She never asked Scott why. She didn’t ask him a lot of questions, scared that he would tell her she had no right to be asking. So she never asked if he ever thought of her when they were apart, if he ever felt sorry it didn’t work out between them in college. She never asked about Roxanne—why they broke up and where she was now and whether or not they were still friends. She never asked if he was dating anyone else. She never asked him to define anything or to clear anything up. She never asked what he wanted from her and how he really felt about her. She couldn’t.
Before she knows it, it is the fourth and last Sunday, and Scott is hugging her goodbye inside a sushi bar along La Cienega and thanking her for all the help. For four Sundays, while he lazily flipped through a men’s magazine or sipped on a double machiatto or tinkered with his Blackberry, Summer practically re-wrote the lyrics of the entire album—something she apparently did very well because the label executives raved about all the changes she made. Of course, they didn’t know she did them. Scott wanted to talk to Leon and arrange to pay Summer a creative fee in private, but she waved it off. “I don’t need the money,” she lied, even though her share of the rent for Ashley’s place was due in a week, and her life savings were slowly but surely depleting. I just need you to want me, she added silently.
“I’ll revise the acknowledgments and put your name in,” he tells her as he pulls away. “It’ll be there, in all caps, on the very first line.”
“You don’t have to,” Summer says, but deep down, she thinks, Is that it?
“Your name will be there,” he says. “I promise.”
“Thanks,” she says. She doesn’t know how to ask him the questions that have been keeping her up at night for the last four weeks—how much was too much? When do you know you’ve tried hard enough? And when do you cross the line from meeting someone halfway to being the poster girl for all things pathetic?
Summer thinks, When are you allowed to give up on someone?
Scott kisses the top of her head and says, “You’re the best, Summer.”
Outside the sushi bar, a couple of tourist-y teens wearing floral sundresses and carrying colorful shopping bags approach him for a photo. They look at Summer expectantly, and she sighs and holds out her hand for their camera. Scott puts an arm around each of the jittery young fangirls and smiles that superstar smile Summer has grown familiar with.
“We love you, Scott,” they tell him before scurrying off, obviously starstruck.
“I love you too,” Scott says.
Summer knows it is a blanket ‘I love you,’ directed at all his fans, therefore including her. She pretends she’s okay with this, but as Scott stands beside her looking pleased with himself, she knows it isn’t going to be enough anymore.
When Summer receives the brand new copy of Summer Love in the mail, Scott has already flown to Texas to kick off his tour. She tears the brown wrapping paper off the package, peels off the gold sticker, and slides out the CD’s sleeve, where Scott’s face smolders at her from behind the rain-soaked window of a black vintage car. She opens it to the acknowledgments page and scans the first paragraph for her name. It isn’t there.
She notices a note card taped to the back of the CD. “Here you go, Summer,” it says. “Sorry, the printers couldn’t wait for the revisions for the acknowledgments page. Thanks again for all your help.” Summer knew it wasn’t Scott’s handwriting—it was probably his manager Leon’s, or that quirky receptionist girl’s. She flips the sleeve open again, taking in the lyrics she already knows so well—too well. Out of curiosity, she reads the rest of the acknowledgments. Scott wrote about his eternal gratitude to his family, and to his producers, and to Leon and his band. He thanked his record label for putting up with him, and his new friends in the music industry for believing in him. He thanked the fangirls, of course. He has to. On the very last line, he wrote, “This record is dedicated to Roxanne, my lovely fiancée. We’re getting married next summer.”
Chapter 14
Realistically speaking, Summer should hop straight on a plane and fly back to the life she left behind in Manila. But she doesn’t want to—she feels like she should stay here for as long as she needs to. She doesn’t want to go home, not like this, not with her tail between her legs, not when she feels the world should stop spinning and be miserable with her. She doesn’t want to go home, not when doing so would just highlight the tragic fact that she was wrong and everybody else was right. She doesn’t want to go home, not before she has the chance to prove that she isn’t going to spend the rest of her life being the poster girl for all things pathetic.
