Someone Like Summer

by M. E. Kerr

  Someone Like Summer

  by M. E. Kerr

  To Renée Cafiero, sine qua non,

  there from the very beginning of my career

  at HarperCollins, with thanks for

  so many years of diligence

  Contents

  One

  THE FIRST TIME I SAW Esteban, he was kicking a…

  Two

  MY FATHER’S WORK crews eventually became all Latino. They work…

  Three

  “Esteban Santiago told me he’s going to do the screening…

  Four

  MY COUSIN CLAIRE from Maine was visiting us for the…

  Five

  I LOVED THE WAY ESTEBAN looked that Friday. He had…

  Six

  “DONE!” ESTEBAN called in to me.

  Seven

  SATURDAY MORNING.

  Eight

  “ANNA, I AM SORRY. I came to give you something…

  Nine

  THESE WERE the rules.

  Ten

  DOWNSTAIRS IN THE Seaview Library was a book called La…

  Eleven

  EVERY FOURTH OF JULY celebration my father went to Mom’s…

  Twelve

  THE MOVIE WAS called Maria Full of Grace. It starred…

  Thirteen

  MITZI GRANEY STOPPED in at the library to check out…

  Fourteen

  IN FRONT OF THE CASA there was a tent where…

  Fifteen

  THE SEAVIEW STAR wrote it up this way:

  Sixteen

  SUDDENLY I KNEW why Dr. Annan’s veterinary hospital and the new…

  Seventeen

  “YOU LOOK muy bella, Anna!” He was standing in the…

  Eighteen

  THE ONE PLACE I knew I could find Esteban was…

  Nineteen

  “GET IN,” KENYON SAID. He was waiting for me in…

  Twenty

  “AMERICANS ARE THE only ones who ever embalmed the dead,”…

  Twenty-One

  THE DINNER DISCUSSION, of course, centered on green burial. My…

  Twenty-Two

  BY THE TIME we got Dalí outside, Maxine was on…

  Twenty-Three

  WE HURRIED BACK inside the house, where Larkin was rinsing…

  Twenty-Four

  MY DAD WAS RECOVERING from his bypass at Larkin’s. The…

  Twenty-Five

  MY DEAREST, loco, lovely, amor, my Esteban, This is the…

  Twenty-Six

  CHARLIE ANNAN’S WHITE Saab convertible was parked outside of Feelfree…

  About the Author

  Other Books by M. E. Kerr

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  ONE

  THE FIRST TIME I SAW Esteban, he was kicking a soccer ball down a field behind the Accabonac School. His name was on the back of his team shirt. I saw him notice me, smile, then look over his shoulder at me again. I knew he saw me there. I knew he didn’t see me a few days later, when I went to hear him sing at Jungle Pete’s. Some of the girls at school talked about this singer who appeared there Saturday nights—Esteban Santiago. They said he was hot. Was he!

  I went to the soccer field a lot after that. We were well aware of each other, but it was May before we had our first conversation. I’d gone by the field on my bike, after hanging out on the beach with my pal Mitzi and some other kids from school.

  I sat on my bike while he was taking a break from the game, lifting his T-shirt up to wipe his brow. Then he saw me, and he strolled over.

  “Hello, I’m Esteban Santiago.”

  “I know who you are.”

  “How is that?”

  “I heard you sing at Jungle Pete’s.”

  “Thank you. For coming. Thank you.”

  “You’re very good,” I managed, even though he made me nervous close up.

  He asked, “Do you live near here?”

  “Very near. I’m Annabel Brown.”

  “It is good to have you very near.” Big smile. His black hair wet from playing.

  “Thanks.” I could feel myself blushing.

  “I have no other fan. My sister comes in her car to watch me. But she doesn’t count because we are related.” He looked at me with a shy grin. “Yellow is your color, do you know that?”

  I had on a sun-colored T and low-rise jeans, boxing sneakers, and yellow socks.

  “I know it now,” I said.

