Ann DeFee: Summer After Summer

Thanks to Jeanne and Bobby Schnuriger—

to old friends and new friendships. Bobby, you wanted

your name in a book—so here it is!

And to my hometown—Seguin, Texas.

Summer 1973

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Summer 1993

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Summer 2007

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

“Jasmine Boudreaux! You girls watch out for snakes now, ya hear?” Mama’s honeyed drawl drifted over the languid green river to the wooden raft where I was sunbathing with my three best friends—Bunny Bennett, Mary Alice Cunningham and Misty Stewart.

Although we were as different as the four points of the compass, we’d been best buddies since our first day in kindergarten. Mary Alice was thoughtful, sensitive and more than a little religious. Bunny, the wild child, was on the opposite end of the spectrum. And Misty was our version of intelligentsia, bouncing back and forth between arcane ideologies. One day you’d find her quoting Ayn Rand; the next she’d be reading Karl Marx.

And speaking of dichotomies—I was a walking, talking Gemini. Although I was the most pragmatic member of our group, I was naive enough to fall for every practical joke in the universe.

I was fairly sure Mary Alice and I were the only two virgins in our senior class. I say that tentatively because virginity, or lack of it, was one of the few things we didn’t discuss.

“Bucky said he saw at least half-a-dozen moccasins in the river last night, and you know how those nasty things like to get up on that old dock to sun.”

“Yes, Mama, we’ll be careful,” I replied, although I didn’t bother to open my eyes. Through some strange quirk of fate, Bucky was my brother. He was a junior at the University of Texas and he was absolutely positive he was the grand pooh-bah of the Western world. Truth be told, he was a pain in the rear.

Bunny sat up and engaged Mama in conversation—an exceptionally bad idea since my mother loved to talk.

“Miz Boudreaux, did my mom call?” Bunny could put on the thickest Texas accent you ever heard. And this was one of those occasions.

“No, honey, she hasn’t. What do you want me to tell her if she does?” Mama had to yell in order to be heard.

“Just remind her I’m spending the night here, if you would. Not that she really cares where I am.” That last sentence was meant strictly for our ears.

“Sure thing, honey,” Mama agreed. “Jazzy, we’re eating at the country club so you girls go to the Pink Pig for supper. I’ll leave some money on the kitchen table.”

In Meadow Lake, Texas, population 8,631, the Pink Pig Burger Emporium was the “happening” place. “Happening,” that is, if you were into junk food, teenagers and the occasional redneck—“happening,” of course, being a relative term.

Growing up in a small south Texas town when your daddy’s the police chief presented some challenges. Everyone, and I do mean everyone, thought it was their job to report my every move. Swear to goodness, if I’d been audacious enough to utter the f-word, Mama would’ve known about it before I closed my mouth.

Every weekend, the kids had this ritual where we all circled the Pink Pig, cruised to the park on the other side of town, came back around to check out the movie theater, swung by Garcia’s Pizzeria and then completed the circuit with a trip back to the PP. Round and round we went in a relentless circle of teenage hormones.

I was so busy thinking about life in the high-school zone that I almost missed the fact that Mama was still dispensing advice from the shore.

“Misty, you watch out and don’t get sunburned. With your red hair, you could blister right up.” Mama was well into her drill-sergeant routine.

“Yes, ma’am,” the redhead in question yelled as she rolled over and smeared more baby oil on her exposed stomach. “Maybe if I get my freckles to run together I’ll be able to tan. What do ya think?” she asked, even though we all knew it was a rhetorical question.

Misty had been trying to tan since the fourth grade and she’d never progressed beyond the burn, peel and freckle stage. I, on the other hand, had the skin of my Cajun ancestors and by the end of the summer I was as brown as a berry. It was one of those things that made her crazy.

One of the benefits of living in a small town was that you could have lifelong friends. We’d shared everything—our thoughts, our dreams and on occasion our communicable diseases. The only exception to the “share and share alike” rule was boyfriends. But that’s a story I’ll get to later.

Bunny’s dad owned a tractor factory, which employed half the people in town. She was our bouncy blonde. The bouncy part came naturally; the blondeness was courtesy of a bottle.

The Bennetts were filthy rich and loved to flaunt it. Mrs. Bennett’s diamonds rivaled the crown jewels. And that marble mausoleum Bunny called home was totally sterile.

Misty’s parents were professors. They had to be book smart or they wouldn’t be teaching at the college. However, I thought their general IQ was questionable. Sometimes they treated their only child as if she’d just popped in from another planet.

Mary Alice was a total sweetheart. A bit clueless in the fashion department, but one of the nicest people you could meet. Her dad was a Holy Roller preacher—need I say more?

So now you have an idea why we spent so much time at my house. My parents were cool, most of the time anyway, plus we had a ski boat. And for some unfathomable reason Misty had a major-league crush on Bucky. Just thinking about Misty and Bucky doing anything erotic exceeded my yuck factor.

We were freshly minted high-school graduates and feeling invincible. Actually, that wasn’t quite the truth, at least for me. I was terrified. In a moment of insanity I’d applied to the school of architecture at U.C. Berkeley—that’s in California—and to my amazement I was accepted. It seemed like a good idea when I was filling out the application, but California, good grief!

What was I thinking?

“Jazzy! You’re daydreaming again.” Misty put her thumb over the lip of her Coke bottle and pretended to spray me. “I have a rumor to spread.”

“Wow,” the rest of the group said in chorus. Misty was usually the last person to hear anything. Not that she was ditzy; she just didn’t pay much attention to gossip.

“My mother was on the phone talking to Dean Patrick. She was whispering, but I got the drift of the conversation. Sandy Sorenson is getting married. Her daddy’s on the faculty, you know.” She paused for dramatic effect. “Sandy has to get married!”

“Sandy Sorenson,” Mary Alice whispered. “Oh, my God, she is so beautiful.”

Sandy was in her freshman year at the University of Texas, and rumor had it she’d taken the campus by storm.

“Who’s the guy?” Not that I was prone to telling tales, but I figured we might as well get all the facts.