The Summer Bed

by Ann Brashares

  Quinn smiled. “They weren’t always the source of trouble.”

  Myrna smiled. “It’s generational.”

  They savored the peaches for a few moments in silence. “I think I’m going to make a flower cake for the party,” Quinn said.

  “Lovely. I still have dianthus and borage. Those are wonderful in a cake.”

  As Myrna got older, her garden got smaller and closer to the kitchen door, until now it was a small patch of hardy perennials hugging the back wall of the house.

  At first Quinn was pained by this march of diminishment. “I could keep it going for you,” she’d offered ardently, almost in tears. “The whole thing.”

  Myrna was moved by her offer, but firm. “A garden should reflect what you yourself can and want to do.”

  As Quinn rode home from Myrna’s, it occurred to her she’d said something that wasn’t quite true. When she was eleven, she’d come down with a mysterious illness that lasted for days. Finally the fever got so bad they put her in the hospital. She was in and out of consciousness, hallucinating and dreaming. Which was a mercy, really, because she just hated the sounds and smells of the place.

  She remembered one moment of rough clarity when she woke up in the dark hospital room. She looked through the open door to the hallway and believed she saw her parents framed in the doorway, both of them. She remembered their heads bent together, talking in low voices.

  She might have been hallucinating, but she thought she saw her father reach for her mother’s hand and grasp it for one moment before they turned in different directions and walked away.

  —

  Violet looked pretty. Ray liked the sparkly stuff on her eyelids. He didn’t mind the way her knee kept touching his under the table. But he really hated that question.

  “Nothing. Why?”

  Violet put her hair behind her ears. She shook her iced coffee. “You just seem very distracted.”

  That was fair. He was so distracted it took him a few seconds to process that she’d just accused him of being distracted. “Yeah. Maybe. I don’t know.”

  That wasn’t totally fair. He didn’t know, but he had a pretty good idea. He was comparing a girl he’d touched nearly every part of—hooked up with, hung out with off and on for two years—to a girl he’d met for less than five minutes outside a party.

  With Violet it was always casual, never really intimate. But she was eager and ready and always around. Whereas the other girl was totally off-limits.

  He knew them in completely different ways. Violet he knew from the outside—how she looked and dressed and how she felt in his hands. And though he’d barely seen (let alone touched) the other girl, he only knew her from what she did and wrote and read and made.

  It was a flaw of character, his father told him once, to favor what you didn’t have over what you did. What you couldn’t have over what you could.

  But would she ask him so often what he was thinking?

  He stood. He took his overpriced Hamptons coffee cup from the table. “I have to be at work in a couple minutes,” he told her.

  Violet stood too. As they walked toward the door, she slid toward him. She kissed him on the jaw and he breathed in a flower smell.

  “Are you going to Frasier’s tonight?”

  Violet smelled different every time. Always good and strong and girly, like the makeup aisle, but never the same.

  She was looking at him impatiently out on the sidewalk.

  “Sorry…Frasier’s? No, I already told him I couldn’t make it.” Frasier was an old Wainscott friend. Ray was happy to go surfing or fishing with him but couldn’t stand his parties. “I’m home tonight. Family dinner.”

  “Then back in the city?”

  “Yeah. I’ll see you the next week, I guess.”

  “I might come in for a night.”

  “Okay,” he said.

  “It gets boring out here without you.”

  Violet got bored quickly, he knew. He kissed her and turned to walk to the Black Horse, happy for his thoughts to be free from anyone wanting to get at them for a while.

  Would she get bored quickly?

  For some reason he thought of the Lego city. He couldn’t really imagine Violet, not middle-school Violet or any Violet, working for five months on a Lego city with six parks and no school or even any shopping.

  He tried to re-create her face in his mind, but it was already blurry less than two weeks after seeing it. In fact, it had grown blurry that very night as he tried to fall asleep, superimposed as it was with memory and expectation. He had no problem picturing Violet’s face.

  He’d had those few minutes of clarity, before he knew she was her, when he really saw her. That was the moment he kept trying to go back to, meeting eyes in the hallway outside the kitchen. That was the part that churned into an odd brew of confusion, shame, and excitement.

  He had enough clarity to know he thought she was beautiful. As beautiful as Violet. More beautiful. Maybe other guys would disagree with him. Violet was tall and glamorous and head-turning. But he agreed with himself.

  Why was he doing this?

  He went into the Black Horse through the back door. He checked in with Julio and got to work in the storeroom.

  He started unloading boxes of fancy Italian spaghetti from cartons onto storeroom shelves.

  He peered around the aisle at the back of the last set of shelves to look for more cartons. Instead he found a faultless rendition of the three pyramids of Giza in cans and boxes.

  He smiled. He leaned against the old fire door. His heart was full. He proceeded to spend the next hour stacking miniature tomato paste cans into the Great Sphinx.

  No, she wouldn’t get bored easily. And he had a flaw of character.

  Question of the day for Little Ray:

  Did Quinn ever take you to see the narwhals at the Coney Island aquarium?

