The Summers

by Iva-Marie Palmer

  Clearly, I could finish short stories when they were complete and utter fantasies.

  Sitting at the kitchen table I surveyed the work ahead of me, holding a cup of peach tea in my hands. I unfolded a Chinese food menu scrawled with several different notes. One definitely said, “When Marilyn Monroe met Arthur Miller . . . sexpot plus intellectual equals what?” The rest were harder to read: one- or two-word affairs that were spaced at random around the margins of the menu.

  I checked the clock. 11:27 already.

  “You’re up late.” My dad trekked into the kitchen from his walk. As he grabbed some leftovers, the refrigerator light brightened his face. He’d always been handsome, but his once pranksterlike eyes were different now, more sad and restrained.

  “Where’d you walk?” I asked.

  “Just up and down the beach,” he replied as picked up a chicken leg, and began eating it at the counter. It wasn’t something he normally used to do, always being a man for manners, but I was just happy he was eating. “You’re writing? Anything good?”

  “Just doing some stuff for work,” I said, watching as he cracked open a beer.

  “Want one?” I wasn’t drinking age, but my parents had always said that in their house, as long as driving wasn’t on the horizon, the drinking age was eighteen. I shook my head and cheers’d him with my tea. “At the bike shop? Why would that be keeping you up so late?”

  I sighed. I couldn’t believe my dad still didn’t know about my summer job. He used to know the names of all our teachers, all our friends, and even who our celebrity crushes were. Now, he didn’t even know where I’d been spending my time for the last month. “I’m working for Grace Campbell, the writer? She needs me to transcribe all of these to see if there’s something useful for her next book.”

  He came to the table with a bottle of beer and sat down next to me. “Wow, Grace Campbell. That’s great,” my dad said, picking up a half sheet of notebook paper littered with random words. He chuckled. “Your mom had the worst handwriting. She’d always say I was a bad grocery shopper but the truth was, I was always guessing at what she’d written down. ‘Milk’ would look like ‘nachos.’”

  He stared out the window and we both listened to the water for a minute. I felt the first prickles of a tear behind my eyes but I held it back.

  “Here,” he said, taking the Chinese menu from my hands. “Marilyn Monroe . . .”

  “I got that one,” I told him.

  “Well, this, next to the kung pao platter says, ‘not spicy enough.’ And the word ‘smashing’ is next to the sesame chicken. And ‘got gas’ alongside the moo shu pork.”

  I smirked. “So she’s a food critic, too.”

  We went on like that, my dad helping me translate notes and us laughing about the weirdness of some of them. He didn’t bring up my mom again, but he would stop and just look around, like he could see her in the room or something. I wondered if he could and, if so, why I couldn’t.

  I must have fallen asleep at the table, because I woke up the next morning to the sound of Becca making French toast. There was a blanket around my shoulders and a throw pillow under my cheek, but half my face was stuck to the table. Becca laughed as I pried my forehead off a “Wish You Were Here” postcard from the 1950s.

  She brought over a paper towel. “Drool much?” Sure enough, there was a puddle of drool left behind next to my keyboard.

  The document on my computer was much more filled-in than I’d remembered. But then, I didn’t remember falling asleep, either.

  Then I saw a note on the table, in my dad’s easy-to-read block letters. “Finished these up for you. Tried to move you to the couch, but you weren’t having it. My stubborn Katie. It was fun. Love you.”

  Now the tear I hadn’t shed for my mom last night made its way out of my eye. I spent so much time thinking about how I missed her that I sometimes forgot I missed my dad, too.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  “YOU’RE GOING TO a townie party?” Eliza raised an eyebrow. “Like, pure townie?”

  “We’re not just summer people, remember?” I imitated our mom’s words.

  Eliza was in my room, braiding my hair into a pretty fishtail side braid I’d seen in a magazine. I wasn’t as skilled at hairstyles as she was, and I had a feeling that Ashley Miner might be at the party tonight. I wanted to look good.

