Summerlong: A Novel Part 17

Eventually, the officer seems satisfied and she even gives Claire a hug, tighter than Charlie's hug, and Claire feels the ridiculous shame of being the kind of woman sobbing in a parking lot, hugged by a cop.

"We have to pick up my kids," Claire says, once they are in the car. She explains that her mother-in-law has a migraine.

"Of course," Charlie says.

"I am sorry to take you away from your work," Claire says. "I couldn't reach Don, or anybody." (This is kind of a lie. She had called Don, had texted him, but was secretly glad when he had not responded.) "Claire, it's okay. I had nothing to do today."

"You're a savior."

"You're an angel, Claire. You don't deserve this."

"What?"

"This life. This foreclosure. This upheaval."

"What do I deserve?" she says, laughing a snotty, post-cry laugh.

"You deserve to be happy," Charlie says and starts the car.

"Don Lowry!" ABC says as she throws open the door. She is wearing nothing but a towel. The skin on her shoulders seems to be steaming and her wet hair drips onto her neck and the tops of her shoulders, beading down her collarbone and her clavicle. Don Lowry looks like he wants to bite her, like he wants to suck her hair dry. It is an evening in which impulse and drama are winning and she feels herself not exactly in control of her own behavior, as if the steady parade of grief that has been her life for the last year is finally unraveling into something more permanent: a breakdown, a crack-up, a collapse, a departure.

So there she is in a towel, greeting a sad and likely h.o.r.n.y realtor of thirty-eight.

It's as if she feels Philly watching her cracking up. She feels as if Philly is her audience that night and she is putting on a h.e.l.l of a show. This is her swan song on earth, before, as her dream perhaps predicted, she will meet Philly in the spirit world and leave all of this insanity behind.

"Are you okay?" Don says. "You look like you might faint."

The night air is humid. It seems to shroud ABC's body in steam.

"Is it okay with Charlie that I am here?"

"Yes," she says, leading Don into the foyer. "Sure it's okay with Charlie. Why wouldn't it be?"

"I didn't know you were spending time with Charlie, I mean, not this much time," Don says, his face oddly fallen, as if he'd been slapped by something much larger than himself.

"I'm helping him go through his father's papers," ABC says. "Turns out they are mostly love letters to people other than his wife!"

Don nods. Then says, "Hey, can I borrow your towel? My car just hit a water buffalo."

"The towel?" ABC says. "What? A water buffalo?"

"It's an old joke. Never mind. From a movie called Fletch. Have you seen it?"

"Can't say I have," ABC says.

"You haven't seen Fletch!"

"Why do older guys always do that? Make some obscure movie reference and then act all shocked because a woman fifteen years younger doesn't get the reference? Is that supposed to be flirting?"

"Never mind. But why are you in a towel?"

"I've been swimming, dips.h.i.+t."

"Right."

"So," she says. "How's Don?"

"Fine," Don says. "You were Gill Gulliver's student, right?"

"I was."

"Frankly, he was always kind of a d.i.c.k to me," Don says.

"He preferred female students, I'm pretty sure," ABC says. "Based on the letters we are finding."

"He was always incredibly nice to Claire."

"When we went to see him at the nursing home, he recognized me, but not Charlie."

"Jesus," Don says. "Where is Charlie?"

"He had to go. Some kind of emergency," ABC says. "You wanna go sit outside?"

"It's too hot. Plus it's still daylight. People will see us smoking."

"Wimp."

"Well, the neighbors, you know. They know me. They might see. They've probably already witnessed the skinny-dipping party. I am sure there are rumors."

"I suppose," ABC says. "There'll always be rumors. Let's go upstairs where there's a window air conditioner in the master bedroom. Give it ten minutes to kick in and then it'll be nice and cool and dark."

Don nods.

"Who knew?" she says, smiling at him, and turns with the skip of a dancer toward the steps. "Don Lowry is a total stoner!"

Don feels his mouth go dry already, before he's even had one hit. But he is too terrified to ask for a drink because with ABC in the towel, with her wet hair still dripping, he feels as if he's in a dream and anything he might say or do could break him from that dream.

They go from the foyer straight up the staircase.

Don follows ABC up the stairs, which grow progressively darker, since ABC turned on no lights. Of course, he looks at her legs, bare and damp, as they go up. He feels himself needing to moan but instead he lets out a kind of s.h.i.+vering sigh through his nostrils. He is aroused. He has read articles, while killing the insomniac hours with the inanity of Yahoo news, about ABC's generation. They hook up. They do not date. s.e.x is physical, not emotional. They have all kinds of s.e.x. Oral s.e.x is just a thing they do; they take pictures of it. They say stuff like, We hooked up. Whatevs. It is hard not to feel like a dirty old man imagining all of it, and he feels like one now. Is that what she has in mind? Is she about to hook up with an older man, just for the experience of it?

In the bedroom, ABC keeps the lights off, but there is just enough light coming from the windows and the bathroom down the hall for them to see. She ushers Don Lowry in and directs him to the only chair in the room. It's in a corner, an old futon chair. ABC goes down the hall, to the bathroom, and comes back wearing clothes, cutoffs and a man's tight white unders.h.i.+rt, through which he can see a dark bra.

