The Light in Summer

by Mary McNear

  The guy had started typing on his iPhone again, but he looked up now and flashed a smile at Luke. “It’s 197 miles an hour. But just between you and me, I’ve never even gotten close to that before. And I’m not going to now, either. Not with Officer Sawyer setting speed traps for me.”

  “You know Officer Sawyer?”

  “Well . . . I wouldn’t say we were the best of friends. He gave me a speeding ticket.”

  Luke, thinking about his own recent run-in with Officer Sawyer, studied this man more carefully. He didn’t recognize him, so he didn’t think he lived up here year round. That was the thing about this place. You saw everyone all the time, whether you wanted to or not. On the other hand, he didn’t look exactly like a summer person, either. Summer people usually looked like they were dressed for . . . well, for fun, Luke supposed. This guy—with his T-shirt, blue jeans, and work boots—was dressed for work, and pretty dirty work, too.

  “Where are you from?” Luke blurted out, interrupting the man’s typing again. He didn’t seem to mind, though.

  “I’m from Seattle,” he said, looking up. “Ever been there?”

  Luke shook his head. He didn’t know that much about Seattle, except for one thing. “Seattle has the Space Needle, right?” he said, wanting to lean against the car, too.

  “Right,” the man said, typing again. “And some great skate parks, too.”

  “Really?”

  “Oh, yeah. By the time I moved there, though, my skating days were over,” the man said, typing and talking at the same time.

  “Why?” Luke asked, wondering how old this guy was. He was pretty sure some of his teachers—the younger ones—were around the same age, but this guy seemed different. More relaxed. And, well, cooler.

  “Why?” he repeated, looking up from his iPhone. “Well, I was an architect by then. I think I was worried if I started skating again—I hadn’t done it since high school—I might break a wrist or something.”

  Luke nodded. He’d sprained his wrist once in a fall off his board, but he’d only been in the sixth grade then, so it hadn’t been that big a deal. It would be different for an architect, he guessed. This guy, though, he didn’t really look like an architect, with his dusty boots. Then again, Luke didn’t really know what an architect looked like. This one must make a lot of money. Otherwise, how could he afford a car like this? It must cost, what . . . ?

  “Can I ask you something else?”

  “Why not?” the man said, taking one hand off his phone and running it through his curly brown hair. He wasn’t really giving Luke all of his attention, but the part he was giving him was friendly.

  “How much does a car like this even cost?”

  “It cost . . . it cost a lot,” the man said seriously. “Too much, really. If you’re ever a workaholic, though, with no family to support”—he shrugged—“you might be able to afford one.” He typed something else on his phone, slid it into his back pocket, and pushed off the side of the car. “I’ve got to get going,” he said to Luke. “But it was nice talking to you.”

  Could I get a ride sometime? Luke almost asked, but he knew better. You didn’t ask strangers for a ride. “Nice talking to you,” Luke agreed.

  “I’ll see you around,” the man said, heading down the street. Luke, who knew he should be at the library already, started to cross the street. He wondered if Annabelle had seen the car when she came out of Pearl’s. She probably wouldn’t have been that excited about it, though. But Van would be. And so would Toby. Toby loved cars. And thinking about Toby, and the birthday party he’d had that only Annabelle had gone to, made Luke forget about the car and its owner. By the time he got to the library, in fact, he was in a bad mood all over again.

  CHAPTER 17

  Mom?”

  “Billy? Oh, my God. What’s wrong? Is Luke okay?”

  “Luke is fine,” Billy said, tucking the cordless phone between her shoulder and her ear and fanning herself with an oven mitt. “This isn’t about him. It’s about a roast.”

  “A roast?”

  “Yes, Mom, a roast,” Billy grumbled. It was July first, the hottest day of the summer so far, and her kitchen felt like a steam room. “You don’t have to sound so surprised, either. I made a pork roast,” she added, staring accusingly at it in its roasting pan on her stove top.

  “Oh, Billy. Why would you do that?” her mother asked, her sympathy tinged with reproach. “You know you should not, under any circumstances, cook. It’s an invitation to disaster.”

