Summerlong Read online

  He takes his loot to the counter, tossing in some cheese dip and a bottle of Coke before he gets to the register, as if he means to cement shut the end of his acting career through the consumption of empty calories.

  He recognizes Ashlyn Harms behind the counter. Ashy, whom he’s known since kindergarten, works the register as she did a decade ago, when Charlie was still in high school. She’s heavier now, her hair shorter, but her smile is the same.

  He pretends not to recognize her, because he is a dick.

  Still, she begins to scan the groceries and, without looking up, starts a conversation.

  “How you doing, Charlie?”

  “Good. You?”

  “All right.”

  “Rough week?”

  “I guess.”

  “You look rough.”

  “Do I?”

  “Mooseheads, are they dark?”

  “No. They’re light. See, green glass?”

  “Do you ever hang out? You go to Rabbit’s?”

  “I’ve been away,” Charlie says.

  “Oh yeah? How long?”

  “Six years. No, even more.”

  “We should hang out.”

  “My dad’s in a nursing home. My folks got divorced last year and he got this thing right after that. So there’re some things I need to do.”

  “I think I heard all that. He has Alzheimer’s?”

  “It’s like that, but different. Lewy body dementia, it’s like, I don’t know. It’s unpredictable.”

  “Weren’t you an actor or something? I remember hearing that. Were you in anything I’ve heard of?”

  “Hamlet?” he says. “Seattle Shakespeare.”

  “Didn’t see it,” she says.

  “That’s okay.”

  “Dude, it was a joke. What’s next for you?”

  “I’m between things,” he says.

  “Between what?”

  Then her smile drops away and she looks beyond him to the windows and says, “Ugh, do you know this woman?”

  Charlie shakes his head no as he takes in the vaguely familiar woman—short blond hair, lean, wearing running clothes and holding her hands on her head as if she’s sucking wind, short on breath.

  “She’s a total bitch,” Ashy says. “I think she’s a professor.”

  And, almost as if she hears Ashy say this, that running woman, who had been pacing outside, kicks the ice machine as hard as she can, and keeps on kicking it.

  “Oh, FML,” Ashy says.

  “I got this,” Charlie says, and he goes out after her.

  4.

  For ABC, the simple fact that Don Lowry actually follows her is somewhat thrilling, because though she talks to Philly every day, nothing worth telling Philly about has happened to her in months. ABC can sense Don Lowry behind her, so she pauses and waits for him to catch up. Standing still, without turning around, she waits for him and then when he doesn’t appear at her side, she turns and sees that he is almost a whole block behind her. He has also stopped.

  Looking at the still-dimming sky, the draining of its last light, she says, “Philly, you’re so fucked up!”

  She turns and waves him along. He looks up and down the block, then walks toward her. She’s surprised by the strength of his posture, the fine slope of his shoulders—handsome, and, like a lot of men his age, maybe even more handsome than he used to be, in that brief sweet spot in the ascent toward middle age when one can appear suddenly sexy with gravitas and some gray at the temples, a salt-and-pepper stubble. But despite his attractiveness, he seems less arrogant and sure than the man she’s seen on real estate signs all over town.

  “You talk to yourself,” he says.

  “You walk slowly,” she says, when he finally gets to her. “It’s hard not to walk fast in Iowa. It’s so flat. You have to decide to go slow.”

  He laughs, a nervous breath forced out through his nose and teeth.

  “I guess,” he says. Another of those hard breaths. “Does it bother you?”

  “Does what?”

  “The flatness?” he says.

  She’s considered the virtues of flatness before; eventually, with nothing at all on the horizon but corn and clouds—no mountains, no sky, no smell of sea salt—you forget that there is any place left to go. Your desire to wander leaves you. You settle down and accept whatever there is to be accepted. You assume something will come to you instead. This is why ABC had returned to the prairie last fall. It was wide open and free of ambition. She’d come from Los Angeles and its sprawl of human struggle smack between the majesty of mountain and sea.

