The Fourth Summer

by Kathleen Gilles Seidel

  The next image was a mass of flowers, leaves, and vines. He touched the computer screen. The screen was cool. That seemed surprising. The drawing had so much vibrancy and life, even in cheap blue ink, that it seemed as if its warmth would have to come through.

  He started to trace a line with his finger. It didn’t start and stop, but curved and flowed, moving all over the page, this single uninterrupted line forming a blossom here, a vine over there.

  He felt his body stir.

  Oh, for God’s sake. Was he lusting after a drawing?

  No, it was her. Caitlin. Caitlin of the summers. He wanted her.

  * * * *

  MeeMaw said that she and her friends thought that Caitlin’s doodles were pretty. “I know that you never liked the word ‘pretty’ when you were younger, but we can’t help it. We’re Southern. We like pretty.”

  Growing up, Caitlin had felt that she could never be as pretty as her big sister. Then when Trina got pregnant, Caitlin hadn’t wanted to be anything like her. So for a long time she had dressed like a tomboy, and when she outgrew that, she had chosen the hip and edgy. She had always associated prettiness with Trina.

  But now when she thought about it, of course she liked pretty. Softness, curving lines, watercolor hues, everything that had made the Iris room at the inn a soothing retreat. Why not celebrate all that?

  She was suddenly repelled by the violence and aggression of the games she worked on. Could she support herself on the romance-novel covers? No, that wouldn’t be enough. But what had her dad said about her? That she figured things out for herself. She could figure this one out too.

  She sat down at her computer and signed into the account of Tlin, her game-designer, androgynous alter ego. She wrote a message to those clients. She would finish any ongoing projects, but would not be accepting more work of this nature. She signed off with her own name. Let them know that they had been working with a girl.

  Then she called the Streets and set up an appointment to discuss an educational video game. This would be the first time she had ever worked on a game from start to finish. She began drawing up a budget for the outside help that she would need.

  * * * *

  Nate had an appointment with an orthopedist in Portland. Seth offered to drive him. The appointment didn’t take long, but Nate didn’t want to go back to the resort. He was getting restless. That was not good. Even at the best of times, Nate’s impulsivity made him dangerous. But a bored, restless Nate?

  Oregon was a beautiful, environmentally conscious state. Seth had been paying to North Carolina the taxes he owed to Oregon. The least he could do was protect the habitat from Nate.

  “Let’s be adults,” he suggested, “and go visit the retailers.”

  He pulled up a list of the shops that carried Street Boards. Although Nate and his crutches were hardly a great advertisement for active sports, the store owners and managers were happy to see Seth.

  “Am I crazy,” he asked Nate after the first two visits, “or were they all more interested in the skateboards?”

  “It’s summer. That’s what they are selling now.”

  Yes, but... “Skateboarding’s on the short list to be an Olympic sport, isn’t it?”

  Nate nodded. “But it isn’t likely. A lot of the best people don’t want it. They’re afraid that it will make them lose their authenticity, their street style...basically that they would turn into us.”

  Were skateboards the future of Street Boards? The low end of the market was strong, doing well in places where the snow sports weren’t sustainable. The high-end market was certainly less mature than in snowboarding. God knows those pros were even hungrier for sponsors than the snowboarders were.

  But Seth—he could hear his father’s voice—you are a snowboarder.

  Yes, and I won’t give up the sport, but it can’t be about me, Dad, he answered. It can’t be just about me. We, the family, we need to be a team.

  And he would show Caitlin that he could be a team player.

  * * * *

  Caitlin was busy. Seth’s parents had agreed to the video more quickly than they should have. If they weren’t interested in rebranding the company, there wasn’t much point in doing this. They should have taken some time, thought about it more. But they were so pleased to have Seth interested in something besides filming his parts that they would have agreed to any of his ideas. They were eager to sign her contract.

  She told her romance-writer clients her real name and started having phone conversations with them. She also became the volunteer director of volunteers for Deborah Cornerstone’s campaign. The other volunteers were an oddly assorted group–college students home for the summer, stay-at-home moms, and older widows–but Caitlin scrambled them into some reasonable order. It felt good to think that if women like Deb assumed public office, the courtrooms would no longer be places for testosterone-fueled pissing matches.

  This wasn’t the life Caitlin wanted, borrowing her mother’s car and telling MeeMaw that, yes, it would be nice if Caitlin knew how to play bridge, but she wasn’t going to learn. However, she felt like she was headed in the right direction.

  Caitlin had called April, offering to address her wedding invitations. “I know you were planning on using labels, but calligraphy looks so much nicer.”

  There was some usual Southern back-and-forth—you’re so sweet to offer...can’t let you—but Caitlin won.

  Caitlin went over to April’s mother’s house to pick up the envelopes. April’s invitations had a clean, contemporary look, and Caitlin gave her several fonts to choose from. As she was trying to make up her mind, Caitlin scanned the guest list. And saw her own name and Joan’s and Delia’s...and Seth’s.

  “You’ve invited the whole jury!”

  “Yes, of course. We’re friends, aren’t we? I only have Seth’s parents’ address, but he’s out in Washington State, isn’t he? Do you know that address?”

