The Summer Bed

by Ann Brashares

  They turned onto Newtown Lane and tried the trendy stores first, so brightly lit and brightly colored and brightly perfumed Sasha’s whole head hurt.

  “No,” Emma said to the mini–halter dress Mattie pulled out.

  “No,” she said to the skintight dress, the alligator-print dress.

  After a while Mattie and Sasha were just pulling out the most outrageous ones they could find for the fun of it.

  “No hot pink, no spandex, no feathers, no chains,” Emma stated.

  “I think we have to shop at Talbots,” Mattie complained.

  Sasha laughed. “I could just wear my school uniform.”

  Emma was becoming less amused. “I have to be at work by one,” she said. She steered them down the sidewalk and upstairs to an upscale secondhand place. “Less expensive and less slutty options,” she declared.

  Emma pulled a bunch of things and brought them to the dressing room. Sasha took a navy-blue-and-white-striped maxidress to humor her.

  “Does it come with a burqa?” Mattie asked through the curtain.

  Emma and Mattie were both waiting for her to come out. Sasha felt sweaty and mottled as she tried it on, in that particular fitting-room way. She felt like all the parts of her body were sticking out too far, trying too hard.

  “Well, look at you.” Emma studied her cleavage admiringly, resettled the waist of the dress on her. “Out of four we got one proper girl.”

  Mattie nodded. “Our own fertility goddess. It will be C-sections for the rest of us.”

  “I think you’re calling me fat,” Sasha said.

  “I’m calling you gorgeous,” Mattie said sincerely. Sometimes Mattie made her feel bad for the extra flesh, but today she was in a more generous mood.

  “Try the black one,” Mattie said.

  “Why aren’t you trying on any? Why is it just me?”

  “None are slutty enough,” Mattie said, giving Emma a sideways smile.

  Sasha dutifully tried the black one and came out, sweatily, for inspection.

  Emma turned her around by her shoulders. “Look at your tiny waist. I would show this off if I had it.”

  “Me too,” Mattie said.

  “If Mattie had your body she would never wear another stitch of clothing,” Emma proclaimed.

  “Just if it was cold,” Mattie agreed.

  The three of them gazed at her in the mirror. Sasha fidgeted with discomfort.

  It was hard to do this in front of them. For once, she really did care. August 9 was possibly the only day in her foreseeable life when she would see Ray face to face, in the flesh, and he would see her.

  She wanted to look pretty. She wanted him to think she was pretty. Would he? Would he ever think of her like that? Would he be astounded, horrified to know she thought of him like that? Because she suspected she did. In the midst of everything else, she was almost sure she did.

  She wanted it to be sexy, but not too sexy. She wanted attention, but only some attention and not from just anyone. She wanted a dog whistle of a dress, a frequency heard only by him. An inside joke, intimate but not funny.

  “Who are you dressing up for?” Emma asked.

  Sasha stopped breathing. She felt her face heat up in mortification. In the mirror she watched the redness crawl up her neck. “What?” Could Emma possibly know?

  “I always ask myself that,” Emma continued philosophically. “It was actually Myrna Chapman who brought it up once. She said, ‘When you really dress up, you’re almost always dressing up for someone in particular.’ ”

  Mattie was clowning around with a turquoise feather boa, but Emma had clearly tuned in to something. She arranged the hem of the black dress. “See, in my case I’m obviously dressing up for Jamie, but also for his mom, who I don’t even know. When I was picking out the dress, I realized I was really thinking about her.”

  Sasha swallowed. “What about you, Matt?”

  Mattie looked up. “Matt,” she answered.

  “Yourself?”

  “No, the other one. Matt Reese.”

  Emma let out a huff of breath. “Aren’t we all,” she said.

  “Seriously. I dress or fail to dress for him every day, but he doesn’t seem to notice.”

  Emma rolled her eyes. “How could he not notice? I’m sure he notices.”