  Big Sasha

  BS,

  Yes! She loved that place and she hated it. She cried over the ancient walrus. “He can see the open ocean from his tank!” So I cried too, naturally.

  Did she used to take you under the blue whale at the Natural History museum?

  LR

  LR,

  Many times. She had stories for each one of the scary undersea dioramas.

  She was the only one in the family who took me anywhere. If not for Quinn, I would have turned out like Cameron Reese.

  BS

  Please.

  —

  “Do you think it’s possible that Mom had an affair when she was married to Dad?” Mattie chose a moment when Quinn was wrestling the deep-rooted weeds in a patch of summer squash.

  Mattie decided to burden Quinn with this in its totality. She knew Quinn would take most or all of the weight, and it was just as well. She was tired of carrying it alone.

  Quinn stood up. “Why do you ask?” She looked neither surprised nor hungry for information, as other people might.

  “Because I keep thinking about it. That guy in the Black Horse I told you about?”

  “Uh-huh.” She was back to the weeds.

  “I asked Mom about him and she shut down completely. She hasn’t looked me in the eye since.”

  “What did she say?”

  “Nothing remarkable. She said he was a surfer. He taught her and us for a bit. I knew all that. It was how she looked and acted.”

  “Right.”

  Mattie took a breath. “And then I asked Dad.” Mattie picked at her fingernails violently. “He was so weird, Quinn. He hardly said anything. Silent but cold. I’ve never seen him act like that.”

  Quinn nodded, but her face, even from the side, was pained.

  “It was Sunday afternoon and he was in his study. After I asked him he told me to close the door and right after that I heard so
mething crash on the ground.” She felt shaky as she told it. “What does that mean, do you think?”

  “Something fell.”

  Mattie let out her breath. “Quinn.”

  “Do you want to know what it means?”

  “I don’t know if I do, but I keep pushing, and I can’t seem to let it go.” She cracked all her knuckles. She closed her eyes. “None of us knows what happened. Don’t you kind of want to know?”

  “They don’t want us to know.”

  “Obviously they don’t. Why not? What happened?” Mattie felt itchy and reckless, and even though her recklessness always seemed to cause Quinn the most trouble, it didn’t stop her. “Are you not curious?”

  Quinn wiped the dirt off on her pants. “I don’t think there’s any piece of information that would change the things we know are true,” she said slowly.

  Mattie was barely listening. She opened her hands. “Other people divorce amicably. They stay friends. They have dinner together. They share holidays, go on vacations. I know plenty of people like that. Our parents haven’t stood within a hundred feet of each other in almost twenty years. What happened to them? And why can’t they tell us?”

  “They want to protect us.”

  “From what? Maybe they want to protect themselves. Maybe it’s the one thing they’ve agreed on in all this time.”

  “Maybe even that amount of agreement is good.”

  “When we were little kids maybe. But at a certain point, they don’t get to decide anymore.”

  At last Quinn’s large eyes turned on her with all their force. “Please be careful, Matt.”

  No, that was not what she would be doing. She would trample, lurch, and careen. “Maybe I get to decide. Maybe even Jonathan fucking Dawes gets a chance to decide.”

  Sasha spent two days trying to think of what she could write to Ray about, and then she saw the sphinx behind the back shelves in the storeroom of the market alongside her pyramids and she almost cried.

  She almost cried with appreciation of it. In her heart surged a tidal wave that started to trickle out of her eyeballs. That was weird.

  But it brought such a rush of the old feelings. The Lego feelings and To Kill a Mockingbird feelings and the little plastic animal feelings. It was nostalgia, but something new and momentous, too: the synthesis of her old Ray and the bewildering stranger Ray she’d met outside Samantha Rubin’s apartment building. Here was a beautiful rendition of nearly the whole of Giza made of cans and boxes stretching across the poorly lit aisle behind the last wall of shelves that led to the defunct fire door.

  It brought back an old version of herself that she’d missed, hadn’t really known was gone.

  And then Francis came around in back of the shelves and found her.

  “What the hell is this?”

  She let out her breath. Shit. With her eyes she memorized the last moments of box-and-can Giza.

  “Are those pyramids?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did you make this?” She couldn’t quite read his voice. If Francis was even a little impressed she wanted to include Ray, but if he was purely annoyed she didn’t.

  “Um.”

  “Have I been paying you to make a play world out of dry goods?”

  She tried to look contrite and not just put out. “I’m sorry. I had a bit of extra time after I finished with the morning shipments and restocking. I thought maybe we could use the images on social media.”

  That was complete bullshit, but Francis talked about the value of social media almost as much as he talked about his MBA.

  She could see the wheels turning. “You mean, we could post it on Facebook.”

  “Sure. Maybe create an Instagram account.”

  “Okay.” He nodded, eyebrows raised. “That’s good thinking. You know, that’s why I like to hire you kids.”

  “Ray did it too. He really deserves credit.” She smiled. She couldn’t help feeling proud.

  “You’re Ray.”

  “I mean the other Ray.” Now she knew exactly what she would write to Ray as soon as she got off work. Her heart began thumping irrationally. Her fingers tingled with anticipation.