She calls her mom’s older sister, Tita Elizabeth, who owns a small restaurant in Sacramento, and borrows money to pay Ashley’s rent and buy a plane ticket. Summer promises to return every cent and asks if she can get a job in the restaurant as a waitress, conveniently forgetting to mention that she is a huge, hazardous klutz. Tita Elizabeth generously agrees.
Summer is alone in Ashley’s apartment, packing her bags the day before her flight to Sacramento, when the doorbell rings. A guy with red hair and freckles gives her a sour, strained smile. He is carrying a box of clothes—Ashley’s clothes, Summer realizes after a few seconds.
“You must be…” she says.
“Colin,” the guy interrupts. “Yeah. You’re Summer? Can I leave these with you?”
“Sure,” she says, holding the door open. “But Ashley’s not here.”
He steps inside like he belongs there. “I know,” he says. His voice is tremendously grating. “That’s why I came. I’m just dropping off her clothes.” He sets the dusty box down on the floor beside the overflowing shoe rack, then straightens up and wipes his hands on the back of his jeans.
“Do you want me to call Ashley?” Summer asks. “I think she’s in a meeting downtown with her producers right now, though.”
“That won’t be necessary,” Colin sniffs, like this was all her fault. “I’m leaving.”
Good, Summer almost says. “I’ll tell Ashley her boyfriend stopped by.”
“Ex-boyfriend,” he corrects her.
She can’t say she’s surprised; she knew Ashley didn’t like him enough to keep him around. “He’s holding me back,” Ashley told her. “At this point in my life, I can’t be in a relationship with a guy who doesn’t understand, who demands this much.”
Still, Summer feels a tinge of sympathy for Colin, who stands in the middle of the cramped living room looking angry and confused, like a kid in a toy store who was just told not to touch anything. Although she isn’t sure whether or not it would help, she asks, “What happened?”
Colin’s face softens. “She didn’t want to be with me anymore,” he says, like breakups were ever really that simple.
“Maybe you can still make it work,” she tells him, not quite believing it herself. “If you wait for her.”
He says, “I’ve been waiting for her my whole life. We’ve been friends since junior high, and I feel like I’ve been hanging around her for so long, waiting and waiting and waiting. There is only so much I can take.”
Summer nods like she understands, and perhaps in some hidden part of her, she does. Maybe she knows she made a mistake, waiting and waiting and waiting all those years for Scott to be ready for something real, to swoop in and sweep her off her feet for good. Maybe she knows that she should have known better.
Years ago, when Ellie told her she was marrying Ken, Summer asked why. It was a valid question, and if Ellie had hesitated or faltered on her answer, Summer would have told her to reconsider. But Ellie said matter-of-factly, “He and I just add up.” It was a simple explanation, but Summer ended up thinking about it for days. When do you know for sure that you and someone add up—how do you compute for compatibility, how do you decide that you are ready to spend the rest of your life together? When something goes wrong, do you subtract a certain amount to the overall value of your relationship, and do you keep subtracting until the value runs out, or does forgiveness enable you to
cancel out mistakes? When do you decide that you just don’t add up anymore; when are you allowed to tell yourself that it’s no longer worth it?
When are you allowed to give up on someone?
Before she closes the door, Summer tells Colin, “I think you should let her go.” And he smiles a sad little smile and says, “That’s what I’m trying to do.”
