The Summer We Fell (The Summer, #1)(52)

hearing, in one way or another, that it would be better if I hadn’t appeared at all.

Today, at last, I agree. I’m never going anywhere.

DONNA FLIES DOWN to San Diego, spending money they don’t have to do it. Between what insurance won’t cover for Danny’s surgery and the cost of the trip, they’re stretched thin.

I remain behind to look after the pastor. I can’t work much until Donna gets back, and I don’t have a driver’s license, which means I’m biking to the grocery store every day and balancing the bags on my handlebars to get them home. I clean and make dinner, and the pastor sees our meals together as a glorious opportunity to remind me about the importance of charity and gratitude, giving back and service.

I’m not angry about it, though. I feel nothing when he talks. I feel nothing when anyone talks. As if I’m encased in ice.

Danny’s miserable, though the surgery went just fine. “I just don’t understand why it happened,”

he says mournfully.

“What do you mean?” The why seems pretty fucking clear to me: he took a bad hit from the side; his knees were weak. It’s hardly uncommon in football.

“I’ve done everything I was supposed to.” His voice grows quiet. “You know, I watch my friends doing whatever they want for years, and I just thought my time would come. I thought I’d get rewarded for all of it. Like, maybe I’d finally get on the field this season and I’d play really well, and everything would change.”

It seems impossibly na?ve and yet…I get it. Half the movies ever made are about someone doing the right thing or trying harder than everyone else and winning in the end. In real life, though, you do the right thing and absolutely no one notices.

“Your father would say goodness is its own reward.” My voice lacks conviction.

“I guess.”

In his begrudging reply, I hear what he hasn’t said: that it’s not enough of a reward. That there are better rewards out there, and they’re going to the people who haven’t tried as hard as he has. “You could be more sympathetic, you know,” he adds.

“Danny, I didn’t mean to be—”

“I’ve got to go. My mom just made dinner. Oh, and she wants you to call and update her on my dad.”

We hang up and I stare at the blank walls of my room. I’m so empty now that I don’t even know what I thought I might put on that imagined wall in LA, what I cared enough about.

I wonder what it would be like to have one person in the world as concerned about me as the Allens are with each other and themselves. What it would be like to have one person say, “Juliet, you





don’t seem happy. Are you tired? Is there something else you want from your life?”

Except there is someone who cares that much. One person who put me above everyone else. He just couldn’t show it to the world.

Maybe I’m not empty after all. It’s just that the things I’d put on my walls and the things I’d like to sing about are ones I can’t show the world either.

DANNY IS YOUNG AND HEALTHY. He’s up and about within a week, so Donna returns, but life doesn’t improve much.

My internship has begun and has turned out to be its own special kind of hell. The music teacher, Miss Johnson, is the type who’d make you hate anything she taught. My contribution involves making copies, straightening the room, and walking the bad kids to the principal, but she still acts like it’s a burden to have me around. I just…let it happen.

The little I had to offer the world has been poured out onto the ground and gone to waste.

At home, the pastor isn’t improving. He wheezes anytime he walks up the stairs. And increasingly, he just sits in his favorite chair and has Donna and I get what he needs. Grady is over frequently, lurking like the shadow of death over the house, salivating at the possibility that he might be able to replace the pastor once his mentorship is over.

“Do a bit of missionary work,” the pastor advises him one night when Grady’s been too obvious about his intentions. “I could even handle the sermon on Sunday if you’d like,” he’d said.

“Let yourself season for a while. When Mrs. Allen and I go back to Nicaragua in five years, you can take my place. Marry Libby too. No one wants an unmarried pastor.”

Donna pats his hand. “Leave him alone, hon. Libby’s the same year as Danny. But I suspect there will be any number of weddings two summers from now when everyone graduates.”

She smiles at me then, and I go rigid, my hands gripping the kitchen counter. Yes, I knew this is where it was headed. It just always seemed very distant.

And two summers from now doesn’t sound distant enough.

IN LATE OCTOBER, Danny is cleared to begin training with the team again, but things don’t improve the way he’d hoped.

“That new freshman they brought in from Texas is starting,” he tells me. “Two years I’ve been there and I never started once. And the guy got arrested over the summer for some drug shit, and it wasn’t the first time. How is that fair?”

“It isn’t.” Life isn’t fair. He lived among families with dirt floors and little food for most of his

childhood. I’m not sure how he’s only figuring this out now.

He’s permitted to travel with the team when they play Fresno State, three hours away. The pastor and Donna decide not to go, in theory because of the drive, though I suspect it’s simply that the pastor won’t be able to climb up into the stands.