All the Summer Girls

by Meg Donohue

  Kate realizes now that she had never wanted to see Avalon in the hushed grip of winter because she had worried that doing so would take away some of its magic. How optimistic, to think that cold air would be the thing to complicate her feelings for the place. She lived more than twenty years without losing anyone, not a grandparent or an uncle or so much as a neighbor. She’d had no idea. All those fast, lucky years.

  She and Vanessa stop their bikes at a traffic light. Dani whizzes ahead of them, eliciting a long honk from a Range Rover. Dani raises her middle finger into the air without a glance back.

  “You’re going to get a ticket!” Kate calls.

  Dani shrugs but slows down. When Kate and Vanessa reach her, she turns on her bike seat so she is sitting sidesaddle, the wheels still spinning as though pedaled by an invisible rider. “If you get arrested for biking under the influence, does your driver’s license get suspended?” she asks Kate.

  “I have no idea.” People are always asking her criminal law questions. It’s possible that no one, not even her closest friends, listens when she tells them about her job. She practices civil litigation, mostly intellectual property cases. But people always question her about criminal law. It’s enough to make her think everyone she knows—maybe everyone, period—is just one bad decision away from criminal activity. She’s glad the laws exist. Clearly, she thinks, we need them.

  It’s not until they are almost to the Princeton that Kate remembers to question if she should be on a bike in her condition. She then becomes so consumed with the thought that she might hurt her baby that she can no longer think about the possibility that she might meet someone new, someone who is not at all like Peter, someone who is not her ex-fiancé or the father of her child. She does not think about meeting someone new even one more time before the moment, an hour later, when she does.

  To Kate’s relief, a table on the patio opens up just as they arrive. She sinks into the cushioned seat and cleans the table with an antibacterial wipe from her bag, ignoring the look Dani gives her. She knows, she knows: she’s crazy. News flash: this is not news.

  The Princeton has been remodeled since Kate was here last and is nearly unrecognizable. What used to be a dark, airless dive bar and liquor shop is now brightened by a wall of windows opening onto a patio spruced up with square-edged, contemporary furniture and a complicated cocktail menu. Kate orders a hamburger and a glass of wine. She figures she’ll take one or two tiny sips of the wine and then claim a headache. Or maybe she’ll take it with her to the bathroom and dump it into the toilet. It doesn’t really matter. She’s never been much of a drinker, and her friends aren’t likely to suspect anything. She plans to tell them about the baby, but she finds she’s not quite ready yet. Not tonight, at least. She’s not prepared to confront the reality of her situation at a bar; no amount of hip new furniture can make the Princeton the ideal spot to reveal you are with child.

  Dani seems to be attempting to pull the waitress to the table, drinks in hand, through aggressive staring alone. Vanessa is texting. Kate wonders how Gracie is doing all alone at the house. Ever since she found out she was pregnant, she has felt more protective of her dog, and more attached. She’d blinked back tears when she knelt down and pressed her cheek to Gracie’s thick neck before they left for the bar twenty minutes earlier, inhaling her earthy scent, not caring about the hairs she knew she would find on her dress when she pulled away. She does not know what she would do if anything were to happen to her dog.

  Vanessa glances up from her phone at Kate. “Sorry,” she says. “Just making sure Lucy’s bedtime went smoothly.”

  “Nice try,” Dani says, tearing her gaze from the waitress’s back. “We know you’re really texting Jeremy Caldwell.”

  She is teasing, but Vanessa is clearly annoyed. They’ve always known exactly how to push each other’s buttons; this bothers Kate on more than one level. “I shouldn’t have said anything to you,” Vanessa says.

  “Oh, V, I’m only kidding. Lighten up,” Dani says loudly as the waitress returns and sets their drinks on the table. Kate is in the habit of not conversing in front of waiters, and it makes her uncomfortable that Dani is continuing this conversation as though a perfect stranger weren’t standing six inches from her shoulder.

  “Should I start a tab?” the waitress asks. Her chest is mauve with sunburn.

