The Summertime Girls

by Laura Hankin

  And the next day:

  Beth,

  Today, I woke up, ate three bowls of oatmeal, and fell asleep on the couch for two hours. Then I walked all the way to the subway in the rain before realizing that I’d forgotten my umbrella. I’m watching Shakespeare in Love on repeat. I need to talk to you. What if he’s already hooked up with someone new? It’s possible. He’s so cute, he could go out and find another girl who’s prettier than me. This is awful. I feel like shitty shitty shit.

  Ally had just sent the last one an hour ago.

  Beth,

  Please, as soon as you get this, can we talk?? I need you and your wise words and the fact that you love me. I don’t really like emoticons, but this is how I feel :( :( :( :( :( :( :( I’m an ugly failure and no guy will ever love me ever again and I’ll never love any guy as much as I love Tom and I’m just going to be alone forever, or have some totally loveless marriage with some guy I’ll barely even want to have sex with because I get so desperate. Please help me feel a little bit :), if that’s possible right now. I’d even settle for :/

  Beth closed out of the window with a quick click and stared at the screen, her vision clouded by fury. She realized her hands were shaking, so she sat on them. Ally’s e-mails were so oblivious to everything except her own problems. She had abandoned Beth when Beth had needed her more than anything, had hung up on her when Beth had told her that something terrible was happening, just like Beth had slipped out the door, too overwhelmed to stay with that boy and help in any way she could, making the situation about her instead of about the person who really mattered. She didn’t even know the little boy’s name. She didn’t know anything about him. She’d failed him by not knowing how to fix him, and then she’d failed him again by running away from him.

  Deirdre was right. Sitting around pitying yourself accomplished nothing. It blinded you. She wasn’t going to coddle Ally, and she wasn’t going to coddle herself.

  She’d finish out Haiti, but for real this time. She’d redeem herself in the months she had left. And then, maybe, she’d go to med school, so that instead of staring uselessly at a collection of symptoms, too scared to function, she could snap into action like Deirdre had. She wasn’t better than Haiti, she realized now. But she wanted badly to be better than she was.

  And she was so mad at Ally. She left the Internet café without writing any e-mails, without buying a plane ticket home, and went back to Open Arms. She walked straight up to Peter and Deirdre and said, “What was the little boy’s name?”

  “Michel,” Peter answered.

  “Michel,” Beth repeated. Then she turned to Deirdre and said, “I’m ready to work harder.” After that, she didn’t talk to Ally, or to anyone, about the boy again.

  • • •

  BETH stared out at the boats rocking in the harbor until her phone buzzed. I’m at Monroe’s! came a text from Ally. You close? She power-walked over, trying to concentrate on Grandma Stella’s reunion plan. Again, her palms had gone all sweaty. She wiped them on her shorts and paused outside Monroe’s, taking deep breaths to calm herself down. Through the window, she could see Ally hovering at a table, placing a bottle of wine in the center and saying something excitedly to the waiter, a spindly boy in his late teens who was staring at her in awe. The waiter nodded so hard that Beth worried he’d hurt his neck, then ran off into the kitchen.

  “Hey,” Beth said, walking through Monroe’s front door.

  “Hi!” Ally said. “Perfect timing. Ready to be the coolest spies ever?” Beth nodded. “Okay, great. I told the waiter about our plan, and he said we could sit in this booth over here. It’s the private, romantic booth, apparently, so you can look out and watch other people in the restaurant, but they can’t really see you.” Ally led Beth over to a dark red booth in the corner, separated from view of the main restaurant by a row of fake potted plants.

  Together, they scooted onto the red leather seats, and then Ally reached into a yellow tote bag she’d slung over her shoulder. “I know nobody will be able to see us, but I bought little Groucho Marx glasses to wear anyway, because I thought we’d look smoking hot in them.” She handed a pair to Beth and put hers on, waggling her own eyebrows underneath the fake tufts of hair. “So I just paid for the bottle of Merlot, and the waiter is bringing a basket of bread to the table now.”