Chapter 15
Summer found Tita Elizabeth’s house in Sacramento positively charming. She was given a room of her own, with a queen-sized bed whose sheets were embroidered with cherry blossoms and a bookshelf stacked with meticulously wrapped hardbound novels. There were fresh flowers on the bedside table, and every day, Summer woke up to warm sunlight tickling her on the right side of her face and the sound of the Miles Davis record Tita Elizabeth always listened to while making pancakes and brewing coffee for breakfast. She loved how their neighbors were named Mr. and Mrs. Darling (on some nights, she could almost swear she could see a thin green figure with a pointy hat darting out the second floor window), and how they had an actual mailbox of their own—it was barn red and rusty and brought her handwritten letters from Ellie and Ken every other week. “We miss you,” Ken would write in all caps, and beside that, Ellie would insert, “I really miss picking on you.” Sometimes, the mailbox also brought her presents from Zac: a mix CD with obscure indie songs whose titles had her name in them, or a disturbingly disfigured stuffed bear he had customized to look “just like her,” or an empty jar with a note that says, “I farted into it so you’d remember how much I stink. PS: You’re welcome.”
Summer also loved working at Tita Elizabeth’s restaurant, where it smelled like pumpkin pie and cinnamon sticks all day long and the guests all called her by her first name. She loved the cheerful yellow curtains, the enormous cake and pastry display beside the cash register, the hardwood floors and the way they made music with her footsteps. She loved the way she felt every morning, when she’d switch on the power supply and flood the restaurant with light, like she was revealing a well-kept secret to the world, and the way she felt every evening, when the door would slowly creak shut behind her, like it was disappointed to see her lock up and leave.
She learned to love telling her story, even to total strangers. The more she told it, the less it hurt. And the less it hurt, the clearer things became: she was wrong. She was pathetic. And that was okay, because she won’t be anymore.
A frequent customer, Mr. Brooks, usually came in after the lunch rush wearing the same tweed jacket and bowler hat, his wooden cane proclaiming his presence with its distinct tappity-tapping. If there was a line for the counter, he would stand patiently in front of the cake and pastry display, re-adjusting his spectacles and rubbing his chin with his long, wrinkled fingers. He would study the handwritten labels, looking like he was struggling to decide what to get. But when his turn came, he would always choose a slice of carrot cake and an oatmeal cookie—basically the same items he’d been ordering for the past decade. He brought a book with him sometimes, but mostly, he talked to Summer while she refilled his glass with lukewarm water, always starting a conversation like they were simply resuming a previous one. He was a widower, a grandfather of six, and the coolest seventy-nine-year-old Summer had ever met.
When she told him about Scott, he asked, “That night after you talked to him for the first time, on your way to his gig, did you think he was going to change your life?”
“I did,” she said. “That’s exactly what I thought.”
“That’s where it all went downhill for you, then,” he told her. “Young people these days are always searching for something to change their life—a job or an event or a place or a boy or a girl.”
“That’s true,” she said. “But isn’t that natural? Isn’t it a good thing to be hopeful?”
“The problem is that you never give yourself enough credit,” he said. “Why do you need something or someone else to change your life? Why can’t you do it yourself?”
Summer didn’t have an answer, but it didn’t seem like Mr. Brooks was waiting for one. He continued, “Young people are so reckless about change. So impulsive. They chop off all their hair, they quit their perfectly fine, perfectly fulfilling jobs, they marry someone they barely know, they pack up all their belongings and move away from home. Everything is done on a whim.”
“We welcome change,” Summer said, trying to defend her generation.
“Yes,” said Mr. Brooks. “But you must welcome stability and contentment, too.”
Summer didn’t want to be rude, but she had to ask: “Does it get easier? Does the urge to chase change wear off as you grow older?”
“Sweetie,” he said, laughing. “Look at me. I have been coming to the same restaurant, wearing the same hat and jacket, and ordering the same carrot cake and oatmeal cookie for the last ten years. And I have been in love with the same woman for the last sixty. Does it look like I’m having a hard time?”
Chapter 16
One of Summer’s favorite things about working at the restaurant was sitting at a corner table before closing time and counting her tips—by six weeks, she had enough to pay Tita Elizabeth back for the rent and the ticket, and by three months, she had enough to buy her a new TV, or a new microwave oven. But Tita Elizabeth would just wave Summer off and tell her to set her money aside for something more important.
