He says, “I have champagne,” and she smiles but doesn’t smile.
“I have flowers too,” he says then. “Do you have grass?”
“I don’t,” she says. “I’m sorry.”
She shuts off the water and goes to her room.
Don takes the flowers to Ruth’s room, where she breathes a rattled breath as she dozes. He has arranged the flowers in a vase that he has found under the sink and when he sets them on the shelf across from Ruth’s hospital bed, she sneezes in her sleep.
The champagne he drinks in the hammock alone.
JULY 13,
90 DEGREES
Claire gets a call from dining services that afternoon—there is a reunion at the college, a reunion of the school’s past athletic teams, and they ask if she could help with dinner. They offer to pay double time, since it’s technically the month off for Dining Services employees, and they’re desperate for the help. Three people have called in sick; the sub list, in the summer, is thin.
Claire agrees, asks Charlie to keep an eye on her kids, and walks the few blocks west to campus. At the dining hall, in her visor and black T-shirt, she wonders, if she looks down at the register while she swipes dining hall passes, if people might mistake her for a student.
It is not long after she has that thought that a woman says, “Claire, is that you?”
Claire looks up to see Rachel Pettis and Holiday Furness in front of her, two soccer players from the class of ’97. “Oh my God,” they both say. “Hi!”
Claire says, “Hi.”
“Do you still work here?” Holiday says.
“Not still. Again. I work here again.”
“Oh my God, that is so crazy,” Rachel says. “Are you a professor? Holiday is a professor at Carleton now. Women’s history!”
“They let me help with the soccer team too,” Holiday says. “My husband is the associate dean. I have connections.”
Claire smiles. “I’m not a professor. Professors don’t usually work the dining hall.”
“Ha!” Rachel says, but she doesn’t say much else.
“You should try the vegan bar,” Claire says.
“Are you still with Don?”
Claire looks at the line forming behind Rachel and Holiday. “No,” she says. “But it’s complicated. That’s kind of new. But he still lives here. Yes. We have kids.” She makes a gesture toward the line behind them. “I can’t talk now, I guess.”
“No, totally,” Holiday says, and takes a business card from her wallet and sets it in front of Claire. “My cell is on there. You should call us tonight. We’re having drinks.”
“Okay,” Claire says.
Rachel takes out her own card. Rachel, apparently, is the theater and drama coordinator for the NEA. She takes a pen from Claire’s check-in station and circles a phone number on the card.
“That’s my cell. We’re thinking around nine,” Rachel says. “Will you be done by nine?”
She is speaking in a way that makes Claire feel like Rachel thinks that perhaps she doesn’t understand English anymore.
“Later,” Claire says, and then apologizes to the women who are next in line. She swipes their dining hall passes, too. “Sorry for the wait,” she says. “I used to go here.”
Here is a moment from that summer that, later, one might go back to again and again. Does it change anything for Claire? It’s hard to say. But when she comes home from work, she sees that Charlie has used the relatively cool afternoon as a chance to mow the brown lawn. Claire sees the lawnmower and goes straight to the pool. The door to the bathroom off the study is unlocked, slightly ajar even, and when Charlie finally comes out of the shower, he sees Claire there in the bathroom with him, wrapped in a white towel, naked beneath it. She had gone swimming for a minute, to wash off the fried food smell of the cafeteria, but is now wringing out a swimsuit in the sink and Charlie is there, and she hands him a towel, a blue one, and says, I have been standing outside the shower for a few minutes. The steam in the room is thick, it has nowhere to go. I have been trying to decide what I would do.
She goes up to Charlie now and begins to dry off his body for him, running the blue towel down each arm, down his back, and finally, as she moves the towel down his chest, down the small trail of hair on his stomach, down to his hips—
And in the yard, Wendy: “Mama, are you here? Mama! Mama are you here?”
