The Fourth Summer

by Kathleen Gilles Seidel

  No one came to the door at seven thirty. Nor at seven forty-five. Her dad had run his courtroom on time.

  At eight the tall deputy did knock on the door. She told them to come to the breakfast room.

  Seth and Marcus were already at the table they had sat at for breakfast. Seth had shaved and put his contacts back in. Caitlin sat with them. The deputies on duty stood near the walls. The tall woman took a place near the table where Seth was seated.

  Sally was waiting for everyone to arrive. Her uniform was neat, and the hair at the back of her neck was damp, but the skin under her eyes was gray, and she looked as if she needed to remind herself how to walk. She must not have slept either.

  If North Carolina never sequestered juries, Sally would have had no training or preparation. She had probably spent the night on the internet, trying to find out how it worked in other states. Some of these crazy rules, like confining them to their rooms last night, were probably a result of no one knowing what the rules were.

  Sally gestured for them all to sit down. That didn’t seem like a good sign. Why weren’t they lining up for the bus?

  “The judge has informed me,” she said, “that the court will not be in session today.”

  “What?” About six voices spoke at once. People wanted to know why and when was the case ever going to be done if they took the day off, and didn’t anyone realize that this was like being in prison, and what were they supposed to do with themselves all day? Couldn’t they go home just for the weekend?

  Sally shrugged. There was nothing she could say.

  “Farmers don’t get to take the day off,” Keith muttered.

  But they would be allowed to use this room all day, she said, and they could move freely between it and their own rooms, but no juror should go into a room that was not his. A deputy would escort the smokers outside for smoking breaks, and they were trying to get a TV in here so that the jurors could watch a movie. She had heard about the issue with the phone calls and was looking into that.

  “And you’re going to have to be patient with us. We are trying our best to make this more comfortable for you, and it will get better.”

  “What about exercise?” Seth asked. “There are signs for an exercise room. Can we use that?”

  She said that she would look into it.

  “And could we get some bottled water?” Marcus asked.

  Caitlin could have kissed him.

  “I will see,” Sally said, “but we are going to run into some price issues at some point.”

  “But the deputies are bringing their own water,” he pointed out.

  Sally shot a guilty glance over to her clipboard and stack of folders. She had indeed brought a water bottle. “We’ll see,” she repeated.

  “One more thing, Deputy,” Norma said. She was the nurse. “I would say from the look of things that some of us were unable to sleep.”

  People looked around, wondering who she was talking about.

  “Oh, no,” Joan gasped suddenly. “I snore, don’t I? Oh, no. Caitlin, dear, is that why you were... My sister said—I’m a widow, I didn’t know. I’m sorry, I’m so, so sorry.”

  Caitlin wasn’t sure what to say. “I know that you can’t help it.”

  “But no, no—” She looked at Sally. “Please, can you do something?”

  “I’m sorry. We are trying to get more rooms, but so many people are in for the Fourth. You need to be patient.”

  Joan looked truly mortified.

  “Excuse me. Excuse me.” Yvette had her hand up as if she were in grade school. “I sleep like the dead. That’s what everyone says. I could trade with Caitlin. I don’t mind. Really.”

  Yvette was rooming with Norma. Norma didn’t mind the switch.

  “So that takes care of it, does it?” Sally asked.

  “I think there is also a problem with the men,” Norma said, pointedly looking at Seth.

  “I’m fine,” Seth said. “I’ll be fine.”

  “Are you sure?” Sally asked him.

  “Absolutely.”

  What a jackass. That was one reason Caitlin liked gay men. They didn’t need to be so Clint Eastwoody about everything. Well, Seth was doing this to himself. He was the one who would suffer.

  Caitlin packed her clothes back up and traded places with Yvette. Norma told her to try to get a few more hours of sleep. “But if you sleep all day, you will be miserable tonight. Do you want me to ask one of the deputies to come wake you up at ten or so?”

  “If they will.”

