Second Chance Summer (12 page)

“Okay,” I said. I gripped the bakery box tightly, looking around the street for someone who might help us somehow or tell me what I should be doing. I could feel my heart pounding, and wished that my mother was here, that I wasn’t alone with this.

“You all right?” The redhead I’d seen through the window was standing in the doorway of Doggone It!, watching my father, her expression concerned. She held a cordless phone in her hand. “Do you need me to call someone?”

“No,” my father said, his voice a little strained. He opened his eyes and took a folded white handkerchief from his back pocket, passing it quickly over his forehead. My father was never without one; they got washed with the rest of his laundry, and when I was really stumped for gift ideas—or really broke—they were what I gave him for Father’s Day. He returned the handkerchief to his pocket and gave the girl a smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes. “I’m fine.”

“Okay,” the girl said, nodding. But she didn’t move from where she was standing, instead keeping her eyes on my father.

My father turned to me, and I noticed he looked much paler than he had only a few moments ago, and his breathing was labored. “Didn’t mean to scare you, kid,” he said.

I nodded, and swallowed hard, not sure what exactly had happened, or how to address it. “Are you,” I started, then heard my voice falter. “I mean…”

“I’m fine,” my father said again. He reached down to pick up the Henson’s bag, and I noticed that his hands were shaking. He took out the key ring and headed to the driver’s side, the keys jangling against one another in his trembling hand. Without realizing I was going to do it, I took a step closer to him and reached out for the keys. He looked at me, and a terrible, resigned sadness swept over his face before he looked away.

He let me take the keys from his hand, then walked around to the passenger side of the car without a word. As I unlocked the car, I looked down and saw the scattered licorice bits at my feet, the plastic bag trapped under the tire of a minivan two parking spots away. I climbed into the car and reached over to open the passenger door. I caught a glimpse of the girl, still standing in the door of the pet shop. She raised a hand in a wave, and I nodded back, trying not to notice that she still looked worried.

My father settled himself into the seat a little more gingerly than he had only an hour ago. I dropped the bakery box and my bag in the backseat and moved my seat way up—even though I knew how tall my father was, this never seemed as clear as when I was attempting to drive a car he’d been in before me, and my feet couldn’t even reach the pedals. I started the car, and we drove in silence most of the way home,
his head turned to the window. I didn’t know if he was still in pain. But for whatever reason, I couldn’t seem to form the words to ask him. After we’d had the dining room conversation on my birthday, we had talked very little about the realities of his illness. And I hadn’t really tried. He clearly wanted to pretend that things were just normal—he’d said as much—but in moments like this, everything that we hadn’t said seemed to prevent me from saying anything at all.

“Did you see the name of the pet store?” I asked after driving in silence for as long as I could stand it. I glanced over and saw the corner of my father’s mouth twitch up in a small smile.

“I did,” he said, turning to look at me. “I thought it was a little
ruff
.” I groaned, which I knew he expected, but I was also feeling a wave of relief. It seemed like the air in the car had become less heavy, and it was a little easier to breathe.

“Wow,” I said as I made the turn onto Dockside. “You came up with that one without taking a
paws
.” My father let out a short laugh at that, and gave me a smile.

“Nice,” he said, which was the very highest compliment he gave, pun-wise.

I pulled the car in next to my mother’s and shut off the engine, but neither of us made a move to get out of the car.

“It really is good news about the job,” my father said, his voice sounding tired. “Sorry if that got lost in…” He paused, then cleared his throat. “Everything.”

I nodded, and ran my finger over a spot on the steering wheel where the leather was cracked and could probably be coaxed to come off, if I worked hard enough at it. “So,” I started, hesitantly. “Should we… you know… talk about it?”

My father nodded, even as he grimaced slightly. “Of course,” he said. “If you want to.”

