The Light in Summer

by Mary McNear

  “This is going to be complicated,” she said finally.

  “You sound like Billy,” he said. “You like her, though, don’t you?” he asked, already knowing that she did.

  “Of course. Everyone likes Billy. I just wish things could be simpler, I guess.”

  He shrugged, thinking that with Meghan, things might have been too simple. Too easy. And look where that had gotten him. “I like a challenge,” he said now to Allie. “And besides,” he added, thinking of Billy’s love of novels, “it’s kind of like a good book, right? You don’t know what will happen next. You keep reading because you want to find out.”

  CHAPTER 32

  Luke was grinding his skateboard on the library’s bottom step that afternoon—his mother hated when he did this because it wore down the concrete—when a now-familiar voice said, “Hey, Luke.” He looked up. Yep. It was Cal. Cal Cooper. His name, to Luke, sounded like the name of a cowboy in one of the old Westerns Pop-Pop used to watch. But he was okay, Luke supposed. Or at least, he had been when Luke and his mom had dinner with him at the Corner Bar. He hadn’t asked Luke a lot of questions, which was cool, and he hadn’t been all romantic with his mom, which would have been weird. The thing was, he hadn’t known then that Cal was going to be staying around. His mom had told him the next day he was moving to Minneapolis and they’d be seeing more of him. That worried him a little. How was Cal going to fit into their life? He wasn’t sure.

  “Hey,” Luke said, looking back down at his skateboard. He expected Cal to go into the library, but instead he stopped on the steps.

  “What’s up?” he asked Luke.

  Luke shrugged. He glanced down the block at the drugstore, Butternut Drug, which he’d seen Annabelle go into a little while ago. She’d waved at Luke, a little wave that was barely a wave at all. Since then he’d been wondering if he should go in there, too, or just wait for her to come out again and say something to her.

  Cal looked down the street, too. “Anything happening in Butternut?” he asked.

  “Not much,” Luke said, picking up his skateboard and reaching for the can of Coke he’d placed on the ledge. Not much was happening in his life, either. The earlier rules from this summer were in effect until school started. He could go to Nature Camp, and afterward he could go to the library. The only places he could stop in between were Pearl’s and one of the other businesses on Main Street. That was it. Still no cell phone. Still no Van. He wondered, though, what he and J.P. were up to. Wondered whether if he saw them they would even talk to him. Probably not. But he’d been talking, on their home phone, to his new friend Travis from his hiking trip. He was pretty cool, and he liked a lot of the same pro skateboarders Luke did.

  The front door to the library opened, and Mr. Niles, the school counselor, came out. Luke instinctively looked back down again.

  “Hi, Luke,” Mr. Niles said. He sounded friendly, though the last time Mr. Niles had spoken to him, before he’d gotten suspended, he’d said he was “very disappointed” in Luke.

  “Hi, Mr. Niles,” Luke said. He took a big sip of his Coke, and Mr. Niles, thank God, kept walking.

  “Who’s that?” Cal asked, looking amused.

  “That’s the school counselor.”

  “Huh,” Cal said. And then he chuckled. “I still have a very distinct memory of the counselor at my high school. Mr. Wiggins. He kept a pet gecko in his office. It was the only good thing about going there.”

  “Why’d you go there?” Luke asked.

  “I got sent there. My first couple of years in high school, I wasn’t doing that well.”

  “Why not?”

  “Mr. Wiggins said I wasn’t applying myself. And I wasn’t. But that changed. Or it started to change. The summer I turned sixteen—the summer between sophomore and junior years.”

  “Why did it change?”

  “Um . . . long story,” Cal said. “But I liked this girl, Victoria. And it . . . inspired me to get a job. That’s how I figured out I liked building things. And designing things. I knew after that, if I was serious about doing it for a living, I’d have to do better in school.”