  “No, we’re not, but townie parties can get weird,” Eliza said. “It’s fine when you’re just hanging out with Harborville guys, but when you start dating one, watch out.”

  “You went to parties with townies,” I said.

  “At Ryan’s,” she reminded me. “No one bothered me on my boyfriend’s turf. But they didn’t exactly like me, either. Where’s tonight’s?”

  “Aaron Gray’s apartment. Somewhere farther from shore,” I said.

  “Oh God. The farther you get from shore, the less you should be there,” Eliza said. She ably looped strands of my hair over one another and I marveled at how easy this was for her. How were some girls seemingly born with these skills?

  I rolled my eyes. “Well, if the townies tie me to a stake, hopefully I’ll be able to call you on speaker phone,” I said.

  The first thing I noticed about Ashley were her nails. The hot pink had been traded in for a beautiful shade of blue-green, and they were so neatly filed they each cast their own sharp shadow against the beige walls of the apartment. Mine were mostly unpainted, unless you counted the last hanging-on bit of pink polish that clung to my pinkie nail.

  Thankfully, the party was crowded and cigarette smoke filled the rooms, making the whole apartment feel hazy. Ashley and her friends were standing in the TV nook, where I hoped she couldn’t see me.

  Aaron’s apartment was perfectly nice, but felt distinctly suburban. It could have been anywhere. In fact, it reminded me of a complex in Jersey where I’d been to a party with Matt. His cousin, who managed a Foot Locker and went to night school, lived in a nondescript gray building with eight units. Aaron’s was nearly the spitting image of that, except tan on the outside. His small balcony overlooked a Days Inn parking lot.

  The tiny orange-and-cream kitchen was packed with people, and clusters of plastic liquor bottles lined the counters. Jessica, holding court as the unofficial lady of the house, poured shots for people. She’d informed me that the apartment wasn’t technically Aaron’s he was just subletting until he left for Syracuse.

  Besides Jessica and Aaron, I was probably one of the youngest people here. Most of the crowd had come from work, and most of them worked at various tourist-centric places in Harborville.

  “You okay?” Ryan said, his hand on my back. I looked up at him for some sign he’d seen Ashley or was looking for her, but mostly he just seemed focused on me. He ran his fingers up my spine and twisted the end of the braid around his fingers. A shudder went through me and I wished we had stayed home tonight.

  “Yeah, totally,” I said. Now I touched my braid, feeling like it would come loose at any moment just by virtue of being on my head. “I just don’t really know that many people.”

  “You know Morrison,” Ryan said, pointing a few feet away to where Morrison was talking to a pretty blond girl. Morrison tipped his beer bottle toward us and smiled a hello. “Though I guess we shouldn’t get in the way of his game.”

  There wasn’t much to do in the apartment, except stand around, talk, and drink. The TV was tuned to some extreme martial arts match and some guys clustered around it. Here and there people bobbed their heads to the Jay-Z song playing, but people weren’t dancing. It was a typical house party that was just getting started.

  Ryan said hi to a guy in a Patriots cap who introduced himself as Jeff. “This is my girlfriend, Kate,” he added. A little thrill shimmied through me on the word “girlfriend.”

  “Good to see you, man,” Jeff said, slapping Ryan a high five. I shook his hand. “Nic
e to meet you.”

  “You, too.” I smiled. Jeff was nicely tall and broad. More of a barricade from Ashley.

  “Cheers to the weekend, right?” Jeff said. “I had the worst day at work today. These sisters from Boston chartered one of my boats and wanted to go paddle boarding, and they all thought they were, like, princesses or something.” In a singsongy voice, he mimicked them: “ ‘How do we do this?’ and ‘Can we get an extra hour?’ They wanted everything, even though they didn’t reserve that much time in advance. You could tell they thought I’d bend over backward because they were cute. God, summer people, man.” He shook his head in despair and looked at me. “Where do you work?”

