By Summer's End

by Pamela Morsi

  He’d always been an upbeat, positive, cheerful guy. But that fall Sonny Leland was happier than he could ever remember. He and Dawn went to all the second-run movies at the dollar theater. They shouted and cheered together at basketball games. They visited museums and hiked in the mountains. Sonny was in love, crazy, desperately, mindlessly in love. Classes, work, even the meetings at the frat house were annoying roadblocks on his way to the pizza joint and the woman he loved.

  What was even more amazing was that Dawn loved him, too.

  She’d told him so. Though he would have known anyway. Her eyes lit up when he walked in. She spent every waking moment in his company when she wasn’t working. She didn’t give even the most cursory notice to other guys who came her way. And when he held her in his arms, they just fit perfectly. Their love was their favorite subject of conversation.

  Also by PAMELA MORSI

  SUBURBAN RENEWAL

  LETTING GO

  DOING GOOD

  PAMELA MORSI

  By Summer’s End

  For Sydnee Doherty, who handed me my family history, and showed me the city of Knoxville.

  CONTENTS

  REAL LIFE 1

  REAL LIFE 2

  SONNY DAYS 3

  REAL LIFE 4

  REAL LIFE 5

  SONNY DAYS 6

  REAL LIFE 7

  SONNY DAYS 8

  REAL LIFE 9

  REAL LIFE 10

  SONNY DAYS 11

  REAL LIFE 12

  REAL LIFE 13

  SONNY DAYS 14

  REAL LIFE 15

  REAL LIFE 16

  SONNY DAYS 17

  REAL LIFE 18

  REAL LIFE 19

  SONNY DAYS 20

  REAL LIFE 21

  REAL LIFE 22

  SONNY DAYS 23

  REAL LIFE 24

  REAL LIFE 25

  SONNY DAYS 26

  REAL LIFE 27

  REAL LIFE 28

  SONNY DAYS 29

  REAL LIFE 30

  REAL LIFE 31

  SONNY DAYS 32

  REAL LIFE 33

  REAL LIFE 34

  SONNY DAYS 35

  REAL LIFE 36

  REAL LIFE

  REAL LIFE

  1

  It began like all our moves began. There was nothing about it that stood out as unusual. I came home from school one afternoon in early May to find Mom packing our things into brown cardboard boxes.

  “Sonny has left us.”

  Mom paused dramatically as if in anticipation of an outburst of screams, tears or grief. I glanced toward my sister. Sierra wasn’t surprised, either. Based on our life so far, the world was populated by guys named Sonny. They always left. And they never left her, they left us.

  “We can’t move yet!” I complained. “There’s only two weeks until the end of school!”

  Mom shrugged, unconcerned. “Then you’re mostly done with it. Leaving a little early won’t matter.”

  My mother’s convictions about my education centered mostly on the belief that for her girls, it didn’t really matter. Sierra was so pretty, her future was set whether she memorized the dates of the American Revolution or not. And Mom seemed pretty certain that whatever my ambitions might be, I was likely to achieve them without any information that I might pick up in public school. Mom said I was the brains of the family. I wasn’t really qualified, but somebody had to take up the job. Neither Mom nor Sierra was up to it.

  “The rent’s a week past due,” Mom told us. “If we can get packed up and out of here before morning, it’ll save us some bucks as well as a nasty, unpleasant encounter with the landlord.”

  I wanted to scream, but I just complained under my breath.

  “I wish that just once, just once, I could finish something, do what I said I was going to do, leave a town with time to say goodbye.”

  My ravings were ignored. My mother and sister were positively Newtonian. When in motion they would remain in motion unless acted upon by an outside source.

  I tried to take on that role.

  “What about your job, Mom?” I asked her.

  Mom pulled her long, heavily permed and artificially colored auburn hair up off the back of her neck and secured it there with a giant silver plastic clasp. Typically, she was dressed in skintight Daisy Duke shorts and a halter top. Bulging up from the top of Mom’s cleavage, I could see the familiar tattoo on her right breast. It was a heart-shaped vine of yellow roses, in the center were the words Always Sonny.