  “I like this landscape, Don Lowry,” she says.

  “You do?” he says.

  “Yes. It doesn’t try to alleviate your pain with splendor, some constant reassurance that the world is bigger than your grief.”

  “Are you grieving?” Don Lowry says.

  “Don’t you love that word? Grief?” she says. “It almost stops too soon, fading out before its time, almost like it’s losing energy, that deflating after the long e—it feels like a sigh of defeat.”

  He shrugs. “I . . . ,” he says, then nothing else.

  “Fff,” she says, “eiffff.”

  “Like the wind that comes off the prairie,” Don Lowry says.

  “Yeah!” she says. “That constant wind. Does it ever stop? Come the fuck on, wind.”

  She runs on ahead. What she’s just said is something Philly once said during a storm, in the middle of campus, drunk and stoned and beaming with something ABC knows exists nowhere else.

  At the house, they walk into the foyer and she notices Don looks over his shoulder before shutting the front door.

  “Are you worried people will see you?”

  “I’ll just tell people Mrs. Manetti wanted an appraisal. If they see me.”

  “I suppose if you’re a realtor, you can have an excuse to be in anyone’s house,” ABC says. “Not that you need an excuse.”

  “I’m married.”

  “No shit. I just want to get high. But if you want to leave . . .”

  “No,” he says. “No.”

  They walk by the den where Ruth is dozing in front of the television, an episode of Law & Order. As they walk up the stairs, ABC wonders what Philly would say right now. She’d be delighted and horrified. She’d say, “Oh my God! Don Lowry! The realtor? You smoked pot with Don Lowry? ‘It’s your home, but it’s my business!’ That guy?”

  Sometimes ABC and Philly would joke about the parts of rural Iowa that they found funny—the way the clerks at the grocery store might say, “Well, that’s different,” when they came in with blue hair or a vintage disco dress to buy beer before a party; the way you could get stuck behind a tractor on Highway 6, ambling along at twenty-five miles per hour, and nobody would be in road-rage mode, laying on horns. Everyone would just be calm, as if it was perfectly okay to obstruct the productivity of the world in order to grow corn. And they laughed about the strangeness of the dive bars—meth heads and farmers and blown-apart high school football failures all drinking together, an invented family held together by bad decisions and muted rage and the occasionally intense night of karaoke with undergraduates.

  And once, when they were lying in bed, after sex, stoned and sweaty, ABC had said (for no reason she could recall, maybe to get the morbid reassurance new lovers sometimes need), “What will I do if you die?”

  Why had she thought to say this? What had she known? Had she felt it coming? No, of course she had not: it had only been that strange kind of postcoital conversation, those moments of intimate vulnerability unimaginable in the public light of day.

  Tears down her face, a real crack in her voice. She had started shaking. Philly had wrapped her arms around ABC and had whispered: “If I die? Well, I’ll come back for you. I’ll come get you and take you to the spirit world.”

  “How will I know? How will I find you?” ABC had said.

  There was a long pause and Philly’s face grew grave and serious and all y
ou could hear were the crows gathering in the locusts and a distant storm rolling up from Missouri, and Philly looked ABC dead in the eye.

  “I’ll send Don Lowry,” she said.

  “Who?” ABC asked.

  “Don Lowry! ‘It’s your home, but it’s my business!’ I’ll send that guy.”

  A fit of laughter came next, the kind of laughter they always shared when stoned and the kind of uncontrollable fits of it ABC so missed now. She had never had a friend so funny; she feels she never will again. Shaking with that laughter, they howled with pleasure until they cried and then smoked another joint and made love again then fell into the easy winds of sleep. Just before that sleep came, Philly had turned to ABC: “I just thought of something! Why, if I die now, you will have been the love of my life!”

  But how had she said it? And had she really said it?