  Luke swung himself up to sit on the ledge to the steps and considered Cal with interest. He almost wanted to ask him more about this girl Victoria, but then he changed his mind. What he really wanted to ask Cal about, he decided, was his mom. Because there was something Luke didn’t totally understand. According to his mom, Cal had been, like, this big architect in Seattle. His mom was a librarian in Butternut. Not that there was anything wrong with that, but . . . And then, Cal was rich, too. Anyone who drove that car had to be rich. Whereas his mom was doing okay—they weren’t poor or anything, but, even so. Cal just seemed different, very different, from that guy Ted.

  “Why are you dating my mom?” he asked, wishing maybe he could have put it a different way. But Cal seemed surprised for only a second.

  “Well,” he said, “I like her. She’s funny. She’s smart. And she’s beautiful.”

  Luke frowned. “That’s probably just the moisturizing lotion she uses,” he said, thinking about all the little pots on her shelf in the bathroom. “It’s pretty expensive.”

  Cal laughed. “I think it’s working, though, don’t you?”

  “I guess,” Luke allowed. He finished off his Coke and then crushed the empty can against the ledge. “You know, I’m going to meet my dad in another week. On August fourteenth,” he said, watching Cal. “It’s all planned out.”

  “I know. That’s really cool.”

  “Yeah, it will be,” Luke said. But he wondered sometimes if it really would be cool. What if his dad didn’t like him? Then what would he do?

  “If you’re nervous about it, though,” Cal said to him, “I get it. I mean, who wouldn’t be?”

  “I’m not nervous,” Luke said, a little irritated. “Why would I be nervous?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe because . . . you don’t really know what he’s like yet, and he doesn’t really know what you’re like.”

  “I guess,” Luke said. He crushed the can a little more.

  “So you’ll take some time to get to know each other,” Cal said.

  Luke nodded, and jumped off the ledge. He looked down the block toward the drugstore. While they’d been talking about his dad, had he missed Annabelle leaving it? He didn’t think so. She’d have to walk past the library on her way home. He grabbed his skateboard. Maybe he’d skate by there now. But then what? He didn’t really have a plan. He didn’t even know if she was still mad at him. And what would he say to her if she was?

  “Can I . . . can I ask you something,” he said to Cal, who was still standing there.

  “Sure.”

  This was stupid, Luke thought. He didn’t even know why he was asking Cal about it. Finally he shrugged and said, “There’s this girl . . .”

  Cal smiled. “Luke?”

  “Yeah?”

  “There’s always a girl.”

  CHAPTER 33

  The night before they were supposed to meet Wesley, Billy and Luke drove down to St. Paul and spent the night at her mother’s house. The next morning, after breakfast, Billy and her mom went for a walk together. Billy’s mom, in her eminently sensible way, tried to allay Billy’s fears. She pointed out that Wesley was obviously open to the idea of being Luke’s father or he wouldn’t be meeting with them today. Billy had hugged her, hard, but she was still anxious as she and Luke drove to the airport hotel where Wesley was staying. They got to the hotel coffee shop a half hour early, and they sat in an orange leather booth, Billy drinking water and Luke stirring the ice cubes in his soda, both of them feigning a calmness they didn’t feel. Billy was so nervous. Partly because Luke was so nervous, and partly because she wanted this meeting to be . . . well, to be whatever it was that Luke needed it to be.

  When Wesley walked into the coffee shop, Billy recognized him immediately. He was still nice-looking, Billy saw, and still in possession of that rugged handsomeness she’d found so appealing w
hen she was eighteen. But the years had worked their changes on him, too. He had a squint now to his eyes, and a weathering in his face that suggested how much time he’d spent on the water. Billy and Luke both stood up and met him, and there was a moment—an awkward moment—when Luke and Wesley paused there, neither of them knowing what to do. And then Wesley solved the problem by grinning, pulling Luke into a hug, and saying, “Christ, kid, it looks like you got my dad’s chin.”

  Billy watched in amazement as Luke not only came into his arms but also put his arms around Wesley. And then her son did something she would never forget. He closed his eyes. Just for a second. It was such a simple thing, but it spoke volumes of the trust he already had in Wesley. And it did something else, too. It made Luke look so young, the way his long, spiky black eyelashes—Fuller brush eyelashes, her dad had called them—rested on his suntanned, freckled skin. And then he opened his eyes and let go of his father, and the moment was over. Billy and Wesley said hello, and the three of them sat down at their booth, Wesley setting a plastic bag down next to him on the seat.