  She shrugged. “They sell drinks everywhere,” she answered.

  That was true. In my life so far, we’d already lived everywhere and Mom always had a job. She was a cocktail waitress, a good one. And being pretty didn’t hurt. Mom had nice features, big blue eyes and a great figure. She loved makeup and used a lot. She was like somebody you could see in a movie. Not like the lead actress or anything, but one of the other characters. The ones that don’t have names, only descriptions. Mom would have been Redneck Girlfriend or Slutty Hairdresser. She had those kind of looks.

  “Please Mom, let’s not go!”

  She gave me a little smile and a wink, but I knew it was useless.

  Sierra was already packing. “Let’s head for Los Angeles,” she said. “It doesn’t get so dang hot out there. I don’t think I could stand another summer in Texas.”

  “I hate L.A.,” I told her. “The schools are awful and we always end up in a broken-down car stuck on some freeway.”

  Sierra shrugged. “Okay, well then, Vegas,” she said. “Let’s go to Vegas, Mom. I’m almost fifteen. I could lie about it and maybe get a job in a casino or something.”

  Mom gave Sierra a look of disapproval. “We’re not going to Vegas,” she said, adamantly. “And you’re not working in a casino, ever. I want more for my girls than that.”

  One thing I never doubted about Mom. She loved us and she always tried to do what she thought was best. I guess I did sometimes think that her definition of best was questionable.

  I pulled a garbage bag from the box and began to stash my things in it. Fortunately, or unfortunately, I didn’t have a lot of stuff. When you move a lot, you leave things behind. Sometimes, when we were in a big hurry, we’d leave everything behind. I didn’t mind too much. I thought of my lost possessions as something like Hansel and Gretel’s crumbs in the forest, somehow, someday, all those lost things left behind would help me find my way back.

  Back. Back to where it all began.

  Well, maybe not to where it began. I can’t really go back to where it began. Because it didn’t begin with me. But I began thirteen years ago. My name is Dakota Leland. I’m the youngest daughter of Sonny and Dawn Leland. Of course, Sonny was not my dad’s real name. Nobody’s real name is Sonny. My dad’s real name was Vernon Henry Leland, Jr. Pretty awful, huh? I guess that’s why he was called Sonny.

  Mom fell in love with him when she was very young. She got pregnant with Sierra when she was seventeen and they wanted to get married. It was all very romantic. Of course, his family didn’t approve. So they ran off and rented a mobile home. I like to think that Romeo and Juliet, if they’d been older and smarter, might have done the same.

  Sierra says that she remembers our daddy. But, of course, I know she doesn’t. She’s only twenty months older than me and it’s a fact, literally written in stone—a headstone—that Vernon Henry Leland, Jr. died three weeks before I was born.

  Nobody can remember somebody they knew before they were two. But I don’t point that out to Sierra. She wants to believe that she remembers Daddy, so I let her.

  It’s an honest mistake, I think. There’ve been so many guys in Mom’s life named Sonny. It must be pathological. Nobody could just, at random, fall for that many guys with the same non-n
ame. But whatever, they sort of just blend together.

  The first one I remember was Sonny Bridges. He used to let me ride on his motorcycle. His real name was Daryl. There was Sonny Spivak. He could never remember our names and always called us “Kid.” Sonny Wendt liked to cook. Sonny Cimino was Italian. Those were the ones I’d liked. There were others. Some forgettable, just around for a few days. Others were unforgettable. There was one guy who kept looking at Sierra. She told Mom that it gave her the creeps. We left town the next day. And there was one who gave Mom a black eye. She got him back good. When he fell asleep she handcuffed him to the bed. Then she woke him up by hitting him in the crotch with a yellow plastic baseball bat. Boy, did that guy holler. That was in Florida. Mom said to remind her never to go back to Florida. We left my baseball bat there, but that was okay. I didn’t really want it anymore.

