The Summer Bed

by Ann Brashares

  Her mother didn’t turn. “He was married when he was still in LA, but they split a long time ago, when he came here. I don’t know anything about him now.”

  “What happened?”

  “What do you mean?” her mother shot back, her body still turned away.

  Mattie hopped down off the counter. She felt her heart fast and heavy. She didn’t even know why. “I just mean, why don’t you know anything about him anymore? Why didn’t you stay friends?”

  Her mother did turn now. She looked impatient. She grabbed her phone and started out of the kitchen, lettuce wet and wilting, refrigerator door hanging open.

  “Mattie, why the interrogation? What does it matter?”

  Mattie wanted to follow her, but she didn’t.

  “Plenty of people don’t stay friends.” Her mother’s voice carried behind her. “You don’t need a reason.”

  Down the hall Mattie heard one door open and another one close.

  —

  Ray looked up from the sandwich he was making and glared at his dad’s cell phone erupting into “Ice, Ice Baby” on the kitchen counter in Wainscott. His dad must have left his phone when he’d gone for a run. Mattie had idly changed Adam’s ringtone two years ago, correctly guessing he wouldn’t figure out how to change it back.

  It was yet another old-person kind of thing his dad did, Ray mused with some chagrin. When Ray went on a run he had music to play, of course, and a map app and a running app feeding into a fitness app. A run could barely be said to have happened without his phone.

  Then the landline started ringing, so Ray picked it up like it was a prop on the stage set of a cooking show. “Hello?”

  “Hey, this is George Riggs, is…?”

  “Oh, uh. George.” Ray started to pace, regretted picking up the phone. “Hey. This is, uh…Ray…Riggs.” Why did he add “Riggs”? What a weird thing to do.

  “Great. Wow,” George said, as sincerely as could be hoped. “How’s it going, Ray?”

  “It’s good. So…How’s everything…out there?” He felt the back of his T-shirt dampening with sweat. He realized he’d dropped his voice to sound older, and he was embarrassed for himself. Was it too late to change back?

  “Great.”

  God. Awkward. For the life of him, Ray suddenly could not remember the name of the company where George worked or the name of his pretty red-haired girlfriend. He knew he would remember both as soon as he got off the phone.

  If they just could have been strangers it would have been easy. “Okay, so you probably want to speak to…” Thousands of pointless calculations: your dad, Adam, Dad…“Dad?” He heard his voice rising with guilt and insecurity.

  “Uh, yeah. Is he around? I tried his cell, but…”

  “No, he went for a run. I’ll tell him you called.”

  “Great. Thanks, Ray.

  “Great.”

  “Okay, well, I’ll see you soon, I hope.”

  “Okay, so…nice talking to you.” Did he really say that?

  He put the phone down and felt like crying. That was his brother.

  —

  “I’ll be back on the four o’clock jitney.”

  “Okay. I miss you. Are you sure about this?”

  “Yes. Just stop by the Brooklyn house tonight and we’ll get the first meeting out of the way. Just super casual.” Emma paced in front of the dumpster at the rear of the market, pretending she didn’t see Francis checking on her from the back window. Her break was over, but he usually turned a blind eye for a few extra minutes. “I’ve been thinking about it, and I feel like if we make a presentation of it, she’ll start asking a lot of questions.”

  “And otherwise?”

  “Just a few questions.”

  “Now I’m nervous. If I start saying ‘sorry’ too much, will you kick me under the table?”

  Emma laughed. “The thing is, I want my mom to glimpse what an awesome and lovable person you are, so that later when she finds out what you do and all, it won’t be the only thing she can think about. She’ll already like you before she can hate you.”

  “But what happens if she asks me what I do first thing when I meet her tonight?”

  “I don’t think she will. That’s why we’re going to be so incredibly chill. She counts herself superior to parents who immediately ask their kids’ friends what they do or what college they go to.”

  “That’s weird. Okay. That’s helpful, though.”

