The Light in Summer

by Mary McNear

  The volleyball court was the stupidest thing ever. Back when he was in sixth grade, his mom had been one of the parents who’d wanted the town to build a skate park here, but in the end, the town council had decided it was too dangerous and put in a sand volleyball court instead. Nobody ever used it. It wasn’t even near an actual beach. But that was a small town for you, he guessed. You had to make your own fun. It was why he liked hanging out with his friend Van. He knew how to have fun. And plan stuff. They were always talking about things they were going to do. Places they were going to go. Like tomorrow, for instance, Luke and Van and Van’s friend J.P. were going to do something cool. Something big. Thinking about it, though, made Luke feel kind of nervous, so he thought about what it was like being out here alone at night instead. He liked it, he decided. It was weird, but it was weird in a good way.

  He reached the end of the parking lot and, picking up his skateboard, walked across the lawn to one of the picnic tables. He stowed his board under it, climbed up on it and, after hesitating for a second, lay down on it, and looked up at the sky. It made him feel small, just for a second. He remembered that when they’d moved here from the city, he’d been surprised at how much bigger the sky seemed, how easy it was to see the stars. He tried to pick out some of the constellations now, but he could find only the Big Dipper. Pop-Pop had known all the constellations: their names, where they were, the stories behind them. How had he known so much? Luke wondered. How had he had time to learn it all? And he didn’t know just about stars, either. He’d been a structural engineer; he’d known about building things, too, big things like bridges and tunnels and roads.

  Luke had that feeling now. That feeling like something was swelling up in his chest. He got that feeling, sometimes, when he thought about Pop-Pop. His mom was always trying to make him talk about him, like that would make him feel better or something. And it wasn’t like he’d forgotten about him, anyway. He hadn’t. Like now, he wished he were here. Not right this second, but the last couple of days, when he’d gotten suspended and his mom had made such a big deal out of it. Pop-Pop had understood how to calm his mom down, how to make her laugh at stuff, even stuff she was upset about. Who cared about him smoking under the bleachers, anyway, other than the principal, Mr. Gilmore? Even the PE teacher, Mr. Barry, who’d found them smoking, didn’t really seem that shocked. It was more like he was pretending to be, because he knew he should be. And here was the thing that was so unfair: Mr. Gilmore smoked! It was like this big secret that everyone already knew. Once when he’d given Annabelle and two of her friends from the volleyball team a ride to one of their games, Annabelle had said his car positively reeked of cigarette smoke, and that his Christmas tree air freshener thingy had only made the smell worse.

  Luke took a deep breath, then another one. He was mad now, and that bubble in his chest was still there. He knew if it got hard enough, it would start to hurt, and worse, it would make him cry, which he hated doing. Because what exactly was the point of crying? For a little while he lay there and breathed, and didn’t think about anything, and then he thought about his dad. It was hard to think about someone when you didn’t know that much about him. He didn’t even know what his dad looked like, except what his mom had told him, and it hadn’t been enough, except the part about him having one blue eye and one brown eye. That was cool, and sometimes Luke imagined that when he did find him, in Alaska, which was where his mom had met him, that was how he would know him, because how many people had two different-colored eyes?

  Luke yawned. For the first time tonight, he felt tired. He took another deep breath. The bubble was almost gone now. It wasn’t going to hurt, after all. He’d think about his dad and Alaska on the way home, he decided, rolling off the table and grabbing his skateboard out from under it. And he’d have the whole town to himself while he was doing it.

  CHAPTER 6

  At five P.M. the next day, Cal sat on a folding chair in the Johnsons’ backyard, waiting for the wedding to begin. There had been a summer shower an hour before, and Cal had arrived with his sister and her family in its aftermath to find Jax and Jeremy’s four daughters furiously wiping down the chairs with dish towels and gently shaking out the taffeta bows tied to each row. Since then the sun had come out, and though the day had been hot before, it was pleasant now, with a breeze that smelled of wet grass and shook the leaves on the aspen trees, occasionally sending leftover raindrops down onto unsuspecting guests.

