Summer Hours Read online

  “Right, I forgot.”

  I stood up for a silent, stagy hug. She’d also hugged me downstairs when I’d arrived. But the stories that had leaked out of her household made her kindness seem like something I couldn’t trust. She left without shutting the door all the way.

  Eric waited a minute, got up, and shoved the door shut. He rolled his eyes.

  “Come on, she’s trying,” I said, settling on the floor again.

  “She used to be an actress, remember. It’s still acting, never reality.”

  “So tell me about reality.”

  “I’m getting away in two days.”

  “That doesn’t mean it wouldn’t help to talk about her. Them. Have you seen your dad?”

  Eric shook his head, dealing out six different baseball caps. Some were so crisp they’d clearly never touched his head. The few he did wear in constant rotation had yellow stains on the brim.

  “I’ve always liked this one on you.” I handed him his red Angels baseball cap. The logo was an A with a halo on top.

  “They’ll probably think it’s some Christian thing,” he said, but he shot it into a suitcase. “Nothing but net.”

  “You won’t be like them,” I said. “Your parents.”

  “Everyone believes that. It’s our universal delusion. So what movie are we seeing?”

  “Anything but The Fly.”

  “Paper’s on the hall table.”

  I crept downstairs, and luckily Eric’s mom was on the phone in the kitchen, her back to me, talking about “mid-tier donors.” She had a big event-planning business. I’d been spared another daughter-she-never-had hug.

  Eric’s mom was always so polite, asking me about school and my “mother’s” job. She said mother, not mom. That was one thing. She was way less intimidating than Eric’s father, but her formality and surface perfection had always made me nervous. Mrs. Logan’s affair with her handsome neighbor up the street seemed so impulsive, so out of character. It made me almost like her, learning she wasn’t as flawless as she pretended.

  I grabbed the Register off the table and headed back to the staircase, pausing in the hallway outside the study. Just for a few seconds.

  The door was open halfway so I could see the green water of the fish tank illuminated in the dark. But the room was silent.

  When I got back to the bedroom Eric had a fresh pile of clothes out. Sweaters and a bunch of other warm items I’d never seen. I picked up a gray overcoat with a J. Press tag still attached. Cashmere, and $2,600.

  “Wow.” I petted the soft collar.

  “The mother ordered it. A little too George-Hamilton-in-January, right?”

  “No, it’s beautiful. Of course you’re bringing it. I don’t want to think of you cold.”

  I studied the newspaper. Eric had circled two movies. He knew I was dying to see Four Weddings and a Funeral but I didn’t recognize the other. “What’s Return of the Secaucus Seven? Some Western?”

  “Not a Western,” said Eric. “Old John Sayles movie I’ve been wanting to see.”

  Of course, he’d already seen it, and what he really meant was “I’ve been wanting to secretly observe you while you react to all my favorite parts.” Eric loved to bring people to his favorite movies and pretend he’d never seen them before.

  Secaucus Seven was at the revival theater, where you had to pick your seat carefully because the springs had busted through most of the cushions.

  “Hold up the paper and we’ll let chance decide,” I said.

  He took the top corners of the paper from me and held it between us like a curtain while I pretended to close my eyes. But I peeked as I punched with my index finger.

  “Secaucus Seven it is.”

  He lowered the page and smiled wryly. “You’re a nice girl, Becc. Has anyone ever told you that?”

  “Only about a thousand times. Can we make the seven?”

  Eric leaned to read the showtimes, so close his hair tickled my ear. If I tilted my neck a tiny bit to the right we’d almost be kissing.

  His breath hitched and I held mine.

  I was curious. I was. But I didn’t move.

  He was leaving.

  And something was missing. Some dark matter that existed in the study, and that, I was sure, waited for me in the uncharted land of college.

  More breakable than he seems. I wouldn’t break Eric into pieces for an experiment.

  So instead of moving closer I pulled back. “E. We need to talk about this.”

  “Talk about what?”

  “You know.”

