Second Chance Summer (26 page)

“Hi,” I whispered, and my dad turned his head and smiled when he saw me, pulling his glasses off.

“Hi, kid,” he said quietly. “Can’t sleep?”

I shook my head and crossed to sit on the couch across from his, leaning forward to try to see his book. “What are you reading?” I asked.

“T.S. Eliot,” he said, holding it up for me. The cover showed a black-and-white photo of a mournful-looking man. “Ever read it?” I shook my head. He settled the book on his chest again. “
The Love
Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
,” he said. “I remember it was my favorite in college.” He settled his glasses on the bridge of his nose again and squinted at the text. “I can no longer remember why, exactly, it was my favorite in college.”

I smiled at that and curled up on the couch, resting my head on the decorative pillow that was scratchy against my cheek. It was so peaceful out here—the intermittent crackle of the dying fire, the dog’s breathing, interrupted by an occasional snort, the presence of my dad—that I had absolutely no desire to go back to my own room.

“Want to hear some of it?” my dad asked as he looked over the book at me. I nodded, trying to remember how many years it had been since someone had read to me. I’d always wanted my father to do it when I was little, even though most nights he wasn’t home until long past my bedtime. But when he was there, he was the only one I wanted to hear stories from—he added in details my mother didn’t, like the fact that Hansel and Gretel were guilty of trespassing and willful destruction of property, and that the Three Little Pigs could have pursued a harassment charge against the Big Bad Wolf. “Okay, here we go.” He cleared his throat and started to read in a voice that seemed somehow weaker than the big, booming baritone I’d always associated with him. I told myself it was just because he was trying to be quiet, and not wake the whole house. And I closed my eyes and let the words wash over me—about women talking of Michelangelo, and yellow fog, but mostly, a refrain about how there
will be time, time for you and time for me. And these last words were echoing in my head as my eyes got heavier, and the last thing I remembered before falling asleep was my dad placing a blanket over me and turning out the light.

“I’m not sure what he got this time,” Warren said now as he looked back toward the driveway and the UPS truck. “Personally, I wouldn’t mind more steaks.”

“I hope it’s something as good as those chocolates,” I said, hearing my voice go up a little higher than normal, into the range of forced cheerfulness. “They were amazing.”

“They really were,” Warren said, and I noticed he had the same bright, high tone to his voice. He met my eye briefly before looking back at the water. We weren’t talking about the reason why our dad had suddenly turned slightly manic—or about the fact that he wasn’t eating many of the gourmet treats he was having flown to the Poconos from all over the world, and had started to get noticeably thinner.

I flipped a through a couple more pages of the magazine, but it no longer seemed particularly interesting, and I tossed it aside after a few minutes—but carefully, since it was one I’d borrowed from Lucy. Things had been better with us since our impromptu sleepover. We weren’t good friends again by any stretch of the imagination, but the atmosphere at work had gotten a lot more cordial. Elliot, upon hearing about Lucy’s breakup, had started dropping a lot more things when we were all working together, confirming
what I’d begun to suspect—that he had a crush on her. But as far as I could tell, he hadn’t done anything about this except exponentially increase the amount of cologne he wore to work. I was worried that if he kept it up, customers might start to complain.

“So what’s going on with the Crosbys?” Warren asked, making me jump.

“What do you mean?” I asked, wondering why this simple question was making me so nervous. I hadn’t seen Henry since I so thoroughly embarrassed myself at Movies Under the Stars, but I’d been thinking about him—Henry now, and the Henry I’d known before—much more than I ever would have admitted.

“I mean that tent by their house,” Warren said, looking through the gap in the trees, where you could see a flash of Day-Glo orange vinyl. “It looks like they’re harboring vagrants.”

I shook my head and lay back down. “I seriously don’t think they are.”

“Well, I know that’s what you think, but statistically…” I let Warren drone on about the legal definition of squatting, which somehow turned into him telling me that “hobo” actually stood for “homeward bound,” and I was just beginning to be able to tune him out when I heard a familiar-sounding voice right above me.

“Hey there.” I opened my eyes and saw Henry standing on the dock, wearing a faded Borrowed Thyme T-shirt and surfer-style swim trunks, carrying a towel.

