The Summertime Girls

by Laura Hankin

Except Ally didn’t. This was the first she had heard about Beth disliking Haiti. Her e-mails had been immensely upbeat, filled with a sense of purpose. That is, until they’d stopped coming.

  “Anyways,” Grandma Stella said. “She should be able to have a good time now that she’s back, instead of worrying that her parents and I aren’t getting along.”

  If Beth had hated Haiti, Ally wondered, frustrated, why wouldn’t she have talked to her about it?

  “Is that all right?” Grandma Stella said. “Keeping this between us?”

  Ally nodded. “Of course.”

  SIX

  Beth and Owen stood together in the dim light of the store and smiled at each other, each waiting for the other to say something. Then they both started talking at the same time.

  “How are—”

  “How have—”

  “You first!” he said.

  “No, no, you go,” she replied.

  “How are you?” he repeated. But Beth didn’t know how to answer that question. Navigating the subject of Haiti required an alert brain. It took full concentration to tell people enough so they’d have some idea of what it was like, but not so much that they’d get depressed.

  And right now, her brain didn’t seem to be working at full capacity. She tried to force her neurons to slow down and focus on making speech, but they seemed instead to be zooming in on Owen’s gray eyes. One of them had a fleck of brown in it, a little, unexpected dot that complemented all the other freckles lightly dusting his face and arms. Those incipient muscles of his that she’d noticed when they were in high school had arrived in full, but somehow he looked like he spent more time working with his hands than flexing at the gym. A mental image of him carrying lumber lodged itself in her mind.

  “I’ve been good,” she said. “What about you? What have you been up to?”

  “I’ve been good too. Just spent the last year working in Acadia National Park, doing park ranger things. If you ever have a hankering for a guided nature walk, I’m your guy.”

  Aha, she thought, so the lumber thing wasn’t too far off. Acadia National Park has lots of trees. Then she thought, A national park has lots of trees? Elizabeth Abbott, get yourself together.

  “And I’m heading off to grad school in the fall for environmental science. But I’m here this summer helping my parents close up the store.”

  “I can’t believe Mulberry’s is closing,” Beth said. “My dad used to bring me here all the time.” It was important to Beth to try to articulate the magic of the place to Owen, to explain how much it had meant to a little girl who had never expected to enjoy trips to buy hardware. At this point, her ability to form complex thoughts seemed to be returning, and she realized that this was the longest conversation she’d ever had with him that hadn’t involved ice cream.

  “My parents always loved when you came in,” Owen said.

  “Me?”

  “Yeah. They bought a ton of lollipops when the store opened, thinking all the kids who came in would go crazy for them. And then you were the only kid who got really excited.”

  “I was just thinking about the lollipops!”

  Owen paused for a second, furrowing his forehead in thought. The pinkness in his face had faded, leaving his skin tan and smooth. “Actually, we have a bunch of boxes of them in the back. My parents had a tendency to overorder supplies. I think these ones are a couple years old, but those things don’t ever go bad, right?”

  “What with all the chemicals, I’m sure they’re still fine.”

  “Well, if they don’t get eaten, they’re going to sit in a landfill somewhere until the sun explodes, probably.”

  “Oh no!” Beth laughed.

  “Any interest?”

  “I think it’s our duty to reduce landfill waste.”

  He smiled at her and said, “Hey, me too.” Then he went into the back room and brought out a box. He put it on the floor, and they crouched around it. When he opened it up, Beth peered down. A rainbow of colors shone back up at her. The two of them looked at each other over their makeshift candy shop. Beth felt giddy.

  “So many flavors!” Beth said. “I always just ate butterscotch.”

  “Really? You never tried anything else? You were missing out, Beth.”

  “Hey!” she said. “Don’t talk to me about not trying new things, Mr. Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough.”

  Owen looked up from the tangle of lollipops in his hands then, straight at her, and at first she thought that maybe she’d said something wrong.

