That Summer

He smiled. “I don’t think that’s such a great idea. There’s no telling what might happen when she saw me.”

My manager was watching me, folding sock over sock. “You could at least say hello. I mean, it wasn’t like you ever did anything to her.”

Sumner looked up. He stared at me as if my face was changing before him, and then said slowly, “Well, no. I guess not. Look, I better go, Haven. I’ve got to get back to work.”

“Me too.” I pulled out my name tag and put it on, fastening the clip. “Think about it, Sumner. It’s not like she ever hated you.” I didn’t know why this was so important to me; maybe I thought he could bring back the Ashley I liked so much, the one who liked me. Maybe Sumner’s magic could work on both of us again.

He started to back away, hands in his pockets. He looked smaller to me now, lost in the green of his uniform. “Yeah. I’ll see you later.”

I stood there and watched him walk away, still stalling for time while the second hand of the store clock jumped closer and closer to two o’clock. The mall was noisy and busy now, with people and voices and colors all jumbled together, another Saturday of shopping and families and bright red plastic Lakewood Mall bags. Still I kept my eye on Sumner as he waded through the throngs past the potted plants and swaying banners overhead. He’d been where I was, once; he understood. I watched him go until he was lost to me, another green in a sea of multicolors, shifting.

Chapter Eight

In the time that she’d been home, Casey had managed not only to be grounded for smoking, but also to get caught making hour-long interstate calls to Pennsylvania, drinking a beer behind the garden shed during a family barbecue, and disappearing for an entire day. Mrs. Melvin was exhausted and sick of Casey’s face, so she granted her a leave of two hours to come to see me, provided she called in every half hour and got home by six. She arrived two seconds after inviting herself over, breathless.

“My mom wants to kill me,” she said as we set out for a walk around the neighborhood and a chance to talk in private. “I heard her and my dad discussing my situation last night, on the back porch.”

“And she said she wanted to kill you?”

“No, she said she was beginning to think the only solution was to lock me in my room.” She pushed a mass of orange curls out of her face. “But then she lets me out today. I think she’s up to something.”

“You’re paranoid,” I told her.

“Last night when I called Rick he said he was getting it from his parents, too. He can’t call for a while.” She sighed, crossing her arms against her shirt, a long white polo ten sizes too big. I wondered if Rick had any clothes of his own left. I imagined him leaving 4-H camp naked, with Casey packing up everything he owned as a souvenir.

“It’s only till Thanksgiving,” I said, trying to be helpful. It hadn’t happened to me yet, this swirling mass of emotions that made all the women around me behave so erratically.

“Thanksgiving is forever away,” she whined as we took the corner and headed down the street parallel to our own. “I’m going nuts here and it’s been less than a week. I’ve got to find some way to get up there.”

“Get up where?”

She rolled her eyes. “Pennsylvania. God, Haven, aren’t you paying attention?”

“Not when you start talking like a crazy person. You don’t even drive yet.”

“I will, in two and a half weeks.” With the wedding so close, I’d forgotten her birthday was coming up. “Dad’s been taking me out every night to drive around and I know they’re going to give me my grandmother’s Delta 88. They think it’s a secret and I don’t know why it’s in the garage, but I know.”

“Even if you are about to get your license,” I said as a mass of kids on bikes passed us, all of them in helmets and knee pads, little punks terrorizing the neighborhood, “they’d never let you take off to Pennsylvania.”

“Of course they wouldn’t let me.” She said this matter-of-factly, as if I was slow and just not getting it. Since Casey had gone wild at 4-H camp, it seemed like we had less and less in common. “But that doesn’t mean I can’t go. I just slip out, see, in the middle of the night, and call them the next morning when I’m in, like, Maryland. By then they’re just so crazed with worry they’re just happy I’m alive, so they let me go on. Then I come back and get punished forever but it’s worth it because I get to be with Rick.”

I looked at her. “That will never work.”

She stuck out her bottom lip, something she’d gotten good at in the last week, and said, “Yes it will.”

“Oh, like Rick’s parents wouldn’t send you home the second you showed up. They’re not going to let you just hang out while your parents are sitting around here waiting for you to get home so they can kill you.”

She was staring at the sidewalk as I said this, making a point of not looking at me. After a minute she said in a tight voice, “You don’t understand, Haven. You couldn’t. You’ve never been in love.”

“Oh please,” I said, suddenly fed up. I was sick of hearing about Rick and Pennsylvania and camp stories. I couldn’t talk to anyone anymore. Sumner seemed like the only one who listened at all, the only one who asked for nothing and took nothing from me.

“You know what your problem is,” Casey began, her hand poised to shake at me, but then she stopped dead, sucking in her breath. She grabbed my shirt, tugging, and pointed across one of the yards.