Summerlong: A Novel Part 22

She blinks at him. He is undressing. Stripping down to his black BVDs. His body is tan and looks good, though he is gaining some weight. She can see it in his sides and his chest.

"Will you spend the winter in Minnesota? Will you do it? Say yes?"

He says it with the earnestness he had years ago. She closes her laptop. She tells him to leave.

"It's a great plan!"

"It's not, Don. For one, school. Our kids are in school."

"We can homeschool."

"Oh, they'd love that."

"They might. We could snowshoe and ice-fish and ski! It's not like they like school all that much here. The school's not even that great, you always say that yourself."

"A valid point," Claire says.

"I'd chop wood all winter. I'd get buff again. I'd grow a beard."

She likes him with a beard but he thinks it's bad for business.

"I want you to start living in reality," Claire says.

"Before I do that," he says. "When I see you in your bikini, I can remember every detail of that trip."

"I was younger then," she says. "Good-bye, Don."

She tries to go back to her writing then, but Don hurls himself into the pool, swimming across it, getting out, jogging back over to her side, and hurling himself in again. He whoops and hollers as he does this, which at first sounds exuberantly joyful, and then quickly sounds painful, like an unwanted compulsion has seized control of his body.

Claire finds herself smiling though-she knows this Don, this Don she loves-and she resists the impulse to hurl herself into the water alongside him. He is still, on some level, irresistible to her, but resist him she does.

But when Charlie comes home, she finds herself sunning on the pool deck, in that tiniest of tiny bikinis. She's given up writing for the day by then. For him, she almost goes to the small diving platform and dives in the water, a show, a seductive show, but then she sees that Wendy is with him, sobbing.

Charlie shrugs as he comes near Claire. "Sorry," he says.

"She puked!" Bryan says, appearing suddenly in the yard as well. "In the pool, Mama. She puked in the pool! Will I get sick now? I don't want to puke."

"I couldn't help it," Wendy sobs. "I swallowed so much water!"

Claire wraps herself in a towel and says, as soothingly as her shaky voice can say it, "Okay, okay, everyone. Let's all f.u.c.king settle down."

This is not the word she means to say, but it is what she says.

"Mom!" Bryan says. "Mom!"

JULY 10,.

84 DEGREES.

ABC is bereft of dreams-such vivid dreams, all of June, and now they are gone. Now that Don Lowry has moved in, for some reason, lying next to him no longer makes her dream.

She is in the hammock on the sleeping porch-where she spends almost all of her down time now-and hears Don Lowry coming up the steps. It is late afternoon. Maybe he is drunk; his footsteps seem heavy and unsure, the clomping plod of a drunk man trying to walk soberly.

ABC stands up and smooths down her sundress and is surprised to find Ruth standing there.

"How did you get up the stairs?" she says.

"I walked!"

"You did?" ABC says.

"I feel good. It's four twenty, ABC. It's after four twenty. Do you want to smoke?"

"Okay," she says. "Is Don home?"

"No. No, he is going to go tell Claire some idea he has, then take the kids out for tacos."

"I see," ABC says. "Are they getting back together?"

"Would you care?" Ruth says, with a sideways glance and a smile.

Ruth sits in the large armchair next to the hammock. ABC reaches into her pocket, pulls out an Altoids tin, and lights a pre-rolled joint, and they smoke there, together.

"I wouldn't care at all," ABC says.

"Close your eyes," Ruth says, and ABC does.

"Think of her," she says. "Think of Philly."

ABC shuts her eyes and feels the hammock gently swaying as Ruth says, "Do you see anything?"

"What am I supposed to see?"

"My mother's mother, my Finnish grandmother, used to say that if you closed your eyes and saw fireflies, you know you're entering the spirit world."

"Do you see them?" ABC asks. "Because I don't see one firefly!"

"Oh," Ruth says, closing her eyes just as ABC opens her own. "Oh, yes, they are here! Happy to be here, aren't they?"

ABC closes her eyes again. "Seriously?" she says. "You just shut your eyes and boom-just like that? Spirit world?"

Ruth falls asleep marveling at whatever it is she sees, whatever show that's playing out on the back of her eyelids.

Looking out the window, ABC sees real fireflies all over the backyard, just floating around under the canopy of the trees. She goes out to the yard with a mason jar, catches, easily, twenty or thirty fireflies, and then begins walking. She wanders across campus, and strolls into Charlie's backyard.