  “So come around nine. We’ll say we’re going to hang with some people in Prospect Park. We’ll play it like we’re recent friends, just practically acquaintances, right?”

  “That is distant from the truth, Em. I’m a terrible actor.”

  She laughed again. “Just be friendly, okay? That takes no acting.”

  “Okay. Got it.” She could hear him knocking his foot against his desk, and that was not a good sign.

  “See you then.” She paused. “I love you.”

  “God, I love you.”

  —

  “I thought you were surf casting.”

  Ray turned to look behind him. The old dock stuck out into the pond like a crooked gray finger, and Quinn flickered along it, stepping expertly over the softest planks. He turned back to his line drooping in the still water of the pond. “I was going to. And then I came here instead.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing. Why?”

  She was suddenly sitting next to him, dangling her legs over the side. He had the weird sense that time elapsed in a special way for Quinn. Here she is standing, there she is sitting, now she is kneeling, suddenly she is flat. You never saw her in any of the bending poses in between.

  “You fish in the pond when you’re sad.”

  He turned to her. “That’s not true.” Was that true?

  “And in the ocean when you’re happy.”

  No, he didn’t. Did he?

  Quinn never tried to force a point. She just opened her hands and set it forth like a firefly. You caught it or you didn’t. Even if you didn’t, you tended to notice it blinking around, distracting you.

  “Who called before?” she asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “On the landline in the kitchen.”

  Had she overheard the whole business? She was a silent thing sometimes. She didn’t spy exactly, just perched and absorbed. “Oh. Right. That was George.” He studied the worm guts on his fingers.

  “George Riggs?”

  “Yep.” He was glad she didn’t say “your brother, George.” “He was calling for Adam.”

  She reached into Ray’s bucket and grasped its lone, wriggling occupant. She tossed it into the pond.

  “Hey.”

  “You can’t keep the little guy.”

  “Now I can’t.” He reeled in his line. He baited another hook.

  “If you throw your line back in, you’ll probably catch it again.”

  Ray laughed. Sometimes he did have the forlorn suspicion that he hooked the same poor bass over and over. That was enough to make a person sad if they weren’t already.

  “How’s he doing?”

  “George, you mean?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I don’t know. Fine.”

  “You didn’t talk to him long.”

  Ray was quiet for a while. “No. Not really. No.”

  She was quiet too.

  “I can never think of what to say to him,” Ray heard himself saying. Sometimes when Quinn shut her mouth it caused his own mouth to open and issue unexpected sentiments. Why was that?

  She nodded.

  “He’s a great guy. I know.”

  Quinn smiled.

  He felt stupid, annoyed at himself. He wanted to clear away those words but they kept vibrating in th
e air. “You are friends with him, aren’t you? I mean, outside of everything?”

  “Everything,” in this case, meant their strange, sprawling family. Quinn was related to George as a stepsibling, but not by blood. Not by the DNA of an inconstant father, as Ray was.

  “Sure. Kind of.” She pointed her toes through the skin of the pond. “I send him seeds sometimes.”

  “Seeds?”

  “Yes. Like for turnips, sunchokes, yams. He has that community garden he works on in Oakland.”

  Of course George did that. He planted root vegetables at a community garden when he wasn’t working a hundred hours a week at a software startup or saving dolphins from oil spills.

  Ray suddenly felt too downcast to say the half-true things he usually said about how he wished he and George lived closer. “I don’t really know him,” he said instead. “I haven’t seen the guy in, like, two years.”

  He looked at his sister, her stubby, dirty fingernails splayed on the dock, tanned legs melting into the planks. Her forearms were ropily veined like an older person’s, but the haphazard hair tucked behind her ears made her seem more like a little kid. She was the only girl he knew with short hair, but did she ever get her hair cut?

  “Sad,” she said.