  For the first fifteen minutes, Billy, in her need to fill in the silence, told Wesley about Luke growing up in Minneapolis and their move to Butternut five years ago. But when she realized she was the only one speaking, she stopped abruptly. “Sorry I’m doing all the talking,” she said, looking sheepishly from Luke to Wesley. “Nervous habit.”

  Wesley laughed. “You covered a lot of ground there. Thirteen years in thirteen minutes,” he said, looking at his watch. “Did she leave anything out, Luke?”

  “A couple things,” Luke said shyly, stirring his soda with the straw. That’s when Billy remembered something she’d noticed the first time she’d met Wesley. He had an easy way about him. He was one of those rare people who was comfortable in his own skin, and that made him comfortable to be with. Billy’s tension ebbed away after that, and she relaxed. There was something else, too. He was good at drawing people out. So while he didn’t talk a lot, he got Luke to talk a lot, which to Billy was no small feat. He asked Luke about his summer. Luke, who spoke self-consciously at first, gradually became more confident. He touched on his hiking trip, his counselor, Mad Dog, and volunteering at Nature Camp. He even mentioned a few skateboard tricks he was working on. Wesley confessed to Luke that he’d never owned a skateboard. When Luke pressed him about other sports—snowboarding, surfing, BMXing—he said his wife would probably kill him if he even suggested trying any of them. Luke looked momentarily disappointed. But then Wesley said, “Sorry, kid, the only sport that I can lay any claim to is fishing.” Luke brightened immediately. He told Wesley about fishing for smallmouth bass with his late grandfather.

  While they talked, Billy compared the two of them as discreetly as possible. Funny, she’d always thought Luke had her Black Irish looks. But now she realized he looked a lot like Wesley, too, although it was hard to define their similarities. The shape of their eyes? Their chins? Their foreheads? Oh, well, it didn’t matter. It was there, and Billy felt a kind of satisfaction now in seeing it.

  Eventually the three of them ordered lunch, and after the waiter had cleared their plates away, Wesley took out his wallet and showed them pictures of his daughters, Eleanor and Hannah. They were both adorable, and Billy was fascinated to see that, once again, there was a resemblance between Luke and the two of them, especially Eleanor, who had an impish quality to her that reminded Billy of a younger Luke. Wesley also told them a little bit about his wife, Erin, who was helping him design a Web site for their charter fishing boat business. He showed them a photograph of her, too. Just like in the photo that Billy had seen of her in the manila envelope, she had an open, friendly face. Billy hoped she would welcome Luke into their world, although she imagined this would not happen overnight.

  “Do they know about me?” Luke asked Wesley now about his sisters.

  “They do. They sure do. They’re already fighting over which one of them gets to talk to you first,” Wesley said. Luke’s eyes widened, and Billy wondered how this only child would negotiate two sisters who apparently already had a rivalry for Luke’s affection.

  Later, when Luke left to go to the restroom, Wesley opened the plastic bag he’d brought and extracted a book from it.

  “I think this belongs to you,” he said, holding it out to her. Billy took it from him, astonished. It was the copy of Wuthering Heights she’d left at the fishing lodge in Alaska over fourteen years ago.

  “Why . . . ?”

  He shrugged. “By the time I realized you’d forgotten it, you and your dad had already left. When I left a couple of weeks later, I took it with me. I think I felt guilty about it. I figured you must have really loved it. That night I saw you reading it in the lobby, you were so into it.”

  Billy smiled. “I’d probably read it at least five times by that point.”

  “Really? Well, I kept carrying it around with me from place to place. I think I had some idea of mailing it to you, but I didn’t have your contact information, and I didn’t think the lodge would give it to me. And then I thought maybe I should read it myself since you’d thought it was so good.”

  “And did you?”

  “Eventually.”

  “What did you think?”

