Summerlong: A Novel Part 23

"Kathy took them all there? Did she come home?"

"Dad."

"She left me, you know," Gill says. "Don't blame her really."

"Kathy is here, Dad. My mother. Your wife."

The word dad seems to surprise him, though he says nothing. He makes a small O with his mouth and whistles vaguely through it. Charlie decides not to use the word dad again.

Kathy, meanwhile, is trying to turn her crying face into something resembling a smiling one.

"Do you know me, Gill?"

He shakes his head no.

She bends down and kisses him gently on the mouth.

"It's me," she says.

"Claire?" Gill asks. "Jordanna? Amy? Meredith?"

Kathy walks out into the hallway.

"I'll be right back," Charlie says. Gill says nothing. Charlie finds his mother-this stoic, optimistic, bizarrely carefree lover of Lyle Canon sobbing in a stained orange chair.

"Mom," Charlie says. "It's not personal. It's the disease, he can't help it."

His mother looks up at him and laughs through tears. She blows her nose in a tissue and then sets the tissue down on a copy of Better Homes and Gardens.

"I know that," she says.

"Mom," Charlie says. "Come back inside. It might be the last time . . ."

"All I ever wanted, Charlie, was not to be an afterthought in some man's life."

Charlie understands. He was also an afterthought, but he has a task ahead of him and he goes back inside with the word afterthought like a staccato beat in his head, a million voices, stomping on bleachers, chanting: af-ter-thought!

Af-ter-thought!

Af-ter-thought!

Af-ter-thought!

Charlie stands near Gill and kneels down so he can be at eye level with him.

"I want to finish your book for you, Professor Gulliver."

"My book?"

"Yes." Then, "Dad, it's me. Your son."

"What book?" Gill says, his voice breaking with sorrow or confused exasperation. It is hard to tell which, though Charlie wants it to be the former.

"The one on Gatsby. And Reagan."

"Oh, that."

"Yes, that one. Only I can't find the ma.n.u.script anywhere. Not on your computer, not on your CDs, not in your files."

"You can't?"

"No. Do you have any idea? Is it in a safe or file cabinet or-"

"It's not easy to find," Gill says.

"I know. Tell me, Dad. Where is it?"

"In fact, it's impossible to find it. Tell me who you are again?"

"Charlie. Charlie Gulliver. Your son."

Gill looks back to the window, as if he is now sure that someone is waiting for him on the other side of those blinds.

"There is no book," Gill says.

"What?"

"There is no book," Gill says again. "There never has been."

Charlie watches as his father's chapped lips begin to tremble, and his hands, shaking, begin to clutch his forehead as if he is suddenly in the grip of a blinding headache. Softly now, he says, "Son, there is no book. There never was. Tell your mother. Tell her I am so sorry for all of the things."

JULY 12,.

90 DEGREES.

A sale! Don Lowry makes a sale, a small fixer-upper ranch on the southwest side of town. After the closing, he has a check and he deposits the check just before the bank closes at five. Not a big commission, but a commission, his first in months. It's a check for four thousand dollars. He deposits three and takes out twenty fifties for his wallet. He drives out to the Hy-Vee and buys a bottle of champagne and some flowers, and he's not sure, even as he is buying the champagne, whom it's for, and the flowers, he has no idea, but he decides, for some reason, that he wants the flowers, and then he drives to the Gulliver place, and he rings the doorbell. Claire answers and invites him inside. He follows her and sees she's been in the kitchen cooking dinner with Charlie. The kids are outside in the pool.

"Are they out there alone?" Don asks. "Is that okay?"

"Yes," Claire says. "What are you implying?"

"They're excellent swimmers," Charlie says.

Don ignores this and gives Claire a stack of bills, counting them out onto the counter where Charlie is chopping an onion.

"Thanks," Claire says. "What did you do, rob a bank?"

"Yep," Don says.

Next, Don goes to the yard and strips down to his BVDs and throws himself into the pool to the delighted cries of his kids and he comes up splas.h.i.+ng, roaring like a monster, the volume meant to thrill them like he did when they were toddlers and they run from him, giddily shrieking, and they do not know how real are his roars.

Later, the champagne is warm, but he sticks it in Ruth's freezer and he finds ABC in the yard. His khakis are wet from the rushed way he dressed after swimming, his hair still dripping onto his dress s.h.i.+rt. ABC is watering flowers in her cutoffs and a black swimsuit.