  “Yeah, I guess.” George’s being his brother was a thing of some significance, because otherwise Ray had three sisters. Four sisters, because there was also Esther. Ray still kept a picture on his bulletin board from the time George took him to a Nets game when he was twelve. It was hokey to keep and impossible to throw away.

  Quinn knocked her ankle against his. “It wasn’t because of you, you know.”

  Ray acted at first like he didn’t understand what she was saying, but he did understand.

  “Adam left California before you were born,” she said.

  Ray shrugged.

  “It was unfair to them. I know. But you didn’t do anything wrong.”

  Ray didn’t do anything right, either. He just hung around being a bratty kid while George went to Stanford and won some big engineering prize. If that guy didn’t deserve a father who stuck around, who did? Certainly not Ray.

  When Adam met Ray’s mom, George and Esther were still in middle school. Adam was already divorced from Gina, their mother, but he lived a few minutes away from them in Sausalito and dutifully took them on weekends, from what Ray understood. Half a year later, Adam fell in love with Lila and moved across the continent to be with her. After that he only went back to California twice a year. George and Esther came to the Wainscott house for one week each summer until they finished high school, and then they didn’t come at all. Ray could barely remember those times.

  Adam and Lila got married in the back garden of the Brooklyn house when she was already visibly pregnant with Ray. He grew up pretty much knowing he was an accident. Why have another kid if you can’t be bothered with the two you’ve already got?

  Ray knew about the wedding only from the photographs. And he was admittedly kind of fascinated with those photos. Particularly he’d studied the graphic distress of his five half siblings. He’d even imagined the prelude: Gina grudgingly shipping George and Esther from California stuffed into their best clothes. At the wedding they look like captives in a hostage video. Lila’s three little girls in their hippie hand-me-downs look like they turned up at the wrong party. Even Emma looks uncertain on that day. Quinn is large-eyed and serious. If you look closely you can see in every picture she’s carefully holding Mattie’s hand.

  Why did parents ever make their kids watch them get remarried? Ray imagined a coffee-table book suited to a photographer like maybe Diane Arbus for publication around Halloween: Children Watching Their Parents Marry People Who Aren’t Their Parents.

  —

  “I’m sorry, what was your name?” Emma overheard her mother asking at the front door of the Brooklyn house that evening.

  It was 8:56, according to her phone, and there was Jamie framed in the doorway of their brownstone, a lanky, handsome, fidgeting portrait. She sped down the hallway and pulled up quickly behind her mother. Of course he wouldn’t be on time. Of course he’d be early.

  “It’s James Hurn. Uh, Jamie.” He shot his hand out like he was meeting the president. “I’m a friend of Emma’s.” He hit the word “friend” a little too hard.

  “I’m Lila. Emma’s mother,” Lila said, giving him the once-over.

  “Hi, Jamie,” Emma piped up, probably too brightly. Her heart was pounding. “What’s up?”

  “Come on in,” Lila invited, moving aside for him, shutting the door behind him. She was wearing jeans and slippers and a cardigan with a big moth hole above the hem in the back. She looked like she hadn’t washed her hair in a week. Emma was so worried about what her mom would make of Jamie, she forgot to worry about what Jamie would make of her mom.

  “I was just going to hang with some friends in Prospect Park and I came by to see if Emma wanted to come along.” Oh Lord. He sounded like he was reading from a script. “This is an awesome house,” he added in the least chill manner possible. This was the wrong kind of subterfuge for him. Was there any right kind of subterfuge for him?

  Her mother had turned around by now. She was studying him carefully. “You want something to drink?”

  Emma glanced at the living room, noticing how cramped the place felt with the dark wood and the billions of books. There wasn’t a single surface that wasn’t piled with stuff. Now she had to worry about that, too. She pictured Jamie’s clean, airy suburban house with a big picture window looking onto a sunny lawn and a carport. What was a carport, anyway?

  “Water? Club soda? Wine? Beer? You’re of age, right? Are you hungry?” Lila was always friendly to their friends. She always liked to feed them and ask them about what they were reading and watching.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he answered quickly. He glanced at Emma for guidance.

