by Meg Donohue
“Hello!” her father calls. The hinges on the screen door whine. Her father is short and fit with smooth, tan skin and a full head of silver hair. Dani grins at him. He strides down the stairs and is on the sidewalk in a moment, wrapping her in a hug. They haven’t seen each other since she was in Philadelphia around Christmas—they’re Jewish, but they buy a tree each year. They decorate it with strings of tacky turquoise lights and a collection of antique glass ornaments they found at a flea market one year when Dani was in middle school. They drink a couple of fancy bottles of wine that her father purchases for the occasion and stay up late watching Hitchcock DVDs. The next day they sleep late and finally, around noon, eat mountains of cinnamon French toast, her father’s lone culinary trick, just the two of them.
“Welcome,” he says, grinning. He looks beyond her and waves to Kate and Vanessa. “You’re all here. All the summer girls.”
“Hi, Dr. Lowenstein,” Kate and Vanessa say in unison. They look at each other and laugh. Gracie nearly tackles Dani’s father and he grins, wiping off the slobber she’s left on his cheek.
“Hey, now,” he says. “Buy me a drink first.”
Gracie bounds past him and through the open doorway. He grabs a few of their bags and turns back toward the house. Dani follows. Her father is wearing shorts and a linen button-down shirt that she recognizes and a large gold watch that she does not. His feet are bare. She had not anticipated having to tell him in person that she is moving home. She won’t bring it up in front of Vanessa, that much is certain. Maybe she won’t bring it up at all—he’ll piece the news together himself when her boxes start arriving in Philadelphia. As she passes his car, she realizes it’s not the same sand-colored Mercedes he was driving the last time she was home; it’s the same color, but this one is a bit smaller and has a soft convertible top. Dani has not owned a car since she sold the Jeep her father had bought her in high school to her coke-dealing landlord when she lived in Chicago five years earlier.
“Dad,” she says as they step inside. “What are you doing here?”
“In my house?” he asks.
“Is this one of those ‘senior moments’? You remember I asked if we could have the house this weekend, right?”
He laughs. “I remember. We’ve been down all week, but don’t worry, we’re leaving now. Back to Philly on the hottest weekend of the summer so far, and a holiday weekend, to boot. I must really like you.”
Dani is still hung up two sentences back. “We?”
“We,” her father repeats, shoving his hands into the pockets of his khaki shorts. “Susanna?” he calls up the stairs. “Suz?”
Dani glances back to where Kate and Vanessa are standing awkwardly just inside the door. Gracie is wildly sniffing everything in sight; the sound of her toenails against the tile floor is manic.
“I’m here,” a woman—Suz, presumably—says, hurrying down the stairs. She looks about ten years older than Dani and wears a white cotton tunic that hits her legs midthigh. It’s one of those tunics that are of ambiguous clothing category—dress? beach cover-up? nightgown? She does not seem embarrassed to be caught without pants, so Dani rules out shirt.
Suz stops when she reaches the bottom landing of the stairs and takes a dramatic breath as though she has been in a huge hurry and now needs to compose herself. The landing is still one foot above the entryway floor level so she is looking down on them. She tucks her chin-length auburn hair behind her ears, like someone who is pretending to be nervous. Then she descends the final step.
“You must be Dani,” she says, extending her hand. “I’m Susanna. Suz. Whichever.”
Dani shakes her hand. “Hi,” she says. She raises her eyebrows at her father, waiting for an explanation. Her mind is racing. Her father has had countless girlfriends over the course of Dani’s life—some while he was still married to her mother, many more since their divorce—but he has never brought one of them to Avalon. In Philadelphia, Dani expects to find a gold tube of lipstick that has rolled behind the toilet, or almond milk in the fridge, or a pink wool blazer tainting everything else in the hall closet with its suffocating rose scent, but the Avalon house belongs only to Dani and her father. They grill fish together on the upstairs deck and watch movies with their feet up on the ottoman and ride beach cruisers for soft-serve cones at Avalon Freeze, standing in line with the little kids. The Avalon house is where he chaperoned the activities of Dani and Kate and Vanessa for two weeks every summer, just a single dad and three growing girls, no girlfriend in sight.