  This last guy was Sonny Moroney. He was okay. But it wasn’t like I would miss him.

  “If we’re not going to L.A. or Vegas, where are we going?” Sierra asked as we loaded everything into the rusting Dodge that Mom managed to keep running year after year.

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “But it’ll be nice.”

  She always thought it would be nice.

  “I hope our next place has like a swimming pool,” Sierra said. “I mean, wouldn’t that be great. I could work on my tan. I need a new bikini. I saw one in Target. It’s like perfect. They’ll have the same suits in all the Target stores, won’t they? I’m sure they will.”

  She continued to chatter. Neither me nor Mom responded or encouraged her. Mom’s thoughts were elsewhere. And I was too upset about moving to waste any thoughts on swimming pools or bathing suits.

  We swung by the library so that I could return my books. I didn’t feel too bad about giving up the three I hadn’t read. But the one that I was right in the middle of, sheesh, I really hated to let it go. It was titled Understanding Chaos: An Introduction to Non-Linear Physics. Although I was a total science geek, physics wasn’t typically a middle school subject. But the idea of understanding chaos, that really appealed to me. My life seemed to be mostly chaos and it would have been great to understand it.

  I could have dropped them in the night return box outside, but instead, I left Mom and Sierra in the car and I raced in to the main desk. There was only one guy behind the counter and I didn’t recognize him. I pulled my library card out of my wallet.

  “I need to turn this in. I’m leaving town,” I told him.

  The guy shrugged. “You can just keep it, you might be back,” he said.

  “No,” I told him. “I want to turn it in. I won’t be coming back and I want to turn it in.”

  I set the card on the counter and pushed it toward him, my fingers still on it. He reached for the card and for a moment we were both touching it as I hesitated to let it go. Then the moment was over. I released my connection and stepped back, folding my arms across my chest as if I were cold or maybe just to make sure my heart stayed inside me.

  “Goodbye,” I told the anonymous library clerk.

  “Goodbye,” he answered.

  REAL LIFE

  2

  That night, Mom headed east on Interstate 30 as if she were being chased by state troopers. Fortunately, we were not.

  When she had to buy gas, she went into the convenience store and got a giant cup of black coffee for herself as well as a huge sack of popcorn, some do-nuts, cupcakes, chips and a twelve pack of cold colas. She bought a couple of dozen candy bars. Chocolate had become Mom’s obsession the last few months. It was practically the only thing she would eat. Sierra called it her Amazing Chocolate Diet, because she’d dropped maybe ten pounds eating that way.

  It didn’t work for me. My jeans were getting too tight in the thighs and my face kept breaking out.

  Mom set the cruise control on about ninety. Her Toby Keith CD was blaring on the stereo. And she kept the window down as she chain-smoked.

  I was seated in the back for the first part of the trip, clinging to my seat belt shoulder harness as if it were a lifeline.

  Sierra always wanted to sit with Mom. She sang along with the music for a while. She read roadside signs. She chattered on endlessly about mostly nothing. Sierra was just exactly the kind of daughter that a mom would want on a car trip. She was easygoing, delightful and pleasant. That was the surprising thing about my sister. It was hard not to like her. And believe me, I tried.

  Sierra was the pretty one. I guess among all sisters, one gets that designation. For Sierra it was hands down. No competition. She was blond, blue-eyed, perfect teeth, tall, long-legged and slim. Now, at fifteen, she had gotten boobs and a booty. She was like totally a Betty, as in Betty Rubble. My cartoon equivalent was definitely Olive Oyl.

  Eventually, as the night wore on, Sierra got tired and wanted to trade places so she could sleep. That was okay with me. There was no way that I could sleep. As Mom zoomed through the night passing eighteen-wheelers trucking at top speed as if they were standing still, I watched the white lines on the roadway and braced myself for the inevitable crash and death.

