Page 16 of The End of Summer

“Have thebestday!” I hear him call out from his side of the wall. “Thank you for stopping by!”

“Fuck,” I whisper, opening the pantry and grabbing the shareable-size bag of M&Ms I keep in there for emergencies. I pour out a handful of rainbow deliciousness, and pop the candy bits all into my mouth at once, letting the chocolate melt into my tongue.

What kind of cosmic karmageddon is this?I wonder.Of all the people in the world, why is Brady Hawthorne living next door to me?

Also, why does he have to look like that?

CHAPTER FIVE

BRADY

That’s about right, I decide.

Cape Cod’s small, but it’s notthissmall. So of course the universe should plant me right next door to the girl who got me fired from my job.

Of all people.

Oh, I can just picture it. Perhaps she can bring home updates from my dear old dad about how business is going. It’s obvious she would get nothing if not sheer delight out of watching me squirm.

I’m actually a little surprised that she behaved so, um,spicy. There was definitely an edge to her that I wouldn’t have expected based on our previous interaction. On the contrary, Gretchen seemed pretty cool that first day when I met her. She saw that I was in a tough situation and was willing to do the job – she eventried. And yes, she fell, and that was awful, but even at that, she didn’t cause a big scene about it after. She cleaned up the mess. True, shealmostbroke down in tears, but I caught her before that could happen – effectivelysavingher job, thank you very much. She left – embarrassed, I’m sure. Covered in food. Also, possibly hurt – a twisted ankle or perhaps an injured leg. She was agood enough waitress, so I’m sure she’s just back down at the pub where I found her.

Not in those tights or the tiny robe that barely covered her ass, but whatever.

Itisa cute ass.

Ugh. Enough, man,I tell myself.First of all, she works for your father, so that ass is off limits. Secondly, she’s your neighbor, so get in the habit of locking your door lest she barge in here on the reg like some bad recurring episode of Everybody Loves Raymond. Plus, she should be at the club almost every day in season, so she won’t be hanging around here lurking in the hallway or anything.

Anyway, the hope is soon enough I’ll find a decent 9-5 in my field of interest and won’t have to worry about the wackadoo pub schedule of the server next door. That’s all. In fact, once I’m done building this bed, I’ve got a hot date with the internet to find myself a new gig. Because money doesn’t grow on trees, you know. And I’ve got about enough saved up to cover the two months of rent and utilities I have to pay Luis, but beyond that, I’m not exactly rolling in it.

It’s true. Despite what you’d think, country club wages – even those of an Assistant Manager at a whopping $22 an hour – only get you so far, especially when you have to pay rent to your own father to live in the bedroom you’ve been inhabiting since birth. I’ve also been footing the bill for my car loan, insurance, cell phone, and groceries ever since I left to go to college. I was able to bank a few hundred bucks a month once the pandemic ended; then, I spent a chunk of it on a camping trip to St. John for an eco-tourism class I decided to take through the National Park Service, another chunk on new tires and brakes for my Elantra, and anotherchunk on a girl, who, at this point, is better left nameless. (Fine. Her name is Miranda. We went to BU together. Let’s leave it at that.)

It’s a locally well-known fact that scoring a job on the Cape in the height of the season is not going to be the easiest thing. A lot of business transactions happen via word of mouth; when a job is available, it’s usually gone before it even makes its way to the internet. I’m not averse to driving out of the immediate area, say, to Plymouth, or maybe even a little further, but I don’t think my car could survive the daily commute to Boston long-term, especially given the fact that I just moved 30 minutes further away from the mainland, smack into the elbow-crease of Cape Cod.

It will be fine, though, I decide over a breakfast of microwaved quick oats. I rearrange boxes for the next 40 minutes, determined to keep my promise and be a better neighbor than my counterpart on the other side of the living room wall. At 10:00 a.m., I go back to assembling the bed, and by 10:45, that task is officially crossed off my to-do list. The mattress I ordered – alas, my dear father wouldn’t allow me to bring my own bed with me since “he paid for it” – has a delivery window of between 12:00 and 3:00 p.m., so now there’s nothing left to do but wait.

I park myself at Luis’ dining table and search the main job sites I know of: indeed.com, LinkedIn, and CapeWorks, a division of the Massachusetts Department of Labor. I find a few postings, but nothing that jumps out at me. I check my e-mail, where my mother has forwarded me information about a slam poetry collective that’s starting in Hyannis, as if I am a candidate for anything remotely artistic. Insome ways, she’s as bad as my father, projecting her hopes and dreams onto me as if I am the giant movie screen at the Wellingham Drive-In, just some blank slate in need of someoneelse’svision to transform me into something worth watching.

When I was in kindergarten, my mother had the brilliant idea to enroll me in the Saturday Academy at 4Cs. It was an “enrichment program for the Cape’s best and brightest kids,” which feels like an antiquated thing to even say nowadays. “Best and brightest” implies that others could be classified as “worst and dimmest,” but what was really funny was the fact that it was a self-selected, fee-based program, so there were no gatekeepers. My mother alone was the deciding party determining my luminosity, and she enrolled yours truly in all the things: Creative Writing (of course), Oceanography, a program called “Junior Emerils” – as in, Lagasse – to appease my dad, no doubt – Painting, and Modern Dance.

One might wonder what my well-intentioned (if misguided) mother was up to with her choices. Well, in my later years, I asked her. She informed me that she was trying to “unlock my potential as an artist and an informed citizen of our world.”

At six years old.

Here’s how that played out:

On the first day of “Junior Emerils,” I cut my finger with a plastic knife and cried so hard that I needed to be sent home. “You see?” my mother declared to my father. “Brady isn’t cut out for cooking!” (No pun intended, I’m sure.) “Wecan’t send him back tothatclass. We mustn’tendangerour son.”

Just like that, five classes became four.

Creative Writing was, to her dismay, a bit of a disaster. See, I hadn’t begunreadingyet, at least not independently, and so writing was a bit of a stretch. As I progressed in school, I was a late bloomer with the whole reading thing. It was bad enough that they made me repeat kindergarten. I was placed in resource room for additional help with reading and spelling from first through fourth grade. I’d bet good money that I’m dyslexic, but my father was absolutely not about to accept a child with any sort of disability, learning or otherwise, so we just swept my B/D confusion permanently under the rug. As I got older, the reading thing sorted itself out but I was still an awful speller. Thankfully, computers and cell phones became my predominant sources of communication, and spell check helped me not look like an asshole most of the time. But back when I was six, I had a real time of it in the 4Cs Saturday Academy Creative Writing class. The teacher, Miss Flora, didn’t have the heart to speak to my mother about my lack of ability to read, so instead she let me dictate my (undoubtedly awful) attempts at stories and poetry to her, and she’d write them down for me. The final project was a group exercise where all of our work was collected and synthesized into a “literary journal,” which included a poem I “wrote” about puppies. It went like this:

Dogs are good.

I like small ones.

Cute, cute, cute.

Woof, woof.

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