Now, watching her father reach his arm around Suz, Dani feels like an idiot. Of course he brings women here. All these years, he’s been bringing women here. Just not when she and her friends were there.
“Hi, girls,” Suz says, smiling at Kate and Vanessa. “I’m so sorry we’re still here. This probably isn’t how you expected your girls’ weekend to start. You girls are going to have so much fun! I’m so jealous. I haven’t had a girls’ weekend in ages!” Dani hopes that Kate and Vanessa are noting how many times Suz says the word “girls” so they can discuss it later. “We just wanted to make sure the house was in tip-top shape for you girls before we got out of your hair. And I really wanted to meet you, Dani. And . . .” Suz pauses, widening her eyes as she bites her lip. She looks over at Dani’s father.
Dani’s father clears his throat. “And,” he says. “And,” he looks at Dani, glances at Vanessa and Kate, and then back at Dani. “And we wanted to tell you the news in person, Dani.”
The news? Dani thinks, but even as she is thinking the words she is noticing the ring on Suz’s finger. A huge diamond. Unmissable, unmistakable.
“Oh,” she says.
“I asked Susanna to marry me and she said yes.”
Dani almost never cries, so at first she is confused by her blurred vision. The silence that follows feels interminable.
“Mark,” Suz says quietly. “We’re not even in the living room. We could have had them come in first, offered them a drink.”
Dani hears Kate step up behind her and feels the weight of her hand on her shoulder. But then she hears Kate, still by the door, saying “congratulations” in a tight voice. Dani looks beside her and sees that it is Vanessa’s hand on her shoulder; it is Vanessa who will not fill the awkward silence with a polite expression. She should have known she could count on Vanessa for solidarity in the delivery of silent treatment.
“Ankthadavaka ouyadavaka,” Dani says loudly and quickly to Vanessa. Suz looks at Dani’s father, her mouth open. Dani and Vanessa and Kate developed DaVaKa in elementary school—a hybrid of Pig Latin and the first letters of their names. The key, they’d decided, was to speak so quickly that no one outside of the three of them stood a chance of interpretation. Four of them, actually. Colin had figured it out the first time he heard them, putting a momentary damper on their chatter with one word: “syeadavaka.” Easy.
“Ouryadavaka Elcomewadavaka,” Vanessa says now, quietly but just as quickly. You’re welcome.
“Ladies,” Dani’s father says. “English, please.”
Dani swallows. She wills her eyes to dry and they obey. “Suz,” she says in the one language she knows her father’s fiancée will understand. “I’ll take that drink.”
10
Kate
“We’re going out,” Dani announces after Dr. Lowenstein and Susanna leave.
“Where to?” Vanessa asks without hesitation.
“Hang on,” Kate says. “I thought we were going to stay in and watch movies.” Dani is clearly upset and already a little drunk. Kate feels awful for her. What was her father thinking, breaking the news of his engagement in front of them? For such a successful, charming man, he has always struck Kate as insensitive, treating Dani more like a buddy than a daughter.
“Kate,” Dani says, exasperated, doing that thing she does where she ruffles her own blond hair and then it falls, despite her best efforts, right back into pin-straight place. Kate is sitting on the couch and Dani is pacing in front
of her. She is thinner than Kate has ever seen her and there is a dull cast to her skin. Still, her brown eyes are shining and she talks as loudly as ever, emphasizing her words with her small, expressive hands. “My dad just told me he is getting married.”
“I can’t believe he dropped the news like that,” Kate says. Dr. Lowenstein and Suz had slunk out of the house twenty minutes earlier. From the nervous, darting look in her eye, Kate suspected Suz thought the “girls” were on the verge of rioting. “He never even mentioned her before?”
Dani shakes her head. She takes a slug of whiskey, which Kate can smell from five feet away. She wishes they could just stay in. She’s ready to beg, if it comes to that. “Well,” she says, “my fiancé just told me we’re not getting married.” She meant the line to be self-deprecating and funny, but to her disappointment, she sounds petulant. She’s usually the one who will agree to anything if she thinks it will cheer someone up, so now Vanessa and Dani are peering at her, confused. She feels her face reddening. She’d planned to tell them about Colin that night, she’d been amped up and jittery the entire car ride down thinking about how they would take her confession, but she can’t tell them everything now, not when Dani is dealing with her own stuff and halfway drunk.
