Fifteenth Summer

by Dalton, Michelle

  “I’m just going to get my bag from the bedroom,” I told Josh, slipping into the hall.

  When I got there, Abbie was sitting on the floor with her legs stretched out to the sides. On the rug between them were various piles of papers. They were in all different sizes, colors, and states of wrinkliness, but they all looked old.

  “What’re those?” I asked lightly as I headed for the closet.

  “Granly’s letters,” Abbie said. “Most of them to and from Grandpa.”

  I froze at the closet door and turned to stare at my sister.

  “Wh-what?” I stammered. “Why are you looking at them?”

  “Listen,” Abbie said brusquely as she slapped one of the letters into a pile, then scooped up another from a box sitting at her hip. “Mom has abdicated. We both know this quilt project of hers is not about getting all nostalgic about us as babies. It’s about avoiding thinking about Granly!”

  “Well,” I murmured, “I think it’s a little of both . . . .”

  “Whatever,” Abbie said. “You have a date with Josh, Hannah is off getting hickeys or whatever with Fasthands. And I’m here. So I might as well go through Granly’s things myself. I mean, isn’t that the point of us being here all summer?”

  I felt terrible.

  “Listen,” I said, sinking to the floor just outside her circle of paper piles. “You shouldn’t have to do that by yourself. Do you want me to say something to Mom? Or I could—”

  Abbie held up her hand to stop me.

  “You know what?” she said. Her face and voice softened. “I actually kind of like it.”

  She picked up the letter that she’d just slapped down, and smoothed it out on her leg, as if apologizing to it for the rough treatment. Then she read from it. With her head bowed and her hair spilling forward, I couldn’t see her face, but her voice sounded a little different—slower and more lilting. Less like Abbie and more like Granly.

  “ ‘Dear Artie,’ ” Abbie read. That’s what everyone had called Grandpa, though his real name had been Arthur. “ ‘It feels funny to be so looking forward to the summer when last summer was so beastly. But my New Year’s resolution was to look forward, not back, and I have been better at keeping at that than I have been at studying for my statistics exam. I really don’t believe stats have anything to do with library science, and no (boring) thing you can say will convince me otherwise. By the way, you did catch what I said about last summer, didn’t you, Artie? Now what, or whom, do you think is the reason for that?’ ”

  As Abbie read, I put my hand over my mouth without realizing it. I could just hear my grandmother saying those words, even if they were in my sister’s voice.

  But then again I couldn’t. Because that had been a Granly I never knew, the Granly who was young, writing a love letter to her boyfriend when she was supposed to be studying. And that “beastly” summer. What was that about?

  “You know what I think she’s talking about? That summer?” Abbie said as if she’d seen the question in my eyes. “I think they broke up.”

  “But we never heard about that!” I whispered, glancing at the door.

  “Well, obviously it all worked out in the end,” Abbie said with a laugh. “It’s funny, isn’t it, how someone’s story can change? Maybe when Granly wrote that letter, that was their story, that they had come close to saying good-bye to each other forever.”

  “Which would have meant no Mom,” I whispered, shaking my head in wonder. “No us.”

  “Yeah, and once they were married, who knows if they ever thought about it again. Maybe when your big picture is in place, all those bumps in the road along the way get sort of smoothed over.”

  I thought about that.

  “Do you ever feel like,” I asked, “right now, it’s nothing but bumps?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Abbie said, nodding in recognition. “Why do you think I love to swim so much? There’re no bumps in water.”

  Abbie replaced Granly’s letter in its pile and smoothed it out carefully.

  “Anyway, I think you should read these letters . . . sometime. Mom, too. When you’re ready.”

  I picked another letter up, holding the dry, crackly-feeling paper between my thumb and forefinger.

  “I . . . I might be ready.”

  Abbie shook her head.

  “I know you’re not,” she said. “But that’s okay. I am. I don’t know why I am, but I am. So I’m going to get them all organized for you in little folders, which I know Hannah will approve of, and we can take them home with us. And when you’re ready—they will be too.”