  But he grinned and said, “Well, it’s not too late to branch out. This box probably covers the entire spectrum of taste.” He pulled out a white stick topped with a bulbous black wrapper. “Licorice? Mud pie? Who knows what this one is supposed to be?”

  Beth giggled, a sound that surprised her. “It looks ominous. I think it might be poison.”

  “Maybe we should bury that one at the bottom of the box . . .” Owen said. “So which one do you want?”

  “I don’t know how to even begin narrowing it down.”

  “Well, there’s no need to limit yourself. We could do a lollipop tasting.” He held up a green one, unwrapped it, and waved it around under his nose. He grinned at her and closed his eyes. Then he made a great show of taking a lick. As his tongue swirled around the lollipop, Beth noticed a weird tingle on the back of her thighs. Owen said, “I’m detecting subtle notes of sugar, apple, and corn syrup.”

  Five minutes later, they were both sitting on the floor, amid a pile of unwrapped lollipops. The candies had gone gummy over time, but that hadn’t stopped the two of them from each trying enough flavors to turn their tongues brown. So far, among other flavors, they’d found pineapple, bubble gum, and, as Owen had put it, what pet dander might taste like if a bunch of it flew into your mouth. Beth had kicked off her flip-flops, and her legs, clad in a pair of jean shorts, lay stretched out against the linoleum.

  She touched her tongue to a fuchsia sphere. “I think it’s supposed to be grape,” she said. “Either that, or laundry detergent.”

  “Oh man, I’ve gotta try it,” Owen said, and laughed. The sound of his laugh traveled across the air to her and enfolded her in warmth. She liked it. It made her break out into a gigantic smile in response and, suddenly self-conscious at how she’d lost control of her face, she looked down at her lap. For some reason, she had no more silly lollipop banter left, and he wasn’t saying anything either. A tiny bubble of panic started to rise up inside her at the silence, so she said the first thing that came to her mind.

  “You’ve changed since high school.”

  “Oh? Yeah. Yeah, I guess I have,” he replied. “That’s probably a good thing. High school as a science nerd who couldn’t stop himself from lecturing people about the dangers of global warming was not exactly fun. Not to mention that my main after-school activity was hanging out with my parents in a hardware store every day.”

  “No, not every day!”

  “Yup. Actually. Every single day.”

  “Why? I mean, it’s great here, but didn’t you want to do other things?”

  “Um,” he said, suddenly quiet and not looking at her. “I guess I just felt like my parents needed me.”

  Little warning signs went up in Beth’s brain, saying Danger! Potential for Awkward Conversation Ahead! Take U-Turn Now to Return to Easy Banter. But she couldn’t stop herself from plunging forward. “Do you feel really sad about it?” she asked. He looked at her then, confused.

  “Wait, you mean sad about—” He let his sentence trail off.

  “The store closing,” she said. “I can only imagine, if you spent every day here, you must.”

  “Oh.” He picked up another lollipop and started halfheartedly unwrapping it. “Yeah, I guess.” He paused, like he wasn’t sure whether to go on. She gave him a half smile.

  “Well, not ‘
I guess.’ I am,” he said. Then the words flowed out easily, as though he’d just been waiting for someone to ask him. “This store has always been a part of my life. I sat in that corner and did my homework after school, had my first job here, it was probably the thing my parents talked about the most, and now it’s not going to exist anymore. It’ll just be . . . gone, and fifty years from now, no one will even know it used to be here.” He stopped and looked a little embarrassed. “Thank you for listening to that.”

  “Of course. I understand how you feel,” Beth said. “I mean, sort of. Obviously not to the same extent, I mean, but my grandma is leaving her house. Someone will move in and change it, or maybe even tear it down, and it won’t be my place anymore.”

  “Right—you won’t be welcome.” Owen had been leaning up against a shelf, but now he sat forward in agreement.

  “Yeah.” She sat forward too, leaning toward him. “And maybe it’s childish of me to feel that way. After all, with my grandma, of course the most important thing is her health. Who cares if I don’t have my little summer vacation haven anymore? But I guess it’s just strange and disorienting to think that this store, that house, they’ll be the same physical coordinates on a map as they are now, now when they mean so much to us, but nothing else about them will be the same.”