  When I got home I circled the date on my calendar. May 25, 2005.

  After that if I showed up when the game was going, he’d find a few minutes to talk with me. I admit I wore something yellow, too, always. We’d flirt.

  “You belong in yellow,” he’d say.

  “You belong back in the game. They’re calling you.”

  “I forget fútbol for you.” That smile. Away from him I could close my eyes and dream it into my head, and I’d be smiling myself, thinking of him. See, I don’t care anymore that he’s shorter than I am. It never bothered the girls who went with Tom Cruise. I’ve fallen in love for the first time, I tell my diary, and lucky me, my diary can’t roll its eyes to the heavens and say, What about Trip Hetherton?

  Fini, dear Diary. I always remember what Dad said about an old heartthrob of his. He said, “Five years later I saw her in an elevator and she was two hundred pounds, eating a chocolate ice cream cone that was all over her face and blouse, grinning at me with her mouth open saying, ‘Hey, long time no see.’ That’s what makes life so great, honey! I once wanted to slash my wrists because she dumped me.”

  Trip didn’t really dump me. I was just never sure of him. One time he’d be e-mailing me and calling me and coming over to watch a movie, another time he’d be so distant that I’d think he’d moved out of town. My brother said it was installment-plan dumping.

  That was a whole year ago. I was only sixteen then.

  Trip cannot hold a candle to Esteban Santiago.

  Can you picture C. Harley Hetherton III strolling out on the small stage at Jungle Pete’s, grinning and bowing and then singing until his eyes are shining like stars with his face wet and the crowd going crazy calling out requests? Friends say it happens every Saturday since Esteban started working there.

  A day in early June, our first real taste of summer. It was warm even in late afternoon, and some of the players were in shorts.

  Esteban wore cargo shorts. He grabbed me by the hand as he came off the field.

  “Come with me, Annabel, please,” he said.

  “My older sister wants to meet you.”

  As we got to the battered red Toyota where Gioconda Santiago puffed on a cigarette, Esteban whispered, “Don’t let her intimidate you, Annabel.”

  Then in a proud tone he said to her, “Gioconda, meet Annabel Brown.”

  “I’ve been wanting to meet you,” she said. “Last time after the game you ran away.”

  “I didn’t know you wanted to meet me,” I said. She had a nice smile. She tapped the long ash off her cigarette on the rolled-down window and introduced me to a girl sitting beside her. Serena something.

  Then Gioconda said, “You see my virgencita here?” She used her cigarette to point at a china statue of the Virgin Mary on the dashboard. One of those plastic nodding dogs was next to it.

  “Yes, I see.”

  “I pray to it,” she said.

  “Well, good. Good.” I was embarrassed. My family may pray, but we don’t talk about it.

  “I drive along praying,” said Esteban’s sister.

  I couldn’t think of anything to say to that, and it turned out that I didn’t have to answer because her next sentence came rolling off her tongue, with a different kind of smile that made her eyes crinkle and her
mouth tip slyly to one side. “You are a flour face,” she said.

  “Thank you.” I thought she’d said flower.

  Esteban was bending over to tie his shoe.

  “I pray that Esteban will tell you to stop chasing after him!” she said. This time Esteban heard her, just as I realized she didn’t mean a flower. She meant flour. White.

  “Come on, Annabel.” Esteban grabbed my arm and pulled me. “Vamos!” We could hear the girls in the car laughing. Esteban said, “When will I learn that I cannot trust her to behave herself? I am sorry. I did not know she would do that.”

  His sister was not finished. She shouted over her shoulder, “Stop throwing yourself at my brother, Flour Face.” Then she said something to Esteban in Spanish. I’d had only two years of Spanish, and I didn’t understand it unless the speaker went very slowly. Esteban had to tell me what she’d shouted after me.

  She’d said, “The Santiagos don’t want any white babies running around, Esteban.”

  I tried to be cool when he told me his sister said that. I smiled down at his brown eyes and said, “She’s rushing things, isn’t she?”