“But your television education and your consumption of bowls of microwaveable popcorn cannot be put on hold,” Summer would say.
“Save it,” Tita Elizabeth would insist. “You never know when you might need another plane ticket.”
And Tita Elizabeth was right: One week before her twenty-second birthday, Summer decides she’s going home.
“You really miss Ellie and Ken and Nick, don’t you?” Tita Elizabeth asks.
“I do,” Summer replies. “And I miss Zac.”
“They miss you too,” Tita Elizabeth says. “I can tell. The mailbox doesn’t lie.”
Summer goes to her room, pulls out her suitcase from under the bed, and starts folding her clothes one by one. She does this methodically, her hands moving carefully while her brain begins zipping all around the house, all around Sacramento, heading straight towards Los Angeles and racing back again. She hasn’t heard a single word from Scott since that fourth song-revising Sunday, and she doesn’t expect to. She came across the wedding plans in a magazine—all those gourmet caterers and high-end bakers and expensive gowns and designer invitations—while sipping jasmine tea out on the patio on a weekday afternoon, with the California breeze gently rustling the leaves scattered at her bare feet. The article went on for two grueling pages, but Summer didn’t need to reach the end to realize what she should have known years ago: she and Scott lived in conflicting worlds, and just because these worlds collided once doesn’t mean they had any real chance of merging. She didn’t need to finish the article to know that she and Scott, whether she liked it or not, were done. It wasn’t that they couldn’t be together yet—it was that they couldn’t be together, period.
When she drops Summer off at the airport, Tita Elizabeth tells her, “Your mother did it too, you know.”
“Did what?” Summer asks.
“Fell truly, madly, deeply in love with a celebrity.”
“You’re kidding,” Summer says. “Who was it?”
“You may have heard of him—his name is Julio Iglesias,” Tita Elizabeth says, laughing. “It was a few years before she met your dad. I’m telling you, she was absolutely obsessed with him. She had posters on her wall, photos on her school binder, and his albums piled on top of her bedside table. She practically worshipped him. At one point, she was introducing herself to everyone as Mrs. Iglesias and sounding like she believed every inch of it. Then he responded to one of her letters, and she started asking me about cheap airfares and the dollar-peso conversion rate. I was seriously worried I’d wake up one day and discover she’d left to follow him halfway across the globe.”
“But she didn’t,” Summer
says.
“She didn’t,” Tita Elizabeth agrees.
“I wish someone had talked me out of it.” Summer is surprised that she actually said this out loud.
“Don’t say that,” Tita Elizabeth tells her. “If you didn’t follow him to LA, you wouldn’t have come here. And that would have been a shame, because I really liked having you around.” She smiles. “You’re welcome to visit as often as you want. Or if you change your mind, you’re definitely welcome to come back for good.”
“Thank you,” Summer says, and when they hug goodbye, she feels tears spring to her eyes because she knows she won’t be seeing Tita Elizabeth again anytime soon.
One transatlantic flight later, when the plane’s wheels touch the ground with a definitive thud, Summer pictures her family and Zac waiting (one of them would probably be holding up a tacky sign), grinning from ear to ear, genuinely happy to have her back. She pictures them enveloping her in a big hug, crushing her bones, making it too hard to breathe and making her laugh too hard. As the plane slows down, she feels her heart soaring into the air, lifted up by something resembling the hope she felt when she first met Scott, only much steadier and much safer and much more peaceful.
Summer thinks, Maybe this is what it’s like to be somewhere you belong.
Chapter 17
Summer swallows the last bite of her frosted cornflakes, gulps down her orange juice, and tells Ellie and Ken she’ll be bringing home dinner tonight.
“I want a bucket of fried chicken,” Ken shouts from the bedroom. “And a six-pack!”
“No!” Ellie hollers from the driveway. “No fried chicken or beer! Bring this old man something healthier.”
“Who are you calling an old man?” Ken yells.
“Who do you think?” Ellie retorts.
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