That Summer(27)

This tone, this jumble of important-sounding words, seemed too much like the kitchen-table talk we’d gotten the morning my father moved out. They’d come to us together, while I was eating my cereal, a united front announcing a split. That had been a long time ago, before my mother bought all her matching shorts-and-sandals sets and my father sprung new hair, a new wife, and a new beginning. But the feeling in my stomach was the same.

“Are you going to Europe?” I asked her.

“I don’t know yet,” she said. “I really want to go, but I’m worried about leaving you alone so soon after your sister moves out. And of course the fall, with you in school ... the timing just isn’t so good.”

“I’d be okay,” I said, watching a baby at the table next to us drooling juice all over himself. “If you want to go, you should go.” I felt bad for not meaning this, even as I said it.

“Well, as I said, I haven’t decided.” She folded her napkin, over once and then again: a perfect square. “But there is something else I need to discuss with you.”

“What?”

She sighed, placed the napkin in the dead even center of her plate, and said quickly, “I’m thinking about selling the house.”

The moment she said it a picture of our house jumped into my head like a slide jerking up onto a screen during a school presentation. I saw my room and my mother’s garden and the walk to the front door with day lilies blooming on either side. In my mind it was always summer, with the grass short and thick and the garden in full color, flowers waving in the breeze.

“Why?”

The hard part, the spitting out part, was done and now she relaxed. “Well, it’s only going to be the two of us, and it would be cheaper if we moved somewhere smaller. We could find a nice apartment, probably, and save money. The house is really too big for just two people. We can’t possibly fill it. Selling just seems like the logical choice.”

“I don’t want to move,” I said a bit too loudly, and I was surprised at the sharp tone in my voice. “I can’t believe you want to sell it.”

“It’s not a question of wanting to, necessarily. You don’t know how expensive it is to keep it up, month after month. I’m only thinking of the best plan.”

“I don’t like the best plan.” I didn’t like any of it, suddenly, the changes and reorganizations and alterations to my life that were all in the control of other people and outside forces. I looked at my mother in her nice pink outfit and lipstick and Lydia-inspired frosted-and-cut hair and wanted to blame her for everything: the divorce and stupid Lewis and Ashley’s wedding and even the height that set me to stooping and scrunching myself ever smaller, fighting nature’s making my body betray me. But as I looked at her, at the concern in her face, I said none of this. I would push it back again, dig my heels into where I stood while the world shifted around me, what I’d considered givens suddenly lost to someone else’s mistakes, miscalculations, or whims. A marriage, a sister, a house, each an elemental part of me, now gone.

“Haven, none of this is decided yet,” my mother said, reaching across the table awkwardly to brush back my hair, her fingers smoothing my cheek. “Let’s not get upset, okay? Maybe we can work something out.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, thinking of the tether again, pulling me back even as I strained to get away, to speak my mind. “I didn’t mean to snap at you.”

She smiled. “It’s okay. I think we should all be allowed to yell at each other, at least once, before the wedding. It would probably do us all a lot of good.”

Later, after we’d made small talk so that she could feel we’d ended on a good note, I sat alone at the table and stared out into the mall, putting off going to work. The Lakeview Models would make their first appearance the next weekend, kicking off the official start of mall season, each weekend an event or sales spectacular. It was a whole world, the mall, enclosed and safe, parameters neatly marked. Only Sumner seemed out of bounds, cruising in his golf cart wherever he pleased, keeping the peace and dodging the crowds. As I left I could see him over by the giant gumball machine, uniform on, looking official. He saw me and came over, leaving his cart safely parked by a row of ferns.

“You look upset,” he observed, dropping into step beside me. His uniform cuffs rolled over his feet and hid his shoes.

“Well, it’s been a long day,” I said.

“What happened?” He waved at the owner of Shirts Etc., a round woman with jet black hair that had to be a wig. Her bangs were too neat, clipped straight across her forehead.

“I just had lunch with my mother.”

“And how is she?”

“Fine. She’s going to Europe.” I was walking as slowly as I could, with the Little Feet sign looming up ahead. The words were spelled out in shoes, just like on the boxes and the name tag in my pocket, which I would wait until the last possible second to put on.

“I love Europe,” Sumner said, adjusting his glasses. “I went my sophomore year and had a grand time. Lots of pretty girls, if you don’t mind underarm hair.”

“Did you?”

“Did I what?”

“Mind underarm hair?”

He thought for a minute. “No. Not especially. But it depended on my mood and the extent of the hair itself. They have great chocolate in Europe, too. You should ask your mom to bring you some.”