The Goodbye Summer

by Sarah Van Name

  “I mean,” she continues, “I figured you were planning something with him. You always get so secretive when you’re talking about the future. But I thought it was going to be, like, a courthouse wedding, or moving in with him. I didn’t think you were actually going to leave town.”

  I don’t know what I expected, but it wasn’t this.

  “I guess it’s good that he came up with a plan that is so, you know, upsetting, because it’ll make it way easier to just forget about—”

  “Wait, no, Georgia, I’m still going.”

  Georgia stops mid-sentence. “What?”

  “What…wait, what do you mean?” I say, caught off guard.

  “He wants to move to the middle of nowhere, this has made you feel sick all weekend, you haven’t eaten, you haven’t slept, so obviously the only rational answer is that you’re not going with him.”

  “Well,” I stammer, “I mean, you know, it’s not all settled yet. He wanted me to think about it, but I still want to go with him, just…not there.”

  Georgia stares at me. I am beginning to feel very uncomfortable.

  “So you’re going to convince him to go somewhere else with you.”

  “I…yeah, I guess so.”

  “Even though he undoubtedly has all kinds of psychological issues from his dad leaving his mom for some slut, and this is the first chance he’s had since he was a little kid to spend time with his father. You’re just going to convince him to…do something else? Because he loves you more than his dad.”

  “It’s not a matter of—it’s not about loving me more—he doesn’t have issues. Of course you’d be upset if your dad left—”

  “Yeah, I fucking would. And I’d want to go live with him on a farm, like a real man, and I’d want to drag my hot little girlfriend along with me, but that doesn’t mean it’s the best choice for you, Caroline. You have to think about you.”

  I stare at her, but she’s staring back, expectant. Like she’s daring me to argue. Hot little girlfriend?

  “I, um…” I start and stop. “So you’re not mad about me leaving with him, generally. You just don’t think I should go with him to Kentucky?”

  She props her head in one hand, the other hand poking at the tines of her fork. “I mean, listen. I don’t think it would be smart to run away with him or whatever. For one thing, it would be unbelievably hurtful to your parents, who are great. But more importantly, I think even if you guys stayed together, you would be, you know, who the fuck knows where, with no high school degree, no chance of going to college—”

  “Jake didn’t go to college.”

  “Jake works in a grocery store. Does he want to do that forever? And he could still go to college because he’d only be one or two years late to start, and there’s a decent state school right here. But he won’t because he has no aspirations.”

  “That’s not fair. You can have aspirations without going to college.”

  “Okay, sure, whatever, he has aspirations I’m not aware of.” She presses the tines of the fork into her arm, making tiny white dots in her tan that disappear when she pulls the fork away. “So yeah, no, I think it’d be stupid to run away with him. And I think it would be even more stupid to run away to a farm in Kentucky where not only would you be basically trapped were your relationship to fail, but where you probably wouldn’t even have the freedom of getting a job to fill your days. I mean, you don’t own your own car.

  “But mostly, Caroline?”

  She puts the fork down and places both her hands outstretched on the table, reaching out to me. She looks right at me, and I try to look her in the eyes, but I can’t. I focus on the bridge of her nose, the soft pale place where her sunglasses have interrupted her tan.

  “Mostly, it doesn’t matter what I think. It matters what you think. And the idea of doing this has seriously fucked you up. I don’t know whether it’s this whole Kentucky deal specifically or whether it’s been building up for a while, but it’s made you sick, literally. I mean, you look awful, no offense. Anything that made me feel that bad… It’s like the definition of listening to your gut. You shouldn’t do it.”

  I feel like I’m going to cry. I didn’t expect to ever hear anyone else talk about my plans with Jake, much less in this way—so negatively. She’s speaking aloud so many things I have thought myself, and more I haven’t thought about at all. I want to defend myself, but I have no idea what to say. There is nothing to say. I love him completely is the only defense, and for her, I don’t think it would be enough.

