Second Chance Summer (31 page)

I hadn’t known it would be possible to be more embarrassed than I had been, but apparently new and unseen depths were still being uncovered. “Ah,” I murmured. “Right.” I crossed toward him quickly, and grabbed the stack, trying to avoid eye contact as much as possible. But to my surprise, Henry didn’t let go of the posters right away, making me look up at him, into those eyes that still startled me every time with their greenness. He took a breath, as though he was going to say something, looking back into my eyes. But after a moment, he broke our eye contact and looked away, releasing his hold on the posters.

“I’ll see you around,” he said, and somewhere in my mind, I registered that this was what I’d said to him the first time we’d met again, on the dock.

“I think that’s inevitable,” I said, echoing his words back to him.
I made myself smile as I said it, to take some of the sting out. I turned and walked, fast, to the door, and this time he didn’t say anything to call me back.

My pulse was racing as I crossed the street and walked toward the pet store. I yanked open the door with probably more force than I needed to. I had a feeling that it would probably be best for everyone if I could just be by myself until I shook off this jumpy, reckless feeling. But because of my brother’s social awkwardness, I had to collect the dog, and there was no way around it.

“Hey there!” Wendy said, smiling at me, even though I hadn’t seen her since I’d brought Murphy for microchip identification. But she saw my dog enough that she probably felt like she knew me really well too. “I’ve got your little guy here for you.” She reached under the counter, and I heard the faint click of metal. A moment later, she emerged with Murphy, whose tail started wagging when he saw me.

“Great,” I said, dropping the fliers on the counter and taking the dog. I placed him on the ground, looping his leash over my wrist, which turned out to be a good thing, since he immediately lunged in the direction of the kittens. I glanced down at the posters on the counter, and suddenly felt a surge of sympathy for my brother, having just experienced how humiliating it was to walk up to someone and get shot down. “So. Wendy,” I said, and she looked up from the computer, where she had been no doubt adding this latest service to our bill, “are you dating anyone?”

She blinked at me. “No,” she said, looking maybe a little concerned. “Um, why?”

“Just wondering,” I said. I pushed one of the posters across the counter at her. “Want to go on a date with my brother?”

The whole interaction had gone much more smoothly than I’d been expecting it to. Wendy had agreed almost immediately, and she knew exactly who Warren was—she hadn’t even needed a photo reminder, which was a good thing, since the only picture of him that I had on my phone was a terrible one I’d taken while he was in the midst of telling me how potato chips were invented. I’d taken the picture to try and get him to stop talking and the result was Warren looking both annoyed and out of focus.

As I walked Murphy over to my bike after picking up the corn and some licorice for my father, I was feeling a tiny bit better. Even if I hadn’t been able to make things right with Henry, I had gotten my brother a date and, hopefully, saved the dog from any more excessive grooming.

It wasn’t until I faced the reality of getting home, with the dog, that I realized I’d hit a snag. Presumably, Warren had dropped him off in the car. It turned out that Murphy did not like the concept of my bike basket, and kept trying to get out of it, his nails scraping for purchase. When one of his paws got stuck between the metal slats, he started whimpering in a way that hurt my heart, so I dropped the
kickstand and lifted the dog out immediately. “It’s okay,” I said, pulling him close to me for a minute. I could feel that he was trembling. “We don’t have to go in the basket. It’s okay.” I ran my hand over his wiry head for a moment, and felt him settle down a bit.

But even though I’d made this blithe promise, I wasn’t sure exactly how we were going to get home. I tried riding the bike, holding the dog’s leash to the side, but it kept getting tangled in the wheel and Murphy proved himself to not be the world’s fastest learner in avoiding this. And the same thing happened when I tried to walk the bike and the dog at the same time. So finally, I decided we were just going to have to go on foot. I locked my bike up by the diner, tucked the posters under my arm, and started walking Murphy home, probably undoing all the grooming work that had just been done. I was pulling out my phone to call home and let my mother know that the corn—not to mention me and the dog—were going to be a little late, when a car slowed to a stop next to me.

It was a slightly battered SUV, with Henry in the driver’s seat. He lowered the passenger side window and leaned across the seat. “Hi,” he said.

