by Carol Weston
When we walked into the house, carrying bags loaded with steak, asparagus, and strawberries, Alexa and Kate were in the middle of a fight. “Sorry to be a killjoy,” Kate was saying, “but this backpack is way too heavy!”
“You are a killjoy, Mom! It’s your specialty!” Dad and I traded glances and ducked into the kitchen.
“You need pants, shorts, T-shirts, hiking boots, sneakers, a bathing suit, a hat, and sunscreen,” Kate said. “You do not need heels or a miniskirt. And they said no cell phones because there’s no reception in the hinterlands, remember?”
“Mom, you so don’t get it!” Alexa said, her voice rising. “And nobody says ‘hinterlands’!”
“Call your father. Or ask Brian. Their mantra is: ‘Less is more.’ And what if your luggage gets lost? Don’t pack anything you’re not willing to lose. Your passport is in your carry-on, right? With a change of underwear?”
“God, Mom! I’ve traveled before!” Alexa shouted. Coconut, the cat, scurried into the kitchen to join us.
“Well, no one’s going to help you lug your luggage,” Kate persisted. “And makeup? You’re going hiking!”
“I get zits, okay?”
“Do you want to take a game with you? I have travel chess.”
“That is the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard in my entire life! You know what? Just forget about dinner. I’m going to Amanda’s!” She flew out the door and let it slam behind her.
Two hours later, Kate phoned Alexa’s cell and got no response. She texted. Nothing. She phoned Amanda’s landline. No one picked up. She texted again, and Alexa finally texted back, “Having pizza. Don’t wait up.”
So much for our heartwarming farewell dinner.
• • •
“Shouldn’t I be in a summer program?” I asked Dad over scrambled eggs at City Diner. “Mom would have signed me up for art class or piano lessons or jazz dancing or community service or something.”
“You could be in Panama building homes for Habitat for Humanity,” he conceded. “But you already speak Spanish, and I like having you around. Is that selfish?”
“Yeah, but it’s okay.” Truth was, I didn’t mind unstructured days. I knew I wasn’t just being lazy. I was healing. If that meant sleeping late, reading, vegging with Kiki, and watching videos, so be it. “Besides, in a few weeks,” I reminded Dad, “we’ll be seeing Abuelito.” Not that I wanted to think about the task that awaited us in Spain.
Dad speared a home fry. “We have to find a new apartment before that.”
“We’ve been doing a lame job looking,” I said. Dad liked to spend his free time with Kate, not real estate agents, so when he wasn’t on call, we headed north. When he was on call, Kate sometimes came to the city. Last weekend, the three of us had eaten lunch at the Boathouse in Central Park, then ridden a gondola on the Great Pond.
In the gondola, I’d snapped a photo of Kate and Dad. She was wearing a mint-green dress and sunglasses and, despite myself, I could see that she and Dad looked good together. Happy. I did not, however, share or edit the image in any way. For now, it was enough to let them be inside my cell phone.
• • •
Dad bounded up the front steps and rang Kate’s doorbell. “Honey, we’re home!” he sang. If Alexa had been there, he might not have sounded so exuberant.
“Come in!” She opened the door and gave us both a hug.
“It’s such a nice day,” I said, “I might head over to the lake.” I thought I deserved a gold star for being a good sport, but I had my own reason for giving them some privacy: maybe Sam would be there. Sometimes, I wondered if I was crazy to think about him as much as I did. For all I knew, he had a girlfriend. All we’d done was skip stones and wave once—nothing. But I felt like we had a connection, and I hoped it wasn’t just in my head.
“Sign my name at the snack bar!” Kate said.
“Have fun!” Dad added.
I considered saying, “You too!” But no. I had my limits.
At the club, I looked at the menu and thought about ordering a flatbread or “truffled chickpeas.” But I wasn’t hungry. I saw kids playing cards on the lawn and Marco Polo in the water, and I wondered if there was a way to join in. For a second, I almost wished Alexa were there. Kiki had helped us break the ice, and maybe Alexa and I could get it to keep thawing? The Spanish tutorial had also helped un poquito.
