Unforgettable Summer

by Catherine Clark

  “Don’t worry, this isn’t prom night,” I tell her. “Not even close.”

  “All righty. How long are you going to be?”

  “I’m not sure,” I say. “Five minutes?”

  “Tell you what. I could use some coffee, so how about I turn off the meter and we meet back here in five?” she says.

  “That would be great,” I tell her. I get out of the cab and face the restaurant building. The parking lot is almost full.

  I remember Steve telling me that he worked on Saturday nights because the restaurant is busy and he makes a lot in tips. That’s one of the reasons I agreed to work at Gas ’n Git Saturday nights, back when I was living in fantasyland, back when I thought we’d go out this summer, back when I was delusional.

  I walk into the restaurant with my head held high. The hostess station is vacant, so I decide to seat myself. I spot Steve heading for the kitchen, and I’m about to walk over to him when Jacqui rushes up in front of me.

  “Oh, hi, Fleming. It’s you,” she says. “What are you doing here so late?”

  “You’re going to seat me in Steve’s section,” I say.

  She stares at me. “What?”

  “Just do it. Don’t ask questions,” I say. I pick up a menu from the stack on the hostess station and shove it into her hands. “Let’s go.”

  Jacqui glances over her shoulder at me three times as she takes me to a booth, as if I’m dangerously unbalanced and need to be watched. She places the menu on the table and steps away slowly, guardedly. “Steve will be your server tonight,” she says robotically. Then she turns and nearly sprints back to the hostess station, to help my cabdriver.

  I don’t open the menu, because I know it by heart and because I’m not planning on ordering.

  I’m also not planning on sitting here in the future, wishing something would happen with Steve.

  I look around as I wait for him to come out of the kitchen. Maybe Jacqui has told him that I’m sitting in his section and I’m acting crazy. Maybe he’s already talked to Mike. Maybe he won’t ever come out.

  As I rehearse what I’ve planned to say, which is woeful and dramatic and unrealistic, I look around at the other tables. The customers seated at them are here for fun occasions, or at least occasions, or at the very least, pancakes. They’re not here for the same reason I am. That much is for sure.

  Suddenly there’s a blue apron in my field of vision. “Hello, my name is Steve and . . .”

  “And you’re a complete and utter jerk,” I say. I look up at Steve. He’s dyed his blond hair sort of pink since the last time I saw him. What is up with that? Is he taking hair-dye lessons from the bleached-blond plastic girl?

  “What?” he says.

  The rest of my witty and devastating speech vanishes as I look at him. I stare at the menu for a second to reorient myself. “I talked to Mike tonight,” I tell him.

  “Oh, yeah? Well, cool,” Steve says, looking flustered. “I mean, you guys are sort of like together now, so—”

  “No, we’re not!” I say, a little too loudly for the general IHOP diner. “We’re not together.”

  “Um . . .” Steve bounces up and down on his toes a little. “Fleming? What’s this all about? What’s the deal?” I don’t say anything, and he sits on the edge of the booth bench across from me and looks at me nervously.

  “I guess . . .” I look down and realize that I’m tearing my napkin into shreds. “Look. I thought you were different. And I thought we . . . I thought you . . .” I stop for a minute. This isn’t what I rehearsed. But I’m not going to blow it.

  “I know we just made out a couple of times, but I always really liked you,” I say. “I thought you liked me, too. A little, anyway. I thought we had this connection. I thought we were going places together, not as in go places, you know, achieve great things, but literally go, get out of town, see other states, cities.” The Christie Farrell talking gene strikes at the most inopportune moments. “But now I find out you lied about everything, you never planned on taking French, you aren’t buying a truck, or a van, you aren’t going anywhere. You just liked making out with me. That’s it? And you tell your friends they should go after me because I can kiss good? Kiss well, I mean. No, wait—not just good. Really, really goodwell?”

  “What?” Steve just sits there, looking stunned.

  “Well, don’t I?” I ask.

  I’m an idiot to ask this. I know that, but it still comes out.