  “Oh, um, I was at Smokey’s, but now I’m working for the writer, Grace Campbell.”

  “Don’t know her. So that’s your job year-round?”

  “Kate’s not from here,” Ryan said, stepping in. “She’s from New Jersey. She’s going to Berkeley in the fall.” He didn’t seem as embarrassed as I felt. In fact, he seemed proud to announce this to Jeff.

  Jeff held up his hands in surrender. “Ah, my bad,” he said. “It’s a compliment. You didn’t seem like one of those summer-kid princesses.”

  “No worries,” I said, not really knowing where to go with the conversation.

  “Well, uh, catch you later, Landry,” Jeff said, sauntering off.

  “Sorry about him,” Ryan said. “He can be a jerk. Look, I’m going to get a beer really quick. You okay or you want to come with?”

  I hesitated. If I went with him to the kitchen, I might bump into Ashley, or put myself in her line of sight. If I stayed here, I could probably see who Ryan talked to, and if he made a point to talk to her. “I’m good. Can you just get me a Light?”

  “Sure thing,” he said, kissing me on the cheek.

  I tried to look like I belonged, pulling closer to a group of girls who were talking about the bad behavior of some guy across the room. I was fiddling with the end of my braid when two fingernails lightly tapped my shoulder. I turned around, hoping to see Jessica. Instead, I came face-to-face with Ashley.

  She was more made-up than I’d realized from across the room. I was surprised, again, by the idea that Ryan had gone out with someone who used so much foundation and eye shadow.

  But she was pretty, with big doelike eyes and full lips.

  “You’re one of the girls who brought that food to my house.” Her voice was soft and not mad so much as interested. I thought of how, at that first clambake, I’d hated the wide-open space of the beach and how everyone could look at you. But now I was missing the horizon that would have allowed me to put more space between me and my boyfriend’s ex. What could I do now? Deny it?

  “I’m sorry, that was . . . that was just wrong of me.” It had been, and I was truly embarrassed.

  She shrugged. She had some kind of lotion on that made her shoulders sparkle. I wondered if Ryan liked that kind of thing. “It’s not a big deal. I’ve done weird stuff to learn about a guy’s exes before.”

  She laughed then, and I appreciated it. I laughed a little, too.

  “Yeah, but I should have just asked him,” I said.

  This, it turned out, was the wrong thing to reveal, or the wrong way to say it. “Ryan hasn’t mentioned me yet?” Now her eyes narrowed.

  I shook my head. “I mean, sort of, but . . .” I really didn’t know how to make her feel better about it. And, really, was I required to? I noticed that, a few feet away, some of Ashley’s friends were now watching us. Did they think I was going to turn this confrontation physical? Worse, were they?

  “Well, whatever. We were together for two years. Two years,” she emphasized, and even though she didn’t say the words aloud, I could practically hear her add, Summer Girl. “What are you playing at?”

  “Playing at?” Now I really wished I had a drink. “I’m not playing at anything. I’ve known Ryan since we were kids, and now we’re together.”

  “But we’re adults now, aren’t we? So you’d better be serious. Are you serious?”

  “Uh . . .” I had no idea what the right answer was. Was it worse if we were really together, or just a summer fling? And which one were we, anyway? “I really care about him,” is what I decided on. “That’s all.”

  She eyed me appraisingly. “Well, if you really cared about him or Harborville, you’d know better than to come in and take a souvenir,” she said.

  I blinked. “What do you mean, a souvenir?”

  “Your little romance. Girls like you go off to college, and maybe you say you’ll keep in touch with Ryan, or the guys like him, but you never do. And you give them these big ideas that they’re better than this place.”

  “I love it here. I’m not . . .” I trailed off. She clearly had a piece to say and I wasn’t going to stop her.