  I teetered over the piles of paper to give Abbie a thank-you hug.

  “Aren’t we huggy,” Abbie said, pushing me away with a grin. “You’re clearly getting some action.”

  “Shut up!” I whispered, glancing again at the bedroom door as I got to my feet. “You’re so gross.”

  “Maybe,” she said. “But I also know what I’m talking about.”

  I laughed as I checked myself in the mirror. I’d worn my hair half-down as a concession to Josh, with only the front sections pulled back into a big tortoiseshell clip. But there was nothing I could do about my freckles, other than smear them with tons of sunscreen and hope no more popped out after my day in the sun. I grabbed my bag, blew my sister a kiss, and met Josh out front.

  By the time we arrived at Wex Pond, which was about a two-mile walk from Sparrow Road, we were both hot and sweaty.

  Josh led me to the end of one of the rickety, rocking docks. There, bouncing against the timbers, was a shabby once-white rowboat that looked barely big enough for the two of us. The interior of the boat was blackened with dirt and a little puddle of water. There was one seat in the center that hardly looked big enough for two backsides.

  “Isn’t it great?” Josh said, jumping easily into the boat and holding out his hands so I could hand him the oars and our bags.

  “Um, do you want an honest answer?” I said as I shuffled my feet out of their flip-flops.

  “Of course not,” Josh said with a smile. He got a sly look in his eyes as he pulled a nylon picnic blanket out of his bag. He spread it out on the bottom of the boat. Then he produced a little pillow and tucked it into the back of the boat (or maybe it was the front, I couldn’t quite tell).

  “I was lying about you having to row,” Josh said. “You get to sit there while I row you around. You can pretend you’re Daisy Buchanan.”

  My mouth dropped open. “Seriously?”

  “Well, you like playing Gatsby, don’t you?” Josh held out a hand to help me climb into the boat. “And, conveniently, my English class read that book this year. If I get tired of rowing, I’ll peel you a grape.”

  I burst out laughing.

  “I’m not that much of a princess, you know,” I said. “I’m a waitress! And I’m pretty good with a garden rake.”

  “All the more reason you deserve to relax,” Josh said. “If you want something to do, think of another installment for Diablo and the Mels. The same bit’s been on the specials board for the past three days.”

  “No pressure or anything,” I said as I sank into the little waterproof nest he’d made me. “Besides, it’s a good bit, right? ‘B. smites that low tipper.’ I should leave it up longer as a cautionary tale.”

  Josh laughed, which made me smile—it always did. And he was right. Even though I could feel the cold of the puddle beneath the blanket, and it smelled kind of moldy down there, lounging while he rowed me around the pond did make me feel kind of like a princess.

  My perch also gave me a great view of Josh’s arms flexing as he leaned forward and back, pulling at the oars.

  “Do you need me to be your coxswain,” I said. I imitated Tori’s cute, squeaky voice and pointed. “A little to the right, Joshie.”

  “Har-har,” Josh said, a little out of breath with the rowing. “By the way, you don’t say ‘right’; you say ‘starboard.’ ”

  “Oh,” I said. I watched him take a few more pulls on the
oars.

  “What do you like about rowing?” I asked.

  Josh cocked his head to think for a moment.

  “I like the efficiency of it,” he said. “One stroke can take you a whole boat-length down the river. And I like how a whole row of guys can all be communicating with each other, matching each other’s rhythm, putting extra muscle into it, sprinting for the win, all without saying a word.”

  I nodded slowly, imagining the steady, strong back-and-forth motion of a queue of boys, all with shaggy hair fluttering in the breeze, save one.

  That communication without words but through breath and rhythm and some sort of telepathy . . . it fascinated me.

  Sometimes I felt that Josh and I had that kind of silent way of speaking to each other, with our eyes and our gestures.

  And of course with kissing.

  Everything seemed to make me think about kissing lately. But I didn’t want Josh to know that (even though I had a feeling that he felt much the same way). So I grabbed my bag and rooted around in it until I found Someone New, an Allison Katzinger novel that I was rereading after finding my own left-behind copy on Granly’s bookshelf.