  “Yes,” Dani says and drains a third of her martini. She makes no move to find her wallet. Vanessa rolls her eyes, opens her purse, and hands the waitress a credit card.

  When the waitress walks away, Kate releases her breath. “We should have stayed home,” Kate says. “It’s pretty hard to fight when you’re watching a movie.”

  To her surprise, Vanessa and Dani laugh. “We could do it,” Vanessa says at the exact moment Dani says, “We’d find a way.”

  Before Kate realizes what she is doing, she has taken a long drink of wine. She holds the chardonnay in her mouth, cheeks full, unsure what to do.

  “What’s the matter?” Dani asks. “Is it awful?”

  “It’s the house chardonnay at the Princeton,” Vanessa says. “Of course it’s awful.”

  Kate swallows. “It’s fine,” she says, inadvertently pressing her hand to her belly. Sorry, baby, she thinks. It’s the first time she has addressed her thoughts directly to the baby and the act stuns her. She gives her belly a discreet pat.

  “Well, salud, then,” Dani says, holding up her glass. “To the Princeton’s fine wine.”

  Kate first notices him watching her when she walks by the bar on her way to the restroom. He is leaning against the bar, talking to the guy on the stool beside him, and he doesn’t take his eyes off Kate even when she meets his gaze. He smiles and raises his beer. From a distance, his eyes look dark, but she will later see that they are in fact a deep shade of blue. For a guy that gangly and young looking, he is impressively confident. Kate smiles back without thinking and then drops her eyes to the floor, embarrassed. His smile is disarmingly sweet and she carries it with her all the way to the bathroom.

  Two girls are standing in front of the sink talking about a fire on the beach. Kate hurries into a bathroom stall.

  “John set the thirty-pack box on fire,” one of the girls is saying. “I didn’t think he’d actually do it.”

  “He’s lucky he didn’t get hurt,” the other girl says.

  “He did! He has a huge blister on his thumb now.”

  They break into laughter, and the bathroom fills with the pulse of music as they pull the door open. The door swings shut and Kate is left alone in the quiet with her racing heart.

  She has found it helps, in moments like this one, to focus on making a list. She lists the things she remembers about Colin, testing herself. She and Dani and Vanessa used to lie on their stomachs on the public dock at Fifty-Third Street and pull nets through the water, catching tiny fish and the occasional crab. That is what this list-making exercise feels like: she snags some memories, but many others evade her. She worries that the memories that flit out of reach as quickly as they appear—the darkest and the most luminous ones—are the important ones; she’s left with random, ordinary memories—the slowest and dumbest. Still, the task steadies her.

  Colin would watch anything on television, even the girlie nighttime soaps Kate favored. She always waited for him to ask her to change the channel, and he never did.

  He loved all candy, but especially lemon drops. His jeans had a faded little rectangle in the front right pocket where he kept a box of them.

  He had borderline Dumbo ears. In preschool, the teacher told their parents that Kate had developed a habit of grabbing Colin’s ear and tilting his head as if she were pouring water out of a teakettle. (He grew his hair to hide them in high school.)

  In middle school, as a gag, he switched all of the gift tags on their Christmas presents. It turned out to add to the fun, so he did it every year for the rest of his life.

  Even when he was angry, he was quiet. Their grandmother once asked him
if the cat stole his tongue and gave it to Kate, and the line swiftly evolved into a famous family joke, nubby with use: What’s the matter, Colin? Kate got your tongue?

  When she gets back to the table, Dani and Vanessa have moved on to shots, and Dani hands her one as she sits down. They don’t notice that she dumps it over her shoulder, dousing the potted plant in the corner of the patio.

  “Let’s dance,” Vanessa says. She is drunk, her eyes liquid. There are two empty shot glasses and an empty martini glass in front of her. The colorful scarf that was once tied around her head is now around her waist. Her long hair is pulled up in a high, slick bun, and large gold disc earrings sway against her neck when she talks. It seems as if every guy in the bar is looking toward their table. What would that be like? Kate wonders. To have your pick?

