The Light in Summer

by Mary McNear

  Was this her dream house? No, probably not! Certainly it was a far cry from the home Billy had grown up in, a two-story red brick colonial on a leafy street in St. Paul. This was a single-story clapboard house on a block of other single-story clapboard houses, each with a neat square of green lawn in front, each guilty of only minor transgressions of originality—a gazebo nobody ever sat in here, a slightly sinister garden gnome there. This neighborhood—only a few blocks from Butternut’s Main Street—was what Billy could afford when she and Luke had moved here five years ago, and as a single mom, she liked to think she specialized in the possible, the practical, and most important, the achievable.

  Besides, if it had felt like a compromise at the time she’d bought it, it had revealed some pleasant surprises since then. After she’d had its peeling beige exterior repainted a Lake Tahoe blue, for instance, with a crisp white trim, the house had looked positively spiffy, and when she’d pulled up its wall-to-wall carpeting—again, beige—she’d been delighted to discover the original oak floors underneath. There’d been a few perks for Luke, too: a basketball hoop for the driveway, a tire swing for the backyard, and a long hallway he could slide down in his socks. Billy had furnished the house with Danish modern furniture she’d bought at an estate sale in St. Paul and added bright geometric area rugs, midcentury light fixtures she’d scavenged online, framed abstract art posters, and of course, books—lots and lots and lots of books. Overall, she was pleased with the effect, and if she hadn’t quite succeeded in indulging all of her Mad Men fantasies here (teak boomerang coffee table notwithstanding), she at least liked to think of it as a place where the partners at Sterling Cooper would have felt comfortable.

  But as she entered the kitchen, she had to admit this was one room in the house that had defeated her. The only signs anyone had even been in it were her unwashed coffee cup from that morning standing in the sink and the faint whiff of microwaved popcorn in the air. She sighed. After leaving the library, she’d briefly entertained the idea of cooking a well-balanced meal for Luke’s dinner, but she knew all too well her efforts there would be spurned. These days, he seemed to find fault with almost everything she did. And truthfully, despite thirteen years of parenting, she still wasn’t much of a cook. Partly it was because the timing always seemed to elude her—her vegetables underdone, her meat and fish overdone, her rice gummy. And partly it was because she and Luke had lived with her parents until he was eight, and Billy’s mom, who was as gifted in the kitchen as Billy was inept, had been happy to do all the cooking for them. So tonight, for the second time this week, she’d stopped off at Spoon River Pizza in Butternut—a favorite haunt of Luke’s—and picked up a cheese pizza for dinner. That was all right, though, wasn’t it? she thought, putting the groceries in the fridge and refilling Murphy’s water bowl. The cheese in pizza had protein in it, right?

  She left the kitchen, pausing in the hallway outside the den. Converting this third, rarely used bedroom into a quasi-office/entertainment center had been Billy’s idea, an attempt to transfer the sounds of Netflix movies, Xbox games, and cable sports out of the common areas and into a room where the door could be closed. This house felt small enough without the sounds of intergalactic battles and martial arts skirmishes issuing from the living room.

  Billy listened now to the screeching sounds of a car chase mixed with the staccato of a gunfight, this on a day when Luke was supposed to be unplugged. Fast & Furious, she decided. Billy, a lover of serious drama and fluffy romantic comedy, had never imagined she’d become adept at knowing which action movie franchise was playing simply by the ratio of chaotic sound to terse dialogue.

  The sound of the car chase continued unabated from the other side of the door, and Billy braced herself for Luke’s moodiness, which she imagined would be worse now than usual, given that he’d had a whole day at home to brood. Come on, Billy, get it over with, she thought, and she cracked open the door far enough to see Luke, wearing a pair of jeans torn at the knee and a Reel Legends T-shirt, sprawled out on the couch. One of his feet was up on the coffee table, his sneakers half-off, their laces untied. He was wearing his baseball cap backward. He had one earbud in so he could listen to his iPod and one earbud out so he could listen to the movie. She shook her head. She’d never understand how Luke’s generation could divide their attention in this way.

  She opened the door a little further and, angling into the room, nudged him on the shoulder. “Luke,” she said.