  “Sure. Yes,” Steve says. He glances around the general area, and a man waves a coffee pitcher in the air, asking for more. “Um, I sort of have to—”

  “You’re such a hypocrite!” I cut him off, not done yet. “We totally hit it off, and you liked kissing me—but you can’t go out with me because I’m not your type? Instead you want to go out with her?” I practically scream as I throw my arm out to point at Jacqui. “She’s your type?”

  A busboy is walking by with a tray full of dishes and he veers away at the last second, avoiding a crash.

  That’s when I realize that I don’t know whether I’m sitting here begging and humiliating myself, or whether I’m finally standing up for myself and telling him what I want. And what’s the difference, really?

  “So did you want to order anything?” Steve asks. “I mean, maybe we could talk on my break. I’m not sure, because we’re sort of busy tonight, but—”

  “No. I can’t stay. I don’t want to talk. I just—I thought you were different,” I say as I get to my feet. “I don’t know why. But you’re not. And I don’t even know what I’m doing here.” I start to run for the door.

  “Hey! Are you skipping out on the check?” Jacqui yells after me.

  Dine and dash, Charlotte told me once. But this isn’t what she meant. I leap into the waiting cab and tell the driver my home address.

  “Denny said you left work in a cab. Where have you been?” My mother and father are sitting outside on the front steps, with the door ajar so they can listen to the kids inside.

  “What are you doing out here?” I ask, grateful that Denny didn’t tell my father where I went. I can just imagine my dad running into IHOP in his skating gear, shaking his fist at me.

  The Lindville Limousine driver pulls away with a friendly good-night wave. From the looks on my parents’ faces, maybe I should whistle for the taxi to come back.

  “I can’t sleep. My back hurts and I’m too huge,” my mother says. “And your father just got home from driving around, looking for you after you weren’t at Gas ’n Git and you didn’t show up here.”

  “So where were you?” my father asks.

  “I can’t explain right now,” I say.

  “Yes, you can, and you’re going to,” my father says. “P. F., what’s going on? You’re worrying us.”

  “It’s nothing,” I say.

  “Nothing? Then how about answering our questions? You’re spending money to take a cab. Why? Where did you go?”

  “Look, I had a really bad night,” I say. “I’m only half an hour late, and I don’t want to talk about it.”

  My father stands up. “Maybe not, but you’re going to.”

  I can’t tell them that I had to go confront someone I’ve been obsessing over. “I had to take a cab,” I say, “because you won’t let me drive. Sometimes there are places I have to go that I don’t want you to take me to. And I can’t skate there, at night, and there’s no buses at night, and I can’t get a ride. So that’s why. It’s the first time I’ve done it, and it cost me twenty-one dollars, and I don’t plan on doing it again, okay?”

  My father’s staring at me and blinking rapidly. I can tell that he’s reached his personal boiling point—I’ve seen him like this before. “Fine,” he says. “But we still want to know where you went in that cab. If you don’t tell us, we’ll call the cab company. It’s not that hard.”

  “Fine. Go ahead,” I say. “Call them. Whatever. I’m tired.” I walk into the house and go upstairs to get ready for bed. While I’m brushing my
teeth, I hear my mother and father in the hallway, talking. I can’t hear what they’re saying, but I know it’s about me.

  The Skating of the Lambs

  My father’s first performance is at 7:00 on the opening night of Rodeo Roundup Days. It costs four tickets to see him, which means Dad is worth more than the petting zoo but less than the Ferris wheel.

  I look nervously around the bleachers as we sit down, to see if anyone I know is here. So far I recognize some kids from school, and several of my parents’ friends. Mr. Stinson is rinkside, with a few other Lindville bigwigs.

  I look around the non–regulation-size rink, which they didn’t exactly finish closing off the way they were supposed to. There’s a new roof to keep out the sun, and both ends and one side of the building are completed; but one side is only half done, covered with a chain-link fence and chicken wire, with random boards nailed to it. This goes with the decorating theme, because they’ve also nailed wooden boards against the rink’s interior to make it look like a corral. Generators are whirring loudly, trying to keep the ice and the rink area cold.