  * * * *

  She fell asleep immediately and had to struggle to wake up when the deputy knocked on the door. She wasn’t wildly eager to go back to the breakfast room. She knew that if she started to sketch—and what else did she have to do?—she would be surrounded by people who wanted to watch and ask questions. She wouldn’t live alone and work as a freelancer if she wanted to be surrounded by people asking questions.

  But she should at least let Norma know that the room was available if Norma wanted to study.

  “Oh, you’re awake,” Chatty Heather exclaimed as soon as she saw Caitlin coming down the hall. “Caitlin’s up,” she called out to the others. “I was wondering how long you would sleep. I know people who can sleep forever. I don’t understand that. I can’t. Your boxes are here. We can’t wait for you to open them. So, come, come.” She started tugging Caitlin over to the corner of the room.

  Caitlin pulled herself free and glanced around the room, looking for the tall deputy. She must be off duty. “What are you talking about?”

  “Those. Those. Your boxes.”

  Next to the little refrigerator were two big cardboard boxes with Caitlin’s name on them. One was in her mother’s handwriting, the other in her grandmother’s.

  Apparently not only had Caitlin’s mom not let her down, she had issued an “all hands on deck” call. If Caitlin had both her mother and her grandmother packing for her, she might be able to colonize Mars with what they had sent.

  Apparently the boxes had come with her luggage, but deputies hadn’t had time to search them last night. “I’m sorry,” Sally apologized. “Someone was supposed to tell you about them.”

  “That’s okay,” Caitlin said. Sally must be getting sick of apologizing.

  “We did have to take out a few of the movies, the ones with courtroom drama. We will return them to your family.”

  “Fine.”

  April was getting the boxes out of the corner, putting them on the table. “Caitlin might want to open them in private,” Norma said.

  “Oh...but we have been looking forward to it all morning.”

  “And it’s fine,” Caitlin said. Even if her mother and grandmother had thought that they were equipping a years-long Mars expedition, they would not have sent any sex toys.

  The first thing was a soft mohair throw blanket and a small pillow. That was nice. Sequestered-jury sex was looking about as likely as Mars-expedition sex, but at least she now had something more cuddly than the heat-stamped polyester bedspreads. Then came her favorite shampoo and conditioner, toothpaste, deodorant, dental floss, and a box of tampons. Navy wives thought of everything, didn’t they? There was the portable CD player that she had last used in fifth grade along with a zippered case of CDs. The case was bright purple with Trina’s name spelled out in crystals. That had to be full of boy-band music. There were a book light, plenty of batteries, and a collection of books and movies from home along with a very old portable DVD player. She had read a lot of the books and seen all the movies, but who cared? Her mother had also gathered up whatever art supplies Caitlin had had in North Carolina; there were half-used pads of good paper along with Faber-Castell colored pencils, M. Graham watercolors, and brushes. The pencils had been sharpened to different lengths, and some of the tubes of watercolor had been squeezed down to half capacity, but it didn�
��t matter. Caitlin did most of her work on the computer these days; it would be nice to play around with the old-fashioned way of doing things. In San Francisco she felt that she couldn’t do anything creative unless she was billing someone for it.

  Thank you, Mom. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

  People were passing around the books and the movies, asking Caitlin if they could borrow this one or watch that one. “Let me catch my breath,” she said.

  Everything in the second box was new. Apparently as soon as they had gotten the call, her mother and grandmother had started packing, and her father had gone to Target. He must have spent several hundred dollars. Or more. All the movies were new releases, chosen at random as her father knew nothing about new movies. When he had come to the book section, he had probably just scooped up everything off the top-sellers rack and then a few nonfiction titles with interesting covers. There was a book about rules for card games and four new decks of cards. At the bottom of the box were board games, Scrabble, Monopoly, a fifteen-hundred-piece jigsaw puzzle, which someone grabbed from Caitlin, and then a boxed game with a note from her mother taped to the shrink-wrap.