  Billy didn’t argue this point. Even she had no idea what had inspired her to try to cook dinner for Cal. “Look, Mom, it’s done. It’s too late to rethink it now. My guest is arriving in”—she checked the oven clock—“in five minutes.”

  “Your guest?” her mother said, warming to the topic. “Who is he?”

  “Why would you assume it’s a he?”

  “Because I doubt you’d risk life and limb to cook for a she.”

  That’s true, Billy thought, fanning harder. But the fact was that she’d started this thing and she was going to finish it. “Look, Mom, you’re right, it’s a he, and, even though he’s just a friend, I need your help. Please.”

  “Of course, honey. What’s the problem?” her mom asked, shifting into crisis mode.

  “The problem is, I don’t know if it’s cooked all the way through or not.”

  “Use a meat thermometer. Pork should reach an internal temperature of 145 degrees.”

  Billy blinked. How did she know this? Billy knew it now, but only because she’d looked it up on the Internet. “I don’t . . . I don’t own a meat thermometer,” she admitted.

  There was a barely audible sigh on the other end of the line, and Billy knew her mother was asking herself how it was possible for anyone not to own a meat thermometer. Her mother, though, tended not to dwell on unanswerable questions. Not for nothing had she been a vice principal at a girls’ school for twenty-five years. “All right. Why don’t you start by telling me exactly how you cooked it?”

  “In a roasting pan at 350 degrees for an hour.”

  “Then it should be done. Just to be sure, though, why don’t you cut into it? The inside should be pinkish, but not pink.”

  “Hold on,” Billy said, putting down the phone. She got a fork and knife and, pushing past Murphy, who was literally drooling on the floor from the smell of cooking meat, sawed into the roast and examined it critically. It was definitely pink.

  She picked up the phone again. “What’s the difference between pink and pinkish?” she asked.

  “Well, pinkish is just slightly pink.”

  “But still pink?”

  “Well, of course still pink. Just not very pink.”

  “I can’t tell which it is.” Billy sighed. “It’s one or the other.”

  “Then it’s fine. I’m sure it’ll be delicious.”

  Billy glared at the roast again. She was actually starting to hate it. “I don’t know,” she said, chewing on her lower lip. “It just doesn’t look done. It’s supposed to have this glaze on it, this maple and mustard glaze. But it doesn’t look like the picture in the recipe. That roast”—she consulted the picture she’d printed from the Internet—“that roast has a nice browned look to it. You don’t . . . you don’t think I should put it back in the oven?”

  “No. Now, what else did you make for dinner?”

  “A tomato and red onion salad and a summer herb potato salad.” Those, at least, had been a success. She’d made them ahead of time and had put them, proudly, on the already set kitchen table.

  “Perfect,” her mom said. “And don’t worry about the roast.”

  “Easy for you to say. You’ve never served a piece of meat in your life that wasn’t perfectly cooked. I’ve got to go, though, Mom. My guest will be here any minute.”

  “All right, honey. I love you. And Billy, enjoy yourself tonight. I know that sometimes, between Luke and the library, you can forget to . . . focus on yourself. So have fun. Promise?�
��

  “Promise,” Billy echoed. “I love you, too. I’ll call you tomorrow,” she said, hanging up. She inspected the roast once more and made a snap decision. She turned the oven up from 350 degrees to 450 and popped the pan back inside it. There. The roast would cook a little more, to the right degree of pinkness, and with any luck, it would brown nicely in the process. She’d leave it in for only five minutes. She was about to set the oven timer when the doorbell rang.

  Murphy, barking enthusiastically, bounded for the door, and Billy hurried after him, plagued by an unfamiliar nervousness. For God’s sake, relax, she told herself. This is not a date. This is a casual dinner. This didn’t stop her, though, from glancing into the hall mirror as she passed. She wasn’t thrilled by what she saw. In the humidity, her cotton dress looked wilted, her hair was curling at the ends, and despite the pressed powder she’d applied so carefully to cover her freckles, her face looked a little shiny.