  Emma gave him a quick shrug in return, trying to telegraph that he should say whatever he wanted.

  “I’m mean, yes, I’m of age. And no thanks, I’m not hungry, I just ate.”

  Lila looked from Jamie to Emma and back again with her perceptive eyes. The two of them stood stiff as boards, an unnatural distance apart. They looked like they were waiting for sentencing. This was not chill.

  “Can’t I get you a drink, at least?”

  “Sorry. Uh. Just, uh. Water?” he answered.

  “Sure,” Lila said. “Sit down, why don’t you? Unless you’re in a hurry? Emma?”

  “Uh, thank you, Mrs. Harrison,” Jamie pitched into the brief silence that followed. “No, ma’am. I mean, yes, ma’am. No, I’m not in a hurry. Yes, I’d like to sit down.” He gave a drowning look to Emma.

  “Maybe we should get going,” Emma called loud enough for her mother, who was pouring a glass of water in the kitchen. She sensed this was going downhill.

  In a flash Emma had her shoes on her feet and her bag in her hand. But it was too late. Jamie had already perched woodenly on the sofa, across from her mother, with his glass of water.

  “Emma, sit. Stay for a minute.” Lila was on to a scent. Emma could just feel it.

  Emma sat. It seemed the least controversial option. “Just for a minute,” she said.

  “So how do you know Emma?” Lila asked Jamie.

  Emma clenched her fists. Downhill and off the cliff. This was a terrible idea. Whose terrible idea was this, anyway? God, she hated it when her idea was the terrible idea. She gave Jamie what she hoped was a reassuring look.

  “We met at a…work function,” Jamie said.

  What could Emma really ask of him? Jamie was pathologically honest. It was one of the things she loved about him.

  Lila looked perplexed, maybe owing to the fact that the Black Horse Market didn’t put on a lot of “work functions.” “And what is it you do?” Lila continued. />
  “Jamie works in business,” Emma put in. She could tell immediately it didn’t help.

  “What kind of business?”

  Emma let out the breath she’d been holding. Since when was her hippie-dippy mother the Gestapo? “Mom.” She knew she sounded like she was twelve.

  “What? Is it a secret? Are you a spy?”

  “Investment business,” Jamie said quietly.

  This was not a great answer under any circumstances. Lila would be more open to him if he were a gas station attendant than a banker. “What firm?”

  Jamie looked at Emma in abject misery and Emma just shook her head. Neither of them said anything.

  “What is going on with you two?” Lila demanded.

  “What do you mean?” Emma said weakly, unable to summon up any indignation. “Nothing.”

  “How long have you been seeing each other?”

  Silence. They couldn’t even look at each other.

  “Nine weeks,” Jamie finally answered, relieved to say something honest.

  Lila looked at Emma carefully. “Okay. So that explains a lot about you, my dear one.”

  Emma returned her mother’s gaze. “What are you talking about?”

  Lila smiled. “I knew something was up. I knew you were involved with somebody. I just couldn’t figure out who. But why are you both acting so weird? Why have you been so secretive?”

  Emma and Jamie exchanged another set of plaintive looks.

  “What? What? You’re making me nervous now.”

  Emma cracked her knuckles. Jamie looked deeply queasy. Emma took a stabilizing breath. She opened her mouth and came out with nothing.

  “My God, are you pregnant?” Lila asked.

  “No!” Emma shot back. “How could you ask that?”

  “Because I know something is up. Just tell me what it is.”

  Jamie couldn’t take it anymore. “I’m an analyst at Califax Capital,” he finally confessed, as though he’d murdered somebody. “For Mr. Thomas. Not directly for him. I mean, he’s like my boss’s boss.”

  Lila slumped back into her chair. “Seriously?” She looked more sickened than relieved.

  “Yes.” Jamie hung his head.

  “And that’s how you met? Through Robert, I’m guessing?”