  His eyes shifted from mine to the wall of movie posters behind me. “I think it’s too late to make the seven.”

  “What? We have an hour.”

  He looked down at the tag on the fancy overcoat, yanked it carelessly. “I think we should skip the movie. I still have a ton of packing.”

  “E. Come on. It’s our last day. Let’s figure this out.” I scratched his knee gently with my fingernail.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Don’t do this. Don’t leave like this. We can figure it out.”

  “Why don’t you say figure it out one more time, Becc? Figure it out. Like a calculus problem?” He lobbed the coat into his suitcase, hard.

  “No. Not like that. I’m not saying it right.”

  “I think you’re making yourself pretty clear.”

  I waited for him to say anything, to meet me halfway, to at least try to reach across the awkwardness.

  But he only crumpled up the newspaper and tossed it at the garbage. Missing, I noticed with cheap satisfaction.

  “You’re acting like a pouty kid.” I stood. Waited thirty seconds. Nothing.

  I left, and he didn’t stop me.

  6

  Busting Out

  August 1, 1994

  WHERE I WAS SUPPOSED TO BE | The Orange Park Courier

  WHERE I WAS | The square

  I settled into my “office” at the newspaper—a card table in the hall by the copier, violating fire codes.

  I’d talked Les Corcoran, the owner/publisher/editor of the Courier, into giving me a job for the summer. He’d worked at the LA Times decades before and told me he’d bought the Courier only to keep busy between fishing trips.

  I’d interviewed wearing my mom’s blue skirt suit, safety pinned to hold the waist up, clutching a long, narrow notebook that made me feel like Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday. (Eric had gone through a screwball comedy phase junior year.) Les took one look at my starry eyes and reporter’s notebook and said, “This ain’t journalism.”

  But he took me on.

  Les produced the Courier on an ancient PageMaker layout system and he wasn’t always big on journalistic integrity, gleefully bumping town council articles for paid advertorials from tree pruners. My only payment was a few bylined clips and the glory of saying I worked at a newspaper.

  I loved it anyway.

  I loved running around town digging up stories. Meeting strangers, triple-checking their quotes, reading their voices for tones that told me they were a little too eager to be in print, and I should be wary. Or that they were a little too defensive, and I should press harder. When I’d decided to be a reporter, back in grade school, I’d known only that it felt important, and it still did. It sounded so simple—setting facts down in black and white. But it rarely was, and I liked that.

  I loved revising my articles until they were fair and balanced and clear, until the writing was muscular, as my newspaper faculty advisor in high school had always put it.

  I even loved the lingo. Slug and lede and drop-dead. And I loved the frantic hour on Friday afternoons before closing the next week’s issue, racing to make the printer’s deadline. Les called these “fire drills”—like the time when an advertiser pulled out so I had ten minutes to cu
t an AP article on the new beach resort in Newport from eight hundred to two hundred words to fit the hole. The adrenaline rush was addictive. After every fire drill Les said that was it, he was going to “sell the old rag like I should’ve done a decade ago.”

  He pretended he didn’t care about the newspaper anymore. Once, when I spent a weekend revising an article he’d already approved, Les said softly, “Ah, you poor kid, you’ve got the bug, don’t you?” But his voice told me I’d joined a secret and important club.

  As usual for a Monday, Les wasn’t in. He didn’t show up until at least Wednesday afternoon. But he had left me an advertorial to fix. Four hundred words on the new frozen yogurt shop, written by the franchise owner, who described “toppings” in breathless detail. I cleaned it up and played with headlines, settling on “Yo-Fresh Serves Up Cool Treats.”

  Then I turned to my pet project, a story on the Orange Park movie theater. I called the new owner of the long-shuttered building for the fourth time because I was trying to get a private tour. But once again I got shunted to her assistant.

  “Okay, we’ll just have to run the story without a quote from her, I guess,” I said. “Thanks!”

  Les hadn’t agreed to run a thing.

  “Wait, what story?”