  “Mom,” he yelped with surprise, yanking out his earbud and sitting up on the couch. Billy found the remote on the coffee table and pointed it at the TV. Yes, she’d been right—Fast Five. She clicked it off, but the subsequent silence seemed to overwhelm the small room, and when she spoke, her voice sounded unnaturally loud. “I thought we agreed on no electronics today,” she said, putting down the remote.

  “No, you said no cell phone, no computer, and no Xbox. You didn’t say anything about the TV or my iPod. Besides, what else was I supposed to do?”

  Gee, I don’t know. Read a book, maybe? The house is full of them, you know, she wanted to say, but she stopped herself. This was a sore point with her. Sometime over the past year, Luke, who’d once consumed books the same way he’d consumed Oreos, had stopped reading everything but his skateboarding magazines. It was galling to Billy, first as a parent and only second as a librarian. But what could she do? She couldn’t force him to read, could she? (Though honestly, the thought had occurred to her.) But now, because she didn’t want tonight to be a replay of last night—Billy furious over Luke’s suspension, Luke defiant but not yet entirely convincing in his defiance—she tried to find the line between caring and firm as she said, “All right. Next time, though, no electronics means no electronics. Are you hungry? I brought a pizza home. Let’s have it while it’s still hot, okay? Oh, and there are no pesky vegetables tonight, either,” she added, referring to an old joke of theirs about how annoying it was to have vegetables every night with their dinner. She left before he could answer her or, more likely, not answer her, stopping only to pick up a few stray kernels of popcorn from the rug.

  In the kitchen, she set plates and napkins on the table. She was filling two glasses with ice and water when Luke came in, flipped open the pizza box, and slid a piece of pizza onto his plate. He was on his way out of the room when Billy said, “Whoa. Where are you going?”

  “To my room?” he said, stopping but not turning around.

  “I don’t think so. We’re having dinner together, Luke. Remember?” Billy had once been more casual about this, but a mandatory sit-down dinner—even if it consisted only of a few slices of pizza—was one of many rules she’d put into place recently to improve parent-child communication. Luke sighed audibly, turned around, and came back to slump down at the table. This was new, too; he no longer sat on furniture so much as draped himself over it. Billy was tempted to tell him to sit up straight but restrained herself. She’d been frequenting the parenting section of the library lately, and all of the books said the same thing. Choose your battles. She wouldn’t fight this one. Or about a hundred other battles over things he did that she found equally irritating.

  She brought their water glasses to the table and sat down across from him, studying him under the kitchen lights and puzzling over his recent transformation. He’d grown taller. He’d lost more of his baby fat and found in its place a new angularity in his build, a new sharpness in his features. But for the most part, he still looked very much like himself, a self that happened to look very much like herself. Dark hair, fair skin, blue eyes heavily fringed with lashes, and a spray of freckles over his cheeks and across the bridge of his nose. No, the real changes in Luke were subtler, less direct, and harder to pin down. It was like looking at a snapshot of a Luke she knew well only to find it inexplicably blurred around the edges.

  She served herself a slice of pizza and smiled as she watched Luke fold his slice in half lengthwise and take a bite. He’d eaten his pizza like this since his grand
father had taken him on a vacation to New York City for his tenth birthday, and when he’d come back, he’d informed Billy proudly that this was the way real New Yorkers ate their pizza. Billy almost reminded him of this now, but Billy’s father, Pop-Pop to Luke, who’d died a year ago, was now on a long list of subjects Luke refused to discuss. Instead she said casually, “Margot came into the library today.” Margot Hoffman was the educator/naturalist at the Butternut Nature Museum, and the director of its wildly popular Nature Camp. Wildly popular with local parents for being conveniently located and affordably priced, and reasonably popular with their children, ages five to twelve, whom Margot labeled “junior naturalists.”

  “She asked about you, Luke,” Billy added.

  He looked at her sharply.

  “No, not about your suspension,” she said quickly. “Just about how you’re doing. She told me she’s really excited about you being a counselor’s helper this year.”

  Luke actually groaned. “You’re not still going to make me do that, are you?”

  “Luke, you wanted to do it. You practically begged Margot when you were a camper there last summer.”

