“You could have come to the door.”
“I know...but listen, I have called my parents. I’m cutting out tonight. Do you want to come?”
“Aren’t you going to say goodbye to people? It’s what they are expecting.”
“There’s no way we are going to have a happy little party and pledge to be BFFs forever. We got together to do a job. We did our part. And that’s the end of things. Except for you, I’ll probably never see any of them again. So do you want to leave tonight?”
Leave tonight? Of course she wanted to go with him. But what would it be like for the other ten if she and Seth weren’t there in the morning? It would be strange enough to have him disappear, but at least she could try to explain. She could make up something about him needing to go to New Zealand.
She shook her head. “No, I’ll wait with the others.”
“Then I’ll be seeing you tomorrow night. I think our mothers are organizing something.”
She nodded. Her mother had already told her.
“And about last night—”
It had actually been this afternoon.
“—I saw that some of your hair was caught in my watch.”
What did that have to do with anything? “It didn’t hurt.”
“Looking at it made me feel bad, like I’d used you.”
“You didn’t.”
He waited for her to say more. She didn’t. “Okay, then, I will see you tomorrow night.”
“Of course.”
* * * *
She could have gone out to the balcony and watched his parents drive up. His mom would have hugged him while his dad started to load the car. But she didn’t. She stayed in her room and thought about him turning his wrist to unbuckle his watch and seeing her hair caught in the buckle.
Hadn’t he noticed that she was using her own shampoo again? That she had switched back as soon as he said that was the one he liked?
CHAPTER ELEVEN
People were going to ask why Seth had left. They would expect her to know...and of course she did. But what could she say? Others had also been eager to get home, but they were staying, knowing that it was important to the group.
Well, yeah, he put himself first. What could you expect from a snowboarder? He’s way too cool for the likes of you.
They—she—might have expected that he had changed.
Ultimately she didn’t have to explain anything. As she came down from the third floor in the morning, she saw a cluster of people gathered around one of the second-floor rooms, looking worried.
It was the Goldenrod room, Yvette’s room. Apparently she had sat up all night, nearly catatonic. She hadn’t packed, showered, slept, anything. She couldn’t stand the thought of leaving her spacious room with its sunny walls, heated towels, claw-foot tub, and glass-walled shower. She couldn’t bear to leave the charming breakfasts and interesting dinners, the quiet evenings in the library, and, above all, the attention, the kindness, the concern.
Even Seth, she had told Stephanie earlier in the evening, Seth Street, had spoken to her every day, every single day.
Since then she had said almost nothing.
Caitlin knew that Yvette lived in her sister’s mobile home. She used to have a bedroom of her own while her sister’s two kids shared the other room with their mom. Then the sister’s boyfriend had moved in; the kids took over the second bedroom, and Yvette was on the sofa...even though Yvette paid half the rent and half the groceries, and the boyfriend paid nothing.
How could Caitlin complain about her apartment being so small?
“Have we called—” Caitlin broke off. They weren’t Sally’s problem anymore.
“911?” Norma finished for her. “It isn’t medical. And really there’s nothing we can do. She just doesn’t want to go home.”
“I can’t blame her there,” Caitlin acknowledged. “Her sister’s probably gotten used to not having someone sleep on the sofa.”
“Stephanie went in with some water, trying to get her to drink something,” Norma said. “That might help.” She gestured for the rest of them to go downstairs.
The four older people were in the breakfast room. They looked up eagerly when Caitlin came in, but she shook her head. No news.
“I was wondering,” Keith said, “if one of us should take her in—we’ve all got extra rooms with the kids being grown—but Joan says that that just delays the inevitable.”
“The rest of us have done something with our time here,” Joan explained. “Stephanie’s found a new job, and Dave is really enjoying his art. That rubber band is working for Heather. She’s not talking so much, and April is trying to breathe while she laughs. I learned how I miss teaching. Delia and I are thinking about linking up with the mothers who are homeschooling. She could do music, and I can work with the struggling readers. But Yvette put her head in the sand. She hates her life. She wouldn’t think about how to fix it. And we can’t do it for her.”
No. Caitlin hadn’t been able to make her sister happy...her sister had had to do that herself.
But that hadn’t kept Caitlin from wanting to. “I’d be willing to ask Seth’s dad if he could find her a job at the Street Boards factory.” For all her passivity, Yvette was a diligent worker. “It doesn’t solve her living situation, but at least working conditions are better.”
“That’s good of you,” Joan said, “but she still has to decide if she has any boundaries with her sister.”
* * * *
Caitlin expected that her parents would arrive early, and they did. Her father went up to get her luggage. She took her box of art supplies into the breakfast room, wanting to give them to Dave. But no one was there. So she wrote his name on the box and went out to the car with her parents. That was it. It was over.
In the car, her parents were eager to talk about the trial. They kept asking her if she had any questions. Her father reminded her that she could say whatever she wanted now.
“I just don’t care. I really don’t.”
“It was badly handled,” he said. “But the district attorney is facing a strong challenger in the election this fall. It’s time to clean house.”