  “About the remodel. How people fear it’s stripping out all of the historic features.” People was one lady I’d interviewed at the Orange County Historical Society.

  “That’s not true, it’s a beautiful restoration.” Whispering, paper shuffling. “Wait, could you come Friday at ten?”

  “That would be great!”

  Then I had five more hours with nothing official left to do but explore yogurt puns, so I called Serra.

  She answered in a swoopy customer service voice. “Baskin-Robbins, home of the original thirty-one flavors, hoooow may I help you?”

  “It’s me. Can you sneak away for a sec? I got some interesting mail this morning.”

  “Eric?”

  “Nope. He clearly still hates me. I wish I hadn’t said anything about the boat.”

  Every day when I left for work I searched the mailbox for a letter from Eric. He hadn’t returned my emails or written since he’d left for Brown.

  I wanted to make things right. I wanted to lie near him on a stack of pillows in his closet theater and breathe in his familiar smell. Coast soap and Soothing Aloe Barbasol and root beer. I wanted to force the old playful look back into his eyes. It had only been a month but it felt like time was running out, as we drifted away into our new lives.

  “He’ll come around, Becc. So, mail?”

  “The roommate letter came.” It was in my pocket: a pink envelope I’d identified immediately from the Maine return address and girlish printing. Serra and I had been assigned a triple room at Berkeley, in a high-rise a block from campus. We’d been waiting all summer for letters from our future roommate, speculating about what she’d be like and planning the hundred thoughtful ways we’d make sure not to leave her out.

  “Holy fuck, I need to see it immediately.”

  * * *

  Baskin-Robbins was a five-minute walk from the Courier office, across the town square.

  When I opened the pink-trimmed glass door, setting off the little bell, Andrew Meade was wiping down tables and Serra was manning the counter.

  I waited while she served outrageously big scoops of bubblegum ice cream on sugar cones to two wide-eyed little girls, handing them over with a conspiratorial smile. Then she helped a mom dithering over ice cream cakes in the sample book. Finally, the lady ordered a Batman cake.

  “We’re going outside for a sec, do you mind covering the counter?” Serra said this to Andrew in the same un-Serra voice she’d used to answer the shop’s phone.

  “Not at all, take your time!” Andrew said.

  Serra had had a crush on Andrew all year. She sat behind him in honors physics, and had become obsessed with the two triangles of hair on his neck, which changed from buzzed to softly curling between haircuts. She’d monitored their status like phases of the moon, giving me daily updates.

  She’d asked him out a week ago, and it hadn’t gone well. Apparently he’d turned all stiff and told her he was dating Erin O’Connor, this awful JV cheerleader from The Heights.

  Erin O’Connor: if she worked at Baskin-Robbins, she’d serve stingy scoops.

  We sat in the square, on the low brick bench-wall that surrounded the last of Orange Park’s orange trees. The groves that had once blanketed our part of the county were long gone, so this bedraggled sole survivor had a plaque in front of it: Planted in 1937. Everyone just called it The Orange Tree.

  “Things with Andrew still seem a little...frosty,” I said.

  “He and Erin are going to Big Bear with their parents this weekend. It’s like now their families are united against me.”

  “Like the Mafia?”

  She scrunched her face at me.

  “He’s an idiot,” I said. “Erin O’Connor’s the worst.”

  “You can say it. She’s racist trash.”

  “I know.” Erin was always complaining about gardeners eating lunch in the square. I touched Serra’s hand. Her round brown eyes were still laughing, but I didn’t know how she kept her spirits up dealing with daily crap like this. Erin O’Connor wasn’t the only one I’d heard at school who used gardener as a catchall term for anyone who didn’t need a punch card at Gold Coast Tanning.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “Just think of the gorgeous, enlightened college boys waiting for you.”

  “Look.” Serra nudged me.

  Mrs. Logan was across the street in front of the theater, carrying her Dominico’s grocery bag to her car. She’d probably been shopping for a dinner with him. Tonight they’d eat poolside, then ascend to the Logans’ perfect beige master bedroom... Would they set the silk throw pillows aside? Or did they do it on top of the pillows, too frantic to wait, crying out like people did in movies?