“Hi,” I replied. Maybe he just wanted to continue our conversation from earlier, but this seemed like an odd place to do it.

“Do you need a ride?” he asked. The minivan behind him slammed on its brakes, and then honked loudly. Henry waved him around, and I realized that this was not a moment to really consider
the question, or wonder why he was asking after he’d so effectively shot me down less than an hour before.

“Sure,” I replied, picking up the dog and opening the passenger door. I got into the car and slammed the door, looking over at him as he shifted the car into gear. “Thanks. The dog hasn’t mastered the concept of riding in the bike basket.”

“No problem,” he said, pulling back onto the road. “We’re going to the same place, after all. It seemed rude not to offer.”

I nodded and I stroked the top of the dog’s head and looked out at the trees on the side of the road. So it wasn’t anything except politeness. I really shouldn’t have been surprised. I focused on making sure Murphy’s bow—pink polka dot, again—was straight and concentrated on not speaking. I’d made such a fool of myself earlier that I didn’t see the sense in making it worse. But the silence between us felt oppressive, like it was a physical force closing in on me from all sides.

Henry might have been feeling this as well, because he turned on the radio, then turned it off when a twangy, country-sounding voice started singing about lost love. We drove without speaking for a few moments, and then he glanced over at me. “I didn’t know you had a dog,” he said.

“Yeah,” I said, scratching the spot between the dog’s ears that always made his back leg thump. “It’s kind of new.” Henry just nodded, and silence fell between us again. I was about to leave it at that,
but then, figuring that this was a safe and non-humiliating topic, took a breath and continued. “He belonged to the renters who had our house last summer.”

Henry glanced over at the dog, comprehension dawning on his face. “Yes,” he said, “that’s where I know him from. It’s been bothering me ever since I first saw him.” He paused at a stop sign, looking from the dog to me. “So why do you have him?”

“They left him behind,” I said. “We haven’t been able to track them down, so we’ve kind of just taken him in.”

“They left him,” Henry repeated, his voice strangely flat.

I nodded. “At the end of the summer,” I said. I looked over at Henry, expecting some kind of reaction. Everyone else’s responses—even my grandfather’s, over the phone—had been angry, distressed, concerned. But Henry’s hands just tightened on the wheel, something closing off in his face.

We drove the rest of the way home without speaking, and Henry passed my driveway and pulled into his, confusing the dog, who had sat up straight when we neared our house, his nails scrabbling against the glass of the window, eager to get home. He clearly hadn’t put it together that this was also the place where people dumped syrup on him. “Thanks for the ride,” I said, when Henry had turned off the engine, even though he made no move to leave his car.

“Right,” he said, his voice sounding far away. “Sure.” I looked over at him, wondering what I’d said, or if this was just the residual
tension from earlier. It seemed that in my efforts to put the past behind us, I’d unwittingly made things even more uncomfortable. I started to say something—anything—to try to get us back to a more amicable place, when the dog started full-on whining, standing up on my lap, straining to get back home again, which must have seemed extra frustrating now that it was so close.

I pushed open the door and slid out of the car, dropping the dog down to the ground, where he immediately started pulling against his leash. I was about to say something else to Henry, but he was still sitting in the driver’s seat, looking lost in thought. So I just closed the door gently, and then headed up his driveway, being tugged by much more force than I would have thought a small dog was capable of, wondering what had just happened.

An hour later, I was sitting on the front porch with a glass of Diet Coke, extra ice, shucking the corn for dinner. My siblings were with me, and they were, technically, supposed to be helping. But instead, Gelsey was doing her ballet exercises using the porch railing as a barre and Warren was pacing back and forth, barely avoiding getting whacked in the face by Gelsey’s
grands battements
, peppering me with questions about his upcoming date.

“And she said yes?” Warren asked, as I peeled back the green husk from a ear of corn, exposing the yellow and white kernels underneath. I felt my stomach growl just looking at it. Fresh corn
was one of the best things about the summer, and Henson’s corn was always spectacular. I dropped the husk into the paper grocery bag resting at my feet, then looked up and gave my brother a look.

“Yes,” I said, for what had to be the eighth time. “I asked her if she wanted to go to the movie on Friday, she said yes, and I took the dog and left.”