  “Yes. But she knows I like you…that way, Annabel.”

  “Do you tell her that?”

  “She is my family. I do not have to tell her. She sees me looking at you when I am playing.”

  “Dear old family,” I said. “Try to put anything over on them.” I hardly heard myself. I kept thinking about what he’d said, that he liked me “that way.”

  Esteban said, “Years ago there was trouble in my country and my father was captured. We never saw him after. Ever since, my sister protects me too much. I tell her those things don’t happen in this country. She still looks out for me always.”

  “I am sorry about your father, Esteban.”

  “Thank you…. I tell Gioconda don’t worry about me. I can take care of myself.”

  “What does your sister think you’re going to do?”

  “She is more concerned with what you are going to do. Maybe you will take me away from my family, from my country. Do you think you will do that, Annabel?” He smiled. His eyes crinkled, too, but in a sweet way. He was so great-looking. His hair shone like new coal.

  “I have something to tell you, Annabel,” he said. He took my hand as we walked along. “I am going to do some work for your father.”

  “What?”

  “A week from this Friday afternoon I am going to put the new roof on your garage. Dario Lopez from our house was scheduled, but he has to take a driver’s test to get his license.”

  “And my father hired you?” All the other Latinos who worked for Dad seemed older. Esteban was just twenty. He had no training in construction. Dad never went down to the railroad station, where the unemployed, unskilled immigrants waited for jobs. He had regular crews. He was a major taskmaster.

  “Your father hired Dario, but I will take his place.”

  “I thought you said you cooked at the Pantigo Deli, Esteban?”

  “I do. I do all things. I cook. I do yard work. I sing.”

  I couldn’t see him working with Dad’s crew. Dad never let them listen to radios while they worked. Other contractors didn’t care, but Dad wouldn’t allow it. They didn’t talk. They just hammered away, putting up house frames in a day, roofs in half a day. They were hard, hard workers!

  “My father is a perfectionist, Esteban. Since when are you a carpenter?”

  “Since I said I would do it for Dario.” He gave me a big smile.

  TWO

  MY FATHER’S WORK crews eventually became all Latino. They work for ten dollars an hour.

  When my brother was home from Cornell, he was always after Dad. “You call yourself a contractor? You hire slave laborers, Dad. And what happened to the local men you used to hire?”

  “The locals want twenty-five, thirty an hour. Some jobs these guys do, the locals won’t do.”

  “So you hire desperate immigrants who’ll work for anything!”

  “It’s a darn good deal for them,” my father said defensively. “Most of them don’t speak English, and some don’t even have papers. I don’t ask questions. I give them steady work. They learn on the job, some of them, and they can earn as high as three hundred a week.”

  “I can’t discuss it with you, Dad. Your mind is made up.”

  “You college boys don’t know zilch about the working world,” said Kenneth Brown to Kenyon Brown. “The only thing you really know how to do is spend money someone else earns.”

  “I waited tables all last summer, Dad, in case you don’t remember.”

  “Oh, is that a job? Do you have any calluses? Is your neck sunburned? If you want to know what work is, watch these Latinos. They’re a whole new breed, Kenyon! We’ve never had people like them! They sock away three fourths of what they earn. They send it to their families.”

  “So did the Irish when they used to come here summers.”

  “The Irish never stuck around more than a few months. They were all kids, just here for the summer. Give me the muchachos any day! They’re the best thing that ever happened out here.”

  “Out here” is the tip of Long Island, the Hamptons, Seaview to be exact. We were a resort town in the summer, yet more and more people were staying with us longer, and more vacationers were buying houses too. Some said the computer had changed everything—that now people could do their work from home, no need to go into the office every day. Whatever the reason was, we were growing fast, and the new immigrants were a big part of the picture. They did not come to us for a vacation, as so many did. They came here to work.

  They came from everywhere: from Brazil, Cuba, Mexico, Colombia, Puerto Rico, Guyana, you name it.

