Second Chance Summer (37 page)

“Hey,” I called to him, shading my eyes with my hand against the sun.

“Hi, yourself,” he said, reaching me and sitting down on the dock next to me. I saw his eyes widen at the sight of my bikini, and I laughed as I leaned over and kissed him. He tasted sweet, like buttercream frosting, and I had a feeling he’d been on icing duty that day at work.

When we broke apart, he reached for his backpack and unzipped it. He pulled out a square green bakery box, the smallest one that Borrowed Thyme used, and held it out to me. I had a feeling that I should protest, just out of politeness or out of respect for his dad’s profits, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to do it convincingly. As I took
the small box, I found myself smiling. There were very definite benefits to dating someone who worked in a bakery, I had found out. “What is it today?” I asked as I opened the lid and peered inside. A cupcake sat inside, yellow cake with white icing. A
T
had been placed on top of the icing with mini chocolate chips. “This looks great,” I said, feeling my stomach growl just looking at it.

“Lemon cupcake,” he said. “And my dad’s new lemon-vanilla frosting. He wants your input.”

“Happily,” I said, closing the box carefully. I had learned the hard way that if I didn’t wait until after dinner—and then share with my siblings—it was Henry who bore the brunt of it the next time he came by the house. “Thank you.”

“And, um,” Henry said as he pulled out a small plastic bag filled with cookies, “these are for your dad. Double chocolate chip, fresh-baked.”

“Thanks,” I said, as I placed the bag next to my cupcake box, feeling a now-familiar lump start to rise in my throat. When I’d told Henry about the fact that my dad wasn’t eating much, he’d taken to counteracting this (along with his father, I’d later learned) by trying to find the one dessert or bread that might bring my father’s appetite back again. Despite their best efforts, this didn’t seem to be working. My dad always made a big show over the treats, oohing and ahhing, but he only had a bite or two before claiming that they were just too good to keep all to himself.

My father was doing about the same—that is, doing a little bit worse every day, even though it wasn’t possible to see until I looked back and realized that, this time last week, he hadn’t slept from afternoon until dinnertime and had been able to walk up the stairs without Warren’s help, my mother walking behind, ready to catch him if he tumbled backward. He’d stopped reading late into the night, and his voice, the one I used to be able to hear across the house, had continued to diminish, and now I could sometimes barely hear him across the dining room table.

We were still doing our diner breakfasts twice a week, even though he’d taken to just ordering toast, and even then, only eating a few bites of it, no matter how Angela scolded him. But even though he didn’t eat much, we continued to do our questions. I couldn’t remember how it had happened, but we had moved past the questions on the placemat quiz, and had just started talking. I had always loved my father, of course—even though I hadn’t yet found the right moment to tell him this. But it wasn’t until we started having our breakfasts together that I really got to know him.

I learned about how my dad had almost gotten fired from his first law job, and about the trip around Europe he took after college, and how the first time he’d seen my mother, he’d fallen in love. The one thing that I had been most surprised by, though, he’d told me two days before. We’d been talking about our shared past, all those childhood moments that I, at one point, had been sick of hearing
about. It wasn’t until now, when every day I had with my father was suddenly numbered, that I realized just how precious they had been. A thousand moments that I had just taken for granted—mostly because I had assumed that there would be a thousand more. My father had just finished telling the story (even though I’d heard it at least twenty times) about how I’d come to his office for Take Your Daughter to Work Day when I was six and had drawn all over a very important piece of evidence, when he stopped laughing and just looked at me over his coffee cup.

“Here’s one I bet you don’t know,” he said, giving me a smile. He was thinner than ever, and his skin continued to darken from yellow to a darker tan, like he had had a very unfortunate experience at a tanning bed. It made his teeth look startlingly white in contrast.

I still couldn’t get used to the physical changes that were happening so quickly in my father, proof that there was something very, very bad going on inside of him. Something that wouldn’t stop until it killed him.