“Hi,” I stammered, sitting up and trying to fluff up my hair, which I had a feeling had gone limp with the heat.

Warren pushed himself up to standing and tilted his head to the side, then asked, “Henry?”

Henry nodded. “Hey, Warren,” he said. “It’s been a while.”

“I’ll say,” Warren said. “It’s nice to see you again.” He crossed to the end of the dock and held out his hand. After a tiny pause, Henry shifted his towel to the other arm and they shook. “I heard that you guys were next door to us now. How’ve you been?”

“Pretty good,” Henry said. He glanced over at me and met my eye for only a second, but it was enough to set my pulse racing. “How about you?”

“Oh, fine,” Warren said. “Good, really. Heading to Penn in the fall, spending the summer doing some reading.” Henry nodded politely, not seeming to realize that Warren was just getting started. “Like, right now I’ve been reading up on the history of veterinary sciences. And it’s really fascinating stuff. For instance, did you know that—”

“Warren,” I interrupted. He looked over at me and I smiled at him, all the while trying to convey with my thoughts that he should really stop talking, or better yet, leave.

“Yes?” he asked, apparently not understanding any of these mental messages.

“Didn’t you, um, have to help Dad? Inside?” Warren just frowned at me for a moment, causing me to question, not for the
first time that summer, if my brother really was as brilliant as everyone seemed to think.

“Oh,” he said, after a too-long pause. “Right. Sure.” He waggled his eyebrows at me in what was a very un-Warren, but incredibly annoying, way before he turned to go. He’d only taken about two steps when he pivoted back around to face Henry. “Actually, about that tent on your lawn—” he started.

“Warren,”
I said through clenched teeth.

“Right,” he said quickly. He gave Henry a quick wave, then turned and headed up the grassy slope toward the house.

“Sorry to bother you,” Henry said as he walked up to where I was sitting on the dock, dropping his towel next to mine. “I didn’t realize you guys were out here.”

“Oh, no,” I said, and could hear how high my voice sounded. It was as if I’d suddenly become part Muppet. I was suddenly very aware that, in my bikini, I wasn’t really wearing all that much. “It’s fine. Totally, totally… fine.”

Henry spread out his towel and sat on it, stretching his long legs out in front of him. I was conscious that there was not a lot of space between us, and couldn’t help thinking back to that moment in the woods, his hands on my back, the only thing separating his skin from mine the thin fabric of my T-shirt.

“Your brother doesn’t like the tent?” he asked, bringing me back to the present moment.

“It’s not that,” I said. “He just… wondered what was going on with it. He was worried that you were taking in hobos or something.”

Henry smiled at that, a smile that crinkled the corners of his green eyes and made me smile back, almost like a reflex. “Not hobos,” he said. “But close. Davy’s living in it.”

“Oh,” I said, then paused, waiting for more of an explanation. When Henry just leaned back on his elbows, and looked out at the water, I asked, “And why is Davy living in it?”

“He’s been on this whole wilderness kick for a few years now. He’d sleep in the woods if my dad would let him. This was their compromise. And he’s only allowed to sleep in it in the summers.”

Thinking of the occasional weekends we once used to spend up here in the winters, and how frigid cold they could be, I nodded. “Did he get it from you?”

“Get what from me?” Henry turned to face me, eyebrows raised.

“The whole in-the-woods thing,” I said. Henry continued to look at me, and the directness of his gaze was enough to make me look away and concentrate on smoothing out the wrinkles in my towel. “You were always trying to get me to come with you and look at different bugs. You used to love that stuff.”

He smiled at that. “I guess I still do. I just like that there’s a system in the woods, an order to things, if you know how to see it. I always find myself in the woods when I need to think something out.”

Silence fell between us, and I realized that this was the first time, since our initial meeting on this dock, that it had been just the two of us—no little brothers or customers or blond girlfriends. But it wasn’t an uncomfortable silence—it was companionable, like the silences we used to have when we’d spend rainy days in the tree-house, or hours lying out on the raft. I looked over at him and saw that he was already looking at me, which surprised me, but I didn’t let myself look away. I took a breath to say something—I had no idea what; in my head I hadn’t gotten any further than his name—when he stood abruptly.