  Mattie considered. “Then maybe it would be more accurate to say he doesn’t enjoy or appreciate my efforts.”

  “Then he might be the only one,” Sasha pointed out. “Cameron sure enjoys them.”

  Mattie made a face of disgust.

  Emma turned back to Sasha. “You still didn’t answer.”

  Sasha devoted her attention to a rack of clothing on wheels at the front of the dressing area. She seized on a beautiful color—something between celery and mint—and pulled it from the rack. She held it up. It was a slip dress in raw silk, three-quarter length and cut on the bias. It was ethereal but totally simple.

  She went back into the fitting room and pulled it over her head.

  She loved the feeling of it falling over her body, skimming her outlines but not pulling or sticking anywhere. Sheepishly she opened the curtain. She pushed her hot, heavy hair off her neck.

  Her two sisters stared.

  “I gawk,” Mattie said.

  “Wow, Sasha,” Emma said. “That’s the one.”

  Sasha turned, her skin prickling with the excitement of it. “Not too low-cut?”

  “No, just right,” Mattie said. “You’ve got to lose the bra, though.”

  They stared for another moment.

  “Sash, it is not lost on me that you refuse to tell us who you are dressing up for. But whoever it is,” Emma proclaimed, “will absolutely fall in love.”

  “So I hope it’s not Jamie’s mother,” Mattie added.

  As far as Mattie was concerned, it was not a good time for Jonathan Dawes to pull into the dusty parking lot of Reeses’ Farm Stand.

  Maybe it was a good time.

  The engagement party, the great convergence of their lives, was less than forty-eight hours in the future, and what Mattie hoped would be an ennobling event turned out was not.

  At the house the lawn was unkempt and overgrown. When her dad got to the house on Sunday his hair would fly off his head. And Mattie could not sweet-talk or even bribe any of the local lawn service companies to come fix it. They’d all been burned in the battle of her parents at one time or another. Same story with the swimming pool company. And again with the outfit that was supposed to remove the tree that had fallen into the driveway. Most times Mattie didn’t particularly care about these things. But for this one day, she did.

  “We like getting paid. We don’t like affidavits,” said Mike of Hamptons Hedges.

  Fair enough.

  Not even the valet parker wanted to do business with them. “We’ve heard stories,” the guy said. “A house owned by enemies.”

  When Jonathan Dawes drove in, Mattie was sitting with her phone on her lap behind the counter under the shade of the oaks bunching cilantro, trying to locate the place where her father had rented a mower.

  She hadn’t really known she was mad at him until Jonathan Dawes swung shut the door of his rhubarb-red Prius and strode toward the farm stand. If he wasn’t surprised to see her, he was a pretty good actor.

  “Mattie,” he said, half like a question, his eyebrows elevating.

  She stood as he approached. She was glad there was a counter separating the space between them. She was relieved nobody else was around—no other customers or any Reeses for the moment. She didn’t reach out to hug him. She lifted her arms and hugged herself.

  “You work here?” he asked.

  “Only for the last four years.” Yes, she was angry. She felt it in her mouth.

  He winced. “I guess I d
on’t stop here too often.”

  “I guess you don’t.”

  He tipped his head slightly. The air was awkward. “Everything…all right?” he asked.

  She was tempted to just say yes, fine, and send him on his way with some tomatoes and corn or whatever, but the anger was still in her mouth. “Apart from my confusing loss of identity, yeah. It’s all good.”

  His eyebrows stayed up, but the rest of his face fell. It took him a while to regroup. “Because of…what I said at Ditch Plains?”

  “It had an impact, you might say.”

  “Of course,” he said slowly. He rubbed his hands over his face. “I’ve replayed that conversation a hundred times in my mind. You must know I thought you knew. Or I thought you at least suspected. I thought that was why you came to see me.”

  Even now Mattie couldn’t close the deal in her mind. A perverse part of her wanted to. Knew what? Suspected what? Another part really didn’t.

