Second Chance Summer (7 page)

“What?” I asked, hearing how defensive I sounded, as I straightened a teaspoon.

My mother sighed. “Can you stop it with the pouting, please?”

If there was a sentence designed to make me pout even more, I didn’t know what it was. Even though I didn’t want to, I could feel myself scowling. “I’m not pouting.”

My mom glanced through the screened-in porch out to the water, then looked back at me. “This summer is going to be hard enough for all of us without this… attitude.”

I closed the silverware drawer harder than I probably needed to, now feeling guilty as well as annoyed. I’d never been my mother’s favorite—that was Gelsey—but we’d always gotten along fairly well.

“I know you didn’t want to come here,” she said, her tone softening. “But we have to try and make the best of it. All right?”

I pulled the drawer open, then pushed it closed again. I’d been in this house for only a few hours, but already I was feeling claustrophobic. And the presence next door of an ex-boyfriend who hated me—with good reason—wasn’t helping. “I just,” I said, a little haltingly, “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do here all summer. And—”

“Mom!” Gelsey stomped into the kitchen. “The crib is still in my room. And the lights aren’t working.”

“The Murphys probably took the lightbulbs, too,” she muttered, shaking her head. “I’ll go look.” She walked out behind Gelsey, her hand resting on my sister’s shoulder, but stopped at the kitchen threshold and turned back to me. “Taylor, we can talk about this later. In the meantime, why don’t you or Warren go pick up a pizza? It doesn’t look like I’m going to be cooking anything here tonight.”

She left and I stayed in the kitchen for a few minutes longer, my eyes drawn to the plastic orange prescription pill bottles that lined the counter. I looked at them for a moment longer, then headed off in search of my dad, since I knew wherever he was, Warren would be as well.

I found them both—not that it was a very long search, in a house this small—sitting around the dining table, my father with his glasses on, a stack of papers and his laptop in front of him, Warren with a huge book that he was frowning importantly at, making notes on a legal pad as he read. Warren had gotten in early-decision to Penn, and was already planning on the pre-law track, but to look at him, you’d think that he was already an equity partner, and that law school—not to mention college—would just be a formality.

“Hey,” I said, poking my brother in the back as I took the seat next to my dad. “Mom said to pick up pizza.”

Warren frowned. “Me?” My father shot him a look and he got to his feet. “I mean, sure. What’s the name of the place downtown?”

I turned to my dad, and so did Warren. My brother might have had a photographic memory, but it was my father who always remembered the important things—events, dates, names of pizza restaurants.

“The Humble Pie,” my dad said. “If it’s still there, that is.”

“I’ll find out,” Warren said, straightening his polo shirt and walking to the door. He stopped after a few steps and turned to us. “You know that pizza was developed as a way to use leftovers, starting in Italy, in the fifteenth—”

“Son,” my dad said, cutting him off. “Maybe over dinner?”

“You got it,” Warren said, flushing slightly as he walked out. A moment later, I heard the front door slam and the sound of the car engine starting.

My dad looked at me over his computer screen and raised an eyebrow. “So, kid. Your mother really asked your brother to get the pizza?”

I tried to hide a smile as I pulled at a loose thread at the end of my T-shirt and shrugged. “She may have suggested either of us. I delegated.”

He shook his head, smiling slightly as he looked back down at his papers. He hadn’t stopped working when he was diagnosed, claiming that he was just going to finish up a few loose ends, but I knew that he wouldn’t have been happy if he wasn’t working. He’d been a partner at his law firm, specializing in appeals. He went into
the office every Saturday, and most Sundays as well. It was just normal that he was only at dinner one or two nights a week, working the rest of the time. I’d gotten used to the phone ringing late at night or early in the morning. I’d gotten used to hearing the faint hum of the garage door opening and closing at four a.m. as he headed into the office early, someone’s last hope at a second chance.

“What are you working on?” I asked, after he’d been typing in silence for a few minutes.

“A brief,” he said, glancing up at me. “I’ve been working on it for a few weeks now. Would have had it done sooner, but…” He let the sentence trail off, and I knew what he meant. A few weeks ago—three to be exact—we’d found out what was wrong with him, which had derailed everything for a while.

