Текст книги "We'll Always Have Summer"

Автор книги: Jenny Han

Соавторы: Jenny Han
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Chapter Thirty-two

Conrad

Her name was Agnes. A lot of people called her Aggie, but I stuck with Agnes. She was in my chem class. On any other girl, a name like Agnes wouldn’t have worked. It was an old-lady name. Agnes had short dirty-blond hair, it was wavy, and she had it cut at her chin. Sometimes she wore glasses, and her skin was as pale as milk. When we were waiting for the lab to open up one day, she asked me out. I was so surprised, I said yes.

We started hanging out a lot. I liked being around her. She was smart, and her hair carried the smell of her shampoo not just fresh out of the shower but for a whole day. We spent most of our time together studying. Sometimes we’d go get pancakes or burgers after, sometimes we’d hook up in her room during a study break when her roommate wasn’t around. But it was all centered around both of us being premed. It wasn’t like I spent the night in her room or invited her to stay over in mine. I didn’t hang out with her and her friends or meet her parents, even though they lived nearby.

One day we were studying in the library. The semester was almost over. We’d been dating two, almost three, months.

Out of nowhere, she asked me, “Have you ever been in love?”

Not only was Agnes good at o chem, she was really good at catching me off guard. I looked around to see if anyone was listening. “Have you?”

“I asked you first,” she said.

“Then yes.”

“How many times?”

“Once.”

Agnes absorbed my answer as she chewed on her pencil. “On a scale of one to ten, how in love were you?”

“You can’t put being in love on a scale,” I said. “Either you are or you aren’t.”

“But if you had to say.”

I started flipping through my notes. I didn’t look at her when I said, “Ten.”

“Wow. What was her name?”

“Agnes, come on. We have an exam on Friday.”

Agnes made a pouty face and kicked my leg under the table. “If you don’t tell me, I won’t be able to concentrate.

Please? Just humor me.”

I let out a short breath. “Belly. I mean, Isabel. Satisfied?”

Shaking her head, she said, “Uh-uh. Now tell me how you met.”

“Agnes—”

“I swear I’ll stop if you just answer”—I watched her count in her head—“three more questions. Three and that’s it.”

I didn’t say yes or no, I just looked at her, waiting.

“So, how did you meet?”

“We never really met. I just always knew her.”

“When did you know you were in love?”

I didn’t have an answer to that question. There hadn’t been one specific moment. It was like gradually wak-ing up. You go from being asleep to the space between dreaming and awake and then into consciousness. It’s a slow process, but when you’re awake, there’s no mistaking it. There was no mistaking that it had been love.

But I wasn’t going to say that to Agnes. “I don’t know, it just happened.”

She looked at me, waiting for me to go on.

“You have one more question,” I said.

“Are you in love with me?”

Like I said, this girl was really good at catching me off guard. I didn’t know what to say. Because the answer was no. “Um …”

Her face fell, and then she tried to sound upbeat as she said, “So no, huh?”

“Well, are you in love with me?”

“I could be. If I let myself, I think I could be.”

“Oh.” I felt like a piece of shit. “I really do like you, Agnes.”

“I know. I can feel that that’s true. You’re an honest guy, Conrad. But you don’t let people in. It’s impossible to get close to you.” She tried to put her hair in a ponytail, but the front pieces kept falling out because it was so short. Then she released her hair and said, “I think you still love that other girl, at least a little bit. Am I right?”

“No,” I told Belly.

“I don’t believe you,” she said, tilting her head to one side. Teasingly, she said, “If there wasn’t a girl, why would you stay away for so long? There has to be a girl.”

There was.

I’d stayed away for two years. I had to. I knew I shouldn’t even be at the summer house, because being there, being near her, I would just want what I couldn’t have. It was dangerous. She was the one person I didn’t trust myself around. The day she showed up with Jere, I called my friend Danny to see if I could crash on his couch for a while, and he’d said yes. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I couldn’t leave.

I knew I had to be careful. I had to keep my distance.

If she knew how much I still cared, it was all over. I wouldn’t be able to walk away again. The first time was hard enough.

The promises you make on your mother’s deathbed are promises that are absolute; they’re titanium. There’s no way you’re breaking them. I promised my mother that I would take care of my brother. That I would look after him. I kept my word. I did it the best way I could.

By leaving.

I might have been a fuckup and a failure and a disappointment, but I wasn’t a liar.

