Girls of Summer

by Nancy Thayer

  “Yeah,” Mack said with an intimate wicked grin. “For me, too.”

  eighteen

  When her father returned to the kitchen, Beth asked, “Are you dating her?”

  She knew her father would be slow to answer. He was a thoughtful man, wanting not to be misunderstood.

  “I’m not sure,” he said at last. “I think for now we’re friends.”

  “You two looked more than friendly to me.”

  Mack put his hands on the back of a chair. “Would that be a problem for you? I know you liked Theo in high school.”

  “Oh, Dad, come on, that was high school!”

  “Theo is back in town. He helped you in the office today.”

  “True,” Beth responded with exaggerated patience. “But that was a one-time thing.” She was distressed and couldn’t figure out her own emotions.

  Her father said, “Well, you’re upset about something.”

  How could Beth tell her dad that what was really driving her out of her mind was Theo?

  She’d felt so close to Theo when he was unpacking the computers. He’d seemed so real, not just a handsome goofball. But what was going on with Lisa and her dad? It would be impossible to date Theo if his mom was dating her dad!

  “Thanks,” she said, when her father handed her a warm cup of cocoa with a marshmallow on top. “This is awesome.” She took a breath. “But please. Are you seriously seeing Lisa, like, romantically?”

  Mack grinned. “Are you, like, ten years old?”

  “I mean, Dad, come on. Isn’t she a lot older than you?”

  Mack’s face changed. She could tell her father’s sense of humor had disappeared. “She’s ten years older than I am. We’re both adults. I don’t see the problem.”

  “Well…won’t people talk?”

  “For God’s sake, Beth. When have we ever cared about people talking? I thought I raised you to be more open-minded than that. So what if people talk?”

  Beth flushed. She’d made her father angry, and that was an indication of how he felt about Lisa Hawley. When she was a little girl, she’d wanted, in a vague misty Disney sort of way, to have a new mother who would love her and help her choose the right clothes and make her bedroom lavender instead of the dazzling pink her father had painted it. By the time she was twelve, her feelings had changed. She didn’t want another woman to break into the happy twosome she’d become with her father. Whenever she caught him flirting with another woman at a school ballgame or play, she’d plunge into a dark mood for days. She’d pretty much hated him during high school because he wouldn’t let her go places or have boys spend the night like her other friends’ parents did.

  But now she was older, and she could guess at how lonely her father had been all these years. Lisa was nice. She was pretty, even beautiful, she was smart, and she was kind. Beth could understand why her father liked Lisa.

  But Lisa was Theo’s mom. Would Beth be as upset about her father dating Lisa if Theo was still out on the West Coast or married to someone else? And why was Beth so adolescent over Theo anyway? He was handsome, but was she shallow to care about that? No. No, even in high school she’d crushed on Theo Hawley. He was kind, never a bully. He was smart, too, though not a super brain like his sister. If anything, now that Beth was searching her memories, she thought Theo had been kind of…lost. He’d been everything—prom king, football quarterback leading the team to victory, head of the Clean Team that walked Nantucket’s beaches and streets, picking up litter. But she remembered an occasional melancholy in his eyes.

  It had always been Theo for her, but she’d hidden it, because she didn’t dare let anyone know her feelings. Atticus chose Beth, and all her girlfriends were crazy with envy and curiosity, because Atticus was mysterious, the dark prince, the tortured poet, his black curls hiding half his eyes, those eyes as blue and deep as the sky. He needed her, and that was a powerful pull. Atticus had confessed to her his most secret fears, his depressions, his anxieties, and toward the end, his discovery of OxyContin.

  After Atticus died, Beth discovered that for her, grief felt like fear, as if she herself were trapped in the earth, but alive, unable to claw her way to air. For a long time, she lived every hour and minute with the words if only scratching through her mind. If only she had slept with Atticus, would that have kept him from wanting to die? If only she had pressured Theo to help Atticus, maybe together they could have saved him? If only she had told Atticus’s parents that he was using OxyContin, buying it from some older guy who hung around the high school, shooting hoops. If only she hadn’t really wanted to be with Theo, because Atticus had been so sensitive, he probably had guessed her true feelings.

