That Summer

  “Family friend,” Sumner put in. “I like to think I’m more than just one among the crowd of Ashley’s ex-boyfriends. I want to believe I made my mark.”

  “You did,” I said. He had to know how important he was. “You were the best of all of them.”

  He laughed. “I wouldn’t say that.”

  “How old are you?” Casey asked him, her head cocked to the side like she was Nancy Drew solving a mystery.

  “Twenty-one,” Sumner said, glancing down at his uniform. “And it shows, doesn’t it?”

  “Not really,” Casey said, and her voice was different, long and drawling. And I didn’t like the way she was standing, either, all cutesy in her big shirt and cutoffs, smiling at Sumner like he was some guy at camp.

  “Well, we better go,” I said, wanting to move on. Suddenly I wasn’t so sure I wanted to share Sumner with Casey, who saw boys only as people to take shirts from and pine for. I wasn’t sure I wanted to share him with anyone. “I’ve got to get home.”

  “You do not,” Casey said, using that same voice on me now, high and flirty. “God, Haven’s always having to go home and do something, isn’t she? She’s such a good girl.”

  I looked at her. “I am not.”

  “Oh Gawd,” she said, “honestly. Anyone looks bad compared to you, Little Miss Do Whatever Anyone Wants You To.”

  Sumner looked at me, then said, “Ah, but you do not know Haven as I do.”

  “I’ve known her all my life,” Casey said, now smacking her gum, which she thought made her look cool (she was wrong), “and I know.”

  “She’s a wild one,” he said, grinning at me, making it up on the spot. I loved it, every bit. “Maybe sometime she’ll tell you about it.”

  Casey looked at me, still smacking. “You must have the wrong girl, Sumner.”

  “Nope. That’s her,” he said, pointing at me as he turned to walk away. “I know. Take it easy, Haven. Nice to meet you.”

  “You too,” Casey called after him, waggling her fingers. She waited for him to get lost in the crowd and then said, “Why didn’t you tell me about him? He’s so cute.”

  “He’s just Sumner,” I said. “He dated Ashley forever.”

  “Well, he’s fine as hell,” she said, using another expression she’d picked up at camp. “All this time you’re after some guy at the mall and you didn’t even tell me.”

  “It’s not like that,” I said.

  “Why not? You should be after him, big time. He seems to like you already. Can you imagine, you dating a college boy? That would be so cool!”

  “He’s my friend,” I said, amazed that Casey could take Sumner away from me and twist him into something else, something almost dirty. That wasn’t what he was to me.

  “Whatever,” she said, still smacking her gum. “If it was me, I’d be after him.”

  “You don’t understand,” I said quietly, not wanting to talk about it anymore. Me and Sumner—that was ridiculous. He was Ashley’s old boyfriend, for godsakes. And Casey didn’t understand because she couldn’t. She hadn’t seen her whole life change in the last few years, hadn’t had everything taken away. His reappearing was proof that the time I looked back to had actually happened. This summer, Sumner was just what I needed.

  Chapter Ten

  The wedding countdown, suddenly reduced to single digits, continued. With eight days to go to The Big Day, Ashley had her bachelorette party, which allowed her a full week to recover from the night of drinking, giggling, and general secret activity that her friends had been planning since the engagement. I’d overheard my mother saying something to Lydia Catrell about strippers and tequila, but since I was underage I went along for dinner and then was dropped off unceremoniously on my front lawn while the rest of the group sped off to places unknown. I watched television until late and fell asleep on the couch, remote still in my hand, then woke up when I heard scratching at the front door. The doorbell rang, a few times, among an explosion of giggling, the slamming of car doors, and a beeping horn. I opened the front door and found my sister splayed out on the porch, missing a shoe, wearing what appeared to be underwear around her neck, and mumbling.

  “Ashley?” I wasn’t quite sure what to do. “Are you okay?”

  “Mmmhpgh.” She rolled over so that she was flat on her back; her face was red. “Haven.”

  I leaned over her, smelled her breath, and then took a few steps back. Across the street, Duckdog started barking. “Yes?”

