Summer People (29 page)

“I'll be off before then,” Nathan assured him. Using the phone in the living room, he cleared his throat and dialed Leah's number. His blood jumped when she answered.

“Nathan! Oh my God, how are you?”

He inhaled deeply and almost laughed. “I'm all right.” He told her about Ellen's accident the way he'd practiced telling the story to his father, and he had her attention for a while. But maybe he made the story too long, or too unnecessarily detailed, because near the end he heard her whisper something to one of the kids.

“So,” Nathan concluded.

After a moment, Leah said, “That's so sad! And scary! Were you scared?”

“Yeah, I was a little bit.”

“I would have been terrified. I probably would have run out of the house screaming.”

“No, you wouldn't.”

“How is she doing now?”

“She's doing okay. It looks like there's a decent chance she's going to recover enough to walk and talk again. But she's not going to do it here. They don't know how long it's going to take for her to get back to normal or even how much she's going to recover, so Glen wants to fly her back to Cleveland. He was talking about doing it tomorrow, but I think he's probably going to wait until next week.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah, so I may not be here much longer.”

“You have to go home when she does?”

“Yeah, I guess. I would have to get the car back to them, anyway.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah.”

There followed a heavy silence. Then Leah said, “Well, swallow it and go to bed.”

Nathan's mouth hung open. But it turned out she was not talking to him. Leah said, “I'm sorry. Meghan has an ear infection, so I have to give her her medicine.”

“What have you been doing since I last saw you?”

“Mostly taking the kids to the beach. Meghan can't go in the water, so I've been making loads of sand castles with her. I usually ask them, ‘Don't you want to lie on this nice towel, work on your tan, maybe read some of my
Cosmo
?' But they always want to make castles. I'm getting pretty good at making them.”

Nathan said, “I came over last night, but Rachel said you weren't there.”

“Yeah, I didn't see your car, so some people were getting together over at Ethan's and I went over there.”

“Who's Ethan?”

“I think you met him at Thayer's party that night? Brown hair. He was getting into the hot tub?”

Nathan remembered a young man with a sculpted chest and lantern jaw. “So what did you do over there?”

“Just ordered pizza and hung out. He's having a party tonight if you want to come.”

“This is the same guy who's friends with Thayer, right? The same guy who was with him when he was trying to kick my ass?”

“Yes, but he's really nice, though,” Leah said, laughing embarrassedly. “I think you'd like him. He was the one who was trying to get them to stop, remember?”

Nathan looked through the French doors at the sailboats tacking across the slate-blue water. Deciding he was too tired to argue, he said, “I don't know. I'm pretty beat. Do you feel like just taking a walk or something?”

“I would, but I think this is going to be one of the biggest parties of the summer.”

“I'm pretty exhausted,” Nathan said.

“I'll bet. You've had a super-stressful couple of days.”

“Hello?” Ralph's voice came on the line.

Nathan said, “I'm getting off in two minutes.”

The line clicked.

To demonstrate that he was not afraid of Thayer or his friends, Nathan took down directions to the party. “So should I expect to see you?” she asked, and Nathan wondered if she felt anything like his own heartsickness when he told her he didn't know.

 

A
n hour later Ralph stood in the living room wearing a white T-shirt, cutoff army pants, and a pair of blue-and-orange running shoes. He said he'd been jogging for almost a year, and although he still carried a stubborn paunch, he'd already lost twenty pounds. Nathan sat in Ellen's chair, eating spinach casserole, while Ralph ran in place in front of the television, slapping his knees.

Not long after Ralph left, a car pulled into the driveway, so Nathan
turned off
Entertainment Tonight
and picked up
Audubon
magazine. Glen entered carrying a Gilman's grocery bag and two bottles of wine. They greeted each other and Nathan asked about Ellen's condition, but Glen did not seem in a good mood.

“I think she was just getting tired toward the end of the day,” he muttered, glumly. “Having young men around seems to liven up my mother, so I think you and Ralph probably saw her at her best this afternoon.”