“I think I’m going to go for a swim,” he said.

“Oh,” I said. “Okay, have—” But I lost whatever I was going to say next, because that’s when Henry took off his shirt. Dear God. I swallowed hard and looked away but then, remembering my sunglasses perched on top of my head, I lowered them as casually as possible so that I could look at him and not have it be totally obvious that I was staring. And I don’t know if Henry had been lifting sacks of sugar or flour at the bakery, but his shoulders were broad, and his arms were muscular, and his stomach muscles were defined….

It suddenly seemed much warmer on the dock than it had just a moment before, and when Henry nodded at me before diving into the water, I tried to wave back casually. I watched him swimming—the stroke I recognized, the one we’d both been taught by our long-ago swim team instructors—until I couldn’t see
him any longer, then pulled on my shorts and T-shirt, picked up my towel, and headed inside.

As I came close to the house, I became very aware of two things—opera and popcorn. A soprano was wailing, hitting her high note as I crossed in from the screened-in porch to the kitchen, where I discovered the source of the popcorn smell.

There was what looked like a movie theater’s worth of popcorn on the dining room table—popcorn in tins, popcorn in bags, balls of popcorn wrapped with cellophane. Warren was standing nearby in the kitchen tossing a popcorn ball up in the air, while my father sat by the table, the dog sleeping in the crook of his arm, humming along to the music, reading along with the liner notes.

“Hi,” I said as I dropped my sunglasses and magazine on the kitchen counter. I looked around at all of it, and since the house hadn’t been a popcorn factory when I’d gone out to the dock, I figured this must have been what arrived in the UPS truck.

“Taylor, listen,” my dad said, holding up a finger. Warren caught the popcorn ball, and we all listened to the woman sing something in Italian. He smiled at me when she’d finished her aria, and I noticed for the first time how white his teeth looked against his skin, which was getting a more yellowish cast. “Isn’t that lovely?”

“Very nice,” I said, as I headed over to the table and helped myself to a handful of what looked like kettle corn from an open bag.

“It’s
The Barber of Seville
,” my dad said. “Your mother and I saw a production of this when we were first married. And I always told myself I’d go see it again, someday.” He looked down at the liner notes, turning the pages slowly, and I took a bite of my kettle corn, which pretty much put all the other kettle corn I’d ever had to shame.

“This is incredible,” I said, and my dad gestured for me to give him some. Though he took a handful, I noticed he ate only a few kernels and winced slightly when he swallowed. But he smiled at me nevertheless.

“Supposed to be the best popcorn in the country,” he said. “I thought we should try it out, especially if we’re finally going to watch
The Thin Man
tonight.” I exchanged a glance with Warren, who tossed the popcorn ball up in the air again. Though none of us had ever seen it, my dad had been talking about
The Thin Man
for years. He claimed it was the perfect bad-day antidote, and was always offering—or threatening, depending on how you looked at it—to play it for us when we were in bad moods. “You kids will love it,” he continued. “And I think Murphy will get a kick out of Asta.” He jostled the dog, who opened his eyes and yawned, resting his head against my dad’s arm.

At least, that had been the plan. But then Gelsey came home, thrilled with the news that Nora had been given permission to sleep over. And it seemed my mom had volunteered Warren and myself as babysitters, because she’d made reservations to go out to dinner with
my dad at what had been their favorite restaurant in Mountainview. Since the opera was blaring again downstairs, Gelsey was bouncing-off-the-walls excited about her sleepover, and Warren was back to the subject of How Interesting Vets Are, I retreated to the front porch with my magazine and a Diet Coke. The shadows of the trees were just starting to stretch across the gravel when my mom stepped out onto the porch, calling, “Taylor?”

“Yeah?” I turned around and saw that mother was dressed up in a way I hadn’t seen her in a while—white summer dress, her hair up in a chignon, her eyes done. I could smell her light, floral perfume, the kind she only ever wore when going out, the one that conjured all the nights I’d spent when I was younger, sitting on the bathroom counter and watching her get ready to go out with my dad, convinced that she was the most beautiful woman in the world. “You look great,” I said, and meant it.