Caitlin agreed.
“It’s a woman who’s running. We’ve contributed to her campaign, but she needs to reach out to the young people, you millennial types. Since you’re going to—”
Caitlin wasn’t listening. She wanted to see Seth. That was the only thing she could think about.
Now her mother was talking. “I got you a hair appointment. But you don’t have to go. We can cancel. Elena will understand.”
Hair? In San Francisco she left hers long and went to a beauty school twice a year to have the students trim it. Did she want to go sit in a salon today? She didn’t know. Apparently former prisoners had trouble learning how to make their own decisions again once they were released.
So she let her mother decide.
Elena, her mother’s stylist, suggested that she cut Caitlin’s hair to emphasize her eyes. Caitlin said that that sounded fine. The stylist knew that Caitlin had been on the jury, and she was dying to talk about it. Caitlin had to explain how weary she was of it all. She should have brought headphones so she could listen to music on her phone, but she had forgotten that she was now allowed to do that.
She watched as Elena cut and cut and then cut some more. Surely she was cutting too much. Was she punishing Caitlin for not wanting to talk about the trial? Caitlin knew that she should try to stop her, but apparently she had also forgotten how to speak.
Her hair ended shorter than it had been since elementary school. It was layered and fringed; she looked nothing like herself.
“Oh, honey, you look so pretty,” her mom exclaimed when she got home. “The way those side layers call attention to your eyes...do you like it?”
Caitlin shrugged. She had no idea
if she liked it or not. She put on an apron to help her mother with the beet and orange salad they were taking out to the lake house.
She thought about calling Seth. Find out how he was doing, see if being home was making him feel any better.
No, she could wait. It would be better to see him in person. On the phone he would say that he was fine.
She decided to call her sister instead.
There were hundreds of texts and messages queued up on her phone. She ignored them.
“Can you talk?” she asked as soon as her sister answered. Trina worked at a lighting-design firm and was in the middle of a huge contract.
“Actually, yes. Our computers are down. How are you? I’m dying to come see you. I wanted to throw myself in the car the minute I heard, but school’s already started, and you know Dylan. He’s in a million sports. We will be there Labor Day.”
“You won’t recognize me. Mom’s hairdresser cut my hair.”
“That took some courage. Send me a picture.”
Obediently Caitlin turned her phone around, took a selfie, and sent it to her sister. How strange to be able to communicate like it was the twenty-first century.
“Oh my God,” Trina gushed a minute later. “I love it. That’s so cute. It’s totally you.”
“Totally me?” Caitlin turned the phone again to look at the picture. “It’s a 1970s shag.”
“I know. It’s retro, it’s hip.”
Caitlin turned to look at herself in the mirror. On the streets in San Francisco, would she stop that girl and ask where she had gotten her hair done?
Fat chance.
Trina squealed that her computer had come back on. She had to hang up. Caitlin went to her room to get ready for the picnic. She hadn’t even opened her suitcase. She was sick of everything in there. She went down the hall and leaned over the banister. “Mom, does Trina keep any clothes here?”
Her mother came out from the kitchen, drying her hands on her apron. “Only pajamas and workout clothes. Otherwise she borrows from me. Do you need something? I have a Lilly that I stopped wearing because I think it is too short for someone my age.”
Ten minutes later Caitlin was in an aqua-and-taupe print Lilly Pulitzer sleeveless sheath dress. Her mother was two inches taller than Caitlin, so what had been too short on her was a ladylike knee length on Caitlin. Then her mother had handed her some thin gold bangles and a pair of strappy pink flat sandals.
Caitlin looked at herself in the mirror on the back of her parents’ closet door. She didn’t look hip, she didn’t look retro; she looked like she was going to a luncheon for the Palm Beach Hospital Auxiliary’s gala planning committee.
* * * *
Seth’s family was waiting on the terrace that spanned the roadside of the lake house. Through the backseat window of her father’s car she could see Seth standing by the railing. He was in loose khaki shorts, something he had never worn at the inn, and a blue button-up chambray shirt. He was wearing Sperrys without socks. The shirt was untucked, the sleeves were rolled up, and he had his own sleek watch back on.
He looked like a magazine ad...which was no surprise because this was straight out of a magazine ad. She had seen one of Seth and his two friends horsing around on a beach, all of them in Street Boards gear. Seth’s shirt would have a small Street Boards logo above the pocket. Except for the fact that he had been barefoot in the ad, this had been exactly what he had been wearing.
It made him seem unreal, like someone she didn’t know.
Mr. Street—Caitlin was having trouble calling him Tom—had come around the car to open the door for MeeMaw. He noticed that Caitlin was trapped under a big, foil-covered pottery bowl. He signaled to someone to come open her door.
Becca, Seth’s sister, got there first. She reached in the car to get the bowl.
“Well, look at you!” she exclaimed. “Your hair. You look so pretty. What a difference.”
Caitlin thanked her as she slid out of the car. She tried to take the bowl back.