In the kitchen, Glen uncorked a bottle and unpacked groceries.

“Ralph went out jogging, and he and I ate some of this casserole that Kendra Garfield cooked for us,” Nathan said, opening the door of the refrigerator.

After Glen microwaved the casserole, they both walked out onto the porch. Thin streaks of clouds lay on top of the horizon, reflecting the salmon glow of the setting sun. Glen glanced at the grill, but if he noticed the ashen streak on the clapboards, he said nothing about it as he sat down. Placing the plate on the small wooden table Nathan had pulled over for him, he raised his glass and stared at Nathan. “To my mother's recovery.”

Nathan raised his glass and drank.

Glen took the first bite of his casserole and said, “Mother had a surprise visit this afternoon from Bill McAlister.”

Nathan's heart skipped, and he worried that this was the beginning of a conversation he had been dreading almost since Glen's arrival. “Yeah?”

“Have you and Mother seen much of him?”

“Well, we haven't seen a
whole
lot of him, but he came over every once in a while, and I never really knew how to handle the situation. Because your mother would know he was there, and clearly be interested in seeing him, and it would have been really awkward to ask him to leave.”

Glen nodded as he chewed. “I don't think there's much you could have done in those situations.”

Nathan felt both relieved and aggravated by this reply. If he had known Glen felt this way, Nathan could have saved himself a great deal of hand-wringing. But he wiped his mouth and smiled good-naturedly. “How did you handle him today?”

“I let him try and talk with Mother, but she was already very tired, so we ended up talking a fair amount about you.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“I don't think he's my biggest fan.”

“No, I don't think he is either.”

Nathan's face fell. He had half-expected Glen to protest, and consequently, he felt short of breath. “What did he say?”

“Well, he had a very different account of what happened at his wife's house that day with Ellen, for one thing—he said you told his wife to fuck off.”

“That's a lie.”

“He also said that both his wife and his step-grandson thought you tried to hit her with the car.”

“That's a lie, too.”

“Why didn't you tell me that's why those boys attacked you?”

“I did tell you.”

“You told me that they were angry—that Bill's grandson was angry—because you had brought Ellen over to his grandmother's house, not because they thought you cursed at her or tried to hit her with my mother's car.”

Nathan nodded. “I should have told you…but I was just…Mr. McAlister talked about them maybe pressing charges for this thing that never happened, and I was just in this mode of not telling anybody anything more than was necessary.”

Glen stared at Nathan with blue eyes that revealed more intensity and gravitas than Nathan would have thought possible from someone born into a life of ease and privilege. Glen said, “I don't know what to believe at this point. I'm more troubled by his suggestion that you weren't very attentive to my mother this summer.”

“That's definitely not true.”

“Then why was that asshole able to rattle off about half a dozen parties where my mother was invited but somehow didn't show up? You took her
to
his
party—the one party I told you I would rather my mother not have attended—but somehow managed not to bring her to anyone else's party this summer?”

“I didn't know how to stop her from going to Mr. McAlister's party, short of standing in front of the door and preventing her from going!” Nathan exclaimed. “And the other parties…I don't know what happened. Sometimes when I got to the post office, the parties had already happened, but Ellen was also tired a lot, and said she didn't feel like going.”

“Bill says it was probably because you wanted to go out with this girlfriend you have here.”

Nathan shook his head. “That's not why.”

“He also said you were planning to go out with her the night my mother fell?”

Nathan was stunned. He took a moment to figure out how Mr. McAlister could have known. Then in a quieter voice he admitted, “That's true.”

“Well, then, how lucky are we? How lucky is my mother?”

“I was planning to go out after your mother was asleep,” Nathan explained, his indignation suddenly rising to match Glen's. “I was with her practically every conscious moment of her day, and when she was asleep, yeah, I sometimes took a walk with this girl Leah. But you obviously thought that your mother was okay enough to be able to send her up here with just—”

“She isn't okay!” Glen shouted.