"Shut the door," Don says. She shrugs and shuts the door and pushes in the b.u.t.ton on the k.n.o.b.

"Okay," ABC says. "All secret now!"

Don frowns. "No, no," he says. "Whatever."

"You're already paranoid and you haven't even had one toke, Don Lowry."

At that moment, he wants to be nowhere else. Nothing seems real in this small room. There is no urgency in the universe, no failure, no unhappy circ.u.mstances one couldn't overcome with joy.

ABC is holding a small purse from which she retrieves a joint that has been hidden with a mess of joints tucked into a small Altoids tin. She cranks up the ancient window AC unit and kneels on the floor in front of it and lets the cold air blow on her face. The machine hums and buzzes and rattles, but it works, and then it stops working for a moment, and then it kicks on again.

"I put on some clothes," ABC says. "It seems more appropriate than a towel. Anyway, it's hot in here but will cool off soon."

After one hit, he feels clarity: he doesn't want to cheat on Claire. He is on the precipice of cheating, maybe, which in itself is a kind of thrill for him, and yet, if he thinks about it too much he knows it is the same thing. On the precipice or over the precipice, once you're there, you're there. But for now, he pretends he is discovering something innocently, has heard some distant music and has simply gone toward it, naive and open to the universe.

"Just relax," ABC says. She sits cross-legged on the floor on some pillows she'd found in another room. She is sitting right in front of him, at his feet, and she has to reach up toward him where he sits in that comfortable chair to hand him the joint.

"Remember, you have to be funny. That's our deal."

When she reaches up to him, he looks down her s.h.i.+rt.

She doesn't acknowledge this in any way, no coy smile or annoyed adjustment of her neckline. Her t.i.ts are big. This is the extent of the clarity he is now having. Wow. She has great t.i.ts. Claire has small t.i.ts, also great. The number of t.i.ts that Don has touched in his life is an incredibly low number.

"What are you thinking about?" ABC asks.

"Nothing," he says.

"Good."

Don Lowry is beside himself. He exhales and closes his eyes. ABC takes the joint back, takes one more hit, and then curls up against the sad stranger next to her and hushes him to sleep. She places a pillow behind his head.

"There's something in this pillow," he says, and reaching into the case, he pulls out a small white tank top, like his wife wears over her sports bra when she runs. He holds it up to his face and smells it. It smells like Claire.

"Let's sleep next to each other," ABC says. She stands up and asks Don to stand up and then collapses the futon chair into a large twin bed.

"Lie down, Don Lowry," she says. When he does this, she gets down and cuddles against his side.

"I won't sleep," he says. "I'm not someone who can just fall asleep like that."

"You fall asleep with me all the time. Maybe I'm your sleeping charm," ABC says.

"What were you and Ruth talking about this morning?"

"What do you mean?"

"She kept telling you to tell me something. To stop hiding it from me?"

"Just try," ABC says, "try to sleep."

"That was amazing s.h.i.+t," Don Lowry says. "Or is all stuff this amazing now? Should I be smoking pot every day?"

"Yep" is all ABC could stand to say. She wants him to stop talking now. She wants her dream of Philly to come back. "Please sleep next to me now."

"G.o.d, I'm so thirsty. I want to know what Ruth was talking about."

"Charlie has beer in the fridge downstairs. And some juice, I think. I can't move," ABC says.

"I'll go get us two beers," Don says, but doesn't move.

"What do you think she was talking about?" ABC asks. "Ruth."

"I think maybe you're in love with me," Don says. "I think maybe she was telling you to tell me you're in love with me."

"Don," ABC says. She lifts her head and kisses him lightly on the cheek. "Don't be dumb."

Sometime later, in the darkness, ABC is at the sh.o.r.e of the vast lake again, and Philly is walking toward her, emerging naked out of the soft but frigid white surf.

What Charlie decided to do, upon picking up Claire's two confused and bored kids, who'd been cheated out of a day of swimming by their pa.s.sive-aggressive, migraine-faking grandmother, was stop at the Hy-Vee for pizzas and root beer and ice-cream sandwiches, plus gin and tonic fixings.

He would throw these kids, and their mother, his friend, a pool party. He announced this aloud and the kids cheered.

Now Charlie wears orange swim trunks and a blue oxford, half unb.u.t.toned. Next to him, there is a sweating tumbler of gin. A triple, like hers? Claire has a desire to gulp her drink. But the kids are there. She needs to slow down. A lime floats among some ice. She already feels more than just buzzed.

"Jesus, now that was a weird day."

"Do you want another drink?" Charlie says.

"No," she says.

"How are you holding up? Do you want a swim?"

"In this case," Claire says, watching her kids jumping in and out of the pool, Taylor Swift playing from the FM radio, "I think I'd need a suit."

"Probably a good idea. You want me to go to your house and get one?"

"No. I feel better," she says. The gin, piney and strong, flushes her cheeks warm with blood. A strap from her sundress falls then, baring a shoulder, and she lets it ride. "I guess I had my first panic attack today."

"Mazel tov," Charlie says. "I have had so many already. You're a late bloomer. When I was leaving Seattle, my last few weeks there, I had one every day at five o'clock. Like when everybody would start leaving work, and I had no work to leave, I just got terrified. I was convinced I'd die in a terrorist attack or some natural disaster."