  Now here they all were, so many years later, and when she’d been alone with Theo in the Ocean Matters office, she had wanted so much to touch him. To take his hands and talk to him for hours, about everything. To kiss him.

  He’d seemed pleased enough to be around her. Sometimes when their eyes met, his look stopped her heart. But Theo stopped every woman’s heart. She was too serious and he was too lighthearted to make a long-term relationship work.

  She came out of her reverie to see her father sitting there, waiting for a response.

  “You’re right, Dad,” Beth said softly. “It’s cool that you’re happy.” She rose from the couch, took her mug to the sink, dutifully rinsed it and put it in the dishwasher, kissed her father good night, and went up the stairs to her room.

  She wouldn’t allow herself to be involved with Theo—big freaking chance. Theo could have any woman he wanted, plus he loved the ocean on the other side of the country and would no doubt return there where the women were all fit and tanned. She needed to knock herself sideways, off her obsession with Theo, and she had to find a way to do it.

  In her bedroom, she studied herself in her full-length mirror. She was on the slim side and she was pretty enough. She was not completely unexperienced with men. There had been two, and she had almost loved them. Just not quite. Besides, she planned to live here all her life, though that didn’t mean she had to settle down right now. She could play around, she could experiment, she could be frivolous—maybe she could have an affair with Ryder! He was handsome, and they’d be seeing each other often, and there wasn’t a chance that he’d be serious with her, but she didn’t want serious, she wanted fun. Summer fun, just like everyone else!

  nineteen

  Theo slept late again and woke grumpy. He showered and pulled on board shorts and a tee. He was aware of Juliet in her bedroom talking to someone on the phone. In the kitchen, he brewed himself a cup of coffee, made toast, and used up most of the jar of strawberry jam. As he ate, he heard Dave and Tom chatting and laughing in the living room.

  Loneliness and a sense of uselessness nibbled at him. He put his toast back on the plate, suddenly ashamed of pigging out on the great glob of jam.

  The only thing Theo considered himself good at was surfing, and he was hardly an ace at that. Surfing was always challenging, even dangerous, and while they might look the same, each wave was different. A few times, Theo had caught the tube, surfing inside the barrel of a humongous wave, with water around him in a loop as he sped just in front of the crash. In those moments, he’d experienced the almost religious high of being part of the spectacular unnamable energy that created the wave and lit the wave from the sun and made his body and the sun and the wave one quantum whole. Those few times he’d felt exalted, way out of body at the same time he was totally in his body. He’d felt touched. Chosen. Blessed.

  But those rides in the tube were few and far between. He’d never belong to the elite core of surfers, no matter how many years he tried. And when he was slammed into the ocean floor, he’d felt more than hurt—he’d felt rejected. Dismissed. Damned.

  Without surfing, what was he? He worried about whether or not he would ever feel brave enough to surf again. His mind pla
yed over and over in an endless loop the shock of that monster wave slamming him into the ocean floor. The knockout punch bashed the wind and all sense out of him, and for a long moment he’d squeezed his eyes shut, knowing he was about to die. He didn’t die. The water lifted him up, and he swam to the shore, his leash tugging his board with him. Everything hurt. He’d never wiped out like that before, and he was embarrassed and angry at his weakness.

  Often when someone wiped out, the guys gathered around, slapping one another on the back, shouting encouragement or sarcastic insults meant to get a surfer back up and in. This time, Theo’s left arm hurt like hell, and he couldn’t shake it off. Finally, Eddie drove him to a hospital where the fracture was diagnosed and his arm set in a brace and a sling, and he was actually glad, because Eddie could tell the others that the wave that slammed Theo had broken his arm, allowing him to retain some kind of dignity.