Claire struggles to put her wet swimsuit back on as Wendy’s voice comes closer and closer. She slips out of the bathroom just in time, leaving Charlie standing there, and Charlie hears her say, “Yes, baby, yes. I am here.”
Later, in the evening, Claire makes a gin and tonic in the kitchen, drinks half of it in one long pull, and says to Charlie: “This has all been a big mistake.”
“What has?” he asks.
“All of this,” she says. “This pool, this house, your face, my life.”
She puts her hands on his chest and buries her head there, her face between her fists.
JULY 20,
84 DEGREES
The heat finally breaks, temporarily. The purple clouds of a sluggish dawn linger in the finally dry air. In the cool morning, the sudden small relief from the oppressive heat has Don Lowry thinking: he has failed to breathe in life deeply enough, but at the first hint of chilled air on the horizon, he vows to change. Come autumn, he will show his children the wonders of the leaves. He will become a different kind of father.
It is not yet seven A.M., but Don Lowry stands outside Mrs. Manetti’s gate, getting the morning paper, and he turns and surveys the yard as he thinks these thoughts, just as he did decades ago with his lawn mower, his ancient truck behind him full of yard tools, his young heart then also heavy, but heavy with different woes. Older now, a man who sells homes, he has no tools with him this morning and has not been hired for any task; he is only stepping out into the morning to collect the daily paper, which he will, as has become his custom in the past few days, read aloud to Ruth Manetti over breakfast while ABC sleeps in upstairs. He thinks of how the Manetti house would look with his FOR SALE sign in the yard—even better, with a SOLD sticker slapped across it.
He is concerned, mostly, for his children this morning, who have been stoic, even cheerful through the past few months, but who have seen their parents at their intolerable worst, have probably noticed, at least intuitively, how their parents have been hungover and even sometimes asleep with other people and sobbing for no reason and smoking cigarettes and grass. Have they seen all of this? Understood it? Bryan is twelve, surely he’s seen or heard something that has troubled him. And Wendy is so empathetic, she can sniff out stress from a mile away. She knows things were amiss, greatly amiss. She has resumed bed wetting since the move to the Gulliver house. Claire hasn’t told him this, which made him angry. He’s heard it from Bryan.
Truth be told, damage has been done. The kids will probably remember images from that summer for a long time, will file them away as pathetic memories of a father and mother gone nuts. Years later, Bryan will think of these images every time he drinks too much and quarrels with his wife. Wendy will call up recent episodes on some therapist’s couch, where she has gone to get over a breakup with some tattoo artist but will instead spend hours discussing her sad and confused and distant father. “We moved into this guy’s house,” she will tell her shrink. “I have no idea who that guy even was, but he was way cooler than my dad. My dad was this big depressed loser. I don’t talk to him anymore.”
Don Lowry has succumbed to the Shadow; he’s cast it over his children now, and they’ll feel it too for the rest of their lives. It is not something one can undo. He should have seen it coming, but even if he had, he would have felt powerless to stop it.
When he is back on the porch, holding the newspaper, somehow his mood lifts again. He can change all of this. He can reset the course. His father had given up, had seen his mistakes as impossible to recover from—but Don Lowry has not made those mistakes yet. He has gotten a bit lost is
all, hidden the wrong things from his wife, said some mean things, and sneaked out into the darkness and lingered in its pleasures. But he can come back.
He kicks the porch railing with his slippered foot. The porch itself needs to be jacked up; three rotten boards need replacing. Some of the steps should be rebuilt entirely. The left-side railing wobbles. The more he looks at the Manetti place, the more he knows it won’t sell for as much as he once thought. You can’t begin to sell a place with such warning signs greeting potential buyers at the entrance. He will talk to Ruth about it, hire somebody to do it for her before—wait. Before what? Before she is dead? Why will she care about the price her home fetches once she is dead?
At the kitchen table, he’s greeted by Ruth. It’s as if she is waiting for him. She looks well and alert. Up earlier than usual.