  There was something wrong with me, trying to picture these scenarios.

  “Should we say hi?” Serra asked.

  “God, no.”

  Smiling to herself, Mrs. Logan opened the door of her black BMW coupe and settled in the low driver’s seat, her long, bare legs stretched to the asphalt, her shiny blond hair disappearing for a second as she dipped to set the bag on the passenger side. She popped up, pulled her legs into her car as gracefully as an Olympic diver doing a tuck, shut the door, and drove off.

  “She looks happy,” I said. “Don’t you think?”

  “Of course she’s happy. She’s off for a hookup with her boy toy.”

  “Gross. He’s not...”

  “What? Not a boy or not a toy?”

  “I don’t know, I just hate that expression. Let’s read the letter.”

  I read aloud—

  I’m Margaret Jane Estes and I’m going to major in chemistry. I have four sisters and a border collie named Stuey. I can’t wait to meet you!! We’re going to have so much fun!! I’m flying out August 19. My comforter is a pale rose color, in case you want to coordinate. And I’d love to go in on the rent for one of those tiny frig’s.

  “Well...” I searched for a tactful way to address the obvious. That Margaret sounded like an insufferable priss. And she’d misspelled fridges.

  Serra wasn’t tactful. “Fuck. Could she be more wholesome?”

  “She’s going to be the early-riser type.”

  “Margaret from Maine. I picture her in, like, head-to-toe L.L. Bean,” Serra said. “Plaid, turtlenecks. Duck shoes.”

  “It’s okay, Serr. Because even if Margaret from Maine gets up at the crack of dawn, we’ll be at college.” I said the word reverently.

  College.

  We’d dreamed about it forever.

  The crisp wind off the San Francisco Bay blowing away the stale, hot air of
the OC. Forty thousand students from around the world. Freedom and brilliant professors and a real art studio for Serra, a real newspaper for me. Hordes of intriguing, intelligent college guys and certified, grown-up dates.

  Serra shouted to sleepy Main Street, “You hear that, Orange Park? We’re leaving you!”

  The only pedestrian in sight—a dapper gray-haired man walking his terrier across the street where Donna Logan’s car had been a moment ago—turned, startled.

  I laughed so hard I had to press my thighs together so I wouldn’t pee as Serra stood on the brick and called cheerfully to him, waving Margaret Estes’s pink Hello Kitty stationery. “Nothing ever happens here so we’re busting out!”

  August 20

  Move-in week

  Serra and I walked home from the student union, loaded down with textbooks.

  We were in love with the proud weirdness of Berkeley. Noisy Telegraph Avenue, where people sold jewelry and bongs on the sidewalk. (We’d bought matching leather cuff bracelets but not bongs.)

  Chaotic Sproul Plaza, where you could add your name to a thousand petitions. The Naked Guy, who was famous because the university allowed him to attend classes without a stitch on. We hadn’t spotted him yet, but we were desperate to, so we could act nonchalant.

  Even the graffiti thrilled us.

  Serra liked to evaluate its artistic merit, while to me the ugliest scrawl was beautiful. Proof that we’d escaped suburbia.

  “How do you rate this one?” I pointed at the spray paint defacing the front of the Earth Science building: a haughty black cat with the cryptic tag The Cat Knows under it, the letters Fe|Co inside its tail.

  “It’s not bad. Sort of art deco.”

  “Fe is the symbol for iron, and Co is cobalt,” I said. “They’re next to each other on the periodic table. Maybe it’s a chem department thing.”

  “Even the graffiti is smarter here,” Serra said, giddy. “You’re missing out, Margaret!”

  Because Margaret from Maine still hadn’t shown up. We’d waited for her to come through the door all day yesterday, as we unpacked in our tenth-floor room. We’d been considerate, making sure our stuff didn’t take up more than two-thirds of the space.