“Well, then why the fuck did you send me up here with her alone? You think
I
would have been responsible if I hadn't been around to hear your mother that evening?
You
would have been responsible! Did you expect me to camp outside her bedroom every time she went to sleep?” Nathan leaned forward and felt like standing up from his chair.

“I expected you to take care of her.”

“I expected when I came up here that I would be helping out someone who was mentally stable. That wasn't the case, and I sure as fuck should have been told.”

“If you didn't think that was the case, then why the fuck didn't you tell me?”

Nathan opened his mouth, but no words came to him immediately. This was the question that had haunted him almost since his very first morning in Ellen's home. He answered, “I don't know. I wanted to believe she was okay.”

Glen observed Nathan a moment, then drank the last of his wine. The crimson flush of his face began to fade, and he pushed himself back in his chair.

Silence opened between them, and Nathan stared out at the sunlight reflecting across the surface of the harbor. “I'm very fond of your mother and I did the best job I could.”

“All right, it's over now, anyway,” Glen said, waving his hand dismissively as he looked out toward the ocean. “I was just hoping this could have been a more enjoyable time for her.”

“We did have some fun together.”

“I'm sure you did,” Glen admitted. He went back into the house to microwave his cooled casserole. When he returned, with a refilled wineglass, his face was no longer clouded with resentment. He told Nathan about a long, reassuring conversation he had finally had with Dr. Sahni about his mother's condition. The doctor said that although ideally he would like for her to stay a few days longer, he understood the situation with the medically equipped planes, and he didn't expect she would have any complications on the trip back to Cleveland. Glen had been on the phone with the airline for the rest of the day.

“We're leaving the hospital tomorrow at noon, and we'll leave the Portland airport at two o'clock,” Glen said.

Nathan managed to utter, “All right.”

“I wish we could wait longer, but I've got to get back into the field and Dr. Sahni doesn't think we should have any problems. Another thing is that if we do it tomorrow, the airline can provide us with a doctor on the plane.”

“That's good.”

Glen lifted his glass and pushed back the little table in front of him in order to climb out of his chair and sit with legs outstretched on the wooden floor. It was a boyish gesture, and Nathan waited for him to explain why he preferred sitting this way. A bad back, perhaps, or the need for better circulation in his legs. But apparently he was just making himself more comfortable. Propping himself up with one arm, he sipped his wine and said, “Regardless of Bill's complaints, I am grateful you were able to come up here with my mother this summer. She wouldn't have been able to come up at all if it weren't for you, and you probably saved her life.”

Nathan was recovering from the fact that they had been shouting at each other just moments earlier, and he marveled at how relaxed Glen appeared, when his own heart still felt constricted with apprehension. “I just did what anybody would have done,” Nathan said, repeating the words of soldiers and local news heroes, and immediately wishing he had said something else.

Glen was frowning as if deep in thought. “How long were you supposed to be here with her, again?”

“Until Labor Day.”

“Well, remind me before I go, and I'll write you a check for the rest of the summer.”

Nathan's lips puckered with surprise, and he said, “That…that's not necessary.”

“No, that's what you were planning on, and you probably made all sorts of arrangements, so that's what you should get.”

“Well…that's very generous,” Nathan said. He felt as if a tremendous burden was lifting from him, and he might have laughed if he hadn't worried that Glen would take it the wrong way. Even if Glen still thought he was a fuck-up and was only offering the payment because he wanted to do right by Nathan's father, at least it would be a while before Nathan had to worry about money again.

They were taking their glasses into the kitchen when Ralph returned
from his jog. His flushed face and stubble gave his chin a faintly strawberry appearance, and the darkened hourglass of perspiration on his shirt revealed dense swirls of hair. He greeted them and opened the door of the refrigerator, stared inside, then walked over to the sink and filled a glass with water. Glen had started to tell Nathan more about the details of the plan for the next day, but he stopped and repeated the information so that Ralph was aware of it, too.