  The doctors said not to try to surf until he’d had his arm x-rayed to check that the fracture was healed. That had been fine with Theo, but now he hated himself for just sitting around doing nothing.

  For being a coward.

  He was afraid of going into the ocean. The waves on the east side of the country were tame compared to San Diego, but still, Theo felt no pull. He didn’t even want to swim at Sesachacha, which was a waveless pond. The summer was getting hotter but he had no urge to cool off even in the shallow shores of Jetties Beach.

  Maybe this fear was temporary. Maybe.

  Pushing away from the table, Theo rose and wandered into the living room. “Hey, guys.” He was impressed by Dave and Tom, how contained they were, how deliberately they moved. They looked to be in their early forties, probably married with children, and Theo felt like a douche around them.

  “What do you think of the ceilings?” Dave asked, nodding upward.

  “Good. They look good.” Theo had no idea how to judge ceilings. “What’s next?”

  “Your mom’s bathroom. We’ve got to renovate it, take out that old bathtub—”

  “But hey, doesn’t it have claw feet?” Theo asked.

  “It does. It also has the cast iron showing through the porcelain because so much has worn off over the years. We’ve got to put in a new floor, fix up the window, paint the walls, put in a new tub.”

  “We’ve found a new claw-foot tub for her,” Tom added.

  “I suppose you need a plumber’s license,” Theo said.

  “We have them. Mack has a contractor’s license but no one needs carpenter’s licenses. We like working for Mack because we get to do a lot of different stuff.”

  “Huh. Well, let me know if I can help,” Theo said. “I can’t do the plumbing stuff but I can help carry.”

  Dave and Tom exchanged looks. “Man, you don’t need a license to carry a tub. After we detach the plumbing, you can help us carry it down the stairs and out to our truck.”

  “Great.” Theo gave a thumbs-up.

  “Do you have some time to do it now?” Dave asked.

  Let me check my calendar, Theo thought.

  “I absolutely have the time,” Theo told him.

  They hiked up the stairs to his mother’s bathroom. It didn’t take long for the men to disconnect the plumbing.

  “Okay,” Dave said. He was tall and burly, with a bandana around his forehead to catch sweat from dripping down his face. It was actually a very cool look, and Theo wanted his own bandana because sweat dripped down his face, too, but he thought he’d probably look like an asshole if he wore one. “This tub weighs three or four hundred pounds. Theo, you and I will take one end. Tom can take the other.”

  Tom was a small, wiry little dude. He saw Theo’s flash of consternation and grinned. “Theo, I could take you in a fight.”

  Theo nodded. “I’m sure you could.”

  They positioned themselves. “On the count of three,” Dave said.

  At three, Theo heaved upward with the other two, and the tub was off the floor.

  It weighed more than a rhino.

  Slowly Theo and Dave backed out of the bathroom and down the hall to the stairs. The worst part was going backward down the steps. Then the full weight seemed to be on him and Dave. Theo had strong thighs and pecs, but mother of pearl, this bathtub was a monster. He was aware of Dave straining and grunting, swearing, as he set the pace, slowly, purposefully, setting one foot down a stair, and then the other, waiting for Theo to match his movements. And Theo flashed on his quarterback days, when he had been part of a team, and on their best days they had moved collectively like one creature composed of several parts. Those days had been the best.

  They continued, step by step, down to the front hall, where they set it on the floor and took a breather. Like the other two men, Theo put his hands on his knees and bent forward, huffing.

  “Okay,” Dave said. “Open the door as wide as you can. We’ll take it out to the truck.”

  When they had finally loaded the tub in the truck, Dave and Tom walked around, shaking their arms, stretching their backs, cursing, and laughing. Theo copied them, but instead of shaking his arms, he rubbed his left upper arm where the pain was. The pain didn’t go away.

  “You okay, Theo?” Dave asked.

  “Yeah. Wow. That was a mother.”

  “It was. Couldn’t have done it without you. Thanks.”

  Dave turned to Tom and said something about installing the new window in the bathroom. Theo waved, went into the house, and up the stairs, as if he had a hundred projects waiting for him.