  Beth felt all confused inside. This helpful Ally seemed completely different from the one who’d written those slap-in-the-face e-mails half a year ago. This was Ally Without Tom—a different creature from Ally With Tom. “Thanks so much for setting this up,” she said now, and put her glasses on too.

  By 6:05, the center front table was still empty. The bottle of wine, the beige tablecloth, the basket of crusty bread, all took on a pathetic loneliness. The waiter swung by their booth, handing them their own basket of bread through the trees. “Um, is everything okay?” he asked, his voice cracking a bit on the last word. He seemed to be trying to cultivate facial hair, but so far all he had was a neck beard and part of a mustache. He looked back and forth between his two customers, attempting to be suave but coming off terrified. “Are they coming?”

  “I don’t know,” Beth said.

  “Valerie put it in the paper just like we asked her to,” Ally said. Then the door opened and Penny Joan Munson walked in. She sat down at the table, her spine rigid, staring at the wall. The waiter let out a squeak, then cleared his throat and nodded very formally at Beth and Ally. He headed over to Penny Joan, taking his order pad out of his pocket. Beth and Ally squeezed their hands together tightly. Penny Joan waved off the waiter as he approached. He shot a glance back at the booth and then went behind the bar, where he stacked glasses in despair.

  Penny Joan continued to stare at the wall, her lips pursed tightly, avoiding the window. She didn’t touch the bread or the wine. Beth watched her zip and unzip the pocketbook in her lap, over and over again, even as her upper body stayed completely still.

  “Come on, Grandma Stella,” Ally whispered in Beth’s ear. Each time the door opened, the two of them started, but the people who came in were inevitably strangers. With each new customer, Penny Joan’s posture got straighter and straighter, but she kept her back to the door. At every door jangle, she seemed to stop breathing until it became clear that the new visitor wasn’t who she was expecting, and then she swallowed a big swallow and drew in a sharp breath.

  Fifteen minutes went by like this, and then, swiftly, Penny Joan stood up and left the restaurant.

  “Shit,” Ally said. “Where is Grandma Stella?”

  “Oh no,” Beth said, taking off the Groucho glasses. “Why isn’t she here?” Suddenly she felt panicky and rummaged for her phone.

  “Oh my God, do you think—” Ally started to ask, then trailed off. She took her glasses off too, and folded them in her lap nervously. “I should’ve . . .” she said, as she picked at the eyebrow tufts.

  Beth punched in Grandma Stella’s home phone number, certain no one would pick up. She remembered the way Grandma Stella had talked about her will that afternoon. She looked into Ally’s brown eyes as the phone rang, seeing her own worry reflected there. She couldn’t look away from Ally or something bad would happen, so the two of them just faced each other as Beth held her phone to her head. And then, finally, Grandma Stella picked up.

  “Hello?”

  Beth exhaled in relief and nodded her head vigorously at Ally, who let out a big breath too, and dropped her face into her hands. So she wasn’t dead, at least.

  “Hey, Grandma, it’s me. Um, Ally and I are out in town and we just wanted to know if . . .” Beth couldn’t think of anything and made a help me face at Ally.

  “Uh . . . uh . . . flowers? For the party?” Ally whispered.

  “We wanted to know if you wanted us to pick up some flowers for the party.”

  “Oh, darling, it’s only Wednesday. Shouldn’t we wait till Friday morning so they’re fr
esh?”

  “You’re right. You’re so right. What were we thinking? By the way, is everything okay? How are you doing? How are you feeling?”

  “I’m just fine, except the Sox are down two runs and I don’t know if there’s any coming back from this.”

  “Okay. Well, we’ll be back soon. I love you.”

  When Beth hung up the phone, she and Ally stayed silent for a second longer. Beth tried to turn Grandma Stella’s absence into an explanation that made sense.

  “So I guess she just didn’t want to come,” Beth said.

  “Are you sure she saw the paper?”