“That doesn’t sound so brief,” I said, trying to lighten the mood, and was rewarded when my dad smiled.

“Nice,” he said approvingly. My father loved puns, the more groan-inducing the better, and I was the only one who tolerated them—and, for that matter, tried to respond in kind. “I just…” He looked at the screen, shaking his head. “I just want to get this right. It looks like it might be my legacy.”

I nodded, looking down at the scratches on the wood table, totally unsure how to respond to that. We all knew what was happening with my dad, but we hadn’t really talked about it since my birthday, and I had no idea what to say.

“Well,” my dad said more quietly, after a pause. “Back to it.” He started typing again, and even though I’d intended to leave and start unpacking, it suddenly felt wrong to just leave my dad working alone on his last case. So I sat next to him, the silence punctuated only by the tapping of the keyboard, until we heard the crunching of the car’s tires on the gravel, and my mother’s voice, calling for us to come to dinner.

The bathroom wasn’t big enough.

This became massively apparent when we all ended up trying to get ready for bed—what Warren called his “evening ablutions,”—at the same time.

“You didn’t leave me any space,” I said. I nudged past Gelsey, who was brushing her teeth with excruciating slowness, to look in the medicine cabinet. It had been filled with Warren’s contact paraphernalia, Gelsey’s retainer case and lip balms, and too many tubes of toothpaste to make any logical sense.

“You should have gotten here sooner,” Warren said from the doorway, making the already-small space seem smaller. “Can you hurry?” he asked Gelsey, who just gave him a toothpaste-filled smile and started brushing even more slowly, which I wouldn’t have believed was possible without seeing it.

“I didn’t know that I would have to claim cabinet space,” I snapped, as I shoved some of his boxes of contacts to the side, trying to make room for my face wash and makeup remover.

Gelsey finally finished brushing her teeth and rinsed off her toothbrush, placing it carefully in the holder. “You can keep stuff in the shower if you want,” she said with a shrug as she pulled back the striped forest-green shower curtain that had been there forever. “I’m sure there’s some room—” Gelsey stopped talking abruptly, and started to scream.

I saw why a second later—there was a huge spider crouched in the corner of the tub. It looked like a daddy longlegs, which, I’d learned long ago on some nature walk, were actually not dangerous. But that didn’t mean that I necessarily wanted to see a spider the size of my head just hanging out in our tub. I took step back, and bumped into Warren, who was also scrambling out of the way.

“Daddy!” Gelsey shrieked, bolting for the door.

When my father appeared a few moments later, my mother behind him, the three of us were huddled around the doorway, and I was keeping my eyes on the spider in case he decided to make a break for it.

“Spider,” Warren said, pointing toward the tub.
“Pholcidae.”
My father nodded and took a step into the bathroom.

“Are you going to kill it?” Gelsey asked from where she was practically hiding behind my mother—which seemed a tad melodramatic to me.

“No,” my father said. “I’m just going to need a piece of paper and a glass.”

“On it,” Warren said, hustling out and returning with one of my
magazines and a water glass. He handed them across the threshold to my dad, and then the rest of us all hung back. It wasn’t only arachnophobia—my father took up almost the whole of the small bathroom. He’d gone through college on a football scholarship, playing linebacker, and still was big, despite some of the weight he’d lost recently—tall, with broad shoulders and a booming voice, trained over years to carry across courtrooms to jurors’ ears.

A moment later, my dad emerged from behind the shower curtain, holding the glass pressed to the magazine. The spider scrambled frantically from one end of the glass to the other, over the features of the starlet who adorned the cover. My dad grimaced as he straightened up, and my mother immediately took the magazine from him and thrust it out to me.

“Taylor, set this free outside, would you?” She took a step toward my father, and asked, her voice more quiet, “Are you okay, Robin?”

While Robin was my dad’s full name, he went by Rob, and the only times I heard him called Robin was when my mom was angry or worried, or my grandfather was visiting.

My father was still wincing, and I didn’t think I could stand to see it, something I’d almost never seen before—my dad in pain. Magazine and trapped spider in hand, I turned away, glad for an excuse to leave.