  What he had waiting for him was a vial of OxyContin. A doctor had prescribed it for him.

  “No,” Theo had argued. “I don’t want OxyContin.”

  “Look,” the doctor had said, exasperated. “Bone fractures hurt. Oxy helps with the pain. If you’re not in pain, it will make you high. You’re an adult. When the pain has lessened, gradually take fewer pills, and then quit altogether. I’m not renewing this prescription, and you’re not going to become addicted if you follow my instructions.”

  Theo had taken the oxy, but after two weeks, he changed to Tylenol four times a day. His arm still hurt, but not much more than it had in high school after getting slammed in football. He hated oxy. It had killed Atticus. It was the enemy.

  But now his arm hurt like hell. He shut his bedroom door tight and threw himself down on the bed. Damn, his arm burned with pain. Heating pad, he told himself. Tylenol.

  Beth would never date him, never speak to him again if he used oxy.

  Would Beth ever date him at all?

  Dave and Tom were stomping up the stairs and then working in his mom’s bathroom, muttering and guffawing and pounding and dragging.

  Theo wanted to disappear from the planet. He did not want to lie in here like a baby, whining about his poor wittle arm. He needed to do something practical. Something real.

  He grabbed his cell, tucked it in the back pocket of his shorts, and opened his bedroom door.

  He went to the bathroom. “Hey, guys, can I help you with anything else?”

  Dave and Tom eyed him up and down.

  “We can’t pay you without Mack’s permission,” Dave said.

  “I don’t need paying. Just, I’ve got nothing scheduled today.”

  “Great. See those metal pipes we’ve cut? Take them out to the truck. Then you can come back and help us move the toilet.”

  Theo gathered up a bunch of pipes. The ends were jagged and they were small but not light. His arm hurt like hell, but he was grinning as he headed down the stairs.

  twenty

  Juliet put on the navy blue dress her mother had helped her choose in Sail. Her mother loaned her pearl earrings to Juliet, and with a touch of lipstick and a smidgen less eyeliner and mascara than she usually wore, Juliet looked, she was surprised to see, maybe kind of elegant. She and her mom had battled through clothing wars dur
ing her teenage years, when Juliet wanted to wear black, brown, or gray, and her mother kept giving her pastels that would delight a five-year-old. Now Juliet realized she had finally aged enough mentally and physically that she could accept her mother’s taste. There was nothing much she could do with her hair, but if she brushed it a certain way, she looked rather Audrey Hepburn-ish.

  Her mother had the only full-length mirror in the house, so Juliet went into Lisa’s room to get the complete view. Turning this way and that in front of the mirror, Juliet remembered how she never wanted to dress like her mother and she absolutely never wanted to get married and have two children and be left alone to raise them. Juliet had determined she would be smart and focus on her work, on math and computers, digital black and white, nothing soft, fuzzy, and compromising.

  Yet this summer, something about this summer, was softening her or softening the world around her so that the air was gentler, and she was happier. Light was more sparkling and magic so close by. When she looked at herself in the mirror in the navy blue dress, she realized she looked very much like a woman that a handsome, educated man would want to spend time with. The knowledge surprised her and made her do something she hadn’t done since she was thirteen. She put her arms around herself and twirled around in a circle, laughing.

  She knew Ryder planned to take her somewhere posh for dinner, and she was sure he’d wear a blazer. Nantucket was an island of cobblestones, bricks, and sprained ankles, so she wore low heels. No bracelet or necklace, although she had a jewelry box full of those. Her dress and earrings and shoes said proper, but her black eyeliner, delicately and artistically applied, said sex. Her small black clutch was in her hand when Ryder knocked on the door of her mother’s house.

  “Wow,” he said when he saw her.

  “You clean up pretty well yourself,” Juliet told him saucily. She was right. He wore a Brooks Brothers blue-and-white striped button-down shirt and a navy blue blazer with Nantucket Yacht Club brass buttons.