  “I came because you invited me,” she said. “And the thing I wonder is, why did you invite me? Why did you approach me at all? Why did you start this?”

  Whether he’d meant to or not, Jonathan Dawes had thrown a grenade into the middle of her life. It had wrecked her equilibrium, her confidence, and the damn thing hadn’t even finished exploding yet.

  His body looked both tired and more erect. He put his hands on the counter between them. “Listen. There’s a lot to explain. This goes back a long way.” He shifted uncomfortably. “I thought about you very often over the years. As you grew up I saw you and your sisters around town a few times, but I never made contact. I waited until you were an adult, capable of making your own choices about what you wanted to know about yourself.”

  “I didn’t know there was anything to know,” she broke in. “It was a lot easier that way.”

  He sighed. “When I approached you at the Black Horse, I figured I’d say hello and that would be the end of it. It was you who chose to come to Ditch Plains. This is not what I expected to happen.”

  Mattie stood up tall, almost as tall as him. She let her arms fall to her sides. “But is it what you wanted to happen?”

  He looked down. When he met her eyes again, his estimation of her had changed.

  “Because you really made a hash of things for me,” she went on in a rush. “And for my parents. My mom, of course, but the real trouble lies with my dad. And you must have known that.”

  “I didn’t…”

  Mattie was past the point of caution, and for once it was in the service of honesty. “You may not have thought it through,” she said. “I’m not saying I know what your intentions were. But you can’t act like you were just an observer in everything that happened between my parents.”

  Here he stopped. After a while he nodded. “You’re right. I can’t.”

  “You were probably hurt by it too,” she said, surprised by her own forwardness.

  He was clearly struck. He considered her face for a long time, trying to gauge how much to say. He wasn’t as young as he tried to appear. “I was. You’re right about that, too.”

  He looked around. The place was quiet. Distant cars caught the light beyond the fields. “Is there a place we could sit down and talk?”

  “We can talk here,” she said. She thought fleetingly of the miraculous Reese farm talking magic.

  “All right.” He looked up at the sky. He looked down at the dusty ground. “I will be completely rash and tell you the truth. I loved your mother. At that time, I hated your father. And I hated that I couldn’t be with her and with you.”

  Check another box. Mattie now knew where the rashness came from. But for some reason at this moment, she herself felt the opposite of it: infinitely old, capable of all secrets and possibilities. “Why couldn’t you be?”

  He shook his head. “It was a total catastrophe. I don’t know how much of it you know.”

  “Not much.”

  “How much do you want to know?”

  “More. Why couldn’t you and my mom be together? After they split up?” Even her voice had a slow-motion calm, a purposeful unfolding.

  “After you were born your parents’ marriage came apart. And then Lila wanted out, but Robert wouldn’t let her go. That was a terrible time.” He looked up, as though at a memory. “Your sister Quinn saw us together once, your mother and me. I always felt terrible about that. She was so little, I don’t think she’d remember, but those eyes of hers…”

  Mattie nodded. She knew those eyes well, and she doubted they forgot anything.

  “Anyway, it made Robert crazy that Lila wanted to leave him. It was like he thought he owned her. He was already making big money then. He got his lawyers involved. He wanted to punish her. He called in a domestic violence complaint to my apartment when he knew Lila and I were together.”

  “God.”

  “Three officers burst into my bedroom. I was taken to the Montauk police station based on Robert’s false information. Rumors circulated around the East End. Lila wore her scarlet letter.”

  “I didn’t know any of that.”

  “That was just the beginning. Lila would have worn the shame. It was you girls. He threatened to take you away from her. He did take you. For six days he kept you all in a hotel in Manhattan, and your mother was frantic, not knowing where you were. A judge finally ordered him to bring you back to Wainscott. It was summertime. The judge ordered that you girls stay in the house while your parents took turns week to week.”

  That explained a few things. Did Emma remember any of that? Did Quinn?

