That Summer(12)
Author: Sarah Dessen

“Just think,” Lydia was saying as I came in from work one afternoon, “four weeks in Europe. It’s what you wanted to do in college but could never afford. Now you have the money, so why not go?”

“I don’t have the money,” my mother said. “With the wedding so close and Haven going back to school too, I just don’t know if the timing is good.”

“Haven is a big girl.” Lydia smiled at me. “Look at how tall she is, for Godsakes. She can take care of herself for a month. She’ll love it.”

“She’s only fifteen,” my mother said, and I could tell by the way she was biting her lip that she hadn’t made up her mind yet. I felt bad about it but there was some place in me that didn’t want her to go. Europe seemed too far away. I couldn’t picture her anywhere there, except standing in front of famous landmarks from my history books. My mother and Lydia, in front of the Eiffel Tower, Westminster Abbey, the leaning Tower of Pisa. My mother and Lydia, topless in France—the landmarks were easier.

I watched my mother from across the table as she talked with Lydia. Now and then I’d catch her eye and find her smiling at me, that same smile I remembered from when times were better and my father looped an arm around her waist, pulling her in closer the way I so often wanted to do now. To scoop her away from Lydia and the rest of the world and have her all to myself—if only for a while.

Meanwhile, the wedding continued to take over our lives. It hung over the house like a storm cloud, refusing to budge, promising possible disaster at any second. Every surface from the coffee table to the top of the television seemed to be filled with small scraps of paper detailing wedding reminders in my mother’s small, neat hand.

Bridesmaids: orders in by?

Ashley meets with caterer again July 30

Haven shoes, pantyhose, hair?

RSVP list, final version

Europe???????????????

She left them around like clues, a way I had of keeping up with her concerns from day to day. Just like I’d sat in my bathroom and listened through the vent to her crying to Lydia all those mornings. I was only able to share my mother’s concerns from a distance, unknown to her at all.

Meanwhile my father had returned from honeymooning for a week in the Virgin Islands, with a tan, more hair, and a grin that seemed pasted on that my mother noticed even from the front window when he dropped me off after my weekly dinner with him. She tossed her hair and kept whatever sarcastic comment was twisting her face to herself before she headed out again with Lydia, the Town Car’s horn beeping three times to summon her off to the Holiday Inn.

And then there was Ashley, who after dealing with Carol’s on-again-off-again participation in the wedding (now back on, after many tears and much long-distance wrangling and a promise that she could leave immediately after the wedding pictures were taken) was on to another crisis, this being her first sit-down dinner with Lewis’s parents, the Warshers. I sat in my room and listened to her tearing through her closet, hangers clanking, until I was summoned in to judge which dress was best.

“Okay,” she said from inside the closet, where she was busy bumping around, “this is the first option.” She came out in a red dress with a white collar, tugging at the hem to make it appear longer than it was.

“Too short,” I said. “Too red.”

She glanced at herself in the mirror, then gave up on the hem and headed back into the closet. “You’re right. Red is the wrong message to be sending. Red is a warning; it just screams out. I need something that makes me blend. I want them to welcome me into the family.”

Ever since Ashley had met Lewis, she had taken to using what my mother called Oprah phrases. Lewis talked the same way; he was a placater, a peacemaker, the kind of person who would hold your hand on an airplane if you were scared, able to quote verbatim the statistics about how it was the safest thing, honestly. I could only imagine what an entire Warsher clan would be like. They were from Massachusetts: that was all we knew.

She came back out in a white dress with a high neckline and a long flowing skirt that rustled when she walked. “Well?”

“You look too holy,” I told her.

“Holy?” She turned and looked in the mirror, to judge for herself. “God. This is awful. Everything is wrong.” She sat down beside me on the bed, crossing her legs. “I just want them to like me.”

“Of course they’ll like you.” This was one of the rare moments since her engagement when Ashley and I were just talking, not yelling or discussing the wedding or exchanging the odd nasty look on the stairs. I talked slowly, as if one wrong word might end it altogether.

“I know they’ll pretend to like me; they have to do that.” She lay back, stretching her arms over her head. “But they’re normal people, Haven. Lewis’s parents have been married for twenty-eight years. His mother teaches kindergarten. What are they going to think of Daddy if he gets all loud at the wedding and starts doing his Wizard of Oz thing? Plus I already told Mom she’s got to keep Lydia under control because they just won’t know what to make of her. I don’t even know what to make of her.”

“She’s Mom’s best friend.”

“I guess so.” She sighed, bouncing her feet against the edge of the bed.

“Do you think she’ll go to Europe with her?” I asked.

“I don’t know.” She sat up and looked at me. “It would be good for her if she did, though. All this stuff with Daddy has been harder on her than she’s let on to you. She deserves to treat herself.”

“I know,” I said, wondering how much she’d let on to Ashley. With that one sentence, I could feel the five years between us again. “I just think with the wedding and all …”

“Haven, you’re in high school now. You should jump at the chance to stay alone for that long. I would have. God, I would have been wild.” She stood up and went behind the screen, tossing the holy dress over the top a few seconds later. “But you won’t, and that’s good. You won’t be like me.”

I thought back to Ashley’s long list of boyfriends from high school, all their names and faces running together until they ended with Lewis’s skinny nose and constant look of concern. I thought of Sumner again, suddenly, and saw him clearly in my mind on the boardwalk at Virginia Beach, the sunset fading pink and red and purple behind him. I heard the doorbell sound from downstairs and Ashley said, “Get that, will you please? It’s Lewis.”