I did lie to Belly, though. Just that one time in that crappy motel. I did it to protect her. That’s what I kept telling myself. Still, if there was one moment in my life I could redo, one moment out of all the shitty moments, that was the one I’d pick. When I thought back to the look on her face—the way it just crumpled, how she’d sucked in her lips and wrinkled her nose to keep the hurt from showing—it killed me. God, if I could, I’d go back to that moment and say all the right things, I’d tell her I loved her, I’d make it so that she never looked that way again.

Chapter Thirty-three

Conrad

That night in the motel, I didn’t sleep. I went over and over everything that had ever happened between us. I couldn’t keep doing it, going back and forth, holding her close and then pushing her away. It wasn’t right.

When Belly got up to shower around dawn, Jere and I got up too. I was folding my blanket up when I said, “It’s okay if you like her.”

Jere stared at me, his mouth hanging open. “What are you talking about?”

I felt like I was choking as I said, “It’s okay with me . . . if you want to be with her.”

He looked at me like I was crazy. I felt like I’d gone crazy. I heard the water in the shower shut off, and I turned away from him and said, “Just take care of her.”

And then, when she came out, dressed, her hair wet, she looked at me with those hopeful eyes, and I looked back at her like I didn’t recognize her. Completely blank. I saw her eyes dim. I saw her love for me die. I’d killed it.

When I thought about it now, that moment in the motel, I understood I was the one who’d set this thing in motion. Pushed them together. It was my doing. I was the one who was going to have to live with it. They were happy.

I’d been doing a pretty good job of making myself scarce, but I happened to be home that Friday afternoon when, out of nowhere, Belly needed me. She was sitting on the living room floor with that stupid binder, papers all around her. She looked freaked out, stressed. She had that worried grimace on her face, the look she’d get when she was working on a math problem and she couldn’t figure it out.

“Jere’s stuck in city traffic,” she said, blowing her hair out of her face. “I told him to leave earlier. I really needed his help today.”

“What did you need him to do?”

“We were gonna go to Michaels. You know, that craft store?”

Drily, I said, “I can’t say I’ve ever been to a Michaels before.” I hesitated, then added, “But if you want, I’ll go with you.”

“Really? Because I’m picking up some heavy stuff today. The store’s all the way over in Plymouth, though.”

“Sure, no problem,” I said, feeling inexplicably grati-fied to be lifting heavy stuff.

We took her car because it was bigger. She drove. I’d only ever ridden with her a few times. This side of her was new to me. Assured, confident. She drove fast, but she was still in control. I liked it. I found myself sneaking peeks at her, and I had to force myself to cool it.

“You’re not a bad driver,” I said.

She grinned. “Jeremiah taught me well.”

That’s right. He taught her how to drive. “So what else about you has changed?”

“Hey, I was never not a good driver.”

I snorted, then looked out the window. “I think Steve would disagree.”

“He’ll never let me live down what I did to his precious baby.” She shifted gears as we came to a stoplight.

“So what else has changed?”

“You wear heels now. At the garden ceremony, you had on high heels.”

There was a minute hesitation before she said, “Yeah, sometimes. I still trip in them, though.” Ruefully she added, “I’m like a real lady now.”

I reached out to touch her hand, but at the last second I pointed instead. “You still bite your nails.”

She curled her fingers around the steering wheel.

With a little smile, she said, “You don’t miss a thing.”

“Okay, so, what are we picking up here? Flower holders?”

Belly laughed. “Yeah. Flower holders. In other words, vases.” She grabbed a cart, and I took it from her and pushed it in front of us. “I think we decided on hurricane vases.”

“What’s a hurricane vase? And how the hell does Jere know what one is?”

“I didn’t mean Jere and I decided, I meant me and Taylor.” She grabbed the cart and walked ahead of me. I followed her to aisle twelve.

“See?” Belly held up a fat glass vase.

I crossed my arms. “Very nice,” I said in a bored voice.

She put down the vase and picked up a skinnier one, and she didn’t look at me as she said, “I’m sorry you’re the one stuck doing this with me. I know it’s lame.”

“It’s not—that lame,” I said. I started grabbing vases off the shelf. “How many do we need?”

“Wait! Should we get the big ones or the medium ones? I’m thinking maybe the medium ones,” she said, lifting one up and checking the price tag. “Yeah, definitely the medium ones. I only see a few left. Can you go ask somebody who works here?”