  “Yes,” Dani cries. “No one dances in San Francisco. The hipster police arrest you if you do more than bob your head.”

  Kate has never heard Dani speak ill of San Francisco. It makes her happy to hear that the city across the country hasn’t completely won over her friend. She lets them pull her onto the dance floor. They all love to dance. The music’s bass is thunderous—Stupid loud! Dani yells, thrilled—and Kate feels it move her body, buoying her. Dani does her ridiculous hands-on-knees dance move, an act that looks like one of the Three Stooges doing hip-hop. Kate laughs so hard her eyes get misty. Vanessa does her sexy little shimmy. Kate is about to do the African Anteater ritual from Can’t Buy Me Love when a hand cups her hip and she spins around.

  It’s the guy from the bar, the lanky one with the confidence, and he’s smiling that smile again. He can’t be older than twenty-three or twenty-four. “Can I dance with you?” he asks. At least, that’s what Kate assumes he asks; the music is too loud to hear much of anything else.

  Kate looks at Dani and Vanessa. They are already dancing with the guy’s friends. Vanessa’s eyes are shut and her palms are up in the air and she is shaking her hips. Dani grins at Kate and wags her eyebrows over the shoulder of the guy’s friend. Kate wishes she were drunk.

  She turns back toward the guy, and he takes this as a sign that she will dance with him. He puts his hands on her hips, dancing so close to her that she smells his minty soap and feels his smooth cheek brush her ear. She can’t remember dancing like this with Peter. They must have, but she can’t remember when. They had danced together at countless weddings—lately, in fact, it seemed all they did together was dance at weddings—but never like this.

  “I’m pregnant,” she says now, knowing the guy she’s dancing with won’t hear her. It is the first time she has told anyone. He pulls back and grins.

  “I’m Gabe,” he yells. Maybe he’s not even in his twenties, she thinks. A decent fake ID is all he needs to be there.

  “Kate,” she yells and regrets it immediately. She has always wanted to tell some guy in a bar a fake name—Coral, she’d decided—and now it’s too late and she’s having a baby and she’ll probably never have another chance. She could have laughed about this moment with Dani and Vanessa later—I told him my name was Coral!—but now that will never happen.

  “Where are you staying?” Gabe yells.

  “Thirty-Eighth Street on the beach,” Kate says and then bites her lip. Again with the honesty. She doesn’t even know this guy.

  He yells something else. Kate is fairly sure he is saying that he likes her freckles. Her face grows warm. “Where are you from?” he yells. No one is from Avalon.

  “Philly,” she yells.

  “Me too.”

  Avalon is no Vegas. These guys you dance with—they’re probably your neighbors back home. Or the sons of your firm’s senior partners. She’s not sure if this makes it better or worse that she told him her real name. She turns back to her friends.

  It’s too hot! she mouths. She pulls at the neck of her sundress and waves at her face, pantomiming being overheated. They point toward the patio. She nods and looks at Gabe. She wants to explain that this weekend is about her and her friends, not meeting guys, but then she remembers that he is probably already thinking about the next girl he will dance with. She gives him a small, awkward wave and follows her friends outside.

  By the time Kate snakes her way through the dance floor and pushes the door open to the patio, a group of guys has already offered up their table to Vanessa and Dani. It’s in this moment, when she sees they’re both literally swaying, that Kate realizes just how drunk they are. Dani looks as if she might slide off her chair. Vanessa’s eyelids are heavy and have a bit too much shine, and she’s glaring at Dani. Kate’s stomach flips. Vanessa, usually reserved, is a fight-picker when she’s drunk, and Dani, drunk or sober, is always up for sparring. Kate hurries over to the table and suggests they go across the street to Circle Pizza.

  “No! You have to get back out there,” Dani says.

  “Out where?”

  “The dance floor. That guy was super into you.”

  “That guy probably isn’t even old enough to be here.”