  “Oh my God.” Teddy knocked over the stack of books to get to the game. “That’s Revelation.”

  He jerked it out of her hand. “I love this game.” He started to claw the shrink-wrap off.

  “Could I have the note on top, please?” Caitlin asked.

  “Oh, sure.” He handed her the wad of shrink-wrap in which her mother’s note was crumpled.

  Caitlin smoothed it out. The clerk at Target told Dad that this was hottest new game. But it looks pretty hard. We can return it if you don’t open it.

  Too late for that. Teddy was already tugging the box lid off.

  Marcus and Seth were with him. Seth picked up the lid. “This is a new version. Good for your parents, Caitlin.”

  “So you two play?” Teddy was excited. “We need a fourth. Does anyone already know it?”

  “Oh, I’d love to learn,” Heather gushed. “I adore games.”

  “And I would too,” April joined in, laughing her horrible laugh.

  “We need someone who already knows,” Teddy said. “It takes a long time to learn.”

  “Actually,” Keith said, “believe it or not, I’ve played with my grandsons. I’m pretty cool for an old farmer.”

  “This is awesome.” Teddy was already opening the board. “I’ve never had a chance to play this version. Mandy”—that was his wife—“says we shouldn’t spend the money on it.”

  The four men cleared the coffee cups off one table and started to set up the board. Everyone else was looking expectantly at Caitlin. Which one of her toys could each of them play with?

  “I really love jigsaw puzzles,” Stephanie said.

  Caitlin did too. She handed Stephanie the puzzle. Stephanie worked at the bakery, and with her soft cheeks and curvy mouth, she always looked pleasant and patient, as if she didn’t mind if you took forever to choose between a maple sour-cream cake doughnut and a raised one glazed with rainbow sprinkles. She would have never jumped on a patron’s first choice as Caitlin had always done at the Dairy Queen.

  “And this Maria Murphy book,” Delia said, picking up a hardback book, “this is the new one, and I never get to read them until the paperbacks show up in the used-book store.”

  Caitlin nodded. What else could she do?

  But my Mommy and Daddy brought these for me. Me. It’s my turn now, and you all are taking my turn from me. Just like Trina and Dylan did.

  How mature was that?

  Fred told—as opposed to asking—Caitlin that he was going to watch one of the movies even though the little DVD player looked “like a piece of shit.”

  April and Heather pulled up chairs to watch the Revelation game. Heather kept asking questions, wanting to learn the game, and when Teddy was rude, April laughed. Caitlin asked Norma and Joan what they would like to do. Norma said that she was willing to take a study break to play a game, and Joan admitted that she did enjoy a good game of Scrabble.

  Caitlin didn’t particularly like Scrabble—she was a visual person, not a verbal one—but somehow she found herself picking out seven Scrabble tiles.

  How had this happened? Why was she playing Scrabble when she would much rather be working on the jigsaw puzzle?

  Were her mother’s boxes turning her into a good navy wife? Or was it because she had been a Girl Scout and still remembered some of the laws? “Help other people at all times, especially those at home.”

  Delia, the other older woman, joined the game, but she and Joan were a little more interested in whispered gossip.

  At first they only talked about the deputies, how much they liked Sally, the head deputy, how they wished that Ryan, who was in the room now, weren’t so nervous, and how tall Andrea was.

  “I hope Seth Street already has a girlfriend,” Delia said.

  Caitlin almost knocked over her letters. “Why do you say that?”

  “Didn’t you see that deputy Andrea with him this morning? She looks like a pretty determined gal.”

  “I imagine that he can take care of himself,” Caitlin said. And I’m here.

  “I’m surprised that he is on the jury at all,” Joan said. “I didn’t think he lived here anymore.”

  “He doesn’t. He lives in Oregon. He’s like me. He’s still using his parents’ address.”

  “So you know him?”

  Caitlin shook her head. “Just summers when we were kids. I hadn’t seen him in years.”