  Cal heard a murmur of appreciation, and he turned with everyone else to see Daisy Keegan standing at the end of the aisle. She was wearing a simple silk wedding dress with a scoop neck, cap sleeves, and a white satin sash around her waist. A crown of tiny white roses was entwined in her strawberry-blond hair, and she was holding a bouquet of fresh white peonies. Her mother, Caroline, who looked like an older version of Daisy, stood on one side of her in a pale yellow skirt and jacket; and her father, Jack, wearing a navy-blue suit, stood on the other side. So they were both going to give her away, Cal thought. That was nice. It had always seemed unfair to him that mothers, who did so much of the work, had to cede this honor to fathers. The three of them started up the aisle now, and as they drew closer, Cal saw that Daisy, tremulous with emotion, was already crying; a tear ran unchecked down her cheek. Cal turned to look at the groom. He was handsome, standing tall and erect in his army dress blues. Once Daisy reached him, he smiled down at her and brushed her tear away with his thumb. It was such an intimate gesture, and there was so much tenderness there, that Cal looked away and fixed his gaze on a low-hanging tree branch instead.

  His sister, as if knowing what he was feeling, gave his arm a reassuring pat. Cal mustered a smile for her. When he’d arrived at her cabin before the wedding, he’d found her, and her family, in total disarray. “Here, take her,” Allie had said, opening the front door and handing him a wailing Brooke. He took her from Allie and held her a little awkwardly; his experience comforting toddlers was limited. In between gasps, Brooke kept repeating the same two unintelligible words.

  “What’s she saying?” he asked Allie.

  “‘Special sock,’” Allie said, gesturing at Brooke’s feet. One had a little ruffled sock on it that matched her dress, and the other was bare. “She took her special sock off and now she can’t find it.”

  “Well, maybe I can find it,” Cal said, looking down at Brooke and smiling uncertainly. And perhaps it was the novelty of Cal holding her, but Brooke’s crying started to shift into a whimper. She looked at him now with wide, teary eyes.

  “I’ve already tried finding it,” Allie said. “But I’ve got to do something with my hair.” She was wearing a silk print dress, her hair pinned up haphazardly. “Check in the living room. That’s the last place I saw her wearing it.” She gave Cal a quick kiss on the cheek. “And don’t worry about Brooke,” she added, patting her on the back. “She’ll be fine. She just falls apart when she misses her nap.”

  “Right,” Cal said, heading into the living room. “Let’s find this special sock.” After a brief search he found it sticking out from under the couch. “Look, here it is,” he said to Brooke, who had stopped crying and was now hiccupping. She smiled shyly at him, and he slipped it onto her foot using his one free hand. Disaster averted, he thought.

  He shifted Brooke into his other arm and went in search of the rest of the family. He found Walker and Wyatt in the kitchen.

  “Dad, you’re strangling me,” Wyatt complained as Walker tried to knot his tie.

  “Hey, can I help out?” Cal asked, jiggling Brooke, who was now rubbing her eyes sleepily. “I’m pretty good at that.”

  “Sure, that’d be great,” Walker said, reaching for Brooke, who snuggled into his arms.

  Cal set to work on the tie, strangely happy to be useful to both his niece and nephew in so short a time. “There,” he said, tightening the tie’s knot and standing back to inspect his handiwork. “That looks good.”

  “Except that I can’t breathe.” Wyatt gasped dramatic
ally. He put his hands around his neck and made a choking sound.

  Cal looked at Walker in amusement, but Walker only smiled wryly. “Thank God he has to wear one only once in a blue moon,” he said.

  In the end, everything had come together. Brooke had fallen asleep in the car on the drive to the wedding and was still sleeping now in Allie’s arms, a thumb tucked contentedly into her mouth. Wyatt, sitting beside Allie, had forgotten he was being choked by his tie, and instead had a stoic expression on his face that Cal imagined he reserved for occasions like this. Walker’s hand was resting on Wyatt’s shoulder. As Cal looked at the two of them in profile, he saw that there was something about them so utterly similar—the way they held themselves, their posture, or the tilt of their heads—that Cal knew that even a biological connection could not have made them more of a father and son than they already were.