  I do start crying, but it’s like even my tear ducts are tired. They can’t produce the same force or volume I have demanded of them this weekend, so it’s just pathetic little rivulets. I don’t put my hands in Georgia’s. I pull twenty dollars out of my purse and put it on the table.

  “I want to go home now,” I say, and my voice is very small. There’s a long pause. Georgia pulls her hands back into her lap.

  “Okay,” she says, and she leaves my money on the table and goes up to the register and pays for the meal. We go to her car, and all the way home we don’t say anything at all.

  The next few days pass in a fog, slowly and quickly at the same time. I eat lunch in Jenny’s office and watch TV with her. I go home to my parents and eat Mom’s rice-chicken-vegetable meals. She and Dad say they’re happy to have me home when I’d usually be at Jake’s, and they ask me if everything’s okay. I tell them it is. I can tell they don’t believe me, but they don’t press it. We do puzzles and watch television together after supper.

  I avoid talking to Jake, which is hard, and to Georgia, which is easy, because she’s still mad. When Jake texts, I don’t respond. When he calls, I lie and tell him I’m sick. I don’t think he believes me, but I don’t have the energy to say anything else, and neither of us wants to have this conversation over the phone. I leave work fifteen minutes early every day, hopping in the car as soon as my dad pulls up, so Jake can’t surprise me after his shift. On Wednesday, he comes in looking for me, and I see him before he sees me. I hide in Jenny’s office, and she covers for me, tells him I’m home with a cold.

  On Thursday, I spend my lunch break in the aquarium’s jellyfish room. I sit in a corner between the glass and the wall to the next room. When I lean my head against the glass and squint my eyes, it feels almost as if I’m inside the tank. For an hour, while my phone lights up with Jake’s texts, I watch the jellies propel themselves through the water. The skinny threads inside their translucent bodies pulse and shimmer. They move with no purpose and no destination. When I go back to the store, it’s like waking up from a fever dream.

  By Friday, the fog has cleared enough that I know I have to do something. I have also returned to myself enough to feel the slightest bit guilty that I have taken up Jenny’s food and space this entire week without giving her anything in return. I’m not sure if she wants to talk to me, but I should at least try to get to know her. That afternoon, sitting in her office and eating a salad—having finally gotten my shit together enough to remember the food my mom packs for me—I look at her eating her sandwich and wonder what to say.

  She glances away from the laptop. “What?” she says. “Stop looking at me. It’s creepy.”

  “Sorry,” I say.

  We eat in silence until the next commercial break.

  “Why were you so upset after the Fourth of July weekend?” I ask. Immediately, I regret it. I could have asked her so many more innocuous questions. What her favorite TV show is, how long she’s been working here, whether she has any hobbies. But this was the first thing that came to mind.

  She rolls her eyes. “Seriously?” she asks. I shrug. “I was mad because I had to work while all my best friends went to the beach, like we do every year for the past eight years. Because you”—she points a carrot stick at me—“had to have the weekend off, I missed my annual vacation.”

  I shrink
into my seat. “Sorry,” I say again. There are a few minutes of silence in which I try to figure out a way to make this better, just in case I have to eat lunch in her office every day for the rest of the summer.

  “I don’t know if this makes it better,” I say tentatively, “but my mom made me take the time off. We have a big family party. But it always really sucks.” I remember the light of the sparklers and the warmth in my belly, Georgia’s hair frizzy and wild against the night sky, and I feel the slippery, sinking guilt of our fight alongside the lesser and lighter guilt of this lie. But I plow ahead. “My boyfriend and his friends went to the beach too. That’s what I wanted to do.”

  She raises her eyebrows.

  “So we both missed our beach trips,” I conclude weakly.

  “Well, you missed a weekend with your boyfriend who you see every day. I missed a reunion with my four closest friends from college who I see once a year. But sure, we both had equally shitty weekends.” She sighs and seems to deflate slightly. I am pretty sure at this point I’ve ruined any chance of a good relationship with my boss, but then she starts talking again.

