Summer at Sunset: (The Summer Series Book 2)

by Beth Labonte

  Don’t get me wrong, they looked like they were having a blast. It was just chaotic, and trippy, and not the sort of thing I would ever want to find myself at the center of. But guess what? I’m the bride. I’m the center of attention. All of those drunk, psychotic bugs, who may or may not be our metaphorical relatives, will be buzzing around me.

  And I think that it’s going to be okay.

  As long as that one tall, blonde bug stays by my side, and then flies me off to Jamaica, I think that everything is going to be just fine.

  32

  Our Justice of the Peace is ancient.

  Like, he looks too old to even live at Sunset Havens. But he was hired by The Lakeview, so they must have been keeping him around here somewhere. Certainly not on the golf course where they like to keep all the energetic, young-looking old people. Those are the ones they want you to see when you drive by on your trolley tour. Not Arthur Spanley. This guy is just...prehistoric.

  He’s pulled his golf cart right up to the curb in front of The Lakeview—the place where you’re supposed to park long enough to drop someone off—and just left it there, with the right blinker flashing. One of the doormen started to say something, but Nadine rushed outside and waved him away as she helped Arthur out of his cart. I’m more shocked by the fact that Arthur is still driving, than I am by his illegal parking practices. Back in Massachusetts, elderly drivers plow through the fronts of Dunkin Donuts on a weekly basis, so I’m just glad we’re standing well away from the front windows.

  We all watch as Arthur pulls a wooden cane from the passenger seat and starts the long, five-yard shuffle toward the sliding doors, with Nadine hovering nearby as if expecting him to drop at any moment. He’s wearing these huge, black Orville Redenbacher eyeglasses, with shorts, black knee socks, shiny dress shoes, and a tan Members Only jacket. I feel sort of terrible for being disappointed that this is the man performing our marriage ceremony—but in my mind, I was picturing more of a Matthew McConaughey or a Ziggy Marley type. I was picturing someone who would give a really cool, laid back sort of ceremony. Once again, it’s my own fault. You get what you pay for, and I opted to pay nothing.

  Before Nadine can even introduce us, Arthur excuses himself to use the restroom. We watch as he shuffles right past the restroom and into the coat closet, closing the door behind him. After a couple of seconds, he comes back out and one of the women at the front desk directs him to the restroom.

  “Arthur’s great,” says Nadine, while we wait. “He doesn’t let anything stop him. He lost his driver’s license ten years ago because of his glaucoma. That’s when he decided to move to Sunset Havens, so he could still get around by golf cart.”

  I raise my eyebrows. “They let you drive a golf cart with glaucoma?”

  “Sure do,” says Nadine. “That’s half the draw of this place!”

  I make a mental note to be extra careful the next time I cross any streets down here, and also to possibly call in a tip to the police.

  Arthur finally returns from the men’s room, digging around in his pants pockets and extracting a hard candy. He unwraps it and puts it into his mouth.

  “Where is—” He pauses, makes a face, and spits the hard candy back out. He re-wraps it, puts it back into his pocket, and fishes out a different flavor. Pleased with his new selection, he continues.

  “Where is—” He pauses again to clear some phlegm from his throat. “Where is the bride?” He has this very raspy, Gandalf-y kind of a voice.

  “Right here,” I say, smiling and stepping forward.

  “And is this the young groom?” asks Arthur. He walks up to Dad and puts his hands on his shoulders. “The young man on the eve of his wedding? Do I need to give you the talk?” He gives Dad a wink.

  “That’s my father!” I say, horrified. I take a step closer to Graham. “This is the groom.”

  Arthur looks over at Graham, then back at Dad, then back at Graham again. He shrugs, as if seeing no difference at all, and shuffles over to shake Graham’s hand.

  “Let us begin then,” he says, and begins leading us in the direction of the coat closet.

  “This way,” says Nadine, gently steering Arthur in the correct direction. The rest of us follow behind at a snail’s pace.

  ***

  Arthur has our wedding ceremony printed out on a stack of yellowed, stapled pages, from probably the first wedding he ever performed. Or, more likely, from the first wedding ever performed.