“Ruth,” Don says. “Good morning. I hope I didn’t wake you.”
“Nonsense,” she says. “I’ve been up since dawn. Since before dawn. Last night’s fireflies are almost gone. I think the night was too cold for them.”
Don doesn’t quite know what to make of the last statement, but he smiles. When he is that old, if he lives that long, he hopes he will see fireflies when nobody else does.
“Well,” she says. “Maybe you can make us some coffee and toast?”
Don sets about getting breakfast ready, brewing coffee.
“How are the kids?” Ruth asks.
“Hanging in there,” Don says, which he knows implies they are not doing well at all.
“They must be excited about the upcoming vacation,” she says. “You know how magical it is up there, on Superior. I want to talk to you about something. While the coffee brews.”
“What is it?” Don asks, and he can’t help but sparkle inside. This is it. She is going to ask him to sell the house. His earlier pessimism gives way to a sudden optimism. The house, he has already figured out, could list at $449,900, even with the work that needs doing: it’s one of the most majestic houses on Broad, all of the original character still intact. His commission would be 7 percent of that if he brings in the buyer himself. A new dean has been hired at the college who is moving from Winston-Salem, and Don has already sent him a helpful e-mail. He will need a house in a hurry, and—
“I want to go on that vacation with you,” Ruth says.
Don doesn’t answer.
“Next month?” he says. “To Lake Superior?”
“That’s where you are going, yes?”
“Yes. Tom Merrick’s lodge. We go every August.”
“I’m from up there, you know.”
“I know that,” Don says.
“And I want to see it again before I die,” Ruth says.
“Ruth, you—”
“Are you going to tell me that I am not going to die soon? Don’t do that to someone nearing ninety.”
“Is that how old you are?”
“I am making a simple request. You’re not paying me any rent.”
“It’s just . . . I don’t know if we—Claire and I—can care for you properly.”
“I know about Merrick’s place. We went up there, John and I, almost twenty-five years ago. It’s huge.”
“Yes.”
“There’re still several cabins, right? And a lodge.”
“I know. It’s our family vacation though and—”
“I will bring ABC along. You won’t need to help me with anything.”
“We wouldn’t have room in the car,” Don says. “It’s a long drive. We often take the third row of seats out of the Suburban so we can haul all of our stuff. We have these two inflatable kayaks that take up a ton of room.”
“Charlie Gulliver will drive both of us. ABC and me. I’ve spoken with them about the logistics.”
“Why with us? Why don’t you go to some other place? Have Charlie and ABC drive you somewhere else? You could go anywhere.”
“Because I want to see your family there, enjoying it. Bryan and Wendy, playing on the beach. I know their names, you know. I bet you didn’t know that.”
“I remember how much you like kids.”
“I want to see your family in that cold, clear water. I’ve been dreaming of it for years and years, Don. That’s how long it has been since I’ve been back. Don, I love Merrick’s place. I don’t want to be at some hotel or crowded resort. I want a private place, someplace that won’t freak out if an old lady wants to be helped into the lake. I want to swim again, one more time.”
Don tries to picture the old woman walking across the rocks and wading into the lake. The temperature of the water, he knows, could be as low as forty-five degrees. Even in this hot summer, the water will not be comfortable for swimming. And someone that old, if she fell in, she’d die, wouldn’t she? Body shock.
“Ruth,” Don says. “I want to help you. It’s just very complicated. This trip is kind of a last-ditch effort for me.”
“I know. You and Claire are having trouble. Do you think I don’t know that couples have trouble? Believe me.”
“That’s an understatement. You do know I live in your attic? You do remember that, right?”
She smiles. “Do you think I am that senile, Don? I’m almost offended.”
“It’s not that easy to do this, to take other people.”
“If you seek misery, Don, if you seek complexity, those things are easy to find.”
“Ruth, please. The thing is, we may stay up there, for the winter.”