I headed out the front door and down the steps to the gravel driveway, where I lifted the glass. Expecting the spider to crawl away
immediately, I was surprised when it stayed where it was, frozen over This Summer’s Top 10 Beauty Tips. “Move,” I said as I jiggled the magazine, and finally it got the message and skittered away. I shook out the magazine, and was about to go back inside, but the thought of the expression on my dad’s face caused me to leave the magazine and glass on the porch and walk down the driveway toward the road.

I was barefoot, and every step made me flinch, reminding me just how long it had been since I’d been able to do this without shoes on—how long, in fact, since I’d been back here. When I was halfway down the driveway, I reached our bearbox—a wooden, weighted contraption designed to keep the bears from getting into the trash—and had to stop and give my feet a little rest, noticing the fireflies’ lights starting to blink on and off in the grass. Then I practically hopped my way to the end of the driveway, and stepped onto the paved road.

Though I didn’t want to, I found myself gravitating next door. The lights were on in what I now knew was Henry’s house, spilling out from the windows into squares on the gravel driveway. I looked at the lighted windows, wondering if he was home, and if so, which room was his, when I caught myself and realized I was being ridiculous. I looked away and noticed, for the first time, that there was a tent pitched next to the house, a round camping one. As I stared, the tent lit up, throwing whoever was inside into silhouette. I turned and took a few steps up the street quickly, walking nonchalantly, as
though I were just out for an evening stargazing session.

Which actually seemed like a pretty good idea, I decided, as I took in the moon above me, huge in the sky, sending sheets of light down onto the road. I tipped my head back to search for stars.

I’d loved them ever since I was little, and my grandfather, a naval officer, had sent me a book about constellations. I hadn’t ever been good at identifying them, but the stories stuck with me. Lovers exiled to the ends of the universe, goddesses punished for vanity and hung upside down. Whenever the night was clear enough, I’d look up, trying to make out patterns in the sky, trying to see what had caused those long-ago people to tell stories about what they saw. The stars were always easier to see in Lake Phoenix, and tonight they seemed to take over the entire sky. I just stared up at them until it felt like I could breathe, maybe for the first time that day. Maybe for the first time in the last three weeks.

I really didn’t know how I was going to get through the summer. It had only been a few hours, but it already felt like more than I could handle. It was like we were all just pretending that nothing was happening. We weren’t even talking about the reason that we had all decamped there. Instead, we’d spent dinner listening to Warren go on about how pizza was invented.

I turned to head back to the house when I stopped short. The dog from that afternoon was sitting at the edge of our driveway, where gravel met pavement. I looked up the street, to see if there
was an owner coming, leash and plastic bag in hand. The streets of Lake Phoenix were safe enough, and usually deserted enough, that people walked their dogs off the leash. The only time I’d heard about this being a problem was when the Morrisons were walking their mean poodle one night and encountered a bear, no doubt on a bearbox trash bender. Mr. and Mrs. Morrison had beat a hasty retreat, but their poodle, on the other hand—who, in addition to being mean was also apparently not too bright—seemed to think the bear was just a big dog and trotted over to say hello. At some point, the dog figured out that this was a terrible idea, and ran away, unscathed. After that, I never saw the Morrisons walking it without a leash—and a very short one, at that.

But the street tonight was quiet, no late-night walkers looking for their slightly irregular canine. I took another step, and the dog didn’t get up and move, or even stiffen. Instead, its tail thumped harder, like I was just the person it had been waiting to see. I saw that the collar was a faded blue, which meant it was most likely a boy, and that there was writing on his tag. So he had a home, he just was choosing to avoid it. At that moment, I could relate.

Wherever the dog lived, though, he obviously lived somewhere, and that somewhere, despite what he seemed to think, was not our driveway. I walked around him, and headed back to the house, figuring that the dog would be able to take care of himself. I’d gone only a few steps when I heard a faint jingling sound behind me. I turned
back and saw the dog following me. He froze in his tracks, then sat hastily, as though I wouldn’t notice that he had moved. Feeling like I was in a bizarre game of Red Light, Green Light, I pointed back at the road. “No,” I said as firmly as possible, trying to remember all the lessons from
Top Dog
. “Go.”