  Every time he turns a page, he pauses for a really long time before starting to read again. I don’t know if it has something to do with his glaucoma—like, maybe it takes his eyes a while to refocus on the words—but, it’s pretty awkward. I’m holding out hope that he’ll have the whole thing memorized by tomorrow afternoon, but I’m guessing that his memory is about as sharp as his eyesight.

  Graham and I look at each other and smile. Sure, it’s a little weird to read from a bunch of stapled pages and have awkward pauses all over the place, but what’s the alternative? That he forget the lines and start reading us our Miranda rights? Or the Pledge of Allegiance? Let the man have his script, I say. As long as he makes it to the end, where Graham and I are pronounced man and wife, bound together for all eternity, who really gives a fig? The man is no Ziggy Marley, but that’s okay. I’ve become much more accepting over the past twenty minutes.

  “And this is the part where you shall exchange the rings,” says Arthur.

  I choke back a laugh. He really does sound like Gandalf, especially with all this ring talk.

  “Does anybody have the rings?”

  I jump. He’s quite loud, too. I think there might be something wrong with his hearing aid.

  “We, um, we didn’t bring the rings to the rehearsal,” I say.

  “What’s that?”

  Backing up my theory that something must be wrong with his hearing aid, is the fact that he’s barely heard a word I’ve said all evening. It’s starting to get on my nerves.

  “I said we didn’t bring the rings tonight!”

  “Oh,” says Arthur, looking concerned. “You’re going to want to purchase those soon. The wedding is only a few weeks away.”

  “No, the wedding is tomorrow. And we have the rings. We just don’t have them here.”

  “What?”

  Okay, I can’t do this. At any moment he’s going to call me sonny and give me a nickel to shine his shoes. I look to Graham for assistance, but he just makes a hand motion indicating that I should speak up. I return his suggestion with a dirty look, and walk over to where Mom is sitting and holding my purse. I fish out my keys, pull apart two key rings, and walk back to the front.

  “Here,” I say. “We can use these for now.”

  Arthur studies the key rings. One of them still has my Stop & Shop rewards tag dangling from it.

  “Oh, my. You’re going to want to resize these,” he says. “They’re much too big.”

  “Yes,” I sigh. “I’ll do that.”

  After Graham and I pretend to exchange rings, Nadine directs us back down the aisle and into the outdoor area where we’ll have our pictures taken after the ceremony. Lake Fillmore might be man-made, and it might be full of fake sunken pirate ships and the missing bodies of a few Sunset Havens residents—but at this time of the evening, it’s absolutely beautiful. I wrap my arms around Graham’s waist as we look out at the water. I can’t imagine what a relief it will be tomorrow, to be standing here with all of the stress of the wedding behind us, and ten days of relaxation in Jamaica ahead of us.

  “Now, Summer,” says Nadine. “Will your mother be joining you in the family pictures?”

  “Of course,” I say, glancing at Mom. “She’s my mother.”

  “I just wasn’t sure,” says Nadine. “with all of the personal family matters we talked about the other day. I wanted to be able to clue the photographer in ahead of time.”

  “We did not talk about any personal family matters! I told you, my mother just lives far away. That’s the only
reason she wasn’t involved in planning the wedding!”

  “If you don’t want me in the photos, Summer, you can just say so,” says Mom, pulling a tissue out of her purse and blowing her nose. “Your father can take a few photos of me in the parking lot, so you’ll at least remember that I was here. You know, after I’m gone.”

  “Don’t be morbid, Mom. Of course I want you in the photos. Nadine is just trying to cause unnecessary drama.”

  “She’s right,” says Nadine. “I must be watching too many soaps! They put all sorts of crazy ideas into your head!” She laughs loudly and takes off toward the reception hall. Great. Nadine’s hooked on soaps. She’ll probably kidnap me on my wedding day, surgically swap our faces, and trick Graham into marrying her instead. I can only hope that her turkey neck and liver spots clue him in before he goes through with it.