  “Yeah, you love it because you don’t have to live here all the time. And then you go off to your bigger, better life somewhere, and you can talk about that time you took home a little piece of Harborville, by stealing one of its boys’ hearts. And then we . . .” Here, she gestured to the room of Harborville women with a game-show girl’s wave of her arm. “. . . get stuck being compared to a summer person who had a big life and big dreams and stuck our boys’ heads full of what-ifs.”

  “Ryan’s his own person,” I said. “I’m not filling his head with anything. We’re having fun. And we’re really good together.”

  “Well, go ahead and have fun. But don’t think you can take him with you. He was made here and he belongs here.” She was wagging her finger now, and even though she was looking me directly in the eye, I felt like she wasn’t addressing me so much as giving a speech she’d given before, in her head or to her friends. “Take home your little jars of sand and your precious seashells, but just remember that some things will always belong to the beach, and you can’t just come in and decide otherwise. He won’t work in your world.”

  Then she waved, right in my face and, without giving me a chance to respond, rejoined her group of friends.

  I just stood there, not even trying to pretend I was with any of these people anymore. Obviously, I wasn’t, and they didn’t want me.

  I found myself wanting to call Eliza. So this was what she’d meant by a townie party. I looked around for Ryan and saw that he was talking to someone, beers in hand. He must have gotten pulled aside on his way back, and obviously hadn’t seen anything. I didn’t want to go running to him, so, instead, I snuck into the kitchen to talk to Jessica.

  She was sitting on the kitchen counter, pouring lemon drops from a pitcher into shot glasses. “You want?” She gestured to her line of drinks.

  “I’ll take two,” I said. I downed them quickly.

  “Whoa, Sommers, what’s up?”

  I tried to explain Ashley’s rant as best I could. “She basically said he doesn’t belong in my world and vice versa and I can’t just roll out of town with him as my souvenir.”

  Jessica grimaced and helped herself to a shot, flipping her long auburn hair back over one shoulder. “I wouldn’t sweat it. She’s not a threat, or anything,” she said. “The souvenir thing’s a little weird. But, she’s not totally wrong. It’s hard being around here all year, it’s really slim pickings if you know what I mean, and you snagged one of the good ones. One of the best ones, really.”

  I nodded, surprised to hear it coming from Jessica. I couldn’t deny the truth of what she was saying, but it also didn’t mean I was about to give up Ryan. “Yeah, I guess you’re right,” I said, though I had no intention of saying as much to Ashley. “I’d better go find Ryan.”

  Ryan folded me instantly under his arm and kissed me, deep, right in the middle of the party. He held out the beer. “You want?”

  “Not so much, anymore,” I said. I’d downed the shots too fast.

  He looked around. “Steal me away from here, why don’t you?�
� he said. “It’s the same old people every time. I’d rather just be with you.”

  It should have felt like a victory, but I wondered why he was in such a hurry to leave. Was it Ashley, or had Ryan thought better of mixing me in with Harborville?

  It didn’t really matter right now. I was ready to go.

  I pulled him toward the door. “Let’s get out of here.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  OF ALL OF us, Becca was the biggest sailing nut. I’d always thought that if she could live out in the middle of the water, she would. She was positively giddy as we made our way to the marina and our boat. She’d waited for me to get back from Grace’s house, and had packed food and drinks for dinner, plus a wireless speaker so we could listen to music from her iPhone.

  “I’m so excited to finally take the boat out,” she said. “I can’t believe we haven’t used it at all this summer.”

  With a pinch of guilt, I thought of taking Ryan out earlier in the season and decided not to mention it. Becca was crazy excited at the prospect of this outing, and even more excited that it was just the two of us. It was like we were getting away with something.

  She steered the boat out on the water, choosing to go for the same somewhat remote stretch of water that I had gone to with Ryan. She liked to find less-crowded spots because she had a tendency to speed.

  “So, are you feeling better about Ryan’s ex?” she called from the steering wheel.