  Jonathan Dawes paused. He rubbed his eyes. His face seemed to get older as he traveled back in time. “And I did something stupid. I tried to claim you. Of course, your parents were married when you were born. Your father would have pulled the sky apart before even considering that you were not his. I had no legal standing, but I was angry. I couldn’t accept it then. Even your mother begged me to drop it for your sake. That was what finally drove us apart.”

  Mattie nodded. She breathed. Breathed more. She looked at his face and felt sorry for him. Her world made more and less sense.

  It was almost dark by the time Jonathan Dawes finished talking. Whatever produce he’d come for he no longer needed.

  “Well.” He sighed. He seemed to want to move toward her, but he wasn’t going to presume anything anymore. “Forgive me,” he said quietly. He turned and walked back to his car. “May the truth set you free, Mattie.”

  Slowly, diligently, Mattie closed up the farm stand for the night and walked her bike all the way home. She needed to stay as long as she could in the in-between.

  In her mind she considered Jonathan Dawes’s sun-lined face, his effortfully young body, his tired surfer’s affect. He was stuck, just like everybody else, wasn’t he? May it set us all free, she thought.

  —

  On the day before the party Quinn stopped at Myrna’s with cherries, and Myrna was still in her bathrobe. “Are you okay?”

  “I am fine, my darling. I just have a cold. Standard-issue.”

  Quinn went over and put a hand on Myrna’s soft and yielding cheek.

  Myrna studied her with shrewd eyes. “You are looking a bit run-down yourself, Quinn.”

  Quinn shrugged. “I’m fine. I’ll make you tea. And these cherries are good for vitamin C.”

  “Tea would be lovely.”

  Quinn filled the kettle at the sink.

  “But I’m afraid I won’t be able to come to the party tomorrow.”

  Quinn put down the kettle. “Oh. Really? What if I pick you up in the car?”

  “No need.”

  “How about I’ll come check on you after lunch to see if you’re up for it.”

  “No, darling. Really. You take care of yourself and don’t be troubled. Just bring me a piece of your cake when it’s all do
ne.”

  —

  The changeover was at noon like always, and Emma and Jamie’s engagement party was at four. For the first time in Ray’s life, he was going to leave his house an occupant and return to it four hours later a guest.

  The place looked like crap. That was the thing that worried him. He wasn’t Martha Stewart, but he did have basic standards. His mind flashed on a picture of his bedroom in Brooklyn. Okay, very basic.

  The thing that woke him up at four a.m. was the idea of Robert and Evie (and Sasha!) arriving at a house left in disarray by Lila with less than four hours to fix it. He kept picturing Robert’s disappointed face, even though he didn’t even know Robert’s face, disappointed or otherwise.

  Which was why Ray was cruising along atop a John Deere forty-two-inch zero-radius mower he’d rented from Power Equipment Plus in East Hampton, mowing the hell out of the lawn.

  He couldn’t do the edging like the professional guys, but it was better than nothing.

  His mom and Adam were gone before he’d gotten back with the mower, which was frankly a relief to all four of her children. She and Adam weren’t going all the way back to Brooklyn. They were having lunch with Grandma Hardy in Oyster Bay and then bringing her back for the party.

  Ray planned to shower and change at his friend Frasier’s place before returning for the party, but now he was worried he wouldn’t finish mowing in time.

  He’d never stayed past the changeover before. He’d always sort of imagined that the house disappeared into the air at noon every Sunday and then shimmeringly re-formed from the air as a slightly different house.

  And it was the same old troubling thing of having to hustle away like an outlaw while his sisters got to stay and watch the metamorphosis. He imagined they were part of the magic too. At the stroke of noon, they became part of a different family.

  What if he just kept mowing through noon when the other family arrived? He could pretend he was the guy from the lawn service company. They didn’t know him, wouldn’t recognize him. At least, Robert and Evie didn’t.

  He saw Mattie emerge from the front door of the house in her pajamas as he rounded the driveway. “What are you doing?” she yelled over the sound of the mower.