  “Help me inside.” She reached up, waving her arm at me crookedly. I grabbed it and pulled her over the threshold, bumping her head on the door. “Ouch,” she whined. “That hurts.”

  “Sorry.” We were inside now, so I dropped her arm and kicked the door shut. I felt sorry for her, lying on the floor with her head by the umbrella stand, so I pulled her a little farther to the base of the stairs and arranged her in a half-upright position. It was underwear around her neck, a pink pair. Not a girl’s, either. She also had a collection of swizzle sticks poking out of her hair, all different colors. She tried to wipe her hand across her face, hit her nose, then left her hand there and whimpered softly.

  It had been a long time since I’d seen Ashley drunk. In her wilder years, back in high school, she was always getting busted coming in past curfew with a mouthful of Certs and her speech slurred. My mother was never taken in. The next morning Ashley would be grounded with a hangover, and my mother would vacuum outside the bedroom door bright and early, making a point of banging the vacuum against the wall in an effort to get those hard-to-reach spots. I’d woken up more than once to the sound of Ashley getting sick in the bathroom at two A.M., which she thought she was so cleverly hiding by running the shower and the exhaust fan. My parents were never fooled, not even for a minute. They locked their liquor cabinet and did a sniff test every night and eventually Ashley grew out of it, just like she did football players and short shorts and Sumner, not necessarily in that order. Lewis wasn’t a drinker, or a druggie, or even bad tempered. Lewis was viceless, and Ashley gave up everything to become bland, just like him. At least, until tonight. Maybe her friends had known that this was her last gasp, her last chance at the wildness she’d once been famous for. Now I looked at my sister, prone at the bottom of the stairs, and thought how I would miss her when she was gone.

  “Ashley.” She still had her hand over her face, her eyes shut now. I reached down and shook her shoulder. “Come on, at least get on the couch.” I crouched beside her, my tiny sister, and put an arm around her shoulders, helping her to her feet. We stumbled together into the living room, where I directed her to the couch and covered her with a blanket, taking off her one shoe and removing the swizzle sticks from her hair one by one. I left the underwear, just out of spite for all the times she’d been nasty to me in the last few months. Some things are deserved, between sisters.

  I went to the kitchen and got a trash can, which I put by her head in case things got nasty later, and just as I was leaving to go upstairs she mumbled something, then said louder, “Hey.”

  “What?” She was just a blob on the couch now, in the dark. On the coffee table, by the swizzle sticks, I could see a pile of my mother’s lists, all on yellow sticky paper, lying in the one slant of light that was coming in through the curtains.

  “Come talk to me,” she said, and I heard the couch creak as she slowly rolled over. “Haven.”

  I sat down on the chair beside the couch, pulling my legs up to my chest. I could remember when I’d fit in it perfectly, sinking into its deep cushions, when my feet didn’t even touch the ground. Now I contorted myself, linking an elbow around a knee, just to fit in its small space. I didn’t say anything.

  “I’m gonna miss you, you know,” she said suddenly, her voice clearer than before. “I know you don’t believe that.”

  “I figured you couldn’t wait to leave,” I said.

  She laughed, a long, lazy laugh. “Oh, yeah, I can’t. I mean, I love Lewis. I love him, Haven. He’s the only one who e
ver really cared about me.”

  This was old news. I nodded, knowing she couldn’t see me in the dark.

  “It’s all gonna be okay, Haven. You know that, right? You know it.” She was rambling now, her voice softer, then louder, falling off into sleep. “Mom and Dad and everything, it’s all gonna be okay. And Lorna. And me and Lewis. We can’t be sad about it forever, you know? We’ve got to think back to the good times, Haven, and just remember them; that’s all we can do. We can’t worry about the past or what happened at the end, anymore. I can’t and you can’t.”

  “I don’t,” I said softly, hoping she’d fall asleep.

  “You do, though,” she said quietly, her voice muffled by the blanket. “I can see it in your face, in your eyes. You gotta grow up, you know? It’s nobody’s fault. We had good times, don’t you understand? Some people don’t even have that.”

  I saw a shadow passing on the street outside, suddenly, and thought of Gwendolyn. Of going wild. I said, “Go to sleep, Ashley. It’s late.”