  Great, she thought, opening the door with a grim determination. But she smiled as soon as she saw Cal standing there. “Hey,” she said.

  “Hi, there,” he said, smiling back. While Billy might have felt hot and frazzled, Cal looked so cool and fresh in jeans and a button-down shirt that it was as if he were stepping into her house from another climate. “This is for you,” he said, handing her a bottle of white wine. “Chardonnay, right?”

  “Right,” Billy said, trying to prevent a still barking Murphy from jumping up on him. Cal didn’t seem to mind, though. He kneeled to pet him. “And who might this be?” he asked.

  “This is Murphy,” she said, closing the front door. “He’s our wildly ineffective watchdog. If someone broke into our house in the middle of the night, he’d probably bring them a tennis ball to toss for him.”

  Cal laughed. “Is that true?” he asked Murphy seriously, scratching him behind his ears. “Are you a failure as a guard dog? Because I can see you have many other winning qualities. I miss having a dog,” he said, straightening up. “We always had one when I was growing up, but the building I lived in in Seattle had a ‘no pets’ policy. Your son, Luke, must love him. Is he . . . around?”

  She shook her head. “His friend Toby invited him to go out for pizza and minigolf with his family.” Billy had taken this as a good sign. Had Luke reached out to Toby or had Toby reached out to Luke? she’d wondered. Either way, she’d been pleased. “He’s one of Luke’s old friends,” she explained to Cal. “He’s not . . . one of the friends he was with when he got picked up by the police.”

  “That’s good, right?”

  “That’s very good. Toby and Luke were in Boy Scouts together. Toby’s still in it. He’s working toward his Eagle Scout badge.”

  “Ah, I see what you mean, then. Most parents would probably prefer their son be friends with a Boy Scout over a tagger.”

  Billy smiled. She watched as Cal looked around the small front hall, from which you could see the equally diminutive living room and dining room. “I like your house,” he said. “Do you mind if . . . ?” He gestured toward the living room.

  “Not at all,” Billy said, though in truth, when she compared it to the photographs of his living room—his former living room—in the Seattle Met Magazine spread, she felt self-conscious about it. Still, Cal was clearly interested in it, and not only that, he also looked at it differently than most people would have. Not critically, exactly, but carefully. He stopped to admire the teak boomerang coffee table and the midcentury starburst clock on the wall, both items that Billy was inordinately proud of. When he finally came to rest in front of one of the built-in floor-to-ceiling bookshelves on either side of the fireplace, he stood there for a long time. Then he selected a book from it, a biography of Frank Lloyd Wright. Billy smiled to herself. It was one of the few books she owned about architects or architecture, but there was no need to tell him that. He flipped through it, put it back, and looked around again. “Do you know what I like about this room?” he asked Billy finally.

  “No,” she said, though she expected him to say that it looked lived-in, or comfortable, or quirky.

  “It looks like you,” he said simply. “I mean . . . your personality comes through. You know, who you are, what’s important to you, what makes you happy. That doesn’t always happen in someone’s home. In fact, most of the time, it doesn’t.”

  “Thank you,” she said, and as she smiled she felt suddenly shy. She was still holding the wine bottle, she realized, its chilly rivulets of condensation running over her hands. It felt nice. It was so hot in here, even with the windows open and the ceiling fan on. She started to apologize for this, but something in the dining room, which was connected to the living room, caught Cal’s eyes.

  “What’s this?” he asked, heading over to the dining room table.

  “Oh, that’s a model town that Luke built. Well, Luke and my dad,” she amended, following him. Shortly after they’d moved into this house, Billy had given Luke permission to use the dining room table for his myriad building projects. She’d known they wouldn’t be using the table to dine on—the kitchen table worked just fine for that. So she’d covered this table with felt to protect it and let Luke take it over. What he’d done with it was build a miniature town, complete with its own courthouse, post office, bank, school and, much to Billy’s delight, library.

  “This is so cool,” Cal said. “Your dad must have had so much fun working on it with him.” He bent over to get a better look. “How did Luke get started on it?”