  “Exactly. Then, if I have new people who are important to me, or someday when I have kids, and I want to show them this thing that was my whole childhood, I won’t be able to.”

  “I know!” she said. “I think about that too.”

  He was nodding, inching closer, and she was too without even realizing it, as though his empathy were a gigantic magnet. “It’s scary to realize that then there’s this huge part of yourself you can never fully share with them,” he said.

  “Yes! I know with someone like Ally—you remember Ally, right?”

  “Yeah, of course. You guys worked at the ice cream store together.”

  “Right. Anyways, I know our friendship changed completely for the better when she came up to Britton Hills with me for the first time. There was this whole other me that she got to know, that would’ve just stayed a stranger to her if she hadn’t come,” Beth said. “I don’t know if there’s any way to get around that.”

  “Yeah, I don’t know either,” Owen said, and was silent a moment. She realized that the feet between them had turned into inches, that her bare leg nearly touched his on the floor now. She could smell him, a pleasant, piney smell. Self-conscious again, she fought an urge to touch his face and tried casually to reverse her trajectory.

  “Anyway,” she said, leaning back, “what are your parents going to do now that the shop is closing?”

  “I don’t know. They might get enough money from the sale to be able to retire. That’s optimistic, though, so the more likely scenario is that my dad will go work at the Home Depot that’s putting them out of business.”

  Beth felt a deep indignation at imagining Mr. Mulberry, so proud of his own business, in a Home Depot smock. His bushy mustache, his balding head, his genial smile, his potbelly, they all attained an air of elegance when he worked in his store. A customer would ask him a question and he would know the answer, and his whole being would shine with delight. At Home Depot, that pride would have nowhere to go. He’d seem foolish.

  “I hate that,” she said. “I hate thinking of your dad at Home Depot.”

  “I know,” Owen said. “I hate it too.”

  “It must be so hard,” she said, “to have all of these things you take as guarantees—that your parents are generally in control of their lives, that Mulberry’s will always be here—disappearing at the same time.”

  “It is,” he said. “And it also scares the crap out of me—they thought they had it figured out. No matter what else might have happened to them, they had this store that was supposed to carry them through their lives, maybe carry me through my life, not that I wanted that for myself, but still—and all of a sudden it’s gone and they have to start over at age fifty. It’s just like, did they make the wrong decisions? Did they waste their lives by choosing the wrong thing? And is there any way of knowing that you’re choosing the wrong thing? Because I sure as hell don’t want to realize I chose the wrong thing in thirty years. I mean, who knows? Maybe there won’t be any more national parks left to protect and I’ll end up doing palliative care for robots or something.”

  “No,” Beth said. “Well, first of all, I highly doubt you’ll end up at a robot hospice, although I’m sure you’d do a very nice job at that if you wanted to. But also, even if your parents made some wrong decisions and things suck now, it wasn’t a waste.”

  “Yeah.” But Owen didn’t sound convinced.

  “It made them happy for a long time. It made a lot of people happy. Hey, I was always over the freaking moon about those lollipops.”

  “You were,” he said, and for the first time in a while, he cracked that sun-filled smile of his. “You legitimately went a little bit insane about them.”

  “What? Insane? That’s not true!” she protested.

  “Beth Abbott,” he said, “my first memory of you is you walking in here with your dad when we were both, I don’t know, six years old? And you were so calm and self-possessed, looking at the tools very seriously, to the point where I thought you were maybe a tiny fifth-grader or something. And then my dad handed you a lollipop, and you went, ‘Really?’ all wide-eyed, your voice all high, and you started doing this lollipop dance.”

  “A lollipop dance?” she said, laughing. “What does that even mean?”

  “I’m glad you asked. I will demonstrate,” Owen said. He threw his hands up in the air and waved them around, then started warbling, “Lollipoppppp, lollipoppp, I get to eat a lollipopppp.”

  “I did not!”

