The Summer We Fell (The Summer, #1)(31)

“How. Long?”

Goose bumps crawl along my arms.

“She did it for both of the summers you were with us,” Donna replies. “Two full summers.”

He winces. “So even when I was being awful to you. Even then you were paying for me to be here.”

He wants an answer beyond a simple “yes” or “no. ” Because, really, he’s asking a different question entirely: How could you care about me that much, and then do what you did?

He can spend his entire life waiting for the answer. I’m never telling him a thing.

He stands outside my door that night for a very long time.





14

THEN

DECEMBER 2013

D anny arrives home for winter break on my last day of second quarter.

We only go to one Westside party and nothing at the beach at all, which I’m fine with. There are also no dates, but I guess there never were, aside from when Danny and I first met. The shit I’ve seen on TV is laughable anyway. How many high school students are actually enjoying candlelit meals in fancy restaurants or riding in limos like they do on Gossip Girl? None that I know.

With Luke gone, though, everything is better. I’m not the third wheel. I don’t feel fake and conspicuous when I help Donna around the house, and I’m capable of at least trying to see the world the way she does, finding comfort in the small joys: a crisp winter night, a roaring fire, the smell of the Christmas tree. The Allens are content people by nature, and I am not, but if I could even manage to get halfway to where they are, that would be enough. Life is easier when you’re not wanting more than you have every minute of the day.

The diner closes early on Christmas Eve, so I spend the afternoon helping Donna with supper. We eat in the dining room rather than the kitchen, which Donna and I have set with candles and holly.

Christmas music plays softly and the whole house smells like pine.

This is a good life. There’s a spark of something in my heart, a taste of that contentment Donna and Danny find so easily. I silently pray as we start eating, that I can help build that spark into a fire.

That I can convince myself it’s all enough.

The pastor talks about the work he’d like Danny to do next summer, his role expanded now from what it was. I didn’t think of pastoring as a profession you passed down to your son, but the pastor sure seems to be doing his best. Danny would be good at it, too, certainly better than the pastor, but I’m not sure I could ever be Donna—I’d school those bitches who come into the diner so fast if I had half her authority.

“So will Luke be coming home with you next summer?” Donna asks.

I stop chewing, waiting to hear his answer.

“I don’t know,” Danny replies. “The construction firm he was with last summer offered him a bonus to come back, but now he’s talking about staying in San Diego.”



Donna’s brow furrows. “Well, that makes no sense at all. Did he meet a girl?”

Danny laughs. “There isn’t a day that goes by when Luke isn’t meeting a girl. I don’t think that’s it.”

Suddenly, nothing about tonight brings me contentment. The pie crust sticks to my tongue, the air smells sickly sweet, the music is overly sentimental.

It’s last summer all over again. I’m trying so hard to be like the Allens, but somehow, Luke manages to ruin everything for me, even when he’s not fucking here.

OVER DINNER on Danny’s last night home, the pastor revisits his thoughts on indulgence. He suggests we all look at 2014 as the year of restraint, the year we don’t give into our whims. I wonder if Danny told him what happened at the sorority house.

And it seems like an easy thing for the pastor to say. He’s an older guy in moderately poor health.

He doesn’t drink or smoke and I’m not sure other vices call to him. I’d like to see what he’d do, though, if Donna followed him to the letter and didn’t offer dessert every night.

“I like what my father said tonight,” Danny says later as we walk through the neighborhood, hand in hand, enjoying our last moments alone before he leaves. I brace myself for another of his mini lectures on how we need to behave—there’ve been several since he got home—and I feel that wedge between us as if it’s palpable.

Is Danny at fault for it because he’s insisting on doing things his way? Am I at fault because I’ve kept so much to myself? Even Luke knows things about me that Danny does not.

“I need to tell you something,” I whisper.

He squeezes my hand, encouraging me to continue.

“Last summer, I told you I had to read for school but I would sometimes…play guitar instead.”

He frowns. “Why’d you lie?”

“Because I thought if I told you the truth, you’d try to convince me to come out with you guys. It felt like every minute of my day was taken.”

His mouth presses tight, his jaw locks. My reasons don’t justify the lie, I guess. Or maybe he just doesn’t like the implied criticism—that my days were too full, that he tends to push me to do things I don’t want to do.

His nod is slow and reluctant. “I appreciate you telling me. But from now on, I just want the truth, okay?”

My breath holds. I hadn’t planned to tell him everything, but maybe this is the issue—that I’m worried he won’t like who I am if he knows it all.