I point down the right side of the cabin, where a battered wooden structure painted the same orange as the door is hanging from the overhang by a piece of twine. He reaches up to shake the birdhouse on its side—thankfully, it appears that no bird has lived there for some time—and out falls a tiny brass key. It looks like something you’d use to open a chest of drawers from the nineteenth century.

  He holds it up as if he’s found a treasure, grinning big and goofy, and unlocks the door. It creaks as he pushes it open for me. I step inside.

  The place is dark and the air is stagnant, swirling with flights of dust, but everything seems otherwise clean. Two doors rest in the wall opposite us, both slightly open, revealing a bathroom and a closet. A futon and a few armchairs sit on one side of the cabin flanking a large wood fireplace. On the other side are a sink and a ring of countertops and cabinets. A camp stove is curled like a cat in the corner, and two large co
olers sweat beside it.

  “So this place has…”

  “Everything we need for the evening,” Jake says, putting his hands on his hips in satisfaction.

  “I mean, in terms of water, heat, air conditioning?”

  “Water, yes, definitely. AC, unfortunately no. They use the fireplace for heat, but we won’t be needing that today, will we?” He flips a light switch that is literally covered by a spider web. It does nothing. “I think there was electricity at some point, but it appears that it is no longer connected. Just means we’ll use candles! Very romantic.”

  “And!” He squeezes me around the waist and then strides a few steps over to the coolers. He stands next to them like a game show presenter offering the grand prize. “Open it.”

  “These are yours?” I ask as I come over.

  “The coolers are mine; what’s in them is for you. Well, for us.” He beams as I lift the lid of the top cooler. Inside, nestled among bags of ice, is a preposterous amount of food and drink. Crisp lettuce, bright red strawberries, pasta salad, avocados, beer, lemonade. All my favorites. A veritable summer feast.

  “Jake, look at all this!” I exclaim, shocked. Jake’s the hot dog guy. He has never cooked anything more than pasta with me. I didn’t even know he knew I liked avocados.

  “So, you like it?” he says, almost shyly. And I realize this is the first time in a long time, maybe ever, that he’s taken a risk on making me happy. Usually we’re safe in our routine.

  “I love it,” I say, and I pull him close to kiss him.

  The food rests patiently in its icy nest while we have sex on the floor. There’s an old, green rug that somebody’s white dog used to lie on. I see the hairs in minute detail when I turn my head to the left. My back scrapes against the fibers and I wrap my legs around him, and there is no one in the world to hear us, and the crickets are getting loud, and it feels better than sex ever has before, full and hot and complete. I haven’t felt this good about sex since we first started having it.

  Afterward, I curl up in an armchair wearing a sundress I found in Jake’s car. It’s my skimpiest, left there by accident after I changed back into aquarium clothes one night he drove me home. He chops up vegetables for a salad and heats up the chicken on the camp stove and doesn’t even ask me to help. I turn on the playlist my mom made me at the beginning of junior year, songs, she said, that every sixteen-year-old girl ought to know. A lot of old stuff.

  Dinner is ridiculously good. I ask him if he practiced on the chicken, and he looks down and smiles and says, “Yeah, it took a few nights, and a lot of meat went in the trash.”

  I tell him it was worth it. My phone croons Frank Sinatra and the air in the cabin turns blue as the light slowly dies outside.

  Jake lights the candles with his little silver lighter, and suddenly everything is gold. It is magic: as if fireflies came in and fell asleep still all lit up. I put my plate on the floor and snuggle against him. I am full and contented. I do a quick time calculation in my head—the sun just set, so it’s no later than nine, we have time—and relax into his chest. His hand glides up and down my arm and across my chest, lingers on my breasts, continues down and around and around.

  “So,” he says after a few minutes of silence, “I have something to tell you.”

  “Oh?” I twist up to look at him, but from this angle, his head is distorted, eyes hidden behind solid cheekbones. I can see the stubble growing in under his chin. He must have shaved this morning.

  “Yeah.” His chest rises and falls in a deep breath underneath me. “I think I’ve told you how my dad has been living in Florida for a little while, with LeeAnn.”

  “Sure.” LeeAnn is Jake’s dad’s former mistress, now long-term girlfriend. Their relationship status changed eight years ago, when Jake was ten, the night his mom packed her husband’s clothes in three duffel bags and told him to send her an address for divorce papers. “Orlando, right? But you’ve never actually visited.”

  “Right, yeah. I was gonna go down there this spring, but it’s a really long drive and I didn’t have the gas money, and my mom, of course, wouldn’t lend it to me and it just…” His hand pauses in its journey down my arm, then continues. “I never got to it. But that’s no big deal now, because he’s moving. Moved, actually, a couple weeks ago.”

  “Anywhere close to here?” That sick sensation is starting to creep its way back into my stomach, through the humid darkening air and underneath my dress. I don’t know why. Something about his tone, the measured movement of his thumb on my skin.