“The big ones,” I said, because I’d already stacked four of the big ones in the cart. “The big ones are much nicer. You can fit more flowers or sand or whatever.”

Belly narrowed her eyes. “You’re just saying that because you don’t want to go find somebody.”

“Okay, yeah, but seriously, I think the big ones are nicer.”

She shrugged and put another big vase in the cart.

“I guess we could just have one big vase on each table instead of two medium-size ones.”

“Now what?” I started to push the cart again, and she took it from me.

“Candles.”

I followed her down another aisle, then another. “I don’t think you know where you’re going,” I said.

“I’m taking you on the scenic route,” she said, steering the cart. “Look at all these fake flowers and garlands.

Good stuff.”

I stopped. “Should we get some? They might look good on the porch.” I grabbed a bunch of sunflowers and added a few white roses to the bunch. “This looks kind of nice, right?”

“I was kidding,” she said, sucking in her cheeks. I could tell she was trying not to smile. “But yeah, that looks all right. Not great, but all right.”

I put the flowers back. “All right, I give up. From now on, I’ll just do the heavy lifting.”

“Nice effort, though.”

Back at the house, Jeremiah’s car was in the driveway.

“Jere and I can unload all of this later,” I said, turning off the ignition.

“I’ll help,” she offered, hopping out of the car. “I’m just gonna say hi first.”

I grabbed a couple of the heavier bags and followed her up the steps and into the house. Jeremiah was lying on the couch watching TV. When he saw us, he sat up.

“Where have you guys been?” he asked. He said it casually, but his eyes flickered at me as he spoke.

“At Michaels,” Belly said. “What time did you get here?”

“A little while ago. Why didn’t you wait for me? I told you I’d be here in time.” Jeremiah got up and crossed the room. He pulled Belly toward him for a hug.

“I told you, Michaels closes at nine. I doubt you would have made it in time,” she said, and she sounded pissed, but she let him kiss her.

I turned away. “I’m gonna go unload the car.”

“Wait, I’ll help.” Jeremiah released Belly and slapped his hand on my back. “Con, thanks for pinch-hitting for me today.”

“No, problem.”

“It’s after eight,” Belly said. “I’m starving. Let’s all go to Jimmy’s for dinner.”

I shook my head. “Nah, I’m not hungry. You guys go.”

“But you didn’t have any dinner,” Belly said, frowning.

“Just come with us.”

“No thanks,” I said.

She started to protest again, but Jere said, “Bells, he doesn’t want to. Let’s just go.”

“Are you sure?” she asked me.

“I’m good,” I said, and it came out harsher than I meant it.

I guessed it worked though, because they left.

Chapter Thirty-four

At Jimmy’s, neither of us ordered crabs. I got fried scallops and iced tea, and Jeremiah got a lobster roll and beer. The server asked for his ID and smirked when he saw it, but he still served him a beer.

I shook a few sugar packets into my iced tea, tasted it, then added two more.

“I’m wiped,” Jeremiah said, leaning back into the booth and closing his eyes.

“Well, wake up. We have work to do.”

He opened his eyes. “Like what?”

“What do you mean, like what? Tons of stuff. At David’s Bridal they were asking me all these questions.

Like, what’s our color palette? And are you going to wear a suit or a tuxedo?”

Jeremiah snorted. “A tuxedo? On the beach? I probably won’t even wear shoes.”

“Well, yeah, I know, but you should probably figure out what you’re going to wear.”

“I don’t know. You tell me. I’ll wear whatever you and Taylor want me to wear. It’s your guys’s day, right?”

“Ha ha,” I said. “Very funny.” It wasn’t like I really cared what he wore. I just wanted him to figure it out and let me know so I could check it off my list.

Through a mouthful of food, he said, “I was thinking white shirts and khaki shorts. Nice and simple, like we said.”

“Okay.”

Jeremiah gulped his beer. “Hey, can we dance to “You Never Can Tell” at the reception?”

“I don’t know that song,” I said.

“Sure you do. It’s from my favorite movie. Hint: we had the soundtrack on repeat in our frat house media room all semester.” When I still stared at him blankly, Jeremiah sang, “It was a teenage wedding and the old folks wished them well.”

“Oh, yeah. Pulp Fiction.”

“So can we?”

“Are you serious?”

“Come on, Bells. Be a sport. We can put it on YouTube.