And then Vanessa says, “I still have feelings for Jeremy Caldwell.”
Kate feels her mouth drop. Dani stops pacing. They both stare at Vanessa. She’s sitting on one of the stools at the kitchen counter, across the room from the couch. She takes a demure sip of her wine. Dani drops down beside Kate on the couch and laughs. It’s not a nice sound. “We’re all fucked,” she says.
“What are you talking about?” Kate asks. She remembers Jeremy following Vanessa around like a puppy that summer eight years earlier. She’d worried no one would ever look at her the way Jeremy looked at Vanessa, but when she’d mentioned how sweet they were together to Dani, Dani had given their relationship three weeks tops before Vanessa became bored and moved on to the next challenge. It took a little longer than three weeks, but not much. “What about Drew?” Kate asks.
“Drew and I are having problems.”
Kate wonders if having such dramatic looks makes Vanessa more prone to be dramatic. “Since when?” she demands.
“What? You don’t believe me?” Vanessa asks. “You’re the one who said I should meet Jeremy for a drink.”
“You’re encouraging this?” Dani asks. She sounds delighted. Even drunk, she has a way of asking questions that makes Kate feel like she is taking notes, like there is a good chance this conversation will end up in print some day, all her inadequacies exposed in a row like granny panties pinned to a clothesline.
“No, of course not!” she says. She points a finger at Vanessa. “You didn’t tell me the whole story.”
Vanessa shrugs and takes another sip of wine. Her composure disturbs Kate. She has everything Kate wants and it’s not enough for her. Vanessa once told her that early in their marriage she and Drew had stayed in bed for a whole day and watched the entire first season of Mad Men on DVD, drinking martinis and eating deviled eggs. It sounded sophisticated and fun—like the most romantic thing in the world (though she did take a moment to consider how long the smell of eggs must have lingered in the air). When Kate had suggested the idea to Peter, he had given her a funny look and reminded her of his Sunday morning basketball game with his law school buddies. No, she had said, agreeing. You can’t miss that. She’d been disappointed but felt she could hardly fault someone for believing in the sanctity of schedules. You can’t dislike the very thing you love about someone, the very thing you have in common. If she disliked him for it, she’d have to dislike herself too.
“We definitely don’t have enough alcohol for this conversation,” Dani says. She sounds relieved. Dani can turn almost any situation into a reason to go to a bar. “Let’s get out of here. We can take the beach cruisers.”
“Where to?” Vanessa asks again. “The Princeton?” Where they are going is important to her in a way Kate will never understand. To Kate, the question is simply: Stay in or go out? Her irritation is starting to feel unwieldy.
“Why don’t we just stay here?” she says again. “I brought a bottle of chardonnay. We can sit on the deck, listen to the ocean, have a glass of wine. It will be relaxing.” Already, it’s come to this: she’s begging. She doesn’t care. The last thing she wants to do is stand in a crowded bar and pretend to be able to hear her friends. Her feet hurt and she is tired. She looks around the living room, which has been redecorated since she was here last. It’s still luxurious and peaceful, with blond wood floors and light-colored furniture and a large unframed painting defined only by a few sweeping gray brushstrokes—she’ll have to ask Vanessa how she is supposed to feel about that—but it turns out the new white couch is much more comfortable than the old white couch, and all Kate wants to do is stretch out on it and watch a movie. The house is spotless—Dr. Lowenstein must have a very thorough housekeeper; even the baseboards are clean, Kate has already noticed—and this makes her happy. She sees a photograph of Dani and her father in a silver frame on the mantel. Next to it is a photo of Dani, Vanessa, and Kate sitting on a lifeguard stand in their bathing suits with their arms around one another’s shoulders, the dunes and the house in the background. The picture was taken in eighth grade, a fact Kate knows because Vanessa’s cheekbones are still obscured by baby fat, Dani’s chest is as flat as a board, and her own huge smile is marred by the metallic blur of braces.
“I want a martini. Did you bring the ingredients for that?” Dani asks.