  Billy considered this. “When he was in preschool, he used to play with train sets. But my dad noticed he was more interested in the miniature towns the trains passed through than in the trains themselves. So we encouraged him to concentrate on the towns. He’d build and rebuild them over and over again. This was the first one that really stuck, though. Literally stuck. It’s glued down.”

  “It’s really good,” Cal murmured. “A lot of it is built to scale, isn’t it?”

  “That was my dad. He was a structural engineer. He died a year ago,” she added.

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” he said simply.

  Billy had turned her attention back to the miniature town. “It’s not Butternut, obviously,” she pointed out.

  “I noticed that. There’s no comic book store in Butternut,” he said of a corner grocery that Luke had repurposed as a comic book store.

  “I think this town is what Luke thought Butternut should be.”

  “That explains the three playgrounds,” Cal said. “And is this a skateboard park?”

  “Yes.” Billy smiled. “Most of the buildings are salvaged from old train sets or Christmas villages, but that skateboard park was built by hand. That’s balsa wood.”

  Cal nodded, running a finger lightly over a ramp. “How long did it take to build this whole thing?”

  “A year,” she said. “Maybe more. He went through stages. Sometimes he’d work on it all the time, and sometimes he’d forget about it for a while. He always came back to it, though. And when he was really into it, you couldn’t help but feel his excitement and share it. I know because I ended up doing some of the painting. That was all Luke trusted me with, apparently,” she said with amusement, pointing to the white picket fences in front of the houses on Main Street that she had painted with a tiny paintbrush. “He’s not quite finished with it, as you can see,” she added, pointing to an undeveloped area of green felt. “He was thinking about putting a go-cart track over here, or maybe an outdoor ice-skating rink. That’s the nice thing about model towns, I guess. No permits, no zoning, no planning commissions. But he stopped working on it”—she leaned over and straightened a traffic light—“a couple of years ago. Right around the time my dad first got sick. If I asked him about it now, he’d probably say, ‘It’s lame’ or something like that. Everything is lame now, apparently.” And that includes me.

  “He can always come back to it,” Cal said, using a finger to push a miniature working tire swing in the backyard of a house that looked a little
like Billy and Luke’s. Billy smiled. Luke and Annabelle had spent hours and hours and hours on the real tire swing when they were younger. Annabelle, come to think of it, had helped with this model town, too. Luke had let her glue individual leaves onto an oak tree on Main Street. It had been a thankless task, as Billy recalled, but Annabelle hadn’t complained.

  “Are you . . . cooking something?” Cal asked her then, straightening up. “I think it might be . . . burning,” he added, almost apologetically.

  “Oh no,” she said softly. She closed her eyes as if this might somehow postpone the inevitable. The inevitable, of course, was what happened next: Billy ran to the kitchen, Murphy hard on her heels, and Cal right behind them. She put down the wine bottle, found the oven mitts, and opened the oven door. As a cloud of smoke billowed out, she removed the roasting pan and slammed it onto the stove top. Then she turned off the oven and, making a flapping motion with the oven mitts, tried to disperse the smoke before it set off the smoke detector. Then, and only then, did she inspect the roast. It was completely charred, clearly neither pink nor pinkish inside anymore. Far from having a glaze on the outside, it now had a completely carbonized shell over it. What struck Billy, standing with Cal in the still smoky kitchen, was not simply that she’d forgotten about the roast but that she’d forgotten about it so completely. After the doorbell had rung, she hadn’t given it another thought. And the reason for that, of course, was Cal, who so far had the decency not to say or do anything that would in any way increase her mortification. If she’d been trying to impress him, she thought, waving at the smoke that still hung over the shriveled meat, she’d failed. But since when, she wondered, did she try to impress anyone? Or, more accurately, try to pretend to be someone she wasn’t?—which, in this case, was a cook. She picked up the pan and headed for the garbage can.

  “What are you doing?” Cal asked.

  “I’m throwing it away,” Billy said, pausing. “Or would you like to take it back to your cabin to use as a doorstop?” Even Murphy, she noticed, had lost interest in what was left of the roast.