  And again, Cal felt compelled to look away. The bride and groom were now standing under a white wicker archway braided with white roses and ribbons, and the late afternoon sun lit up the gold in Daisy’s hair. The judge, a gray-haired man in his sixties, was saying something about how love is what makes us human. Then he asked Daisy and Will to read their vows, and Cal’s mind went automatically to his own wedding ceremony. What he remembered most about it, he realized, was not the wedding itself but the months of preparation leading up to it. He had wanted a small wedding; Meghan had wanted a big wedding. He’d suggested a vineyard for the reception; Meghan had her heart set on her parents’ country club. In the end, Cal had given in. He didn’t really care that much about the details, whereas Meghan seemed to care about them so much.

  For him, the point was to get married. For Meghan, the point was to have the perfect wedding. And it was perfect, or at least, it had looked perfect. There were the bridesmaid’s shoes that Meghan had dyed three times before she was satisfied they were an exact match to the blush-colored bridesmaid’s dresses. There was the bridal bouquet, which featured the rare chocolate cosmos flower that Meghan had the florist fly in the morning of the wedding for optimum freshness. And there were the hors d’oeuvres that Meghan and the caterer designed to be completely unique, including the tuna sashimi on kaffir lime–scented rice with hibiscus “caviar” that looked more like tiny jeweled packages than something you could actually eat. But by the day of the ceremony, Cal couldn’t help wishing that they’d eloped. By then, they hadn’t had a conversation in months that didn’t revolve around the wedding, and Meghan was starting to seem more like an event planner than a fiancée.

  He watched now as Daisy and Will exchanged rings and kissed. The guests around him stood up and started to clap, and Cal, a beat behind, joined them. The two youngest Johnson daughters, giggling excitedly, threw pale pink rose petals at the couple as they walked down the aisle. “See, that wasn’t so bad, was it?” Allie whispered in his ear, and even Brooke, who was awake now, looked pleased as she clapped her chubby hands.

  “Come on,” Allie said to him during the reception that followed. “I’ll introduce you to Daisy and Will.”

  “They look busy,” he said, but Allie had him firmly in tow and was working her way over to them.

  “It’s nice to meet you,” Cal said a moment later as he shook hands with both of them. “And congratulations.” Neither bride nor groom seemed surprised to have a guest at their wedding they’d never met before, but then again, neither seemed completely aware of what was happening around them. They were going through the motions, Cal understood, doing the right things, saying the right things, but the only other person who existed for them right now was the person they had just married. They were in their own private bubble of happiness. Nothing could puncture it for them, least of all a last-minute wedding guest. And Cal was reminded of something Allie had told him before the ceremony. Daisy’s father, Jack, who’d built a successful business here buying, remodeling, and reselling old cabins, was giving Daisy and Will one of them as a wedding present, and was surprising them with the keys to it that evening. Allie and Caroline had been over at the cabin that morning, filling its refrigerator with groceries and its rooms with flowers. Cal watched as, hands entwined, Daisy and Will stole a smile at each other. He turned away from them abruptly. “I’m going to get something to eat,” he told Allie, and he left before she could introduce him to anyone else.

  The buffet table was set up under the spreading branches of an oak tree, and everything about it—from its blue-and-white-checked cloth, to its centerpiece of vintage milk cans filled with sunflowers, to its mason jar glasses and speckled tin plates for the guests—was in keeping with the country picnic theme of the wedding. Cal took a plate and started working his way down the table. There were mouth-watering platters heaped with fried chicken and spareribs, plates stacked with deviled eggs, biscuits, and corn on the cob, and bowls brimming over with potato salad, coleslaw, green salad, and fruit salad.

  Still, as delicious as everything looked, Cal couldn’t help but feel as if he were a visitor from another country. Another universe. In Seattle, the meals he and Meghan had prepared at home and the restaurants they’d frequented were dedicated to a completely different kind of culinary experience, one best described by adjectives like organic, responsibly sourced, artisan, heirloom, and vegetable-centric. Trends were constantly changing. Seaweed, for instance, was the new kale. Small plates had given way to shared plates. Fermented foods—pickles, sauerkraut, and kimchi—were suddenly everywhere. Artisanal ice cream with flavors like pomegranate-carob, blackberry-basil, and caramel-cilantro now made choosing a simple cone infinitely complicated.