He says, "I have champagne," and she smiles but doesn't smile.

"I have flowers too," he says then. "Do you have gra.s.s?"

"I don't," she says. "I'm sorry."

She shuts off the water and goes to her room.

Don takes the flowers to Ruth's room, where she breathes a rattled breath as she dozes. He has arranged the flowers in a vase that he has found under the sink and when he sets them on the shelf across from Ruth's hospital bed, she sneezes in her sleep.

The champagne he drinks in the hammock alone.

JULY 13,.

90 DEGREES.

Claire gets a call from dining services that afternoon-there is a reunion at the college, a reunion of the school's past athletic teams, and they ask if she could help with dinner. They offer to pay double time, since it's technically the month off for Dining Services employees, and they're desperate for the help. Three people have called in sick; the sub list, in the summer, is thin.

Claire agrees, asks Charlie to keep an eye on her kids, and walks the few blocks west to campus. At the dining hall, in her visor and black T-s.h.i.+rt, she wonders, if she looks down at the register while she swipes dining hall pa.s.ses, if people might mistake her for a student.

It is not long after she has that thought that a woman says, "Claire, is that you?"

Claire looks up to see Rachel Pettis and Holiday Furness in front of her, two soccer players from the cla.s.s of '97. "Oh my G.o.d," they both say. "Hi!"

Claire says, "Hi."

"Do you still work here?" Holiday says.

"Not still. Again. I work here again."

"Oh my G.o.d, that is so crazy," Rachel says. "Are you a professor? Holiday is a professor at Carleton now. Women's history!"

"They let me help with the soccer team too," Holiday says. "My husband is the a.s.sociate dean. I have connections."

Claire smiles. "I'm not a professor. Professors don't usually work the dining hall."

"Ha!" Rachel says, but she doesn't say much else.

"You should try the vegan bar," Claire says.

"Are you still with Don?"

Claire looks at the line forming behind Rachel and Holiday. "No," she says. "But it's complicated. That's kind of new. But he still lives here. Yes. We have kids." She makes a gesture toward the line behind them. "I can't talk now, I guess."

"No, totally," Holiday says, and takes a business card from her wallet and sets it in front of Claire. "My cell is on there. You should call us tonight. We're having drinks."

"Okay," Claire says.

Rachel takes out her own card. Rachel, apparently, is the theater and drama coordinator for the NEA. She takes a pen from Claire's check-in station and circles a phone number on the card.

"That's my cell. We're thinking around nine," Rachel says. "Will you be done by nine?"

She is speaking in a way that makes Claire feel like Rachel thinks that perhaps she doesn't understand English anymore.

"Later," Claire says, and then apologizes to the women who are next in line. She swipes their dining hall pa.s.ses, too. "Sorry for the wait," she says. "I used to go here."

Here is a moment from that summer that, later, one might go back to again and again. Does it change anything for Claire? It's hard to say. But when she comes home from work, she sees that Charlie has used the relatively cool afternoon as a chance to mow the brown lawn. Claire sees the lawnmower and goes straight to the pool. The door to the bathroom off the study is unlocked, slightly ajar even, and when Charlie finally comes out of the shower, he sees Claire there in the bathroom with him, wrapped in a white towel, naked beneath it. She had gone swimming for a minute, to wash off the fried food smell of the cafeteria, but is now wringing out a swimsuit in the sink and Charlie is there, and she hands him a towel, a blue one, and says, I have been standing outside the shower for a few minutes. The steam in the room is thick, it has nowhere to go. I have been trying to decide what I would do.

She goes up to Charlie now and begins to dry off his body for him, running the blue towel down each arm, down his back, and finally, as she moves the towel down his chest, down the small trail of hair on his stomach, down to his hips- And in the yard, Wendy: "Mama, are you here? Mama! Mama are you here?"

Claire struggles to put her wet swimsuit back on as Wendy's voice comes closer and closer. She slips out of the bathroom just in time, leaving Charlie standing there, and Charlie hears her say, "Yes, baby, yes. I am here."

Later, in the evening, Claire makes a gin and tonic in the kitchen, drinks half of it in one long pull, and says to Charlie: "This has all been a big mistake."

"What has?" he asks.

"All of this," she says. "This pool, this house, your face, my life."

She puts her hands on his chest and buries her head there, her face between her fists.