  “So what?” Dani says. “He’s cute.”

  “I’m not interested.” The thought of having to bike all the way home, worrying the whole way about the baby, is elbowing its way through the crowd of thoughts in her mind. She thinks she should probably just start walking now, but she can’t, of course, leave her friends.

  Dani shrugs. “Maybe it’s for the best. It was a little weird. He kind of looked like—ow!” Dani bends over to rub her shin, glaring at Vanessa.

  “Like who?” Kate asks. Vanessa is shaking her head at Dani. Colin. That’s what Dani was going to say. Gabe doesn’t look a thing like Colin—not a thing—but she knows that’s where Dani was headed. This is the first time Colin has come up. They look everywhere but at one another.

  “Shut up, Dani,” Vanessa says finally.

  “It’s okay,” Kate says. “But you’re crazy. He doesn’t look anything like Colin.”

  “So then, what is it?” Dani asks. The elbow she’s leaning on slips off the tabletop. “You’re single,” she says, righting herself. “He’s cute. Live a little!”

  The last time Dani said this to her, Kate got so drunk she did something she will regret for the rest of her life. She will never, ever go down that road again. But this is exactly what Peter wants her to do, isn’t it? He wants her to remember how to lose control. Kate had only told Peter a version of the truth about what happened to Colin. This, she knows, is as much an indication of a problem between them as anything.

  Dani drinks from a plastic cup.

  “Was that cup here when you sat down?” Kate asks, feeling a wave of nausea. Kate knows Dani is hurting from her father’s announcement, but her drinking seems compulsive. Who knows whose lips last touched that cup? It constantly amazes her how oblivious people are to the real danger presented by invisible germs.

  Dani looks down into the cup and then back at Kate. She picks up the cup and drinks the entire thing.

  “That’s disgusting,” Vanessa says.

  “No,” Dani says. “It’s vodka.”

  A waitress appears and sets down three shots. “These are from those guys,” she says, hiking her thumb in the direction of the group of guys who had given up the table. They are huddled by the door of the bar and one of them is rocking back and forth on his heels like the wolf in one of the Saturday morning cartoons Kate and Colin used to watch.

  “Perfect,” Dani says. “Let’s invite them over.”

  “No,” Kate and Vanessa say in unison.

  “They’re not for you, Vanessa. You’re married, remember? They’re for Kate.”

  Vanessa narrows her eyes.

  “Thanks, but no thanks,” Kate says. “Let’s talk about what we’re going to do tomorrow. Bagel sandwiches from Avalon Coffee? Then hit the beach around ten? Wawa hoagies for lunch? What should we have for dinner?” This attempt at redirection is futile. She can see that Vanessa does not even hear her.

  “I remember I’m married, Dani,” she says. Her eyes are slits
now, and Kate doubts she is seeing much of anything. “You don’t have to remind me.”

  “Well, what’s the deal with Jeremy Caldwell then? You dated him for all of five seconds a few thousand eons ago and now, what? You think he’s The One Who Got Away?”

  “Dani,” Kate says.

  “It’s fine, Kate. Let her say what she wants. I’d love to hear Dani’s thoughts about love. This should be fascinating.” She’s leaning forward on the table. Her face is a little slack. This is as close to ugly as Vanessa gets.

  Kate groans.

  “I’m not talking about love,” Dani says. “I’m talking about marriage.”

  “Marriage! That’s the one thing you know less about than love. You’ve never even been the child of a successful marriage.”

  “And now Lucy won’t be either,” Dani says.

  Vanessa gasps.

  “Oh my God, you guys, stop it!” Kate says. “You’re both drunk. Let’s all just take a breath.”

  Without breaking eye contact with Vanessa, Dani reaches across the table, grabs the shot glass that is in front of Kate, lifts it to her lips, and drains it.

  “Why? Why is she taking Drew’s side?” Vanessa mumbles to Kate. Her hair has started to escape from its bun. “She doesn’t even know him. She doesn’t even know what happened.”