  “Well, if he wants to go back to Oregon,” Delia said, putting down a word that used the only free vowel on the board, “he needs to tell that deputy that he already has a girlfriend.”

  Caitlin stared at her tray. There was no way she could make a word now...especially when all she could think about was the time when she was the one needing to pretend to have a boyfriend.

  * * * *

  On the first full day of their third summer, Caitlin got her Diary Queen uniform, a black knit shirt with the DQ logo and a black ball cap. She and two other kids were being trained for three days, and Caitlin, being Caitlin, wanted to be the Best Trainee Ever. By the end of the first day she mastered getting a perfect curl on top of a soft-serve ice-cream cone, something that took some people weeks to learn. That night she took home the price chart and memorized it. The second night she studied the manual on making Blizzards.

  Seth laughed at her. “You’re taking this pretty seriously. It’s just a Dairy Queen.”

  “It’s my first job, and I assume it won’t be my last. Why shouldn’t I take it seriously?”

  The manager had initially said that the new employees would be cleaning, hauling trash, and unpacking supplies. He put Caitlin on one of the registers as soon as training was over.

  Clearly a problem at the Dairy Queen was getting the little kids to make up their minds. Gone were the days when there was chocolate, vanilla, or a swirl of both. There were about fifty million flavors of Blizzards, most of them well-known candies. Caitlin learned to praise the kids’ first choice to the ends of the earth to keep them from changing their minds. She rang up more sales on her register because she could keep her line moving.

  The other problem was Gabe, the assistant manager who worked the evening shift. He was a college student and the franchise owner’s nephew, so no one was going to complain about him. Two of the other girls told Caitlin to tell him that she had a boyfriend. Otherwise he would pester her endlessly to go out with him, and then he would be determined to score. Caitlin, grateful for the warning, told him right away that she had a boyfriend.

  She usually went to work on her skateboard—Seth’s father had made two more new ones for her, one for the park and one for cruising—and then either her grandmother or Seth would pick her up.

  Of course she liked it when Seth did. He u
sually went to the gym after dinner, and he would shower there. So the ends of his hair would be damp, and he would be feeling loose and easy as he did after a vigorous workout. He would wait for her, sitting on top of the picnic table. The lights inside the store would be off, but the big security lamps in the parking lot would be on, and she could see him swinging his feet or hooking one arm across his chest to stretch the back of his shoulder, chatting lightly with other boyfriends or girlfriends waiting there too.

  The other couples would always greet each other with a kiss and then walk to the cars, their arms around each other. Seth would stand up when she came out and say, “Hey.” She would say something, and they would walk to his car, not touching.

  She wanted him to touch her. She wanted him to kiss her. She wanted him to put his arms around her, not like the first big bear hug he gave her in front of her grandmother, but to touch her like he meant it, his hands on her arms, her back, exploring. She wanted to touch him. She wanted to press her body against him.

  She wanted them to kiss as one of the couples in the parking lot did, the girl sitting on the picnic table, her legs apart, the guy standing between her legs, his hands low on her back, so low that they were really on her butt, cupping her, pulling her close to him down there. She wanted to do that with Seth; she wanted him to touch her breasts. Her body was urging her to do this, to do more.

  Yet how could he? After the conversations they had had? We’re friends...we aren’t like that...it’s different for us... She had set those rules, but she had been thirteen, now she was fifteen. And she didn’t want to lose his friendship, not ever, but she also wanted to sit on a picnic table with her legs apart and feel his hands cupping her.

  For all that she dressed like a tomboy, she had never minded being a girl; she just had had enough of all the ruffled pink hand-me-downs that she had to wear when Trina had outgrown them. Couldn’t Seth see that? He had seen her figure. Why couldn’t he see that she was ready for the rules to change?

  Most nights Gabe, as the shift manager, was the last to leave, but one evening Caitlin stayed an extra few minutes to figure out someone else’s register. So Gabe left with her.