  “We had good times,” she murmured, more to herself now than to me, if she’d ever been talking to me, really. “Like that summer, at the beach. It was perfect.”

  “What summer?” I sat up now, listening closely. “Which one?”

  “At the beach... you know. With Mom and Daddy, and the hotel, and playing Frisbee every night, all night. Remember, Haven? You have to remember that, and try to forget the rest....” Her voice faded off, muffled.

  “Sumner was there,” I said to her, “remember, Ashley? Sumner was there the whole time and you guys were so great together, remember? He was the greatest.”

  “The greatest,” she repeated in that same sleepy, soft voice. “It was the greatest.”

  “I didn’t think you remembered,” I said to her, leaning closer. “I thought you’d forgotten.”

  I waited, listening for her response, but she was out, her breathing steady and soft. “I thought you’d forgotten,” I said again, quietly, before pulling the blanket tighter around her, smoothing my hand across her hair and sitting for a while in the dark, watching my sister dream.

  The next morning Ashley spent three hours in the bathroom, moaning and flushing the toilet, while my mother and I stood outside the door wondering if we should intervene. Finally, in early afternoon, she emerged after a shower, looking kind of pasty but alive. Lewis showed up a half hour later, with Pepto-Bismol, ginger ale, and oyster crackers. He was quite a guy, that Lewis.

  “I can’t believe they just left me on the porch,” Ashley was saying as I came into the kitchen later that afternoon. She and Lewis were at the table going over wedding details. She had her legs across his lap and he was rubbing her feet. “Some friends.”

  “They must have thought it would be funny,” Lewis said in his soothing, even voice. He was wearing a pastel oxford shirt and madras shorts, a veritable explosion of color next to Ashley in her gray sweatpants and white T-shirt. She was nibbling on an oyster cracker, eating the edges.

  “Well, it wasn’t.” She took another sip of ginger ale. “If it wasn’t for Haven, I would have died, probably.”

  “No, you just would have woken up on the porch,” I said.

  “I’d rather die. Can you imagine what the neighbors would think?” Overnight, my sister had grown old again, worried about consequences. I missed the loopy silliness of her the night before, hanging off my arm with her hair in her face.

  “Well, if you hadn’t gone out drinking, and done what I did . . . ,” Lewis said in a tsk-tsk voice, checking something off the list.

  “Shut up,” Ashley said, rearranging her feet in his lap.

  “What did you do?” I asked, pulling out a chair and sitting down beside them.

  “We went to a dinner, and then a baseball game, ” Lewis said smugly, “where I had two beers, and made it to my own bed without incident.”

  “And without underwear around your neck,” I chimed in, reaching for an oyster cracker.

  Suddenly I knew, without even looking up, that I’d said something wrong. Very wrong. I had the sensation of eyes boring into my neck, hard. As I lifted my head Ashley was staring at me, her mouth twisted in that tight line that meant I was in trouble.

  “Underwear?” Lewis said, turning to face her. “What’s this about underwear? I never heard anything about underwear.”

  “It’s nothing,” Ashley said, shooting me a death look.

  “Underwear is not nothing,” Lewis said, shifting in his chair so that her feet fell out of his lap to the floor. “You said you just went to dinner and had too many margaritas. You didn’t say anything even remotely related to underwear.”

  “Lewis, please,” Ashley said. “We went to this place, right before we came home. We didn’t stay long, it was stupid, but they told the guy I was getting married and then he ...”

  “Oh, God,” Lewis said, throwing down his pencil. “Strippers? You were with strippers last night?”

  “Not strippers, Lewis,” Ashley said in a tired voice. “They’re exotic dancers, and I didn’t even want to go. It was Heather’s idea.”

  “I don’t believe this.” Lewis looked at me, as if I could help, and I looked back at the table. “We promised each other we wouldn’t do any of that traditional stuff, Ashley. You made a vow.”

  “Lewis, don’t do this. It was just a stupid thing.”

  Lewis crossed his legs, a habit that always made my father cringe. “Did you touch him?”

  Ashley sighed. “Not really.”