I felt a flare of anger then, as sudden and unexpected as if someone had set off a firecracker. “It’s not that I want to,” I said, hearing the sharpness of my tone, regretting it even as the words were spilling out of me. “It’s just that we’re all here, we’re all up here, and we’re not talking, or…” I seemed to run out of words and anger at the same time, and was left with only a sinking feeling in my stomach, since I knew that the last thing I should be doing was yelling at my father. I started to take a breath, to apologize, when my father nodded.

“We will talk,” he said. He looked away from me, straight into the screened-in porch, as though he could see the time in the future when this would be happening. “We’ll say… all the things that we need to say.” I suddenly found myself swallowing hard, fighting the feeling that I was on the verge of tears. “But for now, while we still can, I just want to have a little bit of a normal summer with all of you. Sound good?” I nodded. “Good. The defense rests.”

I smiled at that—he used the legal expression whenever he wanted to declare a subject closed—but I couldn’t push away the
question I’d had ever since he’d been diagnosed, the question that I somehow never felt I could ask. “I just…”

My father raised his eyebrows, and I could see that he already looked better than he had a few minutes earlier. And if I hadn’t known, if I hadn’t seen it, I might have been able to pretend that it hadn’t happened, that he was still fine. “What is it, kid?”

I felt myself smile at that, even though I still felt like I might start crying. This was my dad’s name for me, and only me. Gelsey was always “princess,” Warren was “son.” And I had always been his kid.

As I looked back at him, I wasn’t sure I could ask it, the thing that I’d been wondering the most since he’d told us, sitting at the head of the dining room table. Because it was a question that went against everything I’d always believed about my father. He was the one who checked for burglars when my mother was sure she heard a noise outside, the one we yelled for when confronted with a spider. The one who used to pick me up and carry me when I got too tired to walk. The one I’d believed could vanquish dragons and closet-dwelling monsters. But I had to know, and I wasn’t sure I’d get another chance to ask. “Are you scared?” I asked, my voice barely a whisper. But I could tell from the way that his face seemed to crumple a bit that he had heard me.

He didn’t say anything, just nodded, up and down one time.

I nodded as well. “Me too,” I said. He gave me another sad smile, and we sat there together in silence.

The shuttle bus rumbled up the street and passed our driveway, coming to a stop in front of the house next to ours, the
CUT TO: SUMMER
house. A dark-haired girl in an all-white tennis outfit got out, looking, even from this distance, fairly disgruntled as she stomped off the bus and up her driveway, soon obscured by the trees that separated our houses.

“Was that it?” he asked, after the girl had disappeared from view and the shuttle bus had moved on.

“That’s it,” I said. Then he’d reached out and ruffled my hair, resting his hand on the top of my head. And though we were certainly not a touchy-feely family, without even thinking about it, I leaned closer to my father, and he wrapped his arm around my shoulders, pulling me into a hug. And we stayed like that for just a moment before we both moved apart, almost at the same time, as though we’d agreed upon it beforehand. I slid out of the driver’s side, opening the back door to retrieve my bag, the bakery box full of unfortunate cookies, and the Henson’s Produce bag, which my father let me take.

We were heading up the steps to the house, my father leaning on the railing when he stopped and turned back to me, a smile starting to form that made him look less tired. “Metamorphosis,” he said.
I frowned, trying to make this make sense. “A thirteen-letter word for change,” he continued. He raised his eyebrows at me, pleased with himself.

“Maybe so,” I said. I saw the abandoned crossword lying on the table, and I wanted to run over to it, see if it was the answer I’d been looking for. “Let’s find out.”

chapter nine

“G
ELSEY!”
I
YELLED IN THE DIRECTION OF THE
house. “L
ET’S GO
!” I was standing in the driveway, keys in hand, where I had been for the last ten minutes. I checked my watch and saw that I really should have left by now. Though I had no actual job experience, I had a feeling that that showing up late on your first day of work was probably frowned upon. The plan had been for Gelsey to bike to her first tennis lesson this morning. But her bike (technically, my old bike that was now too small for me) turned out to have a flat tire, and then Gelsey had some sort of meltdown, so it had fallen to me to drive her.