I bet we’ll get a shit ton of hits. It’ll be funny!”

I gave him a look. “Funny? You want our wedding to be funny?”

“Come on. You’re making all the decisions, and all I want is this one thing,” he said, pouting, and I couldn’t tell if he was serious or not. Either way, it pissed me off.

Plus, I was still pissed he hadn’t made it in time to help me at Michaels.

The server came by with our food, and Jeremiah dug right in to his lobster roll.

“What other decisions have I made?” I asked him.

“You decided that the cake was going to be carrot,”

he reminded me, mayonnaise dripping down his chin. “I like chocolate cake.”

“I don’t want to be the one making all the decisions!

I don’t even know what I’m doing.”

“Then I’ll help more. Just tell me what to do. Hey, I’ve got an idea. What if the wedding was Tarantino themed?”

he said.

“Yeah, what if,” I said sourly. I stabbed a scallop with my fork.

“You could be the Bride like in Kill Bill.” He looked up from his plate. “Kidding, kidding. But this whole thing is still gonna be pretty chill, right? We said we just wanted it to be casual.”

“Yeah, but people still need to, like, eat.”

“Don’t worry about the food and stuff. My dad will hire somebody to take care of all that.”

I could feel irritation start to prickle beneath my skin like a heat rash. I let out a short breath. “It’s easy for you to say don’t worry. You’re not the one planning our wedding.”

Jeremiah put down his sandwich and sat up straight.

“I told you I’d help. And like I said, my dad will take care of a lot of it.”

“I don’t want him to,” I said. “I want us to do it together. And joking about Quent Tarantino movies doesn’t really count as helping.”

“It’s Quent in,” Jeremiah corrected.

I shot him a dirty look.

“I wasn’t joking about the first dance,” he said. “I still think it would be cool. And Bells, I have been doing stuff.

I figured out what to do for music. My buddy Pete dee-jays on the weekends. He said he’d bring his speakers and just hook up his iPod and take care of the whole thing.

He already has the Pulp Fiction soundtrack, by the way.”

Jeremiah raised his eyebrows at me comically. I knew he was waiting for a laugh or at least a smile. And I was about to give in, just so this fight could be over and I could eat my scallops without feeling angry, when he said innocently, “Oh, wait, did you want to check with Taylor first? See if she’d be okay with it?”

I glared at him. He needed to quit with the jokes and start acting a lot more appreciative, because Taylor was the one who was actually helping, unlike him. “I don’t need to check with her on this. It’s a dumb idea, and it’s not happening.”

Jeremiah whistled under his breath. “All righty, Bridezilla.”

“I’m not a Bridezilla! I don’t even want to do any of this. You do it.”

He stared at me. “What do you mean, you don’t want to do any of this?”

My heart was beating really fast all of a sudden. “I mean the planning. I don’t want to do any of this stupid planning. Not the actual getting married part. I still want to do that.”

“Good. Me too.” He reached across the table, plucked a scallop off my plate, and popped it into his mouth.

I stuffed the last scallop into my mouth before he could take that, too. Then I grabbed a bunch of fries off of his plate, even though I had fries of my own.

“Hey,” he said with a frown. “You’ve got your own fries.”

“Yours are crispier,” I said, but really it was more out of spite. I wondered—the rest of our lives, was Jeremiah going to try and eat my last scallop or my last bite of steak? I liked finishing all the food on my plate—I wasn’t one of those girls who left a few bites behind just to be polite.

I had a fry in my mouth when Jeremiah asked, “Has Laurel called at all?”

I swallowed. Suddenly I wasn’t so hungry anymore.

“No.”

“She must have gotten the invite by now.”

“Yeah.”

“Well, hopefully she’ll call this week,” Jere said, stuffing the rest of his lobster roll into his mouth. “I mean, I’m sure she will.”

“Hopefully,” I said. I sipped on my iced tea and added,

“Our first dance can be “You Never Can Tell” if you really want.”

Jere pumped his fist in the air. “See, that’s why I’m marrying you!”

A smile creeped across my face. “Because I’m generous?”

“Because you’re very generous, and you get me,” he said, taking back a few of his fries.

When we got back to the house, Conrad’s car was gone.