But these changes didn’t hit home until I saw the proof, like in a picture, or saw the way that other people looked at him. My father was attracting attention now, in a way that made me feel simultaneously embarrassed, angry, and protective. Other people in the diner would stare just a moment too long, looking back to their eggs quickly when I met their eyes.

“What’s that?” I asked, moving my cup to the edge of the table so that Angela would give me a refill the next time she came by. I didn’t really even want more coffee, but the more filled my cup was, the longer our time here would be. These mornings were the only time I had alone with my father, and I had started trying to extend them as long as possible.

My dad smiled and leaned back in his seat, wincing slightly as he did so. “When you were first born,” he said. “I used to go into your room and watch you sleep. I was terrified that you weren’t breathing.”

“Really?” I asked. I’d never heard this one, and as the middle child, I had very few stories that were mine alone, so I was fairly sure I’d heard them all.

“Oh, yes,” my dad said. “With your brother, we never had to worry. He was wailing every few seconds. I don’t think your poor mother got more than five hours’ sleep that first year. But you slept through the night right away. And it used to terrify me.”

Angela arrived with her pitcher, filling up my coffee and nudging my father’s toast closer to him, as though the reason he hadn’t eaten it was that he hadn’t noticed its presence on the table.

“So,” he continued, taking a sip of his coffee, “I used to just stand in your doorway, listening to you breathe. Making sure that you were still with us. Just counting your breaths until I was convinced that you were sticking with us for a bit.”

And then Angela had dropped off the check and we’d moved on to other things—how he’d driven across the country after high school and got lost in Missouri, and how I had actually figured out the truth about Santa Claus when I’d noticed he had the same wrapping technique—sloppy, with masking tape—as my father. But the image of him standing in my doorway, watching over my breaths in the first few weeks of my life, had stayed with me.

Now though, I was on the dock with Henry in the sunshine, and that seemed very far away. “We’ll see if these do the trick,” I said, setting the cookies aside. When they were out of the way, I leaned over to kiss him again. One of the best things about kissing Henry was that it could make the rest of the world—like my dad, and what was happening to him—go away for a little while. It never totally disappeared, but like a TV you could hear in the next room, I was able to think about it less when Henry’s lips were on mine and his arms were around me.

“So,” Henry said. It was a while later, and we were taking a break. We were stretched out together, and I was lying in what I had already come to think of as my spot—there was just a place where I seemed to fit perfectly. His arm was around my shoulders, and my head resting on his chest, one of my legs thrown over his, our feet tangled together. “Do you have any plans for the Fourth?”

I hadn’t been expecting this question, and I propped myself up to look at him. “I think we’re watching the fireworks,” I said. “Out here,
probably.” There was always a fireworks display over the lake, and we’d usually gathered on the dock, as a family, to watch it.

“Great,” he said. “Well, don’t make any plans for afterward, okay? I’ve got a surprise.”

I propped myself up even farther, looking into his eyes. “A surprise?” I asked, not quite able to keep the excitement out of my voice. “What is it?”

“You should get Warren to tell you the definition of the word
surprise
,” he said as I felt myself smile. “It involves not revealing what something is.”

We lay there together for a little longer, watching the sun over the lake as it finally started to go down, and twilight started to fall all around us, the fireflies starting to wink in the grass. When I felt the first mosquito bite me, I slapped it away and sat up, checking the time, and realizing that I should probably head in for dinner.

“Time to go?” Henry asked, and I nodded, standing up and extending a hand to help him up. He took it, but didn’t really exert much pull on it as he stood and I zipped up a sweatshirt over my bikini. I gathered up my towel, sunglasses, and desserts, and we walked across the dock together, holding hands.

When we reached the back of my house, he squeezed my hand. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said.

“See you then,” I said, feeling how wide I was smiling, but
knowing I wouldn’t be able to stop myself. He leaned down and kissed me, and I stood on my tiptoes to kiss him back.