  Was it possible that she was forgetting more than the exact words Philly had said? Was she forgetting Philly’s voice? Was she remembering the voice she heard in videos, in the desperately saved voice mails? What was her real voice like, the voice she used when her mouth was up close against ABC’s neck? That voice. Was she forgetting it?

  What do you do with grief like that? When you can still hear her laughter, still taste her tongue? What do you do? Why do anything? Why work? Why read books? Why cough or refrain from coughing? Why fix a sandwich? When you have had and lost the love of your life before the age of twenty-five, well, fuck! Why wake up, ever, at all?

  “Do you live upstairs?” Don whispers.

  “Pretty much. Ruth moved to the first floor. Actually, she can still do the stairs. I guess we’re planning ahead.”

  “Of course,” Don says.

  “There’s a sleeping porch out back where we can smoke,” ABC says as she points Don through the master bedroom. “Give me a minute. I gotta pee.”

  “I know the way. I’ve been here before.”

  “Have you?” ABC says.

  “I used to do odd jobs for the Manettis. I used to cut their grass, hang their storm windows, all of that stuff. In high school and even in college; I’ve done odd jobs around Grinnell most of my life. I think I was probably the last person to paint some of the walls of that sleeping porch.”

  “You grew up in town?”

  “I did.”

  “And you went to college here?”

  Don nodded. “They give two local kids scholarships every year. Those two kids, when I graduated from high school, went off to the Ivy Leagues, so I got lucky. I sailed in off the wait list.”

  The long, rectangular sleeping porch is furnished with a freestanding hammock on a stand by the west windows. In the middle are two large armchairs; one of them looks as if it has been shredded by cats. Don sits in the sturdier of the two, a big maroon chair with a slanted back, though he still feels uncomfortably large. He pulls the fabric of his shirt, to lessen the obvious curve of his newly rounded gut.

  ABC pulls a small baggie of weed and a metal pipe from a cigar box stashed in a hollowed-out flowerpot that holds an artificial plant.

  “Pretty sneaky, sis,” Don says.

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” Don says. “Just a line from an old commercial. From when I was a kid. It wasn’t funny.”

  “A commercial for what?”

  “A game called Connect Four,” Don says. “Have you played it?”

  ABC lights the pipe and smiles at him while taking a hit, sly and sideways, as if he has just asked the silliest question in the world. She hands him the pipe. They pass it back and forth a few times, in silence.

  “Where do you get it?” he asks.

  “The librarian in Newton. There are books you can request. Anything by Updike will get you weed. Nobody reads Updike anymore. She knows what you mean if you request him.”

  “Nobody reads Updike anymore?” Don says. “That’s hard to believe.”

  “Have you read Updike?”

  “No,” Don says.

  He giggles into his hand, softly and in a sort of hushed chuckle, and finally ABC says, “What’s Connect Four?”

  “Pretty sneaky, sis,” Don says and they both snort with laughter.

  “That’s really a game?”

  Don stands and walks to the hammock. He slips off his shoes, sporty brown leather slip-ons that make his feet look too small, and he sets his shoes neatly against the wall, then flops in the hammock, rocking it turbulently until the whole works calm down, and ABC is watching this realtor she’s just met swinging slowly in the hammock, barely moving, reminding her of a tiny child who’s fallen asleep in a baby swing on the park set.

  This is when ABC climbs in beside him, curling up in a kind of fetal position against him, which, from the way he stiffens his body, she can tell shocks him. He doesn’t expect it but there’s no protest. The hammock sways gently with the weight of them and outside the breeze of evening begins.

  “When I saw you under the sycamore, you looked like you maybe were dead.”

  “Did I?” ABC asks.

  They lie there in the darkness, silent. For a long time, it seems there is the sound only of cicadas and breath and the distant roll of passing cars on Highway 6.

  “Are you gonna be funny now?” ABC asks.

  She hears his breathing, labored, slowing. She turns her face toward his, her mouth an inch or two from his cheek. His eyes are closed.