  “No, it’s fine. It really is. I’ve been mad at you for taking off that weekend since you started here. But it turns out where my friends were, it rained the whole time, and Brittany got food poisoning, and Allison couldn’t drink because she’s still breastfeeding her son. Apparently it was the worst Fourth ever. And anyway, it would’ve been sort of weird and shitty to hear about everything happening in their lives while I’m still stuck working here.”

  “Is that bad?” I ask, feeling foolish yet again, but not knowing the answer to the question.

  “Yes. No,” she says, more uncertain than I’m used to seeing her. Then, she amends, “Well, it’s bad, but it’s unavoidable.”

  I look at her, not sure about the right question to ask. She exhales heavily.

  “After college,” she explains, “I moved to Atlanta with these same friends. I worked as an accountant for this big law firm for a while. Then my mom got sick. My dad passed away a long time ago, and between me and my brother, one of us had to come back here. It ended up being me.” She says it simply, without malice or sadness. “The doctors said she had six months. After a few months of me hanging around all day, she told me to get a job. Something I could leave in the middle of the day if she really needed me, something I could quit easily after she died, so I could get back to my life. But that was two years ago. She’s not better, but she’s not worse either.” She shrugs. “So I’m still here. Lucky in some ways. Unlucky in others.”

  Silence hangs between us for a minute, not wholly uncomfortable.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “I’m really sorry.”

  “It is what it is,” she says. “I look forward to the beach because it’s the one time I get away from…” She waves her hands abstractly. “All of this. But because I stayed this year, we saved money on a nurse for my mom. And besides, next year, I’ll definitely force whatever poor shmuck is in your position to work that weekend, so I only missed the one.”

  She casts a sideways glance at me. “I did eat your chocolate bar, though,” she says.

  “I knew it,” I say under my breath.

  She laughs, and I laugh, and the characters in the TV show start laughing at some silly joke, and for a moment the tiny office seems like a bright little haven.

  Twenty minutes later, as I’m going back to work, she stops me on the way out the door.

  “Look,” she says. “I don’t know what’s going on in your life, and you don’t have to tell me because I told you about my mom. But I’m pretty sure there’s no excuse to be moping around like you’ve been. Tomorrow, you eat lunch with your friends.”

  “They’re not really my—”

  “Bullshit,” she cuts me off smoothly. “Go spend the hour with them. I like you just fine, but if you try to come in here, I’ll lock the door on you.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “And say a goddamn hello to the customers. Ask them if you can help with anything. I’m pretty sure your sad face has been scaring them off this week. We understand each other?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Great. Get outta here.”

  As I turn the sign in the window back to OPEN and remove the cutesy clock (“Back under the sea at 2:00!”), her door slams behind me, and my phone buzzes in my pocket. It’s Jake: can I see you, pls? I really wanna talk.

  Jenny is right. It’s time. That sounds good, I type back. Pick me up at 6?

  He responds instantly. for sure, he says. I missed you.

  The rest of the day is easier than any single hour of the past week. I’ve made my choice. I am calm. I feel a flicker of panic when I see Georgia crossing the atrium alone, carrying some papers to the office from the activity room. She usually drops by the store to talk when she’s on these errands, to procrastinate a little before facing Jamal’s unsmiling face. But today, like all week, she doesn’t even turn my way.

  It is easier this way—better. We’ll make up soon. Or we won’t. But it doesn’t matter much either way, because I’ll be gone in a little over a month.

  Maybe the sickness came from doubting myself. We’ve planned for so many weeks that it’s not a choice at all at this point. I made the promise a long time ago.

  Jake is nervous when he picks me up. I can tell by the way he rubs the back of his hand on the stubble on his chin, how he plucks at his shirt. But he’s trying to be normal. He says some stuff about his day, and it sounds forced, but it’s better than silence. I missed hearing his voice. The scratch in it. When I put my hand on his leg, it’s such an enormous relief to feel the warmth of his body that I have to resist the urge to kiss him right there, while he’s driving.

