Elin Hilderbrand - Summer People

“Why don’t you catch up to your sister?” David asked her.

“I don’t want to. She’s with Garrett.”

“Well, go anyway. I need you to scout out a good spot for us.”

“I’m hungry,” Peyton said.

“Exactly why we need you up front. We can’t eat until we’ve found a place to sit.”

In her mind, Beth willed Peyton to stay right where she was, next to her father, but Peyton succumbed to her hunger. She ran ahead, if you could call stumbling forward in clunky sandals running, leaving Beth and David to bring up the rear alone, if you could call walking with four thousand strangers alone.

“You don’t want me here,” David said.

“I thought you had the Swifts’ party.”

“I wanted to be with my girls,” David said.

“Maybe,” Beth said. “Or maybe you wanted to be with me.”

“You have a high opinion of yourself.”

“The kiss was an accident, David.”

“An accident?”

That was the wrong word. An accident was breaking a glass in the kitchen sink, a fender bender; an accident was what had happened to Arch. The kiss was something more intentional- it was a mistake.

“It didn’t mean anything,” she said, cringing at how cruel that sounded. But didn’t he see? It couldn’t mean anything. “I was kind of drunk.”

“Drunk,” David said flatly. “That’s original. You kissed me because you were drunk.”

Beth pressed her lips together. She liked the way Winnie and Marcus were carrying the cooler. They made it seem effortless. Piper and Garrett, on the other hand, appeared lopsided, and a second later they stopped in their tracks. Piper had to set down her thermos and rest.

“I need you to respect my wishes,” Beth said. “I’m not interested in a relationship with anyone right now.”

“You sound ridiculous.”

“Why is it so ridiculous?” Beth said. Winnie turned around with raised eyebrows. Beth smiled at her reassuringly, then lowered her voice. “I need time and space to grieve for my husband.”

“I understand that, Beth.”

“You don’t understand. If you understood, you wouldn’t be here. You would be giving me space.”

“Don’t you ever ask yourself why it’s me you don’t want around? I’ll tell you why. Because you still have feelings for me and you’re afraid of those feelings.”

“I don’t have feelings for you.”

“You love me.”

Beth looked to see if he was being funny. But his eyes gave off a searing heat. He was serious; he was challenging her to deny that preposterous statement.

“I loved you twenty-five years ago,” she said. “Trust me when I say things have changed.”

“It didn’t seem that way the other night,” he said.

Beth didn’t have to respond because seconds later, Peyton found a spot on the beach large enough to accommodate all of them, and then there was the welcome distraction of setting up camp: spreading out the blankets, unfolding the chairs, taking out the food and pouring drinks. David opened a beer and hovered at the far edge of the blanket while Beth took charge of doling out fried chicken, spooning mounds of potato salad onto paper plates, and trying to keep pieces of plastic wrap from flying into the water. This time last year it was the same menu, but there was only four of them: Beth, Arch, and the twins. Arch loved drumsticks. He ate them all-a total of seven-then joked about the poor one-legged chicken that was limping around somewhere. Stupid, maybe, but the kids thought he was the funniest man on the planet, and so did Beth. She put a drumstick on Garrett’s plate, hoping he would remember, but he was too absorbed with rubbing Piper’s arms. She was chilly, it seemed. Well, yeah, Beth thought, that’s what you got when you wore a halter top to the beach at night. When Garrett finally did notice the drumstick, he ate it in three bites without comment. Beth almost said, Hey, Garrett, remember when Dad… but she knew she wouldn’t be able to pull off the happy nostalgia she intended.

As she ate her dinner, she thought about how one day Garrett and Winnie would get married and have families of their own, and Beth would be left to remember all of the funny jokes alone. She watched as David wandered away to talk to some people he knew, waving his beer around in defiance of the open container law. Maybe she should listen to him, otherwise she might end up old and alone, still clinging to her grief.

It grew dark. Beth collected the paper plates and the wadded napkins and passed around oatmeal cookies. David appeared back at the blanket with a box of sparklers and he gave one to everybody, including Beth, and lit them with a Bic he borrowed from Piper. He watched Beth’s face as he held the lighter to the tip of her sparkler and when the sparkler came to life, bright stars dancing and hissing, he said, “There you go, my dear. Now you can write your name.”

Garrett and Piper wrote their names in a heart, as did Winnie and Marcus. Beth turned her back to the group and wrote her name in the dark air over Nantucket Sound. Beth. She hoped that Arch would see it, from wherever he was watching her.

Beth collected everyone’s spent sparklers and the rest of the trash and settled back in her chair in time for the first burst of fireworks. Red, gold, purple. David sat in the chair next to hers and opened another beer. Beth loved fireworks, the whistle and crackle in the air, the smell of cordite, the oohs and aahs . When the sky was all lit up, she watched the silhouettes of her kids- both of them obviously paired up now. Marcus was leaning back on his hands and Winnie sat close to him, resting her head on his shoulder. Piper lay on her back and Garrett lounged on his side right behind her. They were kissing. Beth studied them for a minute, enough time to dispel any illusions about their innocence. They were having sex. Beth glanced at David to see if he saw what she saw: the tongues when they kissed, the way Garrett’s fingers tugged insistently on Piper’s belt loops. Beth didn’t know how to feel about the situation. She and Arch had always vowed to be honest with the twins about sex and the responsibility that came with it. Arch gave Garrett condoms, and, Beth assumed, informed him how and when they should be used. Beth herself had lost her virginity at sixteen with the man sitting next to her, but somehow she had seemed older then, at sixteen, than Garrett did now, at seventeen. She would have to say something to Garrett about the sex this week-and to Winnie, too, if this thing with Marcus developed. It would embarrass all three of them-really, Arch had been much better at dealing with the kids’ emerging sexuality-yet what could she do? Let her kids go wild in the sack without a few words of caution?

Blue spirals shot through the air, enhanced by a bunch of silver flashes that sounded like very loud popcorn. David applauded for that one. Beth was bothered by everything David had said earlier. Okay, maybe she did have feelings for him, but any fool could see that the feelings made her so uncomfortable that all she wanted to do was push them away.

The finale started and the sky was a messy artists’ palette of color, one bright burst inside another. The great thing about the finale was that just when Beth thought the sky was saturated, just when she thought it must be the end, they shot off more. It kept going and going. Beth leaned her head back against the webbing of her chair. She tried to conjure Kara Schau’s words: Don’t think. Smell the flowers. Don’t worry about packing up and fighting the crowds all the way back to the car. Don’t worry about David Ronan in the chair next to yours. Just enjoy.