“And you’re sure she knew it was with me?” Warren asked. I met Gelsey’s eye just before she sank down into a
grand plié
. She gave me a tiny smile before looking away, stretching her arm over her head.

“I’m sure,” I said firmly. “You have a date. You’re welcome.” I shook my head, wondering if I’d done the right thing. After all, Warren and Wendy sounded like some kind of terrible folk duo. Not to mention the fact that she was now going to be subject to my brother’s endless wellspring of trivia.

“Right,” Warren said, as though just now realizing I had something to do with this. “Thank you so much, Taylor. If there’s something I can do to repay you—”

“There is,” I said, handing him the half-shucked ear of corn, and picking up my Diet Coke glass—I was due for a refill. “Finish these.” I headed in, through the screened-in porch to the kitchen. My mother was slicing up tomatoes, and I recognized the fixings for hamburgers on the grill.

“Corn done?” she asked as I opened the fridge to retrieve my Diet Coke.

“More or less,” I said, glancing out to the porch, where it looked like Warren was talking to Gelsey, wearing a dreamy expression, but not actually accomplishing anything.

“More or less what?” my father asked, walking into the kitchen. He was holding the dog tucked in the crook of his arm and he looked a little rumpled, the way he always did when he woke up from his nap. He had also stopped dressing as though he was going to be called into the office at any moment, and today was wearing an American Bar Association T-shirt with his khakis. Without meaning to, I looked behind him to the calendar on the fridge, and saw that we had somehow ended up in the middle of June. Like every year, the summer was moving much too quickly—but I now had more of a reason to need it to slow down than just not wanting to go back to school.

“The corn,” my mother said, bringing me back to the present moment as she turned down the heat on one of the burners.

“Oh,
shucks
,” my father said, his pun expression spreading over his thin face. I smiled, and it looked like my mother was trying not to. “Oh, I’m sorry,” he said, with mock contrition, “was that too
corny
? Personally, I thought it was a-
maize
-ing.”

“Enough,” my mother said, shaking her head, even though she was laughing. “We need to get these burgers on the grill.” She left the kitchen, brushing my father’s arm lightly with her fingers as she passed, and walked onto the porch, where I could hear her telling Warren to get a move on.

“And how was your day?” my dad asked, turning to me. “Did you do great things?”

I smiled at that, pretty sure that serving people sodas and fries didn’t count. “I don’t know about that,” I said. “But I did get these.” I crossed to the table and handed him one of the movie night posters. “What do you think?” I asked, uncharacteristically nervous as I watched him reading it.

“Did you pick the movie?” my dad asked, his voice sounding a little hoarse.

“I did,” I said, and my father nodded, his eyes not meeting mine, but still on the poster. “You said it was your favorite,” I said after a minute, when he still hadn’t spoken. “And that you’d never seen it on the big screen…”

My dad cleared his throat and looked up at me. “Thanks, kid,” he said. He looked back at the poster. “This is great. I can’t believe you did this for me.”

I nodded, then stared down at the kitchen floor tiles. What I couldn’t somehow bring myself to say was all I could think about—that I had done it because I loved him and wanted to make him happy, and I had wanted him to see his favorite movie again. But implicit in that was what was staring me in the face every time I looked at the calendar—that this would probably be the last time he would see it. That it would, most likely, be one of the last movies he ever saw. I swallowed hard before I felt like I could speak again.
“And,” I said, trying to keep my voice upbeat, “Warren has a date to the movie.”

“Does he now?” my dad asked. He jostled the dog in his arm. “Does that mean he’ll stop tormenting this poor thing?”

“Let’s ask him,” I said, heading out of the kitchen. My father followed behind me out to the porch where Gelsey was now stretching, her foot up on the porch railing, and her head bent toward her knee at an angle that, no matter how many times I’d seen it, always made me wince.

“Shoulders back,” my mother said, and I saw Gelsey make the correction. My dad crossed over to sit next to Warren, who appeared to still be holding the same ear of corn that I’d left him with. I couldn’t help but notice that my dad looked a little winded by the trip from the kitchen to the porch, that he already needed to rest from it. He settled the dog, who seemed more than happy to just be toted around in the crook of his arm, and smiled at my brother.