The front door slammed and she stepped out onto the porch, my mother right behind her. I noticed my mother stayed in front of the door, almost like she was blocking it, lest Gelsey try to make a break for it and run back inside. “Finally,” I said. “I’m going to be late.”

“You’ll be fine,” my mother said. Gelsey just glowered at me, as though I was somehow responsible for all this. My mother smoothed down Gelsey’s hair and straightened the sleeves of her white tennis dress, one that had been mine when I was her age.

“Are you ready?” Gelsey asked, as if it had been me who had been holding us up all along. She pulled herself away from my mother and stomped down to the driveway.

My father, shielding his eyes, came forward a few steps from the garage, where he’d been fixing up our bikes since most of them hadn’t been in a fit condition to ride. “Have a good first day, you two,” he called. “And when you come back, I’ll have the bikes all ready. So you both should be able to ride tomorrow.”

“Great,” I said, trying to sound enthusiastic about this while also trying to remember how many years it had been since I had ridden a bike.

“Have fun,” he called. “Do great things.” I turned back to wave, but he was already heading for his workbench, reaching for an air pump, humming tunelessly to himself.

“Can we leave already?” Gelsey asked, her voice heavy with disdain. I was about to throw disdain right back at her—maybe paired with a lecture about how it was
her
fault we weren’t leaving until now—when I realized we probably didn’t have time.

“Good luck,” my mother called from the doorway, smiling at me. I wasn’t sure if she was talking about my first day of work or about me getting Gelsey there in one piece, but I gave her a halfhearted smile back, then opened the driver’s door and climbed into the car.

I started the engine, trying not to panic when I saw that I had
only seven minutes to drop my sister off at the Rec Center and get myself to the beach—not to mention that I’d received only the vaguest instructions from Jillian as to who I was supposed to talk to when I got there. So as soon as I’d reached the end of the driveway and passed out of sight of my parents, I stepped hard on the gas, now driving much faster than the
WE LOVE OUR CHILDREN… PLEASE DRIVE SLOW
! signs that dotted the road recommended.

Gelsey looked over from where she had been glaring out the window and glanced at my speedometer. “Speed much?” she asked, eyebrows raised.

“I wouldn’t have to if you’d been ready on time,” I said, hugging one of the curves as we barreled down Dockside Terrace. “I was about to leave without you.”

“I wish you had,” Gelsey said as she slumped back in her seat. I came to an abrupt stop that jolted us both forward, then picked up speed again as I headed toward what we had always called Devil’s Dip. It was a huge hill that dropped sharply, then went up again just as sharply on the other side, creating a giant
U
shape. The Dip had been my Waterloo when I’d been learning to ride a bike, and it hadn’t gotten any less steep with time. “I really thought Mom was bluffing. I can’t believe she’s making me do this.”

“Tennis isn’t so bad,” I said as we coasted down the hill and then back up the other side, while I tried to remember my own long-ago lessons. I had never loved it like my father and Warren, and hadn’t
ever hung around the Tennis Center, working on my backhand on the practice wall the way that other kids had.

“Really,” Gelsey said flatly.

“Really,” I said, remembering how Lucy and I had spent very little time playing tennis, and most of our time talking. “It’s mostly just hanging out with your friends, with a little tennis mixed in.”

“Friends,” she repeated softly, looking out the window again. “Right.”

I glanced over at my sister before looking back at the road, regretting my word choice. Gelsey had never made friends easily, and had never had a best friend that I’d been aware of. It probably hadn’t helped that she had spent all of her waking hours, until now, in the dance studio. But Gelsey also didn’t do herself any favors, especially because whenever she got nervous, she masked it with haughtiness or disdain. “Look,” I started, a little uncertainly, glancing over at her, “I know it might be hard at first, but—”