  Aside from that, I leave the rehearsal feeling slightly more than fifty percent confident that everything is on the right track. One of my small, nagging concerns is that Arthur Spanley isn’t going to show up tomorrow—you heard him, he thinks the wedding is in a few weeks. I can’t exactly trust Nadine to remind him. If I mention that he might have mixed up the days, it could give her a whole new idea on how to screw with the wedding. Besides the simple surgical swapping of our faces , she’d probably break into Arthur’s house and erase the wedding from his calendar.

  I certainly can’t call to remind him. I mean, if he can’t hear me in real life, he’ll never hear me over the phone. I don’t know that he could hear anybody over the phone, even Graham. He could probably hear Mom. She’s got one of those voices that can cut through anything—like Soundwave from the Transformers—but I don’t want to listen to her tell me how she could have found us an awesome Justice of the Peace if only I’d let her help plan the wedding. She probably knows one who almost won American Idol or something.

  No, I just have to hope for the best. I just have to drink a lot of wine at the rehearsal dinner, and hope for the best.

  GRAHAM

  33

  Summer’s been signaling to me for a while now.

  We’re having a little cocktail hour before the rehearsal dinner, with some of the family that have flown in for the wedding. Summer’s standing across the room in this sexy little white cocktail number, champagne glass in hand, talking to my Uncle Chuck, who is already seriously sloshed. I don’t know why Dad’s been having such a hard time convincing him and my aunt to move down here. Uncle Chuck seems about as ready for Sunset Havens as they come.

  He keeps leaning in real close to Summer’s face, like he’s telling her a juicy secret, and Summer keeps taking more and more steps backward. Unfortunately, she’s taken so many steps backward, that she’s backed herself right into a corner—which, I believe, is how he and my aunt first got together. Now she’s trying to catch my eye over one of Chuck’s beefy shoulders. Every time she does, she jerks her head toward the exit. She’s blinking a lot too. I hope she hasn’t gone through the trouble of learning Morse Code.

  If all she had in mind was for me to rescue her from Uncle Chuck, I’d have been over there in a heartbeat. Obviously. But she has a little bit more than that in mind, so I admit that I’ve been dragging my feet.

  “So, man, it was like this,” says Eddie, holding his hands out in front of him in a frame shape. “We were all at Club 44, watching the tribute show for Artie Mendelsohn. Great guy. Passed away last month at ninety-four, halfway up Kilimanjaro. Anyway, we’re all at Club 44, when in walks David Lynch.”

  The other reason I haven’t come to Summer’s rescue, is that I’ve been standing here talking with Richard’s brother, Eddie. The man is fascinating. How the two of them are even related is beyond me.

  I raise my eyebrows. “The David Lynch? The Twin Peaks guy?”

  “The one and only,” says Eddie. “It turns out that he and Artie met years ago at a retreat in Rishikesh. That’s India, you know? Same place the Beatles went to learn transcendental meditation.”

  “I had no idea.”

  “Yeah, back in the sixties. Anyway, we talked with David all night. He’s a cool guy. He’s doing a new season of Twin Peaks for Showtime. Says he’s got a small part for me if I’m interested. I’ve never seen the show myself, but he said he’s looking for someone to play a guy named Bob. Ever heard of him?”

  My eyebrows go even higher. Below them, my eyes flicker to Eddie’s shoulder length gray hair. He could totally play Bob. Summer’s uncle is going to reprise the role of one of the most evil characters in television history. I’ve got to go tell her. I’ve—

  I glance across the room again, only to be hit with the Summer Hartwell Look of Death. Uncle Chuck has one hand on each of her shoulders, and as soon as she catches my eye, she starts up again with the head jerks and the blinking.

  I sigh. Bob or no Bob, I’d better get over there before she breaks out in hives.

  “You’ll have to excuse me,” I say. “But my blushing bride has been trying to catch my attention for a while now. She misses me when I’m gone for too long. We’ll have to finish this conversation later.”

  “No problem,” says Eddie, giving me a slight bow. “Namaste, man. Na-ma-ste.”

  “And a Namaste to you, as well.”

  I return the bow and make my way over to Summer. She immediately ducks out from under Uncle Chuck’s grip and drags me toward the exit.