Chapter Thirty-five

Conrad

I would rather have had someone shoot me in the head with a nail gun, repeatedly, than have to watch the two of them cuddling on the couch together all night. After they went to dinner, I got in my car and drove to Boston. As I drove, I thought about not going back to Cousins. Screw it. It would be easier that way. Halfway home, I made up my mind that yeah, that would be for the best. An hour from home, I decided, screw them, I had as much right to be there as they did. I still needed to clean out the gutters, and I was pretty sure I’d seen a wasp nest in the drainpipe.

There was all kinds of stuff I needed to take care of. I couldn’t just not go back.

Around midnight, I was sitting at the kitchen table in my boxer shorts eating cereal when my dad walked in, still wearing his work suit. I didn’t even know he was home.

He didn’t look surprised to see me. “Con, can I talk to you for a minute?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

He sat down across from me with his glass of bourbon.

In the dim light of the kitchen, my father looked like an old man. His hair was thinning on top, and he’d lost weight, too much weight. When did he get so old? In my mind he was always thirty-seven.

My dad cleared his throat. “What do you think I should do about this thing with Jeremiah? I mean, is he really set on it?”

“Yeah, I think he is.”

“Laurel’s really torn up about it. She’s tried everything, but the kids aren’t listening. Belly ran off, and now they aren’t even talking to each other. You know how Laurel can get.”

This was all news to me. I didn’t know they weren’t speaking to each other.

My dad sipped from his glass. “Do you think there’s anything I can do? To put an end to it?”

For once I actually agreed with my dad. My feelings for Belly aside, I thought getting married at nineteen was dumb.

What was the point? What were they trying to prove?

“You could cut Jere off,” I said, and then I felt like a dick for suggesting it. I added, “But even if you did, he still has the money Mom left him.”

“Most of it’s in a trust.”

“He’s determined. He’ll do it either way.” I hesitated, then added, “Besides, if you pulled something like that, he’d never forgive you.”

My dad got up and poured himself some more bourbon. He sipped it before he said, “I don’t want to lose him the way I lost you.”

I didn’t know what to say. So we sat there in silence, and right when I finally opened my mouth to say, You haven’t lost me, he stood up.

Sighing heavily, he emptied his glass. “Good night, son.”

“Good night, Dad.”

I watched my father trudge up the stairs, each step heavier than the last—like Atlas with the world on his shoulders. He’d never had to deal with this kind of thing before. He’d never had to be that kind of father. My mom was always there to take care of the hard stuff. Now that she was gone, he was all we had left, and it wasn’t enough.

I had always been the favorite. I was our father’s Esau, and Jeremiah was Jacob. It wasn’t something I’d ever questioned; I’d always assumed it was because I was the firstborn that I came first with my dad. I just accepted it, and so did Jere. But as we got older, I saw that that wasn’t it. It was that he saw himself in me. To our father, I was just a reflection of him. He thought we were so alike. Jere was like our mom, I was like our dad. So I was the one he put all the pressure on. I was the one he funneled all his energy and hope into. Football, school, all of it. I worked hard to meet those expectations, to be just like him.

The first time I realized my father wasn’t perfect was when he forgot my mom’s birthday. He’d been golfing all day with his friends, and he came home late. Jere and I had made a cake and bought flowers and a card. We had everything set up on the dining room table. My dad had had a few beers—I could smell it on him when he hugged me. He said, “Oh shit, I forgot. Boys, can I put my name on the card?” I was a freshman in high school. Late, I know, to figure out your dad isn’t a hero. That was just the first time I remember being disappointed by something he did. After that, I found more and more reasons to be disappointed.

All of that love and pride I had in him, it turned to hate. And then I started to hate myself, who he’d made.

Because I saw it too—how alike we were. That scared me.

I didn’t want to be the kind of man who cheated on his wife. I didn’t want to be the kind of man who put work before his family, who tipped cheaply at restaurants, who never bothered to learn our housekeeper’s name.

From there on I set out to destroy the picture of me he had in his head. I quit our morning runs before he left for work, I quit the fishing trips, the golf, which I’d never liked anyway. And I quit football, which I loved. He’d gone to all my games, videotaping them so we could watch later and he could point out the places where I’d 180 · jenny han

messed up. Every time there was an article about me in the newspaper, he framed it and hung it in his study.

I quit it all to spite him. Anything that made him proud of me, I took away.

It took me a long time to figure it out. That I was the one who had put my dad on that pedestal. I did that, not him. And then I despised him for not being perfect. For being human.

I drove back to Cousins on Monday morning.