  “You brought a book?” Josh squawked.

  “Of course,” I said, blinking at him. “What, you don’t have one?”

  “Do you just bring a book with you everywhere you go?” Josh said. He looked like he was trying to decide if this was maddening or cute.

  “Um, pretty much, yeah,” I said. “I mean, if I still had my e-reader, I might not have brought it onto a boat. Then again, I probably would have. That’s kind of why I don’t have an e-reader anymore.”

  I sighed, remembering my little electronic tablet fondly.

  “Anyway, I thought you wanted me to relax,” I said, giving his leg a nudge with bare toes.

  “That is what I said, isn’t it?” Josh said. He angled the oars so they backchurned the water, slowing the boat down. He kept on working the oars until we’d pretty much stopped.

  Then he grinned at me.

  “Wouldn’t want you to get seasick.”

  “Oh, really?” I said. “Well, fine!”

  I tossed my book back into my bag, pulled myself up, and plopped down on the seat next to him. Grabbing the oar out of his right hand, I said, “Teach me to row.”

  “Yeah?” Josh said, squinting at me.

  “Yeah! You make it sound so magical. I want to try it.”

  “Okay,” Josh instructed, “flatten your oar while you’re pulling back, then turn it just as you hit the water, like you’re scooping ice cream. I’ll count, and you go with that rhythm, okay?”

  I nodded.

  But every time Josh brought his paddle forward, mine seemed to go backward. And vice versa.

  And then somehow I was paddling twice as fast as he was, but when he sped up, I slowed down.

  The upshot was that our rowboat was spinning around in circles, and I was laughing so hard, I couldn’t row anymore.

  “I hate to say this,” Josh gasped between laughs, “but I think you have no future as a coxswain.”

  “Now do I get to read my book?” I joked. I stood up to turn around so I could settle back into my nice waterproof nest.

  But the boat was still twirling a bit. So Josh, trying to be helpful, dug an oar into the water to stop it.

  Which tossed me off balance, and well, you can guess what happened next.

  Splash!

  It took Josh about two seconds to jump in after me.

  “Are you okay?” he cried.

  My feet found the bottom of the pond, and I stood up. The water only reached my shoulders.

  “I think I’ll make it!” I replied, laughing as I wiped water off my face. “I’m not even ruining any clothes.”

  I reached down and peeled my soaked cover-up over my head and tossed it into the boat.

  “But thanks for coming to my rescue,” I said, giving Josh a light kiss on the lips.

  “Anytime,” Josh said, giving me a bigger kiss in return.

  I turned to float on my back. My fingertips grazed his torso as I fluttered my hand to keep myself balanced.

  “It’s so peaceful in here,” I said. “So different from the big lake. I could stay out here forever.”

  Josh said something, but with my ears underwater, it was garbled. I splashed myself back to a standing position.

  “What was that?” I asked.

  Josh looked down at the water for a moment, pensive, “I said ‘I wish you would.’ ”

  My easy smirk faded.

  “When do you leave again?” Josh asked.

  Automatically I waved my hand—a Not for forever gesture. Because that’s how this summer had seemed for so long—like an endless stretch of days, each longer and hotter and lazier than the last. The ending felt so distant, I’d stopped believing it would ever arrive.

  But now that Josh had asked me to think in terms of the calendar, my eyes widened.

  “We leave the third week of August,” I said. “We’ve got to give Hannah time to get home and pack and fly back out for school in September.”

  Josh looked down at the water. Our hands flittered back and forth beneath the surface, keeping us upright.

  “That’s about a month away,” he said.

  “A month,” I said. My voice sounded craggy suddenly.

  “Well, that’s better than weeks,” Josh said, and I could tell he was adding brightness to his words, the way my mom perked up faded fabric in her quilt by edging it with sunshine-yellow thread.

  “Much better than days,” I added.

  It didn’t feel quite real that these rowboat, beach, and blueberry days . . . were going to end. That my life was going to go back to slamming locker doors, and spiral-bound notebooks, and babysitting, instead of slinging mayonnaise and reading nothing but novels. And being with Josh.

