Page 81 of 28 Summers
“Has she got a new girlfriend?” Jake asks. “Or boyfriend?”
“I wish,” Mallory says. “Either, both, doesn’t matter. I’m worried about her.”
Jake says, “I haven’t seen your brother since his last wedding. When I call him, he’s perfectly civil but he never has time to meet me for a drink.”
“He’s engaged,” Mallory says. She shakes her head. “To a woman he met on Match.com. Tammy. She’s divorced with three children.”
“Is it going to last?”
“Um…no?” Mallory says. “Though where the wedding is concerned, they’re doing the kind thing and eloping. They’re getting married in Tortola.”
“Kind because I don’t have to watch you flirt with Brian from Brookings?”
Mallory can’t hide her smile. Poor Brian—he was completely smitten with her but she indulged him only to make Jake jealous. “Kind because I don’t have to see you with UDG,” Mallory says.
“Arrrgh!” Jake yells. “Why did I not just marry you after that first summer?”
“We aren’t going down the road not taken tonight, my friend. Let’s watch the sun set.”
Jake had taken his usual swim after they first made love and now he’s wearing only his board shorts. His muscles are a little softer, she notices, his middle a little thicker; his dark brown hair is shot through with silvery strands. Mallory can easily picture him as he was the summer she met him. She loves him more now for his age, the gray, the lines around his eyes and his mouth when he smiles. They’ve been doing this nineteen years without interruption. They have been so lucky.
The sun sinks into the ocean. Jake grills their burgers. Cat Stevens is on the stereo, “Hard Headed Woman.” Mallory has started playing the CD for Link. He loves Mallory’s music—Cat Stevens, R.E.M., World Party—and he loves Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Soundgarden because of Fray. Musically, he’s a forty-year-old trapped in a ten-year-old’s body.
Mallory lights the candles—three votives and two tapers in proper candlesticks.
Jake says, “And what about you? How’s school?”
She decides not to tell him about the award because talking about the award will lead to talking about the roof. “It’s like you and me,” she says, and she locks eyes with him. He’s here, he’s here, it’s him, he’s across the narrow table, she is going to crawl into bed with him tonight, wake up with him in the morning. It’s like a fairy tale. It’s like a game of Would You Rather? Would you rather have perfect bliss for only three days or a solid but dull relationship all year long? Mallory would choose Jake every time. “Each year I think there’s no way it will be better than the last, but then it is.”
Jake blows her a kiss.
“This past year I had a once-in-a-lifetime student,” Mallory says. “Abigail Stewart.” Mallory rises to get a copy of the short story Abby handed in for her final paper. It’s about a seventeen-year-old girl who dates a guy in a garage band. She accidentally gets pregnant at the same time that his career takes off. The story was so well done that Mallory initially worried that Abby had plagiarized it. She scoured the internet but thankfully found nothing. The voice of the storywassimilar to Abby’s other work, completely fresh and sassy and irreverent and smart-smart-smart.
“I’m just going to read you the first paragraph,” Mallory says. She loves how Jake rests his chin in his hand and gazes at her as she reads, his face glowing with the candlelight.
“Keep going,” he says when she’s done.
She reads the first three pages, then stops because their food is getting cold. “You can finish the rest tonight in bed,” she says.
Jake has been touching Mallory’s shin with his foot this whole time. They touch each other whenever they can, however they can. He’s here, he’s here.
“I’m going to be too busy in bed to do any reading,” he says.
“Oh yeah?” she says.
“Yeah,” he says, and that’s it—they’re up, heading for the bedroom, dinner forgotten, Abby’s brilliant story forgotten.
They have long since stopped going to the Chicken Box. The risk that Jake will bump into someone he knows is too great. After they make love, they doze off. They have done this in past years, then woken up at two or three in the morning to feast on cold burgers.
Mallory is dreaming about her old ten-speed bicycle. The chain has fallen off and she is trying to put it back on, messy work; she has grease all over her fingers that mixes with the dust and sand of the no-name road.
“Mal.” Jake’s voice startles her awake. She sometimes dreams that he’s in bed with her when he’s not and it’s a crushing disappointment to wake up alone. When she opens her eyes, Jake is there, his warm body pressed up against hers. She can see the silver in his stubble. But then he curls up, alert, straining. “Do you smell smoke?”
Yes,she thinks. The smell of the grill, maybe, wafting in through the open window. An instant later, the smoke alarms start shrieking and Mallory thinks:The candles!Jake yanks on boxer shorts and goes out to the great room with the comforter from the bed. The harvest table is on fire—Abby’s pages, the tablecloth, Mallory can’t see what else. Jake throws the comforter over the table and Mallory grabs the pot of water she used for the corn and douses the comforter. There’s a splash and dripping and hissing and smoke and a smell of melting plastic and charred wood and corn. Mallory is shaking. The smoke detectors are still screaming at them:How could you let this happen?She fills the pot again.
“It’s out,” Jake says. “Mal, it’s out.”
They both hear the sirens at the same time and all of a sudden it’s 1993 again and she and Jake are on the beach, screaming for Fray.
