That Summer

“I dumped him?” she said. “Is that what he told you?”

“No,” I said. “But I saw you do it. That Halloween when he was the mad scientist, remember? I saw you from the window.”

“Haven,” she said slowly, shaking her head. “I didn’t dump Sumner. I mean, I did, but only because he cheated on me. With that girl Laurel Adams; remember her? I walked in on them that night at the party. That’s why I broke up with him.” She watched me as she said this, her voice even and sad. “All this time you didn’t know, did you? God, Haven. He broke my heart.”

I stood there and faced my sister, thinking back to that Halloween when I watched them driving down the street, Sumner in the front seat with Ashley beside him, and Laurel Adams in back with her hair shimmering silver under the streetlight. “That’s not true,” I said, thinking of Sumner as he held me on the dance floor earlier that afternoon. “It isn’t.”

“It is true. I loved Sumner and he hurt me badly.” She reached up to brush my hair out of my face, an awkward gesture, a try at tenderness. “It’s not always so simple, Haven. Sometimes there isn’t a good guy and a bad guy. Sometimes even the ones you want to believe turn out to be liars.”

“But he was so sad, and he kept coming around,” I said, still not wanting to believe it was possible. “He begged for you to come back.”

“That didn’t change what he did.” She shook her head, smiling sadly at me. “Haven, I know you don’t like Lewis, but you have to understand how important it is to me to be able to trust someone I love. After Sumner and after Daddy, I was beginning to lose faith in everything. Lewis might not be Sumner, but he would never hurt me. Never. Sometimes things don’t turn out the way you want them to, Haven. Sometimes the people you choose to believe are wrong.”

“He loved you,” I told her. “He still does, I think.”

“He doesn’t love me,” she said, crossing her arms against her chest. “He might still love me as I was at fifteen, when I didn’t know any better. When I trusted everyone. I’m not that person anymore.” She started walking, holding aside the branches so I could get through. “He’s just a boy, Haven. He was the first to really hurt me, but he’s just a boy. There were a lot of them.”

“Not like him,” I said softly, although I knew that after today I’d never see him, or that summer at the beach, the same way.

“Maybe not,” she said as we came to the car. “But maybe that isn’t so bad. You can’t love anyone that way more than once in a lifetime. It’s too hard and it hurts too much when it ends. The first boy is always the hardest to get over, Haven. It’s just the way the world works.”

She held my door open for me as I climbed in, wet and sticky and tired after a day that was now a blur in my head, stretching back into forever. I watched her come around the front of the car and climb into the driver’s seat and shut the door behind her. We didn’t talk, me and my sister on the day before her wedding. She drove through the rain down those familiar streets, the houses all shiny and bright, and I thought about Sumner and that first summer, when everything was different. He’d affected both of us in separate but similar ways. He was the first to break her heart, and the first boy to let me down, to take something from me that I’d clung to so closely. A myth. Maybe Ashley was right, for once.

I thought about telling her this in the quiet of the car with only the rain drumming overhead. I looked over at her and thought better of it. Some things you don’t have to tell. Some things, between sisters, are understood.

Chapter Thirteen

“It’s time.” My mother was standing in my doorway, in a new pink dress with a corsage pinned below her right shoulder, a group of pink zinnias ringed with blue phlox. The entire house smelled like flowers that morning, from the bouquets that were lined up on the kitchen table, each constructed by her own hands.

I turned away from the mirror and she sighed, clasping her hands in front of her. “You look beautiful,” she whispered, having broken into sobs so many times that morning that she had Kleenex poking out of her pocket, ready. “The dress is perfect. It looks just right.”

Lydia Catrell popped into the doorway and promptly burst into tears. “You are a vision,” she said, sniffling, as my mother offered her a damp Kleenex, which she waved away. “Isn’t she something?”

“She is,” my mother said softly, coming forward to hug me, her corsage pressing against my chest. She took my hand and we started down the stairs, with Lydia chattering ahead of us.

“I just know I’m going to bawl,” she said loudly, the waterworks having passed. “I always cry at weddings, don’t you?”

“I do,” my mother said, squeezing my hand. “But Haven will be the strong one. Lucky for her she didn’t inherit her mother’s emotional tendency.”

“Oh, there’s nothing like a wedding for a good cry,” Lydia said, clomping down the steps in her huge white slingbacks. “Everyone needs a good cry now and then.”

My mother was still holding my hand as we walked through the hallway and out the door to the car. When I’d come home with Ashley she’d only hugged me so tight it hurt before letting me go upstairs for a shower and a long nap, skipping the rehearsal dinner altogether. When I woke up I found her and Ashley at the kitchen table, drinking wine and laughing, their voices drifting up like music. I sat in my nightgown and drank ginger ale with them, and we talked about the old times: when Ashley was ten and almost burnt the house down with her Easy-Bake oven, and when I was six and decided to run away, packing my red patent-leather suitcase with nothing but washcloths and underwear. My mother was laughing, her face flushed pink like it always was when she drank, telling the stories that for so long had remained in the no-man’s land of the divorce, uncomfortable for what they no longer represented. Now we laughed about my father’s hair and about Ashley’s boyfriends, the timeline of boys, each with a quirk we remembered better than his name. And we laughed while it rained and the air smelled sweet blowing in the back door, like the flowers that bloomed just outside. The kitchen was warm and bright and I knew I would remember this night, in the same misty way I’d remembered all the good things, as a time when things were as perfect as they could be. Another summer to reach back to, that week in Virginia Beach now tucked away with the other, older memories. Later, when Ashley was gone and my mother and I tried to fill this house ourselves, I’d look back to that night and remember every detail, from Ashley’s ring glittering as she sipped her wine to my mother’s bare feet beside me on the chair, flecked with grass clippings. It would be a good place to start over.