  “You were supposed to be funny, Don Lowry,” she whispers. “What happened?”

  Don Lowry doesn’t answer. Don Lowry is asleep. And soon ABC falls into sleep too, so deeply that she begins dreaming and in her dreams, there is Philly, who has not been in her dreams before, though she has longed to dream about Philly, has prayed to see Philly in a dream. But Philly is there now, standing at the edge of a rocky beach, white-foamed blue waves, chunked with white stones of ice, crashing behind her. She waves to ABC and in the dream ABC waves back, so happy.

  “Philly!” she says, turning over, moaning near Don Lowry’s ear. “Philly! Is that you?”

  But Philly is gone, and Don Lowry remains motionless, almost as if he is dead, as if he has died instead of her, and she knows now that she has dreamed of Philly because of this man, this Don Lowry, who had once been a joke to her, and to Philly, but was not a joke at all anymore.

  5.

  Her hair is back in a tiny tight ponytail and her blue eyes and cheekbones are even more pronounced because of it. Charlie always felt as if he had a murky face, shadowed and dull in most light, unreadable. The women he dated would always ask him, “What are you thinking?” as if his own countenance was one failure of expression after another. Perhaps this is why he always felt a bit inadequate as an actor. He was inscrutable. He squinted when smiling, grew puffy when tired. You could not read his eyes.

  This woman has the clearest eyes he has ever seen.

  He knows this because she is staring at him, as if trying to place him, and he knows too that he has seen her before. But he would probably have been in high school then, maybe twelve years ago, or more. He’s not been back here much.

  At least she has stopped kicking the ice machine.

  “You don’t by chance have a cigarette?” she asks. His hands are full. He has a twelve-pack of Moosehead in his hands; a plastic sack of groceries hangs from each hand as well.

  “Sure,” he says. “Follow me. I’ll set this down.”

  She scans him, looks to the minivan parked in a dark corner of the lot.

  “I grew up here,” he says, when she seems to notice his Washington plates. “I just got in from a long, long drive.”

  She follows him and he sets his groceries on the slanted hood of the van. He opens the box of Moosehead then, pulls out two bottles, cracks them open with his key ring, and offers her one. She steps into the shadows, out of the light, takes the beer, and drinks it.

  “Are you twenty-one?” she says.

  “Twenty-nine.”

  “Just making sure. If the cops come, I’d like to keep this to a misdeme
anor.”

  “I don’t think Ashlyn will call the cops. What’s your brand?”

  She looks at him, puzzled.

  “Of cigarettes.”

  “Right. Whatever you’ve got. Marlboro used to be my brand. Lights.”

  He sets down his beer, goes into the convenience store, and faces the now-scowling Ashlyn.

  “You know her?” she asks. “She your friend?”

  “I don’t know yet, Ashy,” he says, smiling. “She might be. Marlboro Lights? In a box?”

  “I almost called the fucking cops, Charlie! You tell her that.”

  “She’s cool. I told you that I would take care of it.”

  Ashy gets his cigarettes and offers a free book of Kum & Go matches; he thanks her again, apologizes for the ice-machine incident, and makes a vague comment about hanging out sometime.

  “You know where to find me,” she says.

  He takes the cigarettes out to the woman, who’s almost finished her beer.

  “Well then,” she says, as he hands her the box and the matches. “You didn’t have to do that. I thought maybe you had a pack of your own.”

  “My father told me to always carry cigarettes with me, and a lighter, so I’d have a reason to speak to beautiful women at parties and things like that,” Charlie says.

  “Very smooth,” the woman says. “But you forgot his advice?”

  “I didn’t expect to run into a beautiful woman,” he says.

  “Well,” she says. “Ta-da!”

  She flings the bottle over her shoulder into the alley of Dumpsters behind her, and they both hear its loud clink and shatter.

  “Whoa,” he says. “I just told the cashier not to call the cops. Let’s keep it down out here.”