  “I asked her if she’d read it today, and she said yes. And I even referenced Dear Valerie, and she looked all weird and guilty.”

  Ally tapped on her lips with her fingers. “I guess you’re right, then. She didn’t want to come.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well. I didn’t expect that of her.”

  “I know, me neither. I feel so bad for Penny Joan.”

  “Yeah.” Ally was quiet, and Beth imagined that, like her, she was thinking of the embarrassment and disappointment Penny Joan must have felt as she sat alone at the table. Then Ally said, “We should drink.”

  “Huh?”

  “The bottle of wine, I mean. We paid for it. I want to drink it, so this isn’t a total waste.”

  “Um . . .”

  “Oh, come on,” Ally said. “We’re here. We tried, and our experiment failed, so we should at least get something out of it. Let’s have dinner and get drunk. It’s been almost a week since I’ve had something to drink, and my body’s confused.”

  Beth certainly could stand to forget about things for a little while too. The phone conversation with Deirdre had unnerved her. And her momentary fear that something terrible had happened to Grandma Stella had given her the jitters. A bit of oblivion could be nice. So she stood up, grabbed the bottle of wine from the front table, and waved the waiter over.

  After the waiter had opened the bottle (fumblingly) and poured out two generous glasses of rich maroon for them, lingering at their table until his manager called sharply, “Ricky! Stop bothering them!” Ally held hers up. “Cheers,” she said. “To Britton Hills and Grandma Stella, even though she didn’t show up.”

  For their second glass, Beth gave the toast. “To you,” she said, “for coming up here with me. I’m so thankful to have your help on this. I didn’t realize how much harder it would be to pack up and get everything together for this party without you.” Her face felt warm from the wine, and she couldn’t quite remember why she’d been mad at Ally for so long.

  “Aw,” Ally said, her eyes dark and unreadable in the candlelight. “I’m really glad I came up too.”

  Tenderness for her friend overrode all the past weirdness and made Beth ashamed of how snippy she’d been with Ally. She was glad that at least they still had another half a week together. She took a gigantic sip of her second glass. “I love you such much.”

  Ally laughed. “Did you say ‘such much’? Are you tipsy already?”

  “No . . .”

  “You are such a lightweight! I love you such much too, you drunkard.”

  “You’re a lightweight.”

  “Not me. I have the tolerance of an overweight frat boy.” Ally’s phone dinged, and she checked it. Her face broke out into a smile and when she caught Beth looking, she closed her lips back over her teeth.

  “Who is it?” Beth asked.

  “It’s Nick. From the music store.”

  “He has your number?”

  “Yeah, I gave it to him so he could let me know about this song we recorded yesterday. He says he’s done mixing it, and that I should stop by the store and get it. Can we go on our way home?”

  So they finished their Americanized Italian food at Monroe’s and drank the wine down to its dregs. Or rather, Ally drank the dregs—after finishing her second glass, Beth let Ally do the heavy lifting for the rest of the bottle. Then, leaving the waiter a big tip, they walked arm in arm to Hooked on Tonics. Nick was watching out the window, and when they appeared, he opened the door with what seemed to Beth like studied nonchalance.

  He introduced himself to her with a nod, but his eyes stayed on Ally, who wove back and forth a bit as she walked into the store, her boast about alcohol tolerance apparently unfounded. She looked really pretty, Beth thought, flushed and wide-eyed but not sloppy, her lips dark from the wine. Had she been wearing makeup this whole time, or had she put it on in the bathroom at Monroe’s before they left?

  “So I hear you pushed her down a mountain,” Nick said to Beth. At first, Beth didn’t know who he was talking to, because he was still looking at Ally.

  “What?” she said. “I—no, I didn’t mean—”

  “I was joking,” Ally said. “You jerk.”

  “Anyway, here’s the track. I think it’s really solid,” Nick said, and held up a CD.

  “Yeah? Yes!” Ally smiled really wide, and walked closer to grab it from his fingers. Nick smiled wide in response.