  “He did?”

  “Yeah.”

  He laughed. “Here I was imagining Ray was an adult. I mean, you’ve seen that gorgeous girlfriend who picks him up after his shift every day.”

  Sasha swallowed hard. Her heart kept up, but its rhythm changed. Her smile dangled uncertainly on her face, then fell off.

  Gone was her triumph. She could barely speak. She felt a little dizzy. She wouldn’t have thought Francis had the power to injure her, but there were so many things to feel bad about in that one sentence of his she couldn’t sort through them.

  Ray was an adult. She was a child. Ray had a girlfriend. His girlfriend was gorgeous. His girlfriend was devoted. Sasha had in fact not seen the gorgeous girlfriend. Not at all. Sasha had not even fathomed her. Sasha had no person, gorgeous or otherwise, picking her up after her shift. Not every day. Not any day.

  Now she looked at the dumb can pyramids and just felt stupid. Was Ray making fun of her when he added the sphinx?

  Francis turned to go. “It’s cute.” He gestured to the spread. “Really. Did you get pictures already?”

  She felt stricken. She tried not to. “No. I will.”

  “Good. And then take the whole thing down and put all that stuff back where it goes.”

  She nodded, miserable.

  “Tonight.”

  —

  “I think we should call before we go to Lexi’s,” Jamie suggested.

  Now that Jamie’s parents had agreed to fly east for the engagement party, he and Emma had decided it would be good to call them and stage a preliminary introduction before the hubbub in August.

  Emma pushed her phone against her ear so she could hear better. “Can you get out of work early?”

  “I’ll try. I’ll go back to the office after the dinner if I have to.”

  His voice sounded tight. She wished she could see him so she could read his mood.

  “Let’s meet at my place at six.”

  “That early?” She’d never known him to leave the office before eight on a weeknight.

  “Yeah. I think so.”

  She arrived in front of his apartment building in Long Island City just as he did. He kissed her like he meant it, but his face was anxious. His feet were tip-tapping the whole ride up in the elevator.

  “It’s just a phone call,” she said. “Your folks are the easy ones, right?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. Whose parents are easy?”

  She was trying to understand. He didn’t talk about his family much. His parents were married. He had one sister who was fifteen and prematurely capable. His dad worked in sales for a chemical company. They lived in a nice airy house in a nice subdivision with a carport.

  Was it her he was worried about? She had thought of this before. “They won’t be able to tell I’m Indian over the phone,” she said as he let them into his tiny apartment.

  He looked aghast. “What do you mean?”

  “I was just worrying that when they meet me, they might be surprised I’m not a bit…whiter.”

  He grabbed her and hugged her hard. “Oh, Em, you are so perfectly perfect. I hate that you’re worried about that.” He let her go. “Anyway, I told them all about you—I think I used your description: half-Bengali, half-hippie. They met your dad once for about a tenth of a second when they came to see the office last year.”

  So that wasn’t it.

  “I’m calling,” he said.

  They caught all three Hurns at home. Everyone was warm, polite, full of congratulations, a little awkward. Jamie’s mother effused about the case of champagne Robert had sent.

  “I am touched
that you are all coming here for the engagement party,” Emma said at the end. “I can’t wait to meet you.”

  “See, that wasn’t so bad,” she said after they’d all chimed in about how much they were looking forward to it and hung up.

  Jamie nodded.

  “They all sound great, in fact.”

  Jamie’s eyes looked more guarded than she’d seen them. “My mom is easier sometimes than others,” he said.

  “Well, she sounded like a picnic compared to mine.”

  —

  Mattie was the only one around, so Mattie was the one Sasha had to ask. Not ideal, but it had to be done.

  “Who is the gorgeous girl who picks Ray up from his shift every day?” It was none of Sasha’s business, and not objectively relevant to any aspect of her life, but there it was.

  Mattie was painting her toenails on a lounge chair by the pool. Mattie was so distracted these days, Sasha hoped she could excise the information she wanted, like a surgeon in a hurry, without a lot of curiosity or haranguing in return. “You mean Violet?”

  Shit. She had to have a cool name like Violet. “I don’t know. Do I?” Were there a lot of these girls?

  “I guess you must mean Violet. She’s always turning up. I don’t know about gorgeous.” Mattie considered. “Yeah, maybe she is. Do you know her or something?”

  “Manager Francis told me about her.”

  Mattie rolled her eyes. “Francis is lascivious. What is he, thirty? Violet is in high school.”

  Sasha really did have to wonder about herself. Why was she surprised there was a Violet? Of course there was a Violet. Why did she feel betrayed? Was she completely bananas? What kinds of ideas was she harboring? And yet, her mouth opened again. “Are they serious?”

  Mattie was occupied with fixing up a botched toenail and didn’t appear to judge her for asking. That, at least, was nice. “Serious? They’re kids,” Mattie said, as though she herself were a senior citizen. “It’s hard to use ‘serious’ and ‘Violet’ in the same sentence.”