  “Geez, Sum, the man flew all the way out here for the wedding. You could at least let him squeeze your shoulders.”

  “I’ve been signaling to you for like thirty minutes!” she hisses.

  “Were you?” I nonchalantly rub my hand over my face. I allow a couple of veins to pop out of her neck before I break into a smile. Sometimes she’s just too easy to tease.

  “I’m sorry,” I say, putting an arm around her shoulders. “But did you know your uncle might play Bob on Twin Peaks?”

  “Did you know that your uncle has extreme halitosis?”

  “Bob, Summer. He’s a major character.”

  She looks up at me blankly, then shrugs out from under my arm. Now I know how Uncle Chuck must have felt.

  “Look,” she says, shaking her head. “You need to hurry if you want to catch the both of them together.”

  “Okay, sorry. I’m going.” I hand her my drink and slip out of the dining room. I cross the lobby of The Lakeview and head out into the parking lot toward my golf cart.

  Earlier today I made the mistake of promising Summer that I would speak to Janice and Francine to ensure that they aren’t planning to pull any more funny stuff. I figured I’d run into them at some point today and casually bring it up. Or maybe I wouldn’t end up running into them at all, and the whole thing would blow over without me ever having said a word.

  But, when three o’clock rolled around and I still hadn’t seen them, Summer whipped out an activities schedule and told me that both Janice and Francine regularly attend Friday night beer pong. Then she pulled out a map and a highlighter and showed me that beer pong is located at a rec center only five minutes from The Lakeview. She then told me that she wants this taken care of tonight, in case they have any last minute desperate attempts up their sleeves.

  If it weren’t for the fact that I recently—as in yesterday—landed her father in the emergency room, I don’t even know that I would have agreed to it. I understand her concerns. And, like I said in the hospital, I believe her that some of these women aren’t as innocent as I’d originally thought. It’s just that I still don’t have any solid proof that Francine is some sort of criminal mastermind. And sure, Janice did a lousy thing by inviting Lana to Epcot, but she did it out of a desire to have me marry into her family.

  Come on. Who can blame her? I think that my reaction to seeing Lana yesterday was confirmation enough that I wasn’t happy about it. Bringing it up again today just seems like unnecessary overkill.

  Then there’s the misconception that just because I’m an outgoing, lively guy, I don’t have a problem with confron
tation. I most definitely have a problem with confrontation—particularly awkward confrontation between myself and women who are a quarter of my size and three times my age. I don’t enjoy it. You know what I do enjoy? The fact that everybody down here loves me. The fact that I took Francine to the Senior Prom and I made her night. The fact that when I walk into Starbucks, I’m like some kind of local celebrity. There are so many levels as to why I love this place—from the superficial to the Freudian to the fact that I just really, really like driving around in a golf cart—that I really, really don’t want to ruin it.

  I’d do anything for Summer. You know that, right? But what, exactly, am I even supposed to do in this situation? Pull two old ladies into a darkened parking lot and...what? In my head, I keep hearing myself speaking in this corny mobster voice while pointing a soda bottle at them from beneath my trench coat, asking how they feel about cement overshoes. I don’t know, man. Like I said, if I hadn’t just landed Summer’s father in the hospital, I might never have agreed to this.

  I take a deep breath of the warm, night air, and bring the golf cart up to its full speed of twenty-six miles per hour. I have to make this quick. I only have about thirty minutes before our families sit down to dinner. Summer’s all ready with an excuse if I’m not back in time—apparently I left Eric’s Best Man gift back at the house and needed to go get it. Note to self, buy Eric a Best Man gift.

  I park the golf cart at the Sea Breeze Rec Center and head into the lobby. Beer Pong, Cypress Room, 6:30pm it says on a chalkboard easel. It’s not too difficult to find the Cypress Room, as I just have to follow the sounds of all the whistling and cheering. Several long, metal tables are set up with red plastic cups on either end. Each table has a small crowd gathered around it. The table closest to the door has four cups left on one end, and only one cup on the other. A tiny woman with pinkish, cotton candy hair, is setting up her shot. She shoots. She scores! Her teammates go wild and I high-five her as I pass.