Page 23 of Holiday Tides

Finding joy in the small things is something that Aldon taught me, but I’ve definitely laughed more in the days since Summer moved in across from my reno.

Summer gets halfway through her soup as I assiduously ignore my body’s reaction to her blissful food groans before she asks me to pay up on our agreement. “I’m ready for the butthead-transformation story.”

“Are you sure I’m not the same jerk you’ve always known?”

She shovels another large spoonful into her mouth, rolling her other hand to encourage me to get on with it.

I sigh, leaning against my chair and letting my eyes adjust to the darkness beyond our waterview table. A sliver of a moon casts a faint beam of moonlight over the still water.

“I didn’t go to school because I never wanted to become a doctor.”

Summer doesn’t spit-take exactly, but she makes a little strangled sound in her throat while swallowing her oversized bite with difficulty.

I make my voice annoyingly high, poorly impersonating her. “Then why did you compete with me academically for two years and steal the shadowing spot with Dr. Agrawal?”

My throat constricts at the memory of edging her out of that opportunity when my dad could have gotten me into any hospital with a simple email. But my father wanted me to win that shadowing spot. He always wanted me to be the best no matter what the cost to me.

“Me going to medical school was always my dad’s vision for my future, and I always felt like I had no choice in the matter. He was a doctor. I was to be a doctor. That was it.” Tension coils in my lungs, but I force myself to continue breathing. “Before I transferred to Baywater High, I kept having…episodes.”

A faint ringing in my ears overtakes “Angels We Have Heard on High,” and I close my eyes to ground myself. I haven’t had a panic attack since Aldon found me squatting in one of his renovation sites.

“After one very public incident during a final exam when I was medically evacuated from the classroom, my dad was so embarrassed he moved us to his vacation home in Wilks Beach for me to finish high school. He reasoned that I could get myself sorted out before I graduated. Instead of the intense competition at the private school I’d attended, I’d be a big fish in a small pond.”

A ghost of a smile lifts my lips. “But there was already a big fish there.”

Summer’s gaze darts to the dregs of her soup, finding it suddenly fascinating.

“Competing with you made dealing with the endless pressure my dad shoved on me tolerable.” Multiple memories overlap like a crocheted blanket. “I started sleeping better, actually looking forward to going to school. I never told you, never thanked you. I tried once, but we were…interrupted.”

A flush creeps up Summer’s neck. So shedoesremember graduation night. With the way she’s acted toward me so far, I thought she’d forgotten.

Fighting against the urge to run my knuckles over her heat-stained skin, I continue, “That summer, I knew I wouldn’t be able to hack it at Yale, that I’d only disappoint my father again and again. I had to do something else. I wanted something else. I just didn’t know what.”

My molars grind. Watching Aldon with his family and so many of the giving, loving families in Wilks Beach made what my father and step-mother did all those years ago seem more cruel by comparison. The truth is that I shouldn’t have been surprised. I’d been emotionally orphaned long before they physically abandoned me.

“It came to a simple ultimatum—go to school and become a doctor, or be completely cut off. I figured he was bluffing, but…”

“He wasn’t.” Summer’s voice startles me from slowly shredding the paper wrapper to my napkin bundle.

Unable to meet her gaze, I continue ripping the blue wrapper into smaller and smaller pieces. “No. The plan had been for all of us to move to Connecticut in July. My Dad had already signed on with an exclusive practice there. They’d sold the house. When the movers cleared out our belongings, I just couldn’t do it. I knew what the rest of my life would be like if I went with them. They’d already chosen my career. Would they choose my wife too? The names of my future children?” My shoulders crawl toward my ears. “They left me behind with my Range Rover andthe cash in my wallet and told me to reach out when ‘I got over myself.’”

I don’t realize how tense my forearms are until Summer settles one of her hands over mine. “I’m sorry, Nick.”

“Yeah.”

When I don’t look up, she adds her second hand, scooping mine up in hers so she can press her thumbs into the center of my palms. I should be embarrassed about the ragged sigh leaving my mouth, how my head bows as I close my eyes, but this is the only time I’ve told this story and been comforted.

When Aldon discovered me illegally occupying the far bedroom of one of his delayed renovations, he’d been pissed. And since I’d been a frightened teen who’d spent the last week surviving on dwindling cash after being overindulged and spoiled all my life, I’d lashed out at him.

Aldon could have kicked me out, but he didn’t. He let me stay until the reno started two weeks later, occasionally dropping by with a loaf of bread and a jar of peanut butter. Other times, bunches of bananas or jugs of water would just appear in the kitchen. Then, when the job started, he put me to work. I had more experience with differential calculus than knowing the difference between a Phillips or a flat-head screwdriver, but Aldon didn’t seem to care. He taught me in his gruff way, then took me back to his house, set me up in his guest room, and said goodnight with a terse, “Don’t make me regret this.”

“Then Aldon took me in and taught me everything I know.”

I leave out how he became my real family, teaching me what that word meant as he taught me so many other things.

“Anyway, that should be enough emotional collateral to get me to do whatever you want.”

The joke falls flat, but before Summer can respond, another person joins us at the table.

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