  “Actually it’s Oregon, and I don’t know the address. I suppose I could get it from his mother.”

  “Oh, no. I hate to bother you, and I don’t imagine that he will come.”

  “Probably not.” What had he said? 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 much for the “except for you.” He didn’t seem to be planning on seeing her again either.

  “I was hoping,” April sighed. “He was so great about my dress.”

  “For my part, I hope Sally comes.” Caitlin had seen the deputy’s name on the list. “I would love to see her again.”

  * * * *

  Working on the Street Boards game was challenging, not creatively or technically, but personally. It was too much about Seth. It was important to Mr. Street that the character really seem to be Seth. So Caitlin was looking at hours and hours of video, trying to turn Seth into shapes. She drew lines across his shoulders, she followed the forward twisting of his hips, she tracked each shift of his head, ankles, knees, glutes. She tried to think of him as pixels. It didn’t work. He was still Seth.

  Then, surprisingly, she got a text from him. Could you call me? Need to talk about the game.

  Okay, that was plenty clear. This was a business call.

  Indeed, they exchanged no pleasantries. He got straight to the point. “How hard would it be to convert the work you’ve done on the game into skateboarding?”

  His voice was so familiar. She remembered having to take the family phone into the hall closet to talk to him in private. “The math will all be different because of the speed, but the concept and the visuals...wait, why are you talking about skateboarding?”

  He told her. His notion of the Street Boards rebranding was even more extensive than before. If there was going to be any focus on the elite athletes, it would be the skateboarders.

  “Have you discussed this w
ith your parents?”

  “Not yet. I’m getting my ducks lined up. But they like you so much that I can see them saying that we had to go on with the video simply because you’ve been working on it.”

  Caitlin was charging an hourly rate. She would not lose if the project were canceled. “That’s no way to run a business.”

  “It’s worked for them, but they’ve been lucky.”

  * * * *

  Trina and her family arrived Friday evening of Labor Day week. She hugged Caitlin, apologizing for not coming sooner.

  “You’ve said that a million times. But what have you done with Dylan? Who is that monster truck you brought with you?” Caitlin hadn’t seen her nephew since Christmas. He had grown into a mini linebacker since then.

  “It seems like he needs a new pair of jeans every week.” Trina shook her head.

  “Did you ever think about having more kids?” Caitlin asked Trina once Dylan was out of earshot.

  “Sometimes. We are fifteen, in some cases twenty years younger than his friends’ parents, and the other moms always think that I am the au pair. But whenever there are any kind of parent-child athletic competitions,” she went on, “Trevor and I are the most popular family ever. We can run up and down a soccer field without having heart attacks. But I want to talk about you. Are you really staying in town?”

  “I do know that I am not going back to San Francisco.”

  “What about Seth?”

  “What about him? He has nothing to do with this. He’s back in Oregon.”

  “And is that okay with you?”

  “I don’t have a say in it.”

  “Well, why not?” Trina spoke urgently. “Listen, Caitlin, I never gave up on Trevor, not even when he was so hopeless those first few years. He was relieved when we moved to San Diego. Relieved. Can you imagine how that felt? He was terrified of the responsibility. But I loved him, and I never gave up on him even though everyone else thought he was a dirtbag.”

  She had a point. It was unfair that Trevor had been allowed to mature in a more normal way than Trina, attending college and all, but he had matured. Midway through college he woke up and realized what fatherhood meant.

  “So why are you giving up on Seth?” Trina asked.

  “I don’t know what you are talking about.” Caitlin felt herself go stiff.

  “Are you in love with him?”

  “Why on earth are you asking that?”

  “Because I’m your big sister.”

  Caitlin suddenly flashed back to the halls of one of their elementary schools; it was the one with the wall of glass brick. She was in first grade, and she couldn’t find her lunch money. She had been waiting in the lunch line, feeling frantic. What would she do when she got up to the front of the line? She didn’t care about the food. Her stomach was churning too much to eat.

  Suddenly Trina was there. She had been sitting at a table with third-grade girls and had noticed that her little sister was upset. She had come over and handled it. Caitlin was not the first and only child to have ever lost her money. The lunch lady wrote a little note and put it in the cash drawer. Instead of going outside after lunch, Trina came with Caitlin to her classroom, found the money in Caitlin’s desk, and went back to the lunchroom with her. None of the teachers questioned the two of them walking through the halls together. They trusted Trina.

  That’s what a big sister does for you. When she is eight, she finds your lunch money for you. When she is fourteen, she lends you her clothes. When she is twenty-six, she asks you if you love him.

  I missed this. I missed this.

  “So?” Trina prompted.

  The first time she had been in love with Seth, her grandmother had had to ask her. This time it was her sister. But she was as sure now as she had been then. “Yes, I do. I do love him.”

  “Then seriously, are you just going to wait until he has to come home? Caitlin, you have more initiative than anyone on the planet. Why are you sitting around?”

  “What am I supposed to do? Go out there and beg him to love me? I am not going to do that.”

  “If begging were going to work, then you should do it, but it wouldn’t. Go and figure out why he is there, if he really has been able to get his old life back. If you show up and he won’t make eye contact, then you can turn around because you’ll know.”