She finds the study unlocked and goes inside, where she finds Charlie in a robe. He looks as if he's been swimming and has now dozed off on his cot while reading. A copy of The Stranger is on the floor next to him. ABC clears her throat. Charlie sits up with a start.

"Jesus, come on in, why don't you?" he says.

She locks the door behind her.

"I've been wanting to tell you something," he says. "I found something weird in my dad's things."

ABC slips her sundress over her head and hangs it on a hook near the door. He takes off his robe. He looks good, his body tan, his shoulders muscled and his waist lean. He is already aroused. She likes how easy it is to tell with a man.

She kneels down on the rug in front of him. She will make him forget all about Don Lowry's wife.

"First this," she says. And then, as Ruth Manetti might say: Reader, she blows him.

JULY 11,.

90 DEGREES.

"You know what, Charlie," Kathy Gulliver chirps, literally f.u.c.king chirps, "I'd forgotten how awfully hot Iowa can be!"

His mother has come back to town with Lyle Canon. They have been to a wedding in St. Louis and are swinging through Grinnell one last time before heading out to northern California for the fall, where Lyle has a friend who is not using a cabin, or something along those lines.

"It's a record-breaking summer, Ma," Charlie says. "It doesn't reflect reality."

"Maybe it's a new reality. No rain, no snow. A dust bowl!"

"Don't be so excited."

"Oh, Charlie, you've inherited your father's relentless gloom. It doesn't suit you though. You have my kind eyes."

Charlie and his mother walk down Broad Street in the heat on their way to see Gill. His mother is wearing a huge sunhat and a kind of hot pink tank top that ties in the back and a white skirt. She seems to skip a bit as she strolls. She's lost fifteen pounds from all the hiking and camping and canoeing and her hair is longer than it has been in years, dyed a saucy auburn. She had not given him advance warning. She had simply shown up that morning, rapping on the front door. Of course, Claire had answered, and had to point Kathy to the study out back, where she had been greeted by ABC, emerging from Charlie's chosen bedroom with wet hair and a sheepish smile.

As she watched ABC walk out of the yard, Kathy had said, "You've got quite the little harem going here, don't you? Like father, like son?"

Charlie had to explain, as best he could, exactly why Claire and her two kids were in the main house, and Charlie was sleeping like some squatter in a cot out by the pool.

"It's cleaner that way," Charlie had said, which wasn't much of an explanation.

"And who was leaving your little love shack when I arrived?"

"Mom. Jesus."

"What. I'm teasing. Life is for the living! G.o.d knows I would have f.u.c.ked around a lot more when I was your age, if I could do it all over again."

"Mom!" Charlie had said.

"She looks familiar though, that one," Kathy had said. "I think she was one of your dad's groupies."

Now, only a few hours later, they are heading to the Mayflower to see Gill, and Charlie is still feeling stung by the whole operation, as if he has been ambushed by his mother's appearance, her newly tanned self, and her snark.

"That's quite a summery outfit," Charlie says. He is in jeans and a white T-s.h.i.+rt and canvas sneakers.

"I don't know how you can wear jeans in the summer," she says. "You know one thing I learned from Lyle: if you dress for the weather, if you have the right equipment, you don't ever want to be indoors!"

It is late afternoon and they find Gill sitting in a wheelchair near his window. The vertical blinds are drawn and he squints into the stripes of fuzzy sunlight that manage to get through to his room. Gill's able to stand, for they both watch him for a long moment before making themselves known to him, and Charlie sees that his father will stand periodically and look out the slats in the blinds, as if he is waiting for someone to come and get him. Charlie walks over to him and says, "Dad? Mom's here."

His mother's eyes are drowning. Her flush face suddenly goes pale.

Gill looks like he's about to stand again but then he sits back in his chair.

"Oh?" he says. "My mother?"

He doesn't say Charlie's name but Charlie senses something different in his face this time, he senses that this man does recognize him, if not as his son, then as somebody who has some import in his life. As somebody he has known for a long time but whose name he cannot recall.

"How's it going?" Charlie says.

"Are you here with a car for me? To the airport? It's so much effort to get to the airport from this G.o.dd.a.m.n town, isn't it? That's what makes people go crazy."

"No. No. Sorry. That's not me, Dad."

Charlie motions for his mother to come closer and she does, but she seems hesitant to walk into Gill's field of vision.

"Well, what do you want?" Gill says. "How's ABC?"

"Dad, I have been in your study. I've been looking through your papers."

"My papers! My office on campus?"

"Well, it's all at the house now. All of your things."