  “I didn’t like it,” he said bluntly. For some reason, this made Billy laugh. “I mean, what the hell?” he said, smiling. “What was Heathcliff’s problem? Was he just straight-up crazy or what?”

  “He was pretty crazy,” Billy agreed cheerfully. “But at eighteen, I found his obsessive love for Catherine very attractive.”

  Wesley shook his head. “Well, I’m glad I held on to it. I’m not usually a big believer in fate, but in this case . . .” He shrugged. “Maybe I knew I’d see you again.”

  “Maybe,” Billy said, sipping her water.

  “Can I tell you something? Honestly?”

  “Of course.”

  “Before today, I wanted . . . I wanted to give you the benefit of the doubt about Luke. But I also wanted to . . . you know, to be sure he was my son. I was going to ask that we have a paternity test done, but after I saw him . . .” He shook his head again. “He’s definitely my son. It’s a little bit like looking in a mirror. Not that there’s an exact resemblance. It’s the little things . . . and it’s not just me he reminds me of, either. It’s my family members, too. I mean, Luke’s never met my brother, Nick. But he has so many of the same mannerisms. It’s strange, but it’s strange in a good way.”

  “I’m glad.” Billy smiled.

  “He’s um . . . he’s a nice kid, isn’t he?”

  “He’s an amazing kid,” Billy said honestly. And at that moment, she caught sight of Luke coming back into the room.

  A little while after that, Billy found an excuse to leave them alone together. She ended up browsing in the hotel’s little gift shop and buying a few things she didn’t really need. She wanted to give them time, though, and when she came back to the coffee shop, she was glad she had. They were talking about fishing again, which, thanks to Pop-Pop, was a subject Luke could hold his own on.

  “Hey,” Billy said, sliding into the booth, but the two of them, deep in conversation, only nodded. She smiled, sipped her iced tea, and kept an eye on the time. She had to be at work tomorrow morning, and Wesley, she knew, had a flight later tonight. Finally she reminded Luke gently about the four-and-a-half-hour drive ahead of them, and Wesley walked them out to their car to say their good-byes.

  They stood beside Billy’s car, a little tentative, not quite sure how to end this. Wesley asked Billy about the drive up north. Billy asked him when he’d get back to Port McNeil. Luke stood there quietly. Billy was wondering how to broach the subject of future communication. Should Wesley and Luke play it by ear? Should they set up a time to talk by phone?

  “I’m not sure how this works,” Wesley said, obviously thinking the same thing as Billy.

  “I’m not sure, either,” Billy said with a little laugh.

  “What do we do next?�
�� Wesley asked Luke. “Do we talk on the phone? Or Skype?”

  “How about both,” Luke said with a smile.

  And then Wesley gave Billy a polite kiss on the cheek and Luke a bear hug. “Be good, kiddo,” he said before he headed back into the hotel to arrange for a taxi to the airport.

  An hour into the drive home, Billy asked Luke if he was hungry. He’d been quiet, watching the farmland rolling by out the window.

  “What did you say?” Luke asked, turning to her.

  “I said, are you hungry? We can stop whenever, provided you don’t want anything too fancy.”

  Luke shrugged. “A little,” he said.

  “What did you think, Luke?” Billy couldn’t resist asking now. “Was he different than you thought he would be?”

  “Kind of.”

  “Did you like him?” Billy asked.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “He liked you, too,” Billy said.

  “You think so?” Luke asked, turning to look at her.

  “Definitely. And it sounds like your sisters do, too, even though they don’t know you yet.” And then Billy hesitated, wanting to say once again—the same thing she’d been saying, and thinking, ever since she’d told Luke that she’d heard back from Wesley—We’re going to have to take things slowly. See how they go. But she didn’t say it this time.

  Luke was the next one who spoke. “Actually, I’m kind of starving,” he said with a smile.

  CHAPTER 34

  Luke, stop,” Annabelle said, laughing. “I can’t draw you if you keep doing that.”

  “You mean doing this?” Luke asked, using his feet to push them off from the ground and move the tire swing in a wide arc.