  The only time I could relax was when we stopped for frequent bathroom breaks. Sierra woke up for some of those; others she didn’t. I was glad to just get out of the car and stand on the ground for a few minutes, grateful not to be moving.

  “I’m glad we can stop whenever we want,” I said to Mom when she stopped to let me go to the bathroom at a rest area just outside of Little Rock. “When it’s just us girls, we can do just what we want.”

  Mom nodded. She knew what I meant. When we went somewhere with Sonny—whichever Sonny—stopping was always a negotiated agreement.

  “Do you know why men are like horoscopes?” she asked me.

  I rolled my eyes. Mom loved men jokes.

  “Why?” I responded.

  “Because they always tell you what to do and they’re almost always wrong.”

  Mom laughed a little. I shook my head. I didn’t think it was all that funny. Sierra would have appreciated it. Those two could swap testosterone ticklers for hours. But Sierra was asleep, so the humor was wasted on me.

  We were back to driving then, silently together for a long time. I was watching the road, and Mom seemed lost in thought.

  “Is your sister asleep?” Mom asked, startling me. She was glancing in the rearview mirror as if to see for herself.

  I turned and looked.

  “Yeah, she’s snoozing away,” I answered, a little bit jealous.

  Mom nodded and then a couple of minutes later asked, “How much do you actually know about Sonny?”

  I was stuck for a moment. The guy was not really a standout. He drank a lot of beer. He watched a lot of ball games. He liked to slap Mom on the rear and call her “woman” instead of her name. All her boyfriends were like that.

  “Well,” I began as I fumbled for something unique. “He loved reruns of Walker, Texas Ranger.”

  Mom glanced at me, shocked for a moment and then she laughed and shook her head. “Not him,” she said. “I was asking about your father. What have I told you about Sonny Leland?”

  “Oh, him,” I said and then thought for a moment. “You said that he was a really nice guy. Smart, good-looking. And that he died in an accident at work. A tree fell on him or something.”

  Mom nodded, but she didn’t look at me, she was staring straight ahead. I could see her profile in the dim blue light of the dashboard. She took a deep drag on her cigarette and then blew it out in the direction of the open window.

  “What did he look like?” I asked her.

  She thought about that for a moment. “He was tall,” she said. “Six foot two and muscles. Dreamy, I would have said at the time. Sandy-blond hair, bright brown eyes that seemed able to see anything and he was always smiling.” She glanced over at me. “He looked a lot like my Dakota.”

  “Like me? I thought you said he was good-looking.”

  “He was,” Mom insisted. “And you are, too.”

&nb
sp; I shrugged that off as motherly prejudice.

  “Did I tell you that he was the first person who ever loved me?” Mom asked.

  “Yes.”

  Mom hadn’t been loved a lot.

  “Sonny Leland was the best thing that ever happened to me,” she said. “He loved me effortlessly and unconditionally. It must have been the way that he’d been loved. It just came natural to him. It was so healing for me.”

  I had no comment. What could a kid say to that? Way cool. Or maybe, Gee tough luck, him dying and all.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t get to know him, Mom,” I said, finally.

  “Yeah, me, too,” she answered.

  Nothing more was said.

  As we sped on into the night I began, for the very first time, to really think about Sonny Leland. I began to imagine what my life might have been like if he had lived. It had been just one tree after all. One tree in a forest of trees. What if it hadn’t been chosen for cutting that day? Or they had chosen to cut it earlier or later. What if the wind had been blowing in another direction? Or the wind had not been blowing at all. It might have rained that day. He could have been late to work. Or he could have had a cold and stayed home altogether. It wouldn’t have taken much to change everything. Sonny Leland might have lived. And my life would have been so different.

  SONNY DAYS

  3

  Cumberland Street was near enough to campus for students to walk to and far enough away that they thought nothing that happened there would ever catch up with them.