That Summer (3 page)

“We’re here!” Aunt Ree said in a singsong voice, presenting us in all of our pink as if she’d created us herself. “And just in time.”

Lorna Queen was a beautiful woman. As she turned in her seat to face us, I realized that again, just as I always did when I watched her doing her forecasts in her short skirts with color-coordinated lipsticks. She was pert and perfect and had the tiniest little ears I’d ever seen on anyone. She kept them covered most of the time, but once at the beach I’d seen her with her hair pulled back, with those ears like seashells molded against her skin. I’d always wondered if she heard like the rest of us or if the world sounded different through such small receptors.

“Hi, girls.” She smiled at us and dabbed her eyes with a neatly folded Kleenex. “Y’all look beautiful.”

“Are you okay?” Ashley asked her.

“I’m fine. I’m just”—she sniffled daintily—“so happy. I’ve waited for this day for so long, and I’m just so happy.”

The woman doing her makeup rolled her eyes. “Lorna, honey, waterproof mascara can only do so much. You’ve got to stop crying.”

“I know.” She sniffled again, reaching out to take my hand and Ashley’s. “I want you girls to know how much I love your father. I’m going to make him just as happy as I can, and I’m so glad we’re all going to be a family.”

“We’re very happy for you,” Ashley said, speaking for both of us, which she often did when Lorna was concerned.

Lorna was tearing up again when a man in a suit came in through another door and whispered, “Ten minutes,” then flashed the thumbs-up sign as if we were about to go out and play the Big Game.

“Ten minutes,” Lorna said, her hand fluttering out of mine and to her face, dabbing her eyes. The makeup woman spun her back around in the chair and moved in with the powder puff. “My God, it’s actually happening.”

Ashley reached into her purse and pulled out a lipstick. “Do like this,” she said to me, pursing her lips. I did, and she put some on me, smoothing it across with a finger. “It’s not really your color, but it’ll do.”

I stood there while she added some more eye shadow and blush to my face, all the while looking at me through half-shut eyes, practicing her craft, her face very close to mine. This was the Ashley I remembered from my childhood, when the five-year gap didn’t seem that large and we set up our Barbie worlds in the driveway every day after school, my Ken fraternizing with her Skipper. This was the Ashley who painted my nails at the kitchen table during long summers, the back door swinging in the breeze and the radio on. This was the Ashley who came into my room late one night after breaking up with Robert Losard and sat on the edge of my bed crying until I wrapped my arms awkwardly around her and smoothed her hair, trying to understand the words she was saying. This was the Ashley who had climbed out on the roof with me all those nights in the first few months of the divorce and told me how much she missed my father. This was the Ashley I loved, away from Lewis’s clinging hands and the wedding plans and the five-year-wide impasse that neither of us could cross.

“There.” She capped the lipstick and dumped all the makeup back in her purse. “Now just don’t cry too much and you’ll be fine.”

“I won’t cry,” I said, and suddenly aware of Lorna looking at us behind her in the mirror, I added, “I never cry at weddings.”

“Oh, I do,” Lorna said. “There’s something about a wedding, something so perfect and so sad, all at the same time. I bawl at weddings.”

“You better not be bawling out there.” The makeup lady dabbed with the powder puff. “If this stuff doesn’t hold up you’ll look a mess.”

The door opened and a woman in a dress the same shade as ours but without the long flowing skirt came in, carrying a big box of flowers. “Helen!” Lorna said, tearing up again. “You look lovely.”

Helen was obviously Lorna’s sister, seeing as how she also had those tiny little seashell ears. I figured it had to be more than coincidence. They hugged and Helen turned towards us, clasping her hands together. “This must be Ashley and Haven. Lorna said you were tall.” She leaned forward and kissed my cheek, then Ashley’s. “And I hear congratulations are in order for you. When’s the big day?”

“August nineteenth,” Ashley said. It was the million-dollar question.

“My, that’s soon! Are you getting nervous?”

“No, not really,” Ashley said. “I’m just ready to get it all over with.”

“Amen to that,” Lorna said, standing up and removing the paper bib from around her neck. She took a deep breath, holding her palm against her stomach. “I swear I have never been so nervous, even when I did that marathon at the station during the hurricane. Do I look all right?”

“You look lovely,” Helen said. We all nodded in agreement. An older woman appeared, gesturing frantically. Her lips were moving as if long, unpronounceable words were coming out, but I couldn’t hear a thing she was saying. As she came closer I made out something that sounded like “It’s time, it’s time,” but she was warbling so it could have been anything.

“Okay,” the Weather Pet said with one last sniff. Ashley checked my face again, licking her lips and telling me to do the same, and with Lorna Queen behind us, her sister Helen carrying her train, we proceeded to the lobby of the church.

We’d practiced all this the night before, when I’d been wearing shorts and sandals and the aisle seemed like a hop, skip, and jump to the spot where the minister had been standing in blue jeans and a T-shirt that said Clean and Free Baptist Retreat. Now the church was packed and the aisle seemed about a hundred miles long with the minister standing at the end of it like a tiny plastic figure you might slap onto a cake. We got pushed into figuration, with me of course behind Ashley since I was taller and then Helen and then Lorna, who was telling us all how much she loved us. Finally the mad whisperer walked right to the front of the line, waved her arm wildly like she was flagging a plane in to land right there in the middle of the church, and we were on our way.

The night before, they’d said to count to seven after Ashley left, so I gave it eight because I was nervous and then took my first step. I felt like the man on stilts in the circus who walks as if the wind is blowing him sideways. I tried not to look at anything but the middle of Ashley’s back, which was not altogether interesting but somewhat better than all the faces staring back at me. As I got closer to the minister I got the nerve to look up and see my father, who was standing next to his best friend, Rick Bickman, smiling.