Then again, who was I kidding? When I’d last been with Alexa, she’d trash-talked mothers and blown off her own farewell dinner. It was good she was gone. Better to feel a little lonely than get caught in her toxic force field.
I went down the steps, struggled to unfold a red lawn chair decorated with a white windmill, and settled in with The Princess Bride, yanking down the hem of my checked sundress. I wanted to look confident, but how do you project confidence while reading?
Someone behind me—a lifeguard?—said, “Excuse me, ma’am? Are you a member?”
Oh no! Should I have signed in? This was the first time I’d come to the club by myself since it had opened. I didn’t know the rules.
“I’m the guest of—” I turned around.
Sam was smiling. “I haven’t seen you in a while,” he said. He was wearing running shorts and no shirt, and I tried to look at his eyes, not his chest. “How’s the stone skipping? Been practicing?”
“No. I had finals. But we might start coming out more now.”
“Who’s we?”
“My dad and me. I think you played volleyball with him once?” I could feel myself blush.
“What about your mom?”
I didn’t expect that question and decided to just come out with it: “She died last year—well, a year and two months ago.” If this was going to scare him off, better sooner than later.
Died. Dead. Such short words—single syllables, four letters each. But they changed everything. Was there a better way to say it? “She passed away”? “She’s gone”? I didn’t like the sound of any of it, but I preferred the bitter D words to the sugarcoated ones.
I waited for Sam to ask the inevitable “How?” I always resented that question because then my job was to reassure people that aneurysms are rare and they didn’t have to worry about their moms. Their moms would live long past forty-two, maybe to eighty-two or ninety-two or 102!
But Sam said, “Oh, I’m sorry. That must’ve been really hard.”
“Thanks. Still is.”
One of the condolence cards Dad and I received after Mom’s “tragic death” (they almost all said that) included the words, “Time doesn’t heal, but it helps.” At first, I’d thought that was trite. Now I knew it was true. It had helped that fourteen months had come between that April afternoon and this June one.
In the latest dream I’d had about my mom, she was sitting quietly in my bedroom chair in our apartment. When I’d woken up, the chair was empty. I’d felt a bolt of fresh sorrow and sat upright. I’d wondered, Is Mom really dead? How can I survive without her? Then I’d realized I had survived. I was surviving.
“My grandpa died last fall,” Sam continued. “My mom was a mess.”
Sometimes, I objected when people jumped in with stories of their own. I’d think, We’re talking about my mother. But it was an impossible conversation. There was no ideal response to “My mother died.” Nothing anybody could say was right, yet saying nothing was wrong.
“Tell me about your grandpa,” I said. “What was he like?”
Was that what I hoped people would ask: “What was she like?” instead of “How did she die?”
“You really want to know?” he asked.
I looked into his sea-green eyes and nodded.
“Let’s take a walk.” He extended his hand and pulled me up. A jolt of energy surged between us. Did he feel it too? He stopped at a nearby chair, stepped into his flip-flops, lifted his arms, and pulled on a white
Tar Heels T-shirt. I was startled to notice the wispy blond hair of his armpits. “Grandpa Fritz was a Southern gentleman,” he began, leading me to the path around the lake. “But he moved to New York and built a little beach house.” He glanced at me, then away. “Ever been to Fire Island?”
I shook my head. “No.”
“It’s only a few hours from here, but it’s another world. There are no cars, and everyone rides old, rusty bikes. My grandpa used to spend the whole summer in a place called Kismet. We’d go out on the ferry, and he’d meet us with a beat-up red wagon. On Sunday, my parents would go back to work, and he and I would hang out all week. He’s the one who taught me to skip stones. We even went clamming. Ever been clamming?”
I shook my head again. I wondered if nervousness was making him talkative and me silent. Funny how it could have either effect.
“You squish your toes in the bay till you feel a stone, but it’s not a stone; it’s a clam. We collected buckets and made spaghetti with clam sauce. We went fishing too. We’d use frozen minnows for bait and bamboo rods with corks for bobbers. If the baby bluefish were running, that was dinner. My grandpa showed me how to chop off their heads and tails, and we’d bread the fish and sizzle them. Back then, if my parents served clams or fish, I’d have pushed the plate away, but whatever Grandpa cooked, I ate. You like seafood?”