  There’s a concession stand just outside the rink and a hawker yelling, “Get your frozen lemonade right here!” Torvill and Dean keep bugging me, then Mom, then me again, for frozen lemonade. Dorothy is sitting beside me patiently, waiting for the program to begin.

  Dad told us not to come tonight; in fact he almost sounded like he was begging us not to. I seriously considered skipping this. For one thing, I don’t want to run into either Mike or Steve at the rodeo. For another, I don’t think Lindville’s going to appreciate my dad’s skating, and I feel a major embarrassment coming on. And for still another, it’s very awkward to be here with my mother, to watch my father, when they’re both still mad at me from Saturday night.

  But I can’t not be here. You don’t want to miss any of Dad’s performances. There’s always something really incredible about each one of them—he’ll throw in a difficult jump at the last second, when he’s got the crowd on his side and things are clicking along. He’ll draw them in, have them clapping to the music, and then afterward the ice will be littered with roses and stuffed animals. At least that’s what used to happen, in all the videotapes I’ve seen of him competing. I don’t know about tonight. The ice might be littered with something else, I think as I look at the three lambs and two horses standing on the ice, posed as part of the cowboy scene. Fortunately Dad doesn’t have to skate with the animals—just around them.

  My father is wearing a red-checked gingham shirt and pants that look like brown suede, only they’re fake and made out of stretchy material that won’t split when he jumps. The pants actually have real suede fringe running down the side seams. He’s wearing a black ten-gallon hat, and black skates that match it. Mr. Stinson must be so proud, I think.

  The temperature outside is still in the eighties. To help the ice stay frozen, they’ve dumped in tons and tons of cubed ice and tried to smooth it over, so my father has to skate on a melting and bumpy surface. It’s impossible to skate well on soft ice. The performance is going to be a disaster—in more ways than one.

  Dad has to round up the lambs as he skates around them and leaps over bales of hay, while two rodeo clowns with shoes on slide on the ice and fall down. The rodeo clowns look like some of the people Dad used to skate with in the ice shows. So much makeup, so little time. This is a step down, not just for my dad, but for the rodeo clowns, too. They’re professionals. They keep bulls from killing riders. They don’t goof around on skating rinks. I hope they’re getting paid overtime for this.

  I don’t know what the horses are for, but at least they’ll go with the country music the rodeo guys insisted Dad use, after they said first our alternative-rock medley and then Denny’s U2 mix was too rebellious for Rodeo Roundup Days. They ended up handing Dad a tape and saying he had to use the three songs on it. “So much for artistic interpretation,” Dad said when he showed me the tape.

  At exactly 7:00 there’s an announcement from the audio booth. “Ladies and gentlemen, introducing the one . . . the only . . . Phil Farrell in ‘Cowboy Bo Peep’!”

  Torvill and Dean shriek with excitement and the audience applauds as the music begins: first, just a harmonica playing a sad cowboy ballad, as my father steps onto the ice and circles around. He stops to joke with the rodeo clowns and circles the rink while a horrible voice-over from a grizzled old cowhand goes on about “the life of a lonely cowboy.”

  Then the real music starts: It’s a medley that kicks off with a high-energy Garth Brooks song called—appropriately—“Rodeo.” The crowd loves it and Dad plays to them, smiling and clapping as he does tricky footwork and makes his way up and down the ice. Then he grabs a lasso from one of the rodeo clowns and tries to make rope circles as he skates, only he can’t do it, and the clown chases him and shows him how to do it right. People laugh, but then settle into watching Dad as he tosses the lasso away and builds speed, skates forward, does a quick double Axel. He moves so quickly and gracefully, especially considering he has to skate around livestock. Dad jumps over a bale of hay and the crowd gasps, then applauds. He does a double toe loop and then a triple flip, and even the sheep look impressed.

  Suddenly, outside the rink, there’s a huge commotion. People are screaming, and there’s the sound of thundering hooves. Everyone in the bleacher seats turns around to look out the open side of the rink. I see a giant black bull go rushing past, on the loose—completely out of control.

  “Insane Zane’s escaped!” a woman screams.