My father only does one impression, but it’s a good one. He can do a perfect rendition of the munchkin who greets Dorothy right after she lands on the witch in the
Wizard of Oz,
the one who with two others sings that silly song about being the Lollipop Guild. They rock back and forth and their faces get all contorted. My father only does this when he’s drunk or when a bunch of what my mother calls his bad seed friends are around; but suddenly it was all I could think of, as if at any moment he might forget all this nonsense and start singing that damn song.

It didn’t happen, of course, because this was a wedding and serious business. Instead my father winked at me as I took my place next to Ashley and we all turned and faced the direction we’d come and waited for Lorna Queen to make her entrance.

There was a pause in the music, long enough for me to take a quick glance around to see if I recognized anyone, which I didn’t because all I could see was the backs of everyone’s heads as they waited for Lorna to appear. Charlie Baker, Important Local News Anchor, was giving her away. There had been a long story in the paper this very morning about the novelty wedding of the sports guy and the weather girl, which went into detail about the mentoring relationship between Charlie Baker and the intern he’d taken under his wing during her first shaky days at the station. My mother had left the article out on the kitchen table, without comment, and as I scanned I realized it could have been about strangers for all the attachment I felt to my father’s fairy-tale second marriage.

Lorna was beaming as she came down the aisle. Her eyes sparkled and the waterproof mascara wasn’t holding up the way it should have but no matter, she was still beautiful. When she and Charlie got up to the front she leaned forward and kissed Helen, then Ashley, and then me, her veil scratching my face as it brushed against me. It was the first time I’d seen Charlie Baker, anchorman, close up, and I would have bet money he’d had a facelift sometime during those long newsdoing years. He had that slippery look to him.

The minister cleared his throat, Charlie Baker handed Lorna over to my father, and now, finally, it was really happening. Some woman in the front row, wearing a purple hat, started crying immediately, and as the minister got to the vows Helen was tearing up as well. I was bored and kept glancing around the church, wondering what my mother would think of all this, a fancy church and a long walk down the aisle, pomp and circumstance. My parents were married in the Party Room of the Dominic Hotel in Atlantic City, with only her mother and his parents in attendance, along with a few lost partygoers who stumbled in from a bar mitzvah a couple of doors down. It was low-key, just what they needed, seeing that my mother’s father disapproved and refused to attend and my father’s family couldn’t afford much more than the Party Room for a couple of hours, a cake, and a cousin playing the piano; my father had paid for the justice of the peace. There are pictures of them all around one table together, my mother and father and grandmother and my father’s parents, plus some white-haired man in Buddy Holly glasses, each of them with a plate of half-eaten cake before them. This was the wedding party.

I watched my father, thinking this as he said his vows, speaking evenly into Lorna’s veil with his face very red and serious. My sister began to cry and I knew it wasn’t for the happiness of weddings but for the finality of all of this, knowing that things would never go back to the way they were. I thought of my mother at home in her garden, weeding under a hot afternoon sun, away from the pealing of church bells. And I thought of other summers, long before my father lifted this veil and kissed his new bride.

Chapter Two

Of all of Ashley’s boyfriends, there were only a few that I can remember past the dates and events they represent. Lewis, of course, who would be the end of that line come August nineteenth. Robert Parker, who two months after breaking up with Ashley in my eighth-grade year was killed in a motorcycle accident. But of all of them, only Sumner really mattered to me.

Ashley met Sumner Lee at the beginning of tenth grade, before I turned ten. He wasn’t like anyone she’d brought home before: Ashley was into well-formed boys, mostly athletes—wrestlers, football players, the occasional tennis guy, but that was rare. These boys with their thick necks and muscled legs traipsed up our front walks with my sister on their arms like a trophy. They were polite to my parents, uncomfortable around me, and drank all of our milk when they came around after school. They run together like a blur, these boys, their names three letters: Bif, Tad, Mel. My father liked them because he was on his home turf, with sports as a common ground. My mother eyed her dwindling milk supply but said nothing. We all pretty much saw this to be the norm, at least until she brought Sumner home.

It was right after a nasty breakup with Tom Acker, quarterback of the Lincoln High Rebels. He was skinny and fast and chewed tobacco but only when Ashley let him. When she broke up with him he lurked around the neighborhood after school, football tucked under his arm like Ann Boleyn’s head, haunting.

But Sumner wasn’t an athlete. He was skinny and smooth, with black curly hair and bright blue eyes that almost didn’t seem real. He had a long, lazy Alabama accent and wore tie-dyes and beat-up Converse high-tops that thwacked when he walked. Sumner was the kind of person that you wanted to sit with in the sun and spend the day. He was interesting and hysterically funny and it just seemed like if you tagged along with him you’d never be bored because he never was. My mother said that Sumner was the kind of person that things just happen to, and she was right. Weird, amazing, incredible things, He led a charmed life, always stumbling into something interesting totally by accident.

One time right after he and Ashley started dating, he took us to the mall because he had to buy a shoe tree for his father for his birthday. We were walking along looking for one when we bumped into this camera crew filming one of those taste-test commercials right there in front of Cheeseables, the gourmet cheese shop where they also sell that snobby expensive coffee. They had some guy tasting a piece of cheese and they were trying to get him to say something snazzy they could film for the commercial, but he was hemming and hawing and spending too much time staring at the camera.

“So you like the cheese?” a woman holding a clipboard said to him, prodding. “Would you say it’s the best cheese you’ve ever eaten?”