  “I’m telling you, Beth. There was some skipping involved too. One of the best happy dances I’ve ever seen.”

  “Liar! I don’t believe you.” Her stomach hurt from laughing.

  “I have witnesses. You can ask my parents. The—okay, maybe this is weird to say, but I’m just going to say it—the Beth Abbott Happy Dance is kind of legendary in our household.”

  “It is?” For some reason, in the time she’d spent in high school talking with Ally about Owen, it had never occurred to her that he might talk about her too.

  “Yeah. I mean, one year, I swear my dad hadn’t smiled for a good six months, and then you came into the store and apparently did your happy dance again. He came home from work that night, sat down at the table and said, ‘Goddammit if Beth Abbott doesn’t still light up like a kid at Christmas when you offer her a lollipop.’ Then he and my mom just cracked up for five minutes straight.”

  He was still grinning at her, but she stopped, caught for a second on wondering why Mr. Mulberry hadn’t smiled for six months. He misread her confusion, and the pinkness in his skin crept back to the surface.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “That was weird. I shouldn’t have said that.”

  “No,” she said, wanting more than anything else for his smile not to disappear again. “No, no, no, it was good. It proves my point. I can do an amazing, life-changing happy dance. But your parents gave me the opportunity to show it. So therefore they are also amazing and life-changing, and they did not lead a totally misguided existence.”

  He laughed. “Okay, you’ve convinced me.”

  “Yes! Oh, good.”

  “Thank you for asking me about that. It felt . . . helpful to talk about it.”

  “Of course.”

  Owen nodded. She nodded too, and they moved their heads up and down in silence.

  “It’s really nice to see you again, Beth,” Owen said. He was looking at her with such intensity that she feared she was co-opting his trademark blush.

  Then the bell on the shop’s door rang, and Ally stepped in. She wore strappy leather sandals and a brig
ht red sundress with a sweetheart neckline that tapered at the waist before flowing out to midthigh. She looked so fresh-faced and feminine that Beth, in her T-shirt, instantly felt like she’d been walloped with an ugly stick. Ally’s eyes lit on Owen.

  “Owen Mulberry!” Ally said, with a huge, easy smile. “Oh my God, hi! Got that ice cream addiction under control yet?”

  Owen rose to his feet, and Beth watched the two of them hug. “Hey, Ally,” he said. “I didn’t realize you were around.”

  Beth saw Ally look at the lollipops quizzically. She couldn’t stand the idea of Ally joining in on the lollipop tasting, of Ally cracking Owen up with a pitch-perfect imitation of a wine snob, of her stealing him away without even trying. “Owen,” she said, her voice abrupt, “I totally forgot to ask you if you had any packing tape we could buy. Grandma Stella needs some.”

  “Of course,” he said, and ducked into a shadowy aisle to find it. When he came back, Beth had scooped her lollipop wrappers into the trash can and already had her money out to pay. Ally stood there, her weight shifted onto one leg, her hand on her hip, and kept up an easy stream of conversation with Owen about New York.

  “I’ll be heading there too,” Owen said, “for grad school.”

  “Oh good, so we can hang out!” Ally said. She grinned, showing those adorable dimples of hers. “Here, take my number.”

  It felt like an eternity to Beth, handing over her dollar bills and her exact change. When she gave it to Owen, their fingers touched briefly. His were so warm, like they had been soaking in sunlight. “Thank you,” she said, and turned to go.

  “We’ll see you around, Owen,” Ally said. “Grandma Stella wants to have a crazy party before she moves, and you should definitely come.”

  “Sounds great,” he said. “Bye, Beth.”

  “Good-bye,” she said, darting a quick, halfhearted smile in his direction.

  When she and Ally closed the door behind them and reentered the cloudless day, they walked in silence for a few moments.

  “So Owen got cute, huh?” Ally said. “He’s kind of got that rugged lumberjack thing going on. I mean, he’s not really my type. I like ’em lankier. But still, rawr!” She shimmied her shoulders a little bit and made a sexy face at Beth.