“Ugh.” We broke apart, and I turned to see Davy standing a few feet in front of us, Murphy at his feet. Davy made a face. “That’s disgusting.”

“You won’t always think so,” Henry assured him. “Were you walking the dog again?”

Davy nodded and held out the leash to me reluctantly. Ever since my father had given him the go-ahead to walk the dog, Davy had taken his responsibilities very seriously, coming over to walk the dog several times a day. It had gotten so that Murphy was exhausted by early evening, falling asleep on my dad’s lap immediately after dinner.

“Thanks,” I said, taking the leash from him. Davy nodded and I smiled at Henry. “See you,” I said.

“Bye,” he said, smiling back, causing Davy to groan. Henry walked toward his house, with Davy running to catch up with him, already talking about something.

“And how was your day?” I asked as I picked up the dog, who looked utterly wiped out. I held Murphy, who seemed thrilled to get a little bit of a break, under my arm and scratched his ears as I headed up toward the house. “Did you do great things?”

The first thing I noticed as I headed up the porch steps was that there was music playing. And not one of my mother’s ballets or her
classical music—old-school rock. I dropped the dog on the porch, unhooked his leash, and opened the screen door. Murphy trotted inside, making a beeline for his water dish; a second later I could hear the sound of him slurping.

I stepped inside the house, and the music got even louder. It sounded vaguely familiar, like maybe I’d heard it on an oldies station or in a movie soundtrack. I dropped the cookies and cupcake on the kitchen counter and continued on inside, noticing that the house seemed to be fairly empty, and turning some lights on as I went. I found the source of the music and my dad at the same time. He was sitting on the ground in the TV room, an old turntable in front of him and stacks of records surrounding him.

“Hi,” I said, turning on the light, and making us both wince slightly as the room lit up. He was wearing sweatpants and a T-shirt, but I noticed that his hair was parted as sharply as ever.

“Hi, kid,” he said, starting to cough. After it had passed, he cleared his throat and continued. “What’s the news?”

“No news,” I said, smiling at him. I looked around at the records, and at the one spinning on the turntable. I had to say, I liked this better than the opera. I knelt down and picked up one of the sleeves—it was for someone named Charlie Rich. The album art—and his beard—both looked very seventies. “What is all this?”

He smiled at me and turned down the volume of a song about California. “I was just puttering around the workshop,” he said, “and
I found my old record player and albums. And I was just going to go through them, but then I started listening to them….” His voice trailed off as he picked up one of the albums and turned it over.

“So who is this?” I asked, as the song ended and the next one began, slower and softer this time.

“This,” my dad said, reaching behind him and wincing, picking up the album cover and handing it to me, “is Jackson Browne.”

“Did you used to listen to him?” I asked as I looked down at the album cover art, a car sitting under a single streetlight.

“All the time,” my dad said, smiling faintly, as though remembering it. “It drove my father crazy.”

“So turn it up,” I said, sitting next to him and leaning back against the couch leg.

My dad cleared his throat, then pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and coughed into it. He folded it carefully and replaced it. “You don’t have to listen to this,” he said, giving me a smile. “I know it’s not exactly your style.”

“I like it,” I protested. And I did—the lyrics seemed almost like real poetry, layered with meaning in a way that the Bentley Boys’ songs certainly weren’t. “Tell me about this song.”

My father leaned back against the couch leg as well and just listened for a moment. “This is a song that I always liked, but started to like a lot more after I met your mother,” he said, and I could hear the smile in his voice. “It’s called ‘For A Dancer.’”

I smiled at that, and we sat there as it got darker and darker outside, me and my father, listening to the music he’d loved when he was my age. I knew that soon, the moment would be over—my mother and Warren and Gelsey would return home, bringing with them noise and news and bustle. But for now, there was my father and me, and a moment that I didn’t try to preserve, but just let happen, as I sat next to him, listening to the song, as the record spun and the music played on.

chapter thirty-one