  There was a silence and I thought about making a quick exit, but as I moved to go I felt Ashley’s foot lock around the bottom of my chair, holding it in place.

  “Not really,” Lewis repeated slowly. “So that would be a yes.”

  “It wasn’t like I touched him,” Ashley said quickly, “but he danced in front of me and I had to put money in his... , thing... because it’s rude if you . . .”

  “His thing?” Lewis shrieked. “You touched his thing?”

  “His underwear,” Ashley said. “God, Lewis, his underwear, for Christ’s sake.”

  “The same underwear that was around your neck, right?” Lewis stood up, pushing his chair out. “I don’t want to hear about this, okay? A week before my wedding and my fiancée is out putting her hands on strange men ... I just can’t think about it right now.”

  “Lewis, don’t be like this,” Ashley said, too tired and hung over to get into a big fight. “Like I said, it’s just a dumb thing.”

  “Well, obviously that vow didn’t mean much to you,” Lewis snapped. “So I wonder if any of the others will.”

  “Oh, please,” Ashley said, rolling her eyes. “I’m too tired to deal with your dramatics, Lewis. Let’s just forget about it.”

  Lewis just looked at her, in his pastels and madras. “I think I need some time away from you, Ashley. I have to go now.” And with that he walked stiffly to the door, opened it, and left with a great flourish of shutting it behind him. Ashley just watched him go, then turned her gaze on me.

  “Thanks a lot, Haven,” she said icily. “Thanks a whole lot.” She stood up and slammed her glass on the table, then went out the same door, calling his name.

  I sat at the table knowing I should feel bad. But I couldn’t do it. I knew I owed Ashley somewhere for something nasty she’d done to me; there had been enough over the years. It was exhilarating in a way, this feeling of wrongdoing, of making things even. I listened to them arguing outside and thought of Ashley the night before, telling me to remember when things were good. I sat back, listening, and concentrated on this moment, my last act of revenge against my sister, and savored it.

  It was later that night that I got the call from Casey. I didn’t even recognize her voice at first, a voice I’d heard all my life. She sounded like she was choking, or had a cold.

  “I need to talk to you,” she said as soon as I picked up the phone where Ashley had left it dangling on the floor with a glare at me. She was still mad, even though Lewis had forgiven
her before he even made it down the driveway. “It’s important.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Should I come over?”

  “No,” she said quickly, and in the background I could hear baby Ronald hollering. “Meet me halfway. Right now, okay?”

  “Sure.” I hung up, found my shoes, then walked to the living room, where my mother, Lydia, and Ashley were watching “Murder, She Wrote” and making lists. “I’m going for a walk with Casey.”

  “Fine.” My mother hardly looked up, her mind on the band and the ushers and the flower arrangements. “Be back by ten.”

  As I stepped into the thick summer air I heard only cicadas, screaming from the trees around our house. It was warm and sticky and I left my shoes on the porch, walking barefoot down the sidewalk, past houses with their lights burning, the sound of televisions drifting from open windows. I could see Casey coming from the other direction, walking quickly and brushing her hair out of her face. We met halfway, by the mailbox in front of the Johnsons’.

  “It’s horrible,” she said to me, breathless. She was sniffling—no, crying—and she kept walking, with me falling into step behind her. “I just can’t believe it.”

  “What?” I’d never seen her like this.

  “He broke up with me,” she said, sobbing. “That bastard, he broke up with me over the phone. Just a few minutes ago.”

  “Rick?” I pictured him from all those packs of glossy three-by-fives, always grinning into the camera, a stranger from Pennsylvania.

  “Yes,” she said, wiping her nose with the back of her hand. “I have to sit down.” She plopped herself on the curb and pulled her knees to her chest, burying her face in her hands.

  “Casey.” I reached to put my arm around her, unsure of how to act or what to say. This was the first time it had happened to us. “I’m so sorry.”

  “I’d been calling so much, but he was never home, right? And I was leaving all these messages....” She stopped and wiped her eyes. “And his mother kept saying he was out, or busy, and finally he called me back today and said she made him call me. Haven, he’d been telling her all along to say he wasn’t home. He just didn’t want to talk to me.”