  “He’s gone crazy from the heat!” a man behind us yells.

  The rodeo clowns bolt off the ice and sprint after Insane Zane. Cowboys ride past the rink, in hot pursuit, throwing ropes to try to lasso him. He’s one of the meanest, toughest bulls, and it’s a big challenge every year to see who can stay on him the longest. Apparently no one could stay on him—or with him—tonight.

  When the noise subsides and we all turn back around, my father has stopped skating. He stares dejectedly at the horses and the sheep. He looks completely baffled, like he doesn’t know how he ended up doing this or how to make sense of it. My heart really goes out to him—this isn’t how his first performance should go, no matter how inane it is.

  “He hates having his program interrupted,” Mom says as Dad steps off the ice.

  “I know,” I say.

  Mom turns to me. “I wasn’t saying that for your benefit. I was explaining to the little ones.”

  “The little ones don’t understand, so what’s the point?” I say.

  “Peggy, what is with you? Your attitude is terrible,” Mom says.

  How could it not be? I’m stuck at the rodeo with my family.

  The crowd gasps and shouts as Insane Zane rushes past the rink again. Dean suddenly jumps out of his seat and scampers down the rows of bleachers.

  “Dean, come back!” Mom yells. “Come back here right now!”

  But Dean either doesn’t hear her or doesn’t care. He lands on the bottom bleacher and races for the exit.

  I go after Dean before Mom can tell me to go after him. That would just really irritate me right now. I catch up with him just outside the door. Insane Zane is racing around the concession stand and knocks down both the frozen lemonade cart and the Boots for Sale booth. Dean darts toward the bull before I can grab his shirt. I run after Dean, even though people are shouting at us to get back. Above our heads, ropes are flying as the cowboys attempt to lasso the bull’s horns.

  Insane Zane stops racing and slowly trots toward us. He has a black coat, and seems about as long as a railroad car. He’s taller than I am, wider than I am, and has long, sharp-looking horns and stuff dripping out of his quarter-size nostrils. With those he should definitely be able to smell our fear, and anything else about us.

  I decide not to look at him—staring at him might be challenging him in some way. I decide not to breathe. Then maybe he’ll think I’m already dead. I step in front of Dean to shield him, but he jumps ou
t and does a high karate kick, yelling “Hi-ya!”

  At the same exact moment, three separate ropes circle Insane Zane’s head, stopping him in his tracks. He stands there, staring at us, looking bewildered but still mad.

  “Cool!” Dean says as the cowboys tighten the ropes and rein in the bull. “I got him. Did you see how I got him?”

  I just drop to my knees and hug Dean for all he’s worth. I’m shaking all over, and I squeeze Dean’s tiny shoulders until I stop.

  “I’m going to be a cowboy,” Dean says. “Peggy, let me go; I’m a cowboy.” I release him and he runs around kicking the air and pretending to lasso things with an imaginary rope.

  “Sure you are,” I say. “Of course you are.”

  When we go back inside the rink, Mom wants to know what took us so long. Dad is smiling and playing to the crowd as he skates down the ice, doing some fancy footwork, snapping his fingers to the country beat.

  What Boy?

  We wait for Dad by the burgers, ribs, and pork-chop-on-a-stick stands for a quick snack after his eight-o’clock show. I desperately hope his second show went better than his first.

  I’ve gone on two rides with Torvill and Dean, because Mom can’t. She’s letting the kids stay out late tonight, but she’s the one who looks completely beat. Mom is sleepily eating a half slab of ribs, Torvill has corn on the cob, and Dean a grape Popsicle. Dorothy has fallen asleep in her stroller, which isn’t like her at all. I stand at the end of the picnic table and keep looking around for Charlotte and Denny, who are supposed to meet me either here or over by the Scrambler ride.

  “Peggy, have a seat—there’s room,” Mom says, patting the bench beside her.

  “That’s okay,” I say. “I’m actually not going to be here much longer.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m meeting my friends. We’re going to hang out here for a while,” I say.

  “But that’s impossible. You can’t go hang out late with your friends tonight.”