“Charlie will bring me back here when I’ve had my visit.”
“Ruth, I don’t know.”
“I know you are in despair, Don. So I have a plan for you. This is a step toward a solution, or part of one. If you take me up there with you for August, then I will transfer ownership of my house over to you in the fall. I already have Mendez working on the papers, so when I die, you get the house. You can sell it or live here, but it’ll be yours.”
“What? What about your kids?”
“I have some money set aside for them. They do not know this, but when I die Mendez will give them a letter. They’ll get all my other assets.”
“I’m not sure this is legal, really,” Don says.
“Mendez will figure it out. ABC is taking me back to his office today, to work more on the papers. We’re updating everything—my medical power of attorney is most concerning to me. ABC gets to pull the plug!”
“Jesus.”
“Mendez is a genius. He’s been our lawyer for decades—he can make everything easy.”
“For taking you up to Lake Superior? For three weeks on the lake you’ll pay that much? You’ll give me your house?”
“I won’t be needing it. I want to travel one last time and I want it to be somewhere I know I like. I miss Lake Superior so much. I want to be with people I trust. And I want to help you, Don,” Ruth says. “We can help each other. It’s my last wish. Don’t you think I see what you and Claire are going through?”
“So that’s it. You want to help me? What about ABC? Give her the house.”
“ABC has her own plans. She doesn’t need a house in Grinnell, Iowa. You can even take out an equity line of credit before I die, Don. You can pay off all your credit card debt like that. It’ll be your house.”
“It seems too much like charity.”
“It’s a business deal. You will be taking me on a dreamed-of vacation. I’ve wanted to go back since I turned seventy. Nobody takes an old lady on vacations.”
“I don’t know,” Don says.
“You’re at the hardest time of life, Don. Midlife is when you have to accept what you’ve created, knowing that the life you have is the only one you will live. And that can be terrifying, until you accept it, and then you’re free of terror.”
Don says nothing.
“Then it’s just day by day. And most days are beautiful, Don. It’s regretting yesterday or overthinking tomorrow, that’s when ugliness comes in, right?”
“Uh, yeah. I guess.”
“We’re helping each
other, Don,” she says. “Like we always have. You used to cut our lawn. And dog-sit that awful dog we had.”
“Pepper,” Don says.
“The dog that shit five times a day,” she says.
Don hears noises upstairs. The toilet flushes, the water runs, the floorboards creak. He pours the coffee, butters the toast.
ABC walks into the kitchen.
“Don Lowry!” she says. “It’s your business!”
Then she looks at Ruth and back at Don.
“Did you ask him?” ABC says.
Ruth smiles and nods.
“Did he say yes?” ABC asks.
“I said yes,” Don says. “I’ll take you. But I don’t want to be paid for it. I’ll just take you.”
“I’ll just pay you,” Ruth says.
Later that evening ABC sits cross-legged on a yoga pillow on the floor drinking wine from a coffee mug. Fireflies have come inside and are glowing everywhere, even inside the sleeping porch. She wants to go wake up Ruth, but she feels as if her limbs are too heavy to even move. She is stoned out of her mind, having tried out some new product her librarian had secured.
“I can’t fucking see them,” Don has said. “This is so frustrating. Why can’t I see fireflies?”
“Ruth says fireflies gather when something new is about to happen, or when something old is about to end.”
“Fuck,” Don says. “This stuff must be stronger than usual. I don’t see any fireflies.”
“Totally,” ABC says. “I don’t know if those fireflies are even real.”
Soon, Don is asleep in the hammock, snoring softly. And the realization ABC had earlier that season, on the night in late May when she met Don Lowry, becomes clear to her. She really does have to die in order to find Philly again, and now the dreams and Don Lowry’s presence in her life and even Ruth’s fireflies make sense to her.
She needs to enter the spirit world through the lake. She has to follow Don Lowry to Minnesota.
Summerlong Page 20