  They have changed a lot of things about Seaview. In the supermarkets like Waldbaum’s and the IGA, now there were green plantains, yucca, calabaza, and batata. The little delis popping up along Montauk Highway featured arroz con pollo, enchiladas, tacos, and tamales. Many church sermon boards were in Spanish and English, and so were some town meetings.

  Out in a section of town called Accabonac, where we lived, the biggest problem was finding a place to build sports fields for them. They are soccer players. They all seem to be. That first time I saw Esteban, kicking a soccer ball around a field, the police arrived to warn them all games are supposed to end by six P.M. But sometimes I hear them there at nine or ten, still going, until neighbors call the police back.

  Nobody wants soccer fields in his backyard. Last summer my father was one of the few people in our neighborhood who spoke up for the fields when they wanted to put some a few blocks from where they play now. The vote went against the soccer players, and supposedly the town is clearing land near the dump for them. Meanwhile they remain.

  “What is the matter with people?” my father said. “We have our golf courses and our tennis courts, our baseball diamonds and our football fields. But we just can’t take the idea of having good clean fun going on in our neighborhood if the sport is soccer. We all know who the soccer players are—Latinos!”

  “That’s not why,” my brother argued. “Don’t make a race thing out of it. People don’t want the noise in their backyards. They don’t want the lights at night or the public restrooms!”

  “People should be glad the muchachos want to recreate in their spare time,” said my father. “You don’t see them crawling in windows to rob, or hanging around the parking lots to smoke dope and key cars.”

  There was a fair chance that my father would like Esteban. He admired hard workers because he was one himself. He did not take to Trip. Summers all Trip did was surf and sail, because his family was rich. Trip’s big faux pas was to honk the horn for me the night of our first date. My father made me sit in the living room until Trip figured out he had to get out of his Lexus and come into our house to meet my father. Dad also examined Trip’s driving license and told Trip he was to have me back home by eleven thirty P.M.

  Our garage hasn’t had a car in it for years. Ken
yon slept on a pullout bed in my dad’s office. Dad’s office spilled over into the garage, where Kenyon kept a battered old motorboat, skis, a skateboard, surfboard, all his playthings and gear. Being the only daughter, I always had my own room.

  Now, with Kenyon finishing his last year at Cornell, Dad was reclaiming that part of our house. Kenyon was planning to work for Dr. Annan, at Seaview Vet. Someone had to be on the premises overnight with the animals, so a small apartment went with the deal. Charlie Annan was on the zoning board, and he was a trustee of everything from the hospital to the library. Everyone admired Charlie.

  Of all things, Dad was creating a screening room in the garage. I believe this was part of his plan to begin dating again, or as he put it, “to find the right woman for my old age.” He said he knew he would never find someone like my mother. He used to say Mom was his university, that she had taught him “culture,” that he had not had an original thought in his head for twenty-two years until he married her. He would tell Kenyon and me that he had wanted to name Kenyon Kenneth Brown Junior, and me Mary Brown, after his grandma. But my mother had taught him how important names were, and that if you had an ordinary last name, you deserved an exotic first name.

  In our living room was a sampler my mom had made that said: My heart is free, my head unbowed, I do not join the foolish crowd.

  My father had gotten one of his crews together to install in the garage a hardwood floor and new windows with shutters. He had gotten a permit for a bathroom, a stove, and a sink. He bought a wide-screen TV, a projector, DVD, the works. Then came all new furniture: two leather chairs that reclined, a leather couch that could convert to a double bed. Thick rugs. Fancy recessed lighting. A white marble-top coffee table that swiveled up to a full-size dining table. My father had learned a lot working for the movie moguls and investment bankers who flocked to our shores summers and weekends. This screening room didn’t look like it belonged with the rest of the house. Even my brother was shy about using it for any reason when he was home from college. He kept some of his summer clothes in my bottom bureau drawer. I wasn’t surprised to find a few packages of condoms under his swim trunks.