“I used to spend every August in Spain. Spaniards are big on fish, and I was a pescatarian for a few months when I was twelve. But go on.”
“I’m not boring you?”
“Not at all.” I smiled and he smiled and more arrows of energy ricocheted between us.
“Well, I kept getting taller, while my grandpa started, like, shrinking. I still went to see him every summer, but instead of him taking care of me, we were taking care of each other.” Sam picked up a stray plastic cup and tossed it into a garbage can in the parking lot. “Then last summer, I was mostly taking care of him. But he was still always fixing things—his wooden deck, his outdoor shower, his fence to keep deer out. He even stitched up the holes in his pants because he never liked to buy anything new. We fished together, but he had stopped fishing by himself. So neighbors dropped by and left buckets with their catch. He loved that, and he loved eating for free, living off the land and sea. It’s hard to have a garden in Fire Island—ground’s too sandy—but somehow, he grew tomatoes, lettuce, and arugula. He was really proud of his arugula.” He paused. “Sofia?”
“Yeah?”
“Shut me up.”
I laughed. “I don’t want to.”
“Can I show you something?”
“Sure.”
He led me toward the same windmill that Alexa had shown me, and he seemed so pleased with himself that I didn’t have the heart to say, Been here, done this. Maybe Armonk didn’t have many tourist sites? As we climbed the wooden ladder, he said, “I haven’t talked about my grandfather this much since his funeral. I usually just think about him.”
“I know what you mean.”
“What about your mom? Did she look like you?”
“Yeah.”
We reached the top of the windmill. “So she had beautiful eyes.” He turned away and looked at the lake. We sat on the same wooden bench where I’d sat with Alexa. The blades of the windmill were turning, creaking. The warm sun was streaming in, lighting up specks of dust, and landing in thick broken stripes on Sam’s shorts and T-shirt. We sat down and were silent, and I tried not to stare at his thighs.
I could almost hear Kiki and Natalie squealing, “Omigod, Sofia, he is hot.” I hoped I wasn’t looking at him as if he were chocolate cake and I was starving.
I’d felt nervous up here with Alexa and felt even more nervous with Sam. But it was happy nervous, excited nervous, not I-hope-I-don’t-say-the-wrong-thing nervous.
“My mom was beautiful,” I said, “and maybe I will tell you about her sometime.” My eyes prickled. “But not now, okay?” Whenever I tried to talk honestly about my mom, I couldn’t trust my voice not to go wobbly. “It usually makes me cry, and that’s the last thing I want to do right now.”
My tears still came too easily. I wondered if they always would. After my mom died, I could have sat and sobbed forever. Since that was not an option, I’d put a lid on my tears. Yet they were always right there, ready at a moment’s notice.
Sam slipped his arm around me. “What’s the first thing you want to do?”
I looked into his eyes and tilted my head. I felt like a heroine in a romantic movie. And then I kissed him—gently and tentatively at first and then, when he kissed back, like I meant it.
I hoped he didn’t think I was easy, some fast city kid. Had he kissed a lot of girls? We barely knew each other, although I already knew him much more than Miles or Julian or Daniel.
It was amazing to be kissing Sam, but was I doing it right? Should I have let him make the first move? Should I be placing my hands somewhere? I closed my eyes and tried to banish all thought, and before I knew it, nothing mattered except that we were kissing and his arms were around me. It felt so good to be held.
And kissed! I felt like I was melting into him. His T-shirt smelled like it had just come out of the dryer, and his chest felt solid against mine. I briefly worried that my breasts inside my bra might feel disappointingly small, but I chased away that thought—he didn’t seem disappointed.
So this was kissing! No wonder it inspired singers and painters and writers. Kissing! Kissssing! Kisssssssing! Someday, I hoped I could tell Sam not only about Mom but also about this day. I’d tell him that these afternoon kisses—right now, with him—were my first true kisses, the first ones that counted.