  It didn’t seem real, and yet, when Josh pulled me to him, there was a new urgency in the way we kissed.

  I let my hands linger on his bare shoulders, trying to memorize all his curves and angles.

  He lifted a hand to smooth back my hair and sent water trickling down my face. It felt like tears.

  I let my feet leave the soft, loamy mud at the bottom of the pond so that I was afloat, held in place only by Josh’s arm around my waist.

  And we kissed as if we had all day. If we pretended the day was endless, then a month was nothing to fear.

  Suddenly signs of summer ending were everywhere. The days were getting hotter, but they were also getting shorter.

  My dad started working less as his clients got ready to make the “great migration” to their August vacations. And Hannah started taking long afternoon naps, as if she wanted to cram in as much sleep as she could before she started pulling all-nighters at U of C.

  Finally, on a day when she knew I wasn’t working at the Mels, my mom pulled the stack of tin buckets out of the hall closet.

  The buckets meant blueberry picking. And blueberry picking meant—inescapably—that it was the last week in July.

  This was the week we always went picking when we were in Bluepointe, because it fell right before the berry season peaked and the orchards got crowded. Late July was also when the berries were still small and tart. None of us could stand a super-ripe, sweet, squishy blueberry. It must have been genetic.

  “Mom,” I said as she clanked the stack of buckets onto the kitchen table. “Is it okay if I invite Josh to go picking with us? I’m working the next few days, and I’d really like to hang out with him.”

  My mom frowned and glanced at the other end of the table, which had pretty much been permanently overtaken by her baby quilt.

  “I don’t know, honey,” she said. “We’ve always gone with just us.”

  I followed her gaze to the quilt top. It was really starting to take shape, with cone-shaped swatches of fabric making a shell-like spiral in the center, framed by small squares. It was amazing, but I knew I didn’t see in it what my mother saw. She looked at it and wa
s carried back to the powdery smell of our baby heads, and the satin feeling of our baby skin, our fuzzy never-cut hair, and our mouths that looked like little rosebuds.

  I just saw a bunch of cute old onesies.

  “Listen,” I said, “if you want, I won’t invite him. But . . . everything’s different this summer anyway.”

  Mom’s eyes got glassy for the first time in a while—at least that I’d seen. I felt guilty.

  But I also wanted her to say yes.

  She nodded slowly and said, “See if he wants to come. Tell Hannah she can ask Liam, too, if she wants.”

  Abbie had just walked into the kitchen to pull a snack out of the fridge when Mom made that proposal. She snorted.

  “I can guarantee Fast—I mean Liam—doesn’t want to go on a family berry-picking outing with us,” Abbie said. “He prefers to see Hannah alone. At night. Where nobody can see anybody’s necks.”

  “Abbie!” I growled, looking shiftily at Mom.

  My mom rolled her eyes.

  “Do you think I didn’t see that hickey on Hannah’s neck?” she asked us. “And did you think I didn’t already have a discussion with her about it? Please. Always remember”—she looked straight at me then, and her eyes did not look glassy anymore. Instead they were her steely Don’t mess with me, I’m a teacher eyes—“there’s not much about you girls that I don’t know.”

  I think she did know how I felt about Josh—which was why she’d said he could come blueberry picking with us. I flashed a grateful smile and trotted toward my room to start getting ready while I called him.

  Before I could finish dialing, though, my phone rang! I didn’t even check to see if it was Josh.

  “Hiiiii,” I crooned into the phone.

  “Chelsea? You sound weird.”

  “Emma!” I blurted with a laugh. “Um, I thought you were—”

  “Josh?” Emma said. “Wow. So things are good, huh?”

  I could tell by the flat tone of her voice that she had not called me—at six a.m. California time!—to dish about my boyfriend.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked, flicking on my closet light and stepping inside. I pulled out a dress I’d been thinking would be perfect for blueberry picking—very 1940s housedress, but in a cute way—and tossed it onto my bed.