Summer Hours
Page 36
It hit with awful certainty: I shouldn’t have come.
Would it get better or worse when Alex joined us? I didn’t hate her anymore. Enough time had passed. She couldn’t help how she was.
With Alex to fill the silences, and Casey’s daughter around as a buffer, and me sleeping at my place, I’d just make it through the weekend. Less than sixty hours if I left Sunday morning instead of Sunday night, blaming traffic and work.
“Where’s your mom and your little girl? I’m sorry, I don’t know her name.”
“Elle. Off on a trip together. Tahoe.”
So much for the buffer.
Casey nodded at my old house across the lake. “Now. That one has changed, I hear. Modern everything.”
“Only the kitchen, really,” I said. “The rental company insisted. I’ve just seen pictures.” From across the shining water, I could make out the dark line of the dock, a flash of sunset on a window.
I’d planned to drive there first. Drop off Jett, compose myself, drink a glass of wine (or three, or four) to loosen up for the big reunion. If I had I could have kayaked over to Casey’s instead of driving.
And paddled away again the second I realized how she was going to be.
“You haven’t gone inside?” she said. “Not once?”
I shook my head. “I can do everything online. It’s crazy.”
“I thought maybe you were sneaking back at night. Hiding out in the house, staying off the lake, calling your groceries in. To avoid seeing me.”
“I wouldn’t do that.”
She narrowed her eyes. “You didn’t sell it, though.”
The “why?” was there in her expression, daring me, but I didn’t have an answer. I’d always planned to sell the house. My mother didn’t care either way, and we got offers. Every year, I considered it. But I never went through with it.
I met her stare for a minute before I had to look away. My eyes landed on a spot in the lake about ten yards from the edge of the dock. I didn’t mean to look there. Maybe there was a tiny ripple from a fish, or a point in the sunset’s reflection that was a more burnished gold than the surrounding water.
She followed my gaze. And for the first time, her voice softened. “Strange to think it’s still there. After so long.”
“It’s not. It’s crumbled into a million pieces or floated away.”
Casey shook her head. “No. It’s still there.”
“How do you know?”
“I just do. I feel it in my bones.”
“That sounds like something your mom would say. Used to say.”
She tilted her head, thinking. “God. It does.”
She pulled her knees close to her body and rested her right cheek on them, then looked up at me with a funny little lopsided smile.
There was enough of the Casey I remembered in that smile that I returned it.
I sat next to her, wrapping my coat tighter, my legs dangling off the edge of the dock. It felt strange, to sit like that with shoes and pants on. I should be in my old cargo shorts, dipping my bare feet in the water.
For a minute we watched the quivering red-and-gold shapes on the lake. Then I felt the gentle weight of her hand on my shoulder.
“Don’t mind my flails, grown-up Laura,” she said. “Grown-up Casey is doing her best. She’s missed you.”
The words stuck in my throat, and when they finally came out, they were rough. My eyes on the auburn lake, I reached up to clutch her hand—one quick, fumbling squeeze.
“I’ve missed you, too, Case.”
Copyright © 2018 by Amy Mason Doan
ISBN-13: 9781488096792
Summer Hours
Copyright © 2019 by Amy Mason Doan
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