  “That was before I realized how dumb it is. It’s, like, so lame. I mean, the museum isn’t even a real museum. It has, like, two little rooms, and they don’t even have stuff in them that’s interesting. Who cares about some old birds’ nests, anyway?”

  “Well, Margot, for one,” Billy said. “I think she’s done a lot with the space she has. And it’s not just ‘some old birds’ nests,’ either. There are some interesting dioramas, too, of the Northwoods.”

  “With gross dead animals in them.”

  “With taxidermy animals in them,” Billy corrected him. “And you’d be amazed what an art form many people consider taxidermy to be. There’s a long waiting list at the library for a book called The Complete Guide to Small Game Taxidermy: How to Work with Squirrels, Varmints, and Predators. Really, Luke, we cannot keep that book on the shelf,” she said, trying and failing to coax a smile out of him. He looked, instead, disgusted by the whole topic, though not so disgusted by it as to lose his appetite. He slid another piece of pizza onto his plate, and Billy bit into her piece, conscious that Murphy was under the table, hoping like hell that one of them would drop something on the floor.

  “Look, it’s not like you spend that much time inside the museum, anyway,” she said, changing tack. “Margot has tons of field trips planned. And you like helping out with the little kids, don’t you? Giving them piggyback rides? Remember that little boy last year? What was his name? The one who—”

  “And another thing,” Luke said. “What kind of summer job doesn’t even pay you? Like, what’s the point?”

  “Well, the point is the experience you’ll get, which, hopefully, will lead to a paying job one day soon.”

  Luke had been avoiding eye contact, but now he stole a look at her. “This summer, though, I can’t just . . . ?”

  “Hang out?” Billy supplied, since they’d already had this conversation. She met his gaze, challenging him. Hang out with the same friend you got suspended with? Hang out on your skateboard, which you ride obsessively? Hang out in your room, where you already spend way too much time? “No, Luke. You can’t just hang out. You’re working at Nature Camp. Period. End of discussion. In a few more years, when you’re sixteen, you’ll have more options. Caroline’s already said she’d give you a summer job busing tables at Pearl’s as soon as you’re old enough.” Luke had always loved Caroline and Pearl’s but this got no response from him.

  “And speaking of Pearl’s,” Billy continued, undaunted, “don’t forget tomorrow is Daisy’s wedding. It starts at five, but I think we should leave here by four thirty at the latest. Since the car’s in the shop, we’ll have to walk over to the Johnsons’.” The wedding was being held on their property. She started to reach for another slice of pizza, then stopped herself. She knew for a fact the navy-blue sleeveless linen dress she was planning on wearing tomorrow was just a teensy bit snug on her right now. She took another sip of water instead.

  “Yeah . . . about that,” Luke said, shifting in his chair.

  Billy waited.

  “I might not, like, actually go to the wedding.”

  “Luke, I already told Caroline both of us are coming.”

  He shrugged. And Billy, suddenly exhausted, lifted another piece of pizza out of the box and took a big bite. Calories be damned, she decided. She’d just layer on another pair of Spanx tomorrow. Spanx upon Spanx. “Luke,” she said, keeping her tone deliberately light, “you know as well as I do that if it hadn’t been for Pearl’s, you and I would have starved to death. Seriously, how many times do you think we’ve eaten there since we moved here? Just a rough estimate?”

  He didn’t answer. But Billy was getting used to having these one-sided conversations with him. “Hmm. Let’s see. I would say that, conservatively, over the last five years we have eaten there seven hundred and fifty times. I mean, come on, you’ve practically grown up there. And remember the crush you had on Daisy? You couldn’t even look her in the eye when she’d come to take our order.” This at least got a reaction from him. A scowl. He dropped an uneaten crust of pizza back in the box.

  “What’s the point of having a wedding, anyway?” he groused. “They’re just going to get divorced.”

  “Daisy and Will?” Billy frowned. “Why would you say that?”

  “Because most people get divorced.”

  “No, most people do not get divorced. Look at Pop-Pop and Grandma. They were married for thirty-five years. And they had a wonderful marriage. You know that, Luke. You saw it for yourself.”

  He wouldn’t argue this point, but he wouldn’t concede it, either. He met Billy’s gaze. “If you think marriage is so great,” he said, “then why didn’t you get married?”