  He asks me about my day and doesn’t even mention that we haven’t talked all week, so I tell him about today, with some editing. A woman came in with the chubbiest baby I’ve ever seen, and I tell him about that. He laughs and automatically, a joke about our future baby comes up from my throat. I swallow it. I don’t want to ruin the moment, unnatural though it is.

  He takes me to his house. None of his roommates are there, but we still go out to the porch. That’s when we stop talking.

  He lights a cigarette, fumbles with the lighter. Everything seems loud in the absence of his voice. The click of the flame, his even inward breath on the cigarette, the shush of my legs uncrossing and re-crossing while I wait. As one minute passes, then two, then three, and he lights another cigarette, I realize I will have to be the first to speak.

  “I…” My voice cracks and I clear my throat. “I want to go to Kentucky with you.”

  He turns toward me, and that moment, the moment when our eyes connect, is the happiest I’ve ever seen him. I think it’s the happiest I’ve ever seen anyone.

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “Oh, my God, Caroline, oh my God, I don’t…shit, really?”

  “Really,” I say, and I start laughing, because he is so happy. He puts his head in his hands, and then he turns his whole body toward me to give me a huge messy hug across our chairs, and he is grabbing at me, so I climb over to him and sit in his lap and kiss him for a good long time.

  When we pull back, I say, “Just, I want to make sure…” Fear comes into his eyes, and I quickly continue. “You know, that this is temporary. While we get on our feet. We can still live somewhere else later. Move around. After a few months or something. Right?”

  He relaxes and laughs. “Absolutely. After a few months, whenever. Whatever works.” He takes my face in his hands and says to me, “We are going to have such an amazing life together.”

  I lean back in to kiss him and let those words sit where they fell on the sweat-dampened skin of my chest, willing them to stay there forever like a tattoo, trying, so hard, to believe him.

  Chapter 13

 
Summer days feel so long. The heat is waiting for me when I walk out the door with my dad in the morning, and it’s there at night when I come home. The sunlight is there too, even and white until it finally fades to orange and falls into darkness when I’m not looking.

  You would think with the days so long, the nights would feel shorter. But they have a weight and depth to them that isn’t there the rest of the year. So hot and humid that when I open my window, the room doesn’t get cooler. It just equals out to the rest of the world: a warm, wet blue.

  The city finally fixed the streetlights in my neighborhood. I had gotten used to sleeping in darkness, startling when headlights slipped by. Now it is hard to sleep. I keep waking up thinking my blankets are a maze, and pulling my body out to go to the bathroom—or downstairs to watch TV, or outside on the porch—is the hardest thing in the world.

  It’s still July. Home doesn’t want to let me go. It’s keeping me here and awake.

  The night Jake and I talked, after he took me home, I couldn’t sleep. I turned on the lights in my room and looked at my bulletin board. I let myself skip from picture to picture, future story to story, accepting one by one that they were no longer options.

  I had no postcards of rural Kentucky. It hadn’t even been on my radar. The closest was one from Nashville, a cheesy picture of downtown. I pinned it in the center and squinted as if by doing so, I could see past the buildings and into the country that lay beyond.

  But I kept coming back to one picture, pinned on the bottom like an afterthought. Georgia had found a disposable camera back at the beginning of camp, put it in the lost and found, and asked all the kids if it was theirs—but none of them wanted it. Whoever brought it had probably forgotten, and after all, who uses film cameras anymore? A nostalgic parent, a child who didn’t understand how you could take a picture and not immediately see it. After a while, Georgia took it and started keeping it in her purse or pocket, taking pictures at random times.

  Most of the photographs are pretty bad, with no sense of color or composition, and this one is no exception. It’s a selfie of her and me, a crooked scene with her on the right. We’re lying on the cement one day at lunch. Our heads are touching slightly, and our hair is loose, tangled together. She’s got a huge grin, mouth open as if she’s about to say something exciting, and she’s looking right at the camera. I’m smiling next to her, calmer, eyes closed.