I wanted them to go on forever, so I memorized that June afternoon, holding and being held, kissing and being kissed, feeling the warm, slanting sunrays as the windmill turned and creaked. No matter what happened, I would keep that hour inside me. I knew this because I’d learned how strange time and memory could be.
I’d learned that while most weeks and months whoosh by, there are moments—some good, some horrible—that last forever. Moments that split your life into Before and After.
Maybe these kisses could last forever—but in a good way. I loved feeling his soft lips and strong shoulders, peeking at his closed eyes and long lashes. I wanted time to stretch like taffy and be every bit as sweet. I pictured Sarah Brown in Guys and Dolls singing, “I’ve nevvvver been in love before…”
I must have giggled because Sam asked, “Are you laughing at me?”
“Not laughing,” I said. “Just smiling hard.”
“Good.” We kissed some more. My heart felt so big inside me. I couldn’t believe that on the day that I’d gotten my first real kiss, I’d also gotten my next fifty. Was that how it sometimes worked?
Soon, I pulled away to check the time on my cell. Five thirty already? “I’d better go,” I said. “I don’t want my dad to worry.”
“I’ll walk with you. Where are you staying?”
“We’re not. We’re going back to the city tonight.”
“When are you coming back?”
“Next week, I think.” I liked his eagerness.
“Why not during the week?”
“My dad has to work. He’s a doctor.”
“What about you? Are you a doctor?”
I laughed. “Maybe I can come back sooner. I hadn’t thought of it.” We walked by the lake and through the ball field. “This is the house.”
“That house? That one?” He looked at it as though it were haunted.
“My dad’s going out with Katherine Baird.” He fell silent. “You know ‘Dear Kate’?”
“Everyone knows everyone around here. But don’t say anything, okay? What happens in windmills stays in windmills.”
“Of course.”
Was he acting weird, or was I imagining it? I wished I could schedule a private sessi
on with Dear Kate. I’d ask, “How come the second you kiss a boy, everything gets complicated?” I’d heard other girls say that.
“Give me your number—I don’t have my cell,” Sam said. I reached into my bag for a pen, noticing with relief that it was a normal one, not one of the freebies Dad sometimes brought home that said “Monistat” or had the name of some vaginal goo for urinary tract infections. I scribbled my number on a piece of paper, then tapped his into my cell phone. I wanted to give him one last kiss, but he was already backing away. “Adiós, right? Adiós? Sorry. I take French.”
“Adiós is correct. But hasta pronto is better. It means ‘see you soon.’”
He took off, and I turned toward the house and ran up the steps. I felt like I was flying. But I couldn’t ignore the nagging feeling that something was wrong. Why had Sam been in such a hurry to say good-bye?
• • •
During dinner on the deck with Kate and Dad, I wanted to say, Guess where I spent the afternoon. In a windmill, kissing the sweetest, hottest guy in the whole wide world! Instead, I said, “This may be a lot to ask, but can I stay a little longer next week? Like maybe I could come Wednesday, and Dad could come Friday after work? It’s so nice out here, all the fresh air and everything. It’s just an idea. I don’t want to impose.”
Dad looked surprised. Usually, he was the one pushing Armonk. He’d even apologized to me for taking me away from my friends. Not that I minded. Kiki had come out with me twice, and a lot of my other friends were away anyway—at camps or on programs or vacations. Natalie was visiting cousins in New Hampshire. Madison was in China and, according to Kiki, had eaten a starfish.
Dad looked at me approvingly, no doubt thinking his city girl had fallen under the spell of the country. I wasn’t going to tell him that it was the spell of Sam.
“Tell you what,” he said. “You clear the dishes, and Kate and I will talk.”
“Okay.” As I walked back and forth to the kitchen with plates and glasses, I heard bits of their conversation: “Impose? Are you kidding? This house is way too quiet without Alexa. I’m flapping around in my empty nest, answering email all day, and the one girl I want to hear from never writes.” Dad meanwhile was assuring her that I wouldn’t need much supervision.