“No. No. Seth, come take this. Watch out. It’s heavy. Did you see Caitlin’s hair? Doesn’t she look great?”
Seth stepped forward to take the bowl. “Did you get my text?” he asked Caitlin softly.
She shook her head. “I turned my phone on, but there were a million messages. I couldn’t face them.”
Before he could say more, her mother cautioned him not to tilt the bowl. “It’s got beets. They’ll stain.”
Then his mom asked her mom how she kept her hands from turning red when cutting beets. “Latex gloves,” her mom answered, and they talked about beet juice as they went into the house.
How right this felt, their two families at a picnic together. She suddenly wished that Trina were here along with Trevor and Dylan. Dylan would call her “Aunt Caitlin.” The little Street kids would call him “Uncle Seth.”
This was the reason not to go back to San Francisco, not because her apartment was small or because the city was expensive, but this...family.
“So are you glad to be home?” Seth’s sister Becca asked her when they were in the kitchen together. “Seth seems to be numb.”
“Me too.”
“I’m worried about him. I wish he weren’t leaving so quickly. It’s like he’s running away.”
Caitlin froze. Seth was leaving? “I beg your pardon?”
“Didn’t he tell you? He’s going back to Oregon tomorrow morning.”
What? The shock was like an electric current, sizzling through her, jolting her awake. Seth was leaving? He couldn’t. He simply couldn’t.
She went looking for him. He was on the lakeside deck where his father was lighting the grill. There were enough people out there that no one seemed to notice when she signaled him to come over to the steps.
“What the fuck, Seth?” So what if she were wearing a ladylike Lilly Pulitzer? “What the fuck?”
“I tried to tell you.”
He needed to go back to Oregon. His parents had kept some bad news from him. Nate had injured himself again, and Ben had had some kind of major public flameout, criticizing the entire snowboarding establishment.
So? Wasn’t Nate always injuring himself? He had told her enough about his friends for her to know that. And if Ben had a PR problem, what was Seth going to do about it? She couldn’t see that that was any reason for him to leave.
What had she expected? Just yesterday he had left the inn early, not caring what she or the others thought.
“You know,” she said when his explanation trailed off, “we’ve had this conversation before, back when we were kids. You were saying how you had to go to New Zealand for the good of the company when you wanted to go for yourself.” At least that time he had had a better excuse; that program had put him on the ladder to the Olympics. “Your sister is right. You’re running away.”
“What are you talking about? I’m not running from anything. Nate’s family needs pro riders out on the slopes. The guests expect it.”
And there was absolutely no other professional who would be willing to come to the one place in the United States that had snow year-round? “They can’t need you as much as your own family does. What about the rebranding? And the game? You know that once we talk to someone who knows children’s games, we will have to start over.”
“That’s just it. We don’t know enough to design a game ourselves.”
That annoyed Caitlin. “Once an educator gets me on the right track, I know plenty.”
“Okay, so you do. But I don’t. All that stuff I was talking about rebranding and our reverse inventory logistics, what do I know about any of that?”
Enough to know that his parents needed help.
Speaking of branding...why was Street Boards making chambray shirts? All the other guys in the ad had looked like snowboarders, wearing grungy hoodies and insane neon colors. But a
chambray shirt? Seth didn’t look like a snowboarder. He looked like a North Carolina preppy, a lazy-ass, smug, entitled, North Carolina preppy.
“You could learn,” she said.
“You don’t have any reason to think that.”
They were fighting, and it felt good. Fighting was better than talking about oranges and beets or not talking at all. But she wasn’t going to do it in front of their families. She walked away.
The rest of the evening was difficult. Once the children were settled, the other adults wanted to talk about the trial. The consensus among trial observers was that while the defendants were apparently guilty of some charges, they were innocent of others.
“It seems impossible that you could have sorted it out in the jury room,” Becca’s husband said.
“We would have done our best.” Caitlin felt obliged to defend her fellow jurors.
“I heard that most of you hadn’t finished college.”
“Well, that would include Seth, wouldn’t it?’ she said sweetly.
At the end of the evening she found herself standing on the front terrace with him, waiting for MeeMaw to finish the interminable round of Southern thank-yous and goodbyes. The porch light was on, but the summer evening was still light enough that the lamp wasn’t drawing too many bugs.
“Your hair, that dress, you look so different,” he said. “It’s like talking to a stranger.”
She shrugged. She didn’t have anything to say to him. He was abandoning her. Again.
“I think we were set up to fail. The jury, I mean. I think about the original sixteen. There was no way we could have come to a verdict. Someone must have been okay with that.”
“I figured that out before we’d heard any testimony.”
“You did? How?”
She had paid attention, that’s how. She hadn’t sat there all wrapped up in herself.
That wasn’t fair. It might have taken him forever to learn April’s name, but then he had found a way for her to try on her own wedding dress. “It doesn’t matter now, Seth.”
“You could come to Oregon with me, you know.”
What? Did she hear him right? Did he ask her to come to Oregon with him?
The Fourth Summer Page 21