  “But the place is hard to get to, you have to fly—”

  “Caitlin. Caitlin. Caitlin.” Trina pulled out her phone. “We’ll drop you in Charlotte on Monday. We’re leaving early.”

  Caitlin refused to let Trina use her mileage points to pay for the flight. If she was going to go beg some guy to love her, the least she could do was pay for the flight herself.

  She told both her parents and the Streets that she was going to Oregon to talk to Seth about the game. Surprisingly, none of them asked any questions, not even the Streets, who had a legitimate interest in the issue.

  “I don’t get it,” she said to Trina on the way to Charlotte. The two sisters were in the backseat while Trevor and Dylan were in the front, talking energetically about the Braves’ pitching rotation. “Why wouldn’t the Streets at least ask me what I need to talk to him about, see if they could answer my questions? And Mom and Dad didn’t ask any questions, and since when does Mom not ask questions?”

  “Oh, Caitlin,” Trina sighed. “Don’t you think that they know perfectly well why you’re going...or at least hope that they know? Mom says that the Streets want the two of you to get together as much as she and Dad do.”

  “Excuse me? They actually talk to each other about it?”

  “Well, the moms do. Maybe not the dads, but Mr. Street is crazy about you, and Dad likes Seth a lot. And don’t forget about the big-ass Southern wedding.”

  “That’s what I’m supposed to tell Seth? That my mother wants to plan a big-ass Southern wedding?”

  “Well, no,” Trina admitted. “I wouldn’t suggest that you start there. At least not right off.”

  * * * *

  Okay, she wasn’t going to beg him to love her, and she couldn’t tell him about the big-ass Southern wedding with a cake the size of Tennessee and ten bridesmaids who hopefully wouldn’t have big asses, but Caitlin wouldn’t discriminate against them if they did. So what was she going to say?

  She had no idea.

  His mom had texted her while she was waiting in Charlotte to say that Seth would pick her up at the airport. Indeed, he was there, just beyond security, leaning against a pillar, his arms crossed, wearing a Street Boards hoodie over a loose flannel shirt. He hadn’t shaved in a couple of days so his face was scruffy, more like the Seth of the pictures.

  He straightened and stepped forward when he saw her...and then he looked nothing like his pictures. He was tired, his lips were narrow, his shoulders were hunched up.

  I don’t want you to be unhappy, she wanted to say...but she had a feeling her sister would tell her, hell, yes, you want him to be unhappy. You want him to be fucking miserable when you aren’t around.

  Would her sister ever say “fuck”? Not in front of her ten-year-old.

  He reached for her...no, not for her, for her suitcase. She handed it to him. “Hello, Seth.”

  “It was good of you to come. I know that you didn’t want to, that my dad was insisting.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “My mom told me that my dad is concerned that you’ve never actually seen me ride in person, and that you said that since the game was on-screen, watching the videos was more important.” He was talking too fast. “But I know how my dad can be.”

  Well. This was interesting. Caitlin had only told the Streets that she needed to talk to him about the game. She had given them no more detail because she had had no more detail to give. She wasn’t a good liar. Mama Street apparently was.

  “Now that you mention it,�
�� she said mildly, “seeing you in action live might be a good idea.”

  “What do you mean, now that I mention it?” He put her suitcase down. “That’s what my mom said. Isn’t that why you’re here?”

  “I guess it could be.”

  “And it wasn’t? Then why are you here?” Now he was looking at her. His eyes seemed lighter than normal, almost a sea green.

  If you show up and he won’t make eye contact, then you can turn around because you’ll know. But how could she have ever turned away from him?

  He was still talking. “It’s killing me that you didn’t want to come. I get it. I do. It’s Colleen all over again.”

  “Colleen?” This suddenly wasn’t going so well. “You do know my name is Caitlin, don’t you?”

  “Of course I know your name. Don’t be stupid. Colleen was Ben’s ex-girlfriend. She was really great, and he pushed her away just like I’ve done with you. At least he told Colleen that he loved her. That’s more than I’ve done. But for what it’s worth, I love you, Caitlin. I’m sorry. I told myself I shouldn’t say anything, not after I’ve been such a tool. I guess this will make things super awkward now.”

  “No. No, it won’t.” She couldn’t think. Seth loved her. He loved her. He had started off by saying she was stupid, but he had ended up saying that he loved her. “Not awkward at all.”

  “Then we’re cool.” His voice was stiff, as if he didn’t think for one minute that they were cool about anything.

  She suddenly remembered that she still had April’s wedding invitation. She had forgotten to get his address. She dug it out of her purse and stuck it out at him. “Here. I came to bring you this. That’s why I came.”

  He looked confused, but took the invitation. “What is this? ‘Mr. and Mrs. George Hibbert.’” He read the return address. “Who are they? I don’t know them, do I? And why did you bring it? It already has a stamp on it. You could have mailed it.”

  “It’s an invitation to April’s wedding, and I brought it because I was afraid that you might not come.”

  “She invited me to her wedding?” He looked surprised. “Why would she do that?”