  But the sole mission of this food, Cal thought, putting an especially flaky-looking biscuit on his plate, was to taste good. That was it. He snuck a bite of the biscuit. Christ, it was even better than it looked. It didn’t need any butter, either. It was already full of butter, which was obviously the only ingredient on this table more highly prized than mayonnaise.

  Cal’s mouth quirked up at one corner. Meghan hated mayonnaise. She thought it was disgusting. What would she do if she were here? Pick at the salad, he decided. He paused to pile some of it onto his plate. It was swimming in ranch dressing, which was another thing Meghan hated, probably because she feared mayonnaise was lurking somewhere within it. He, on the other hand, could very happily eat this food until his dying day if it weren’t for one thing: he already missed sushi. He was addicted to it. “God, I’d kill for a spicy tuna roll right now,” he said under his breath as he helped himself to some coleslaw.

  “A spicy tuna roll?” a woman standing next to him in line said. Cal hadn’t noticed her before, but he turned to her now. “You’re not going to find one of those here,” she said, amused, as she lifted a deviled egg off a platter and popped it onto her plate. “Sushi hasn’t reached Butternut yet.”

  “Do you think it ever will?” he asked. Even through the fog of his gloom, he could see this woman was attractive.

  “Anything’s possible,” she said. “When we moved to Butternut five years ago, the only coffee they served at Pearl’s, the coffee shop here, was regular and decaf. Now they serve lattes, espressos, and cappuccinos, too.”

  “Really?” Cal said, hard-pressed to imagine this. He’d spent the better part of his childhood summers spinning on the red leather stools that lined the Formica counter at Pearl’s, and even then, the place had felt like a time capsule.

  “Oh, absolutely. We’re a fully caffeinated town now,” she said, putting a generous dollop of potato salad next to the spareribs on her plate. “Of course, there’s a downside to that. I’m up to two lattes a day now. So, I’m basically trapped in a downward spiral of addiction and poverty.”

  “I know something about that,” Cal chuckled. “I live in the city that gave us Starbucks.”

  “Seattle?” she asked. They’d both paused at the end of the buffet table to gather up napkins and utensils. “Oh, I’d love to go there,” she said. “I’ve seen photographs of the new central library. It looks amazing.”

&n
bsp; Now she’d gotten his attention. The central library was one of his favorite buildings in Seattle. He looked at her, really looked at her, for the first time. She was in her late twenties or early thirties, and she had long, straight, shiny, dark hair, blue eyes, and long lashes. She wore a sleeveless navy dress. But what he found especially appealing about her for some reason were her freckles; there was a sprinkling of them across her nose and cheeks.

  “It is amazing,” he said of the Central Library. “Are you . . . interested in architecture?”

  She shook her head. “I’m interested in libraries.” Cal looked at her quizzically. “I’m a librarian,” she explained.

  “Oh. Here? At the Butternut Library?”

  She nodded. “Have you been there before?”

  “Many, many times. When I was a kid, my mom used to drop my sister and me off there whenever we were driving her crazy—which, now that I think of it, was pretty much all of the time—and then she’d pick us up a couple of hours later. I think she used it as kind of a drop-in child care center.”

  She smiled. “People are still doing that. Did you . . . grow up here?”

  “Only in the summertime. My family had a cabin up here. My sister still does. My name is Cal,” he said, holding out his hand. “Cal Cooper. My sister is Allie Ford.”

  “Oh, of course. I know Allie,” she said, shifting her plate, napkin, and silverware into one hand so she could shake his hand with the other. “She loves Jodi Picoult novels,” she continued. “I always set them aside for her as soon as they come in. And Wyatt. Wyatt is one of our best Bookworms. It’s a club,” she added. “I’m Billy Harper, by the way.”