That Summer(39)

“Rick?” I pictured him from all those packs of glossy three-by-fives, always grinning into the camera, a stranger from Pennsylvania.

“Yes,” she said, wiping her nose with the back of her hand. “I have to sit down.” She plopped herself on the curb and pulled her knees to her chest, burying her face in her hands.

“Casey.” I reached to put my arm around her, unsure of how to act or what to say. This was the first time it had happened to us. “I’m so sorry.”

“I’d been calling so much, but he was never home, right? And I was leaving all these messages....” She stopped and wiped her eyes. “And his mother kept saying he was out, or busy, and finally he called me back today and said she made him call me. Haven, he’d been telling her all along to say he wasn’t home. He just didn’t want to talk to me.”

“He’s a jerk,” I said defensively, hearing that judging tone in my own voice, the one I recognized from Lydia Catrell talking to my mother all those mornings.

“He was hoping I’d just lose interest.... He didn’t even have the guts to call me and tell me he had a new girlfriend. He had his mom lying to me, Haven.” She made little hiccuping noises, bumpy sobs. I kept patting her shoulder, trying to help. “God, I was so stupid. I was going to go up there.”

“He’s an *.” I could see Rick, someone I didn’t know, lurking at the end of a telephone line, mouthing the words I’m not here. I hated Rick, now.

“It’s so awful,” she said, resting her head against my shoulder and sobbing full strength, while I cupped my arm around her head and held her close. “It hurts.”

I’d never been in love, never felt that surge of feeling or that fall from its graces. I’d only watched as others weathered it; my mother in her garden, Sumner on the front lawn all those years ago, Ashley sobbing from the other side of a wall. I sat curbside with my best friend, Casey Melvin, and held her, trying to shoulder some of the hurt. There’s only so much you can do, in these situations. We sat there together in our neighborhood and Casey cried, a short distance down from halfway.





Chapter Eleven




We were down to three days and counting. Things around the house were getting crazy, with the phone ringing off the hook and travel arrangements for the incoming relatives and Ashley having a breakdown every five seconds, it seemed. My mother and Lydia had set up head-quarters at the kitchen table, with all the lists and plans and last-minute invitations covering the space entirely. I had to sit on the counter, with the displaced toaster oven, just to get my Pop-Tart in the morning.

Meanwhile, the rest of the world went on, although it was hard to imagine how. Casey was still suffering, having locked herself in her room and refused to eat for three days, until her mother took her shopping, got her hair permed, and signed them up for another tap-dancing class. Life would go on for Casey, with Rick retreating to just pictures in a photo album.

My father and Lorna had returned from a News Channel 5 promotional trip to the Bahamas, where they’d accompanied a group of viewers who’d won a contest involving sports and weather trivia. My father came back with even more hair, a sunburn, and a set of shell windchimes for me, which I hung outside my bedroom window, where it clanged all night until Ashley claimed it was ruining her sleep and demanded I take it down. I did, but I resented it. I resented everyone lately.

It had started soon after Ashley’s bachelorette party and Casey’s dumping. It was a feeling I’d woken up with one morning, a kind of whirring in my ears and an instability of the world, like things were coming to a head. I faced myself in the bathroom mirror and looked into my eyes, wondering if I would see something new in them, something crackling and different. I felt strong, as if every muscle in my body was taut and lean, not creaky and bony anymore. As if I was growing into myself, finally. I heard things differently, the sound of the neighborhood and the cicadas at night and my own breath, even and full. Everything was heightened, from the blazing blue of the sky to the feel of slippery grass under my feet to the sound of my mother’s voice calling my name from across a room. It was both scary and exhilarating, unsettling and amazing.

The day before Ashley’s wedding was also the first day of the Lakeview Mall Hot Summer Deals Sidewalk Sale, which basically consisted of all the stores taking all the junk they couldn’t sell and putting it outside, slashing the prices in half, and then watching as shoppers gobbled it up. I had to be at work extra early, at seven A.M., to help put one half of every ugly pair of shoes from the storeroom on a table out front, where it was my job to stand and watch for shoplifters while my boss, Burt, shuffled back and forth to the storeroom to find the mates for the shoes on the table. It was loud and crazy in the mall, with people digging through all the merchandise and pushing up against me in their mad dash to find a bargain. But even in all this craziness—with Burt saying in my ear that my sock quota was low so Push Socks, Push Socks and the mall Muzak blaring Barry Manilow and all the hands, all colors and sizes, grabbing at the shoes in front of me—I felt that eerie calmness, that floating feeling, that had followed me for the last few days. It was like I was just above it all, hovering, and nothing affected me.

Out of the blue, a woman grabbed my hand and said, “You call twenty bucks for a kid’s shoe a good deal?” She was wearing a bathing suit with shorts over it, flip-flops, and a big straw hat.