  Billy’s face flushed hot. “Because under the circumstances, it wasn’t . . . possible,” she said, feeling suddenly defensive. “But I didn’t need to get married to have a family. You are my family, Luke. You and Grandma and, when he was still alive, Pop-Pop. You were the only family I needed. But that doesn’t mean I don’t believe in marriage. I do. I believe in it very much. And if I somehow gave you the impression I didn’t, then I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to.”

  She was surprised to feel tears gathering behind her eyes. This is ridiculous, she thought. I’m not going to cry. Especially since I’m not even sure what I would be crying about. To distract herself, she took Luke’s pizza crust out of the box and fed it to Murphy under the table. He scarfed it down, then bumped his wet nose appreciatively against her knee. When she lifted her eyes again, the danger, and the tears, had subsided. She thought Luke wasn’t looking at her anymore, though it was hard to tell; his too-long hair was covering his eyes. She wished he would sit up straight and get a haircut. But that was another battle she didn’t want to fight right now.

  “The wedding is nonnegotiable,” she said quietly.

  He glared at her, stood up, and pushed his chair back. He was leaving the kitchen when she called out to him. “Your plate, Luke.”

  He came back to the table, picked up his plate, and put it in the sink. Billy sighed, helping herself to a third slice of pizza. As Luke was on his way out of the room again, though, she suddenly said, “I miss him, too, Luke. I miss Pop-Pop all the time.”

  “God, Mom, why do you have to keep bringing that up?” he mumbled, and then he was gone. She heard the door to his room slam. So much for parent-child communication, she thought, tossing Murphy another pizza crust.

  CHAPTER 4

  After Billy had fed and walked Murphy, run the dishwasher, put in a load of laundry, answered her personal e-mails, and called her mother, she finally laid claim to the only time in each day that belonged, completely and unequivocally, to her. How did she spend this time? First she poured herself a glass of chardonnay. Then she took her Oxford Illustrated Jane Austen six-volume set from its place of honor on the bookshelf in her bedroom, and
, with Murphy padding along beside her, she went out onto the back porch. Over the last couple of years, this had become her summertime nighttime ritual—back porch, chardonnay, Jane Austen, Murphy—and only occasionally did she deviate from it. The back porch, of course, was weather-dependent, but unless it was pouring rain, unseasonably cold, too buggy, or too muggy, she sat out there. And, as for the glass of chardonnay, every once in a while she might substitute a light beer, a gin and tonic, or even, if she was feeling especially adventurous, a frozen margarita she’d made in the blender. But the Jane Austen part—that was a constant. You couldn’t improve on perfection. And that went double, of course, for Murphy.

  Tonight, though, as Billy nudged open the screen door and walked onto the porch, she knew the enjoyment she usually took in this ritual would elude her. It wasn’t that the back porch was uninviting. It was as cheerful and as comfortable as she’d known how to make it. Someone who’d lived here before her had slapped it, somewhat haphazardly, onto the back of the house, and it showed, but it helped that Billy’s parents had given her a very pretty set of wicker furniture as a housewarming present, and that, through trial and error, Billy had been able to get cornflowers, marigolds, and even poppies to grow in galvanized metal planters. But as she set her wine and books down on the little side table and plucked a dead blossom off one of the marigolds, she couldn’t shake a pensive feeling. It was her dinner with Luke, of course. Since then, he’d been holed up in his room, his door vibrating with the thud of music. Even Murphy seemed slightly offended by the volume; instead of coming up to the porch to sit beside her, he stayed out in the backyard, nosing around in the shrubbery.

  Billy settled into her favorite reading chair. The night was beautiful. It was dark, finally—in another ten days it would be the longest day of the year—but the darkness beyond the yellow porch light felt comforting to her, as if it were somehow protecting the house, the yard, the whole town. And it was warm outside—warm enough for her to be out here without a sweater, but not so warm that she wanted to take refuge in her air-conditioned bedroom. Helping matters was the breeze. It moved through the leaves of the enormous northern red oak tree in the backyard, making a pleasant swishing sound, and bringing with it the scent—always appealing to Billy—of a charcoal grill burning somewhere nearby.