  “A CD,” she said, taking it from his hand more slowly than Beth thought she had to. “How nineties of you.”

  “Unfortunately I already used up all my records and cassette tapes. Sorry.” Ally guffawed, and Nick smirked, pleased with himself.

  “So you wrote a song together?” Beth asked, propping herself up against the counter and feeling like a forgotten third wheel.

  “She wrote it, mostly,” Nick said. “I just recorded it.”

  “Oh, come on,” Ally said, and swatted at his arm. “Team effort!”

  “Yeah, team effort. She wrote the music and lyrics.”

  “He figured out awesome piano stuff for it, and saved me from myself when my original lyrics were terrible.”

  “Don’t forget the drums,” Nick said.

  Ally gasped. “And drums! Oh no! I forgot the drums.” She leaned toward Beth like she was going to tell her a secret and said, “He also played the drums.”

  “I take it you girls had a good time tonight,” Nick said. It rankled Beth that he called them girls.

  “Yes. We drank a lot of wine,” Ally said.

  “No shit. Drunk at eight P.M. That sounds about right for Britton Hills.”

  “I can’t believe you got it all finished so fast. You are a musical recording genius.” Ally was giving Nick the superhero look, and Beth could see him enjoying how his cape fluttered in the wind.

  “Should we listen?” Nick asked. “I can put it on.”

  Ally hesitated, pulled back, looked reflexively at Beth. “Um. Maybe not now. We should probably get back and check on Grandma Stella, right?”

  Beth couldn’t tell if Ally was being sensitive to her increasing awkwardness or overly shy about the song for some other, strange reason. Regardless, she figured it was best to get out of the store as soon as possible, to get Ally away from Nick’s hungry gaze, so she gave Ally the nod she was asking for.

  “Cool,” Nick said. “Okay. Cool. Yeah, well, let me know when you want to jam more.”

  “Definitely. Thank you, sir,” Ally said, and held her hand out for a mock-serious handshake. He grasped it in his own, and they laughed as they moved their hands up and down.

  “Okay, bye,” Beth said, and pulled Ally out the door.

  Grandma Stella was just heading to bed as they got back, acting much more normally, Beth thought, than someone should after standing up her former best friend. She didn’t like what this night had made her think of her grandmother. So after Grandma Stella shut her door and the two of them had sat at the kitchen table in silence for a moment, she turned to Ally and said, “Let’s have more to drink.”

  “Yup,” Ally replied immediately. They took inventory of Grandma Stella’s alcohol collection. Beer and wine in the fridge, tequila and scotch under the sink.

 
“It’s like the rebellious high school experience you and I never had,” Ally whispered, holding up the various bottles, “rifling through the adults’ liquor cabinet.”

  “I haven’t ever tried scotch before,” Beth said.

  “Shut up, really? Oh my God, let’s have some of that, then. Scotch is the best because you can pretend you’re an old man at a classy gentlemen’s club.”

  She filled up two glasses generously and squinted at them. “That’s roughly a couple shots each. Shall we?”

  “We shall!” Beth took a big sip and grimaced. She shuddered a bit as it went down her throat, but then the tingling in her body amplified, and she decided she liked it enough to keep going. As she continued to sip, she could feel herself loosening even more.

  She realized that she wanted to talk to Ally about Haiti. She was tired of keeping it locked inside her. Ally hadn’t cared before. But she had a feeling she’d listen now.

  As Beth tried to figure out how to formulate the words, Ally’s phone, which she’d set on the table, started to vibrate. It whirred against the wood, as distracting as the amplified buzz of a fly.

  “I’m very popular,” Ally said in a silly voice, then glanced at the screen. Then she pressed ignore. Beth geared herself up to talk, to ask Ally if she could tell her something important, and then the vibration recommenced.

  “Someone really wants to talk to you,” she said.

  “It’s just my mom,” Ally said, rolling her eyes and hitting ignore again. “I can call her back later.”