  “Well, it’s, uh…” He wiggles his arm around my neck to scratch his chin. “Kentucky. Out in the country. LeeAnn’s family had a goat farm out there, and apparently it used to be a lot of fun. There’s this big old house they’re gonna fix up. And a barn. Huge barn. The kind with a loft up top and a window that looks out over all the fields and everything. Small town close by, supposed to be real cute.”

  The sickness deepens. I am on the edge of knowing why, but I can’t quite reach the reason. My breathing gets shallower. I wait.

  “And, well, we’re only a month and a half away from leaving, and I know we’ve talked about going a lot of different places, but we haven’t made a decision yet. I’m just thinking about how hard it would be to live out on our own. Of course, we’ll do that someday,” he adds quickly. “But I think right now, it might be good to, you know, be somewhere that can support us a little more.”

  There is a long, long silence as the words sink in. I am waiting for him to continue before I realize that he’s going to make me draw the inevitable conclusion myself.

  “So you’re saying we should go live with your dad and LeeAnn,” I finally respond. A part of me is startled at how normal my voice sounds. The rest of me feels flat and red.

  “Well…yeah.” He clears his throat, scratches his chin again. I adjust against his chest in a way that makes it more uncomfortable, but I don’t want to move again. I can hear his heartbeat thumping against my ear, fast and erratic. I swear his skin moves up and down in tiny beats. Ten seconds pass, twenty, thirty. “What do you think?” he asks at last.

  I guess that’s the question.

  I don’t know. I know that in all my wild imaginings, I never thought of us living in a field, far away from a city. I know that I have no desire to be anywhere with old ladies who will refuse to sell us condoms at the Walmart because we’re not married.

  I know that I always imagined us alone. The two of us and the truck and the stars. The infinite possibilities of every new day. Not LeeAnn and Patrick, checking on us in the morning, guilting us into helping with the chores, eating dinner with us at night. Not that.

  I know Jake is in love with me, and I know he wants to leave this place with me. I don’t know why he wants to go somewhere that sounds like it would become even more of a trap.

  And I don’t know how to say any of that, or at least how to say it well. So instead, I say, “Have you talked to your dad about it?”

  “Well,” Jake says, clearing his throat again, shifting underneath me. “He called me a few days ago, to let me know that he’d moved. And I kind of mentioned it.” I am silent, so he continues. “I didn’t want to tell him about all our plans because I know that’s kinda between me and you. But I mentioned us visiting, maybe for a while.”

  “So it would only be for a while.”

  “Yeah, yeah, definitely, not a permanent thing.” His voice quickens like he’s excited, but there’s no reason for him to be. No reason at all.

  “How long is a while?”

  He sighs. “Oh, I don’t know, Caroline, maybe a month or two, maybe—”

  “And we’d stay in Kentucky after we left? Near the farm?”

  “Well, assuming we got jobs, we could move out, get a place of our own—”

  “Jake,” I interrupt, almost without meaning to. I twist as I sit up too fas
t and tweak my back. “Stop.”

  This is the beginning of a longer sentence, one where I tell him there’s no part of me that wants to be in the rural South, no part that wants to live with a man who cheated and is therefore not to be trusted, no part that wants to be in debt to another set of parents. It’s an introduction to the word insulted, as in: I am insulted that you would think this is good enough for me.

  But instead, I catch his eye, and the look he gives me is so painfully earnest that the words about to come out of my mouth, messy and angry, stick in my cheeks and under my tongue, and I am quiet. All that comes out is a sigh.

  The way his face drops at that, how those heartfelt eyes turn down and his hands fall away from me—I’m glad I didn’t say anything, because he looks so terribly sad. The anger is still resting in that sick cramping place in my stomach, but I’m thinking now I won’t ever have to release it, that it will just bubble away in my sleep, because he understood what I was thinking.

  “You don’t want to do it,” he says.

  “No,” I say back. Quietly.

  He drops his head. I disentangle my body from his, push away to the other side of the couch so we’re facing each other. He doesn’t try to stop me. It’s dark now, and from a little farther away, his expression is unreadable. The light of the candle dances onto his skin and off it. He’s lit orange for a moment; he is devastated. The light’s gone, back; he’s pissed. Gone again, back again; he’s at peace.

  It feels as if we’re sitting like that for a long time. Holding the weight between us like a wool blanket we’re waiting to fold in half, but neither of us wants to be the one to step forward and kneel, gather the folded crease. The crickets and frogs whisper and gossip, and some howling thing cries out in the distance. We are utterly alone together.

  Finally Jake tilts his head up and says, “Will you think about it?”

  I can pretty much guarantee that it’s all I’ll think about for the foreseeable future, and I won’t change my mind. But I say yes. Of the two words available to me in this moment, it’s the one I know how to deal with most easily. How do you say no to a question like that?