Kate looks at Dani but does not answer. Dani is wearing a threadbare black T-shirt with a hole in the shoulder, black leggings, and black flip-flops, and not a single swipe of makeup. It’s a variation of the same outfit she has worn every time Kate has seen her since college. By the end of tomorrow, Kate knows, the dull quality of her friend’s skin will be gone, replaced by a bronze glow. Her hair, already the color of straw, will whiten in the sun and her eyelashes will pale, making her amber eyes appear darker, flashier. Looks mean little to Dani—she is the least vain person that Kate knows—but it has to be pretty easy to not care about your looks when you look the way Dani does wearing what most of Kate’s work associates would consider very old pajamas.
“She wants to stay in,” Vanessa says to Dani. She unsnaps the large gold buckle on her woven leather clutch, peers into the bag, and pulls out a tiny pot of cantaloupe-colored lip gloss. It’s a color that should not look good on anyone, a shade that Kate would barely have glanced at in the lineup at Sephora. She already knows how it will look on Vanessa.
“Of course she does,” Dani says. “But you and I both know the only thing that is going to make her feel better is finding someone new.”
“I’m right here,” Kate says. “Hello.”
“Hello,” they say. Vanessa rubs the gloss over her lips, and they become as full and shiny and attention hogging as a supermodel’s. Kate manages to stop herself from asking to try the lip gloss, and this feels like an accomplishment.
“Well, you’re wrong,” she says. “I don’t want to find someone new. Not yet, at least. Maybe after the wedding.”
Vanessa stops rubbing her lips. “What wedding?”
“Our wedding. The wedding Peter and I were supposed to have. It wouldn’t feel right to start dating someone new before then.”
Dani sighs. It’s her “this-is-worse-than-we-thought” sigh. “We know you don’t want someone new right now,” Dani says. “But trust me, staying home is not going to make you feel better.”
“Dani’s right,” Vanessa says. “We should go out. Just for a couple of drinks.”
“We’ll have the Meg Ryan movie marathon tomorrow night,” Dani says. “I promise.”
Kate looks back and forth between her friends. They are exasperating and selfish, but they have always been this way and she has always loved them and she is not going to stop now, or ever. She realized this a long time ago, and the knowledge has become
a touchstone that brings her comfort. They will never leave her life because she will never allow them to.
“ ‘We can have a good time,’ ” Kate says in the nasally drawl of an uptight Southern debutante, “ ‘but we cannot be wild.’ ” Dani and Vanessa grin, relieved. It’s one of their favorite lines from Shag, a movie about best friends letting loose in Myrtle Beach the summer before they leave for college. Kate had given each of them a copy as a high school graduation gift and during their freshman year at college they would three-way call each other and watch the movie simultaneously, each in separate dorm rooms and cities. Kate missed her friends so much that year; it had been a stubborn sadness, a steady whine that sometimes felt like a soundtrack, setting the tone for her adult life.
Pedaling down Dune Drive on a red beach cruiser, Dani ahead of her and Vanessa behind her, is a transporting experience. The night is quiet; the air on her face is soft; her hair streams behind her; the stars above are as brilliant as stars in a children’s book. They could be nine years old, or fifteen, or twenty-one; they’ve ridden bikes down Dune Drive at all of those ages and all of the ones in between. There must have been so much more to those summers, but what she remembers are the two weeks she spent in Avalon with Dani and Vanessa—two weeks that always went by too quickly, but that in memory stretch to fill an entire season.
She has never been to Avalon in winter. Dani periodically suggested off-season visits throughout high school and even college, but Kate always declined. She knows that Vanessa brought Kyle, one of her high school boyfriends, to Dani’s father’s house one night in the middle of winter, slipping the key from its hiding place under a rock beside the garage door. Vanessa told her parents that she was sleeping at Kate’s house that night and asked Kate to intercept any calls that came in on their house line. She also asked Kate not to tell Dani, an omission that did not sit right with Kate. She had felt trapped—if she told Dani, she would break Vanessa’s trust; if she kept the secret, she would break Dani’s. She had kept the secret and then she sat by the phone all night, worried that Vanessa’s parents would call—and wondering what secrets Vanessa and Dani kept between themselves.
