Beyond Summer (2 page)

PS3573.I53165B49 2010

813’.54—dc22 2010009216

 

Set in Adobe Garamond

 

 

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PUBLISHER’S NOTE

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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As is the case with many stories,
Beyond Summer
grew from a combination of fact, fiction, a sprinkling of whimsy, and with the help of some generous and wonderful people. For that help, and for the friendships that grew and deepened during the researching and writing of this book, I am truly grateful. First and foremost, my thanks go once again to the amazing volunteers who run the Gospel Café, which inspired the Summer Kitchen in the story. My working with you and spending time at the café has given reality to the people of the Blue Sky Hill neighborhood. In particular, thanks to Sherry for being a supportive writer friend, Marsha for your welcoming smiles and warm hugs during my café visits, the volunteer crews for laughter and chatter in the kitchen, and Paula for helping with research for Sesay’s character. To Daisy, Kathy, and Mandy, thanks for a wonderful lunch in Salado and for patiently answering dozens of real estate questions. An enormous measure of gratitude goes to special friends, Jennifer Magers for eagle-eyed proofreading, Ed Stevens for technical help with book videos on the Lisa Wingate YouTube channel, and Teresa Loman for being the Head Loon of the Lisa Wingate Facebook group and the best online scrapbook designer ever. The three of you are the best friends a writer could ask for.

On the print and paper side of things, my heartfelt gratitude goes to the smart, talented people at New American Library, and in particular to my editor, Ellen Edwards. Thanks also to my agent at Sterling Lord Literistic, Claudia Cross. As always, my undying gratitude also goes out to all the booksellers and media personnel who have shown such devotion to the previous books in the Blue Sky Hill series,
A Month of Summer
and
The Summer Kitchen
.

My thanks also go to the many readers who shared the books with friends, took time to send letters of encouragement, and asked for a sequel to the final book in the Tending Roses series,
A Thousand Voices
. While
Beyond Summer
isn’t exactly a sequel, you will discover a few old friends living on Blue Sky Hill, and you’ll finally find out what happened to Dell and Jace. Lastly, thanks to all the readers and friends far and near, who have encouraged me along the way. There are no words to express how much your letters, notes, and e-mails mean to me. You inspire me, you encourage me, you make me believe in the power of story. What a gift I’ve been given in each of you. I hope this story repays that gift in some small measure.

It’s strange, what you look past in a normal day—the big picture you don’t see, while you’re busy focusing on all the little things that seem to matter in the moment. Good hair, an outfit that looks just right, a green light ahead when you’re in a hurry to make an appointment, a short line at Starbucks, a straight shot down the fairway in a game of golf, a smile from a cute guy in the parking lot. You rub your life like Aladdin’s lamp, and magic floats out in little clouds. It works time after time after time. You never stop to consider that there could be a day when a charmed life isn’t charmed anymore. At that point, the wishes become prayers, and you hope against hope that God will take up where the wishing lamp left off.

The summer I turned eighteen became the summer of unanswered prayers. I was hoping that, since the lease was up on the hand-me-down MINI Cooper I’d been driving, there was a new car in the works for my birthday—a combination getting-ready-for-college and welcome-to-adulthood present. And maybe a surprise party—something Hawaiian themed, out on the patio, with floating tiki torches in the pool, grass skirts and coconut bras, and a caterer filling the cabana with fruit baskets carved out of watermelons, perfect for early July. Instead, I got a phone call letting me know that my stepmother had rammed her Escalade into the front doors of the Baby Bundles upscale resale shop while delivering a load of gently worn or still-had-tags-on-them kiddie clothes. The accident wasn’t her fault. It was the stilettos that did it.

Such things are to be expected from a thirty-four-year-old woman who takes the kids to playgroup in high heels, studies future plastic surgery options, and shortens her name to Barbie, because she looks like a life-size version of the doll. If the nickname fits, then wear designer shoes with it, was generally Barbie’s theory.

The emergency phone call was from the nanny. She wanted me to know she was off work in fifteen minutes, and if someone didn’t show up at home before then, she’d be leaving
los niños
with
la tía loca
—the crazy aunt.

The crazy aunt, Aunt Lute, was part of my summer of unanswered prayers, which made sense, considering that Aunt Lute claimed not one prayer in her life had ever been answered the way she wanted. She’d pause after she said that, and contemplate the deeper meanings, her eyes the violet-gray of an iris bloom drying in the sun. Then she’d punctuate the sentence in one of two ways. Either,
The best things in life hide around the blind corners
, or,
Watch out for small favors, Tamara Lee
. The first was an invitation, the second a warning. One ended with a wild laugh, the other with tears pooling in the corners of her eyes and fanning into the wrinkles, like twin rivers flowing into estuaries before being lost in the ocean.

It was impossible to know which one of those assessments of life she really subscribed to. But then, that was Aunt Lute. Crazy as a March hare, which was how she ended up living above our garage after being evicted from a house stacked floor to ceiling with stuff that was fit only for the trash. In a family prone to burning the candle at both ends and dying young, Aunt Lute was a record setter at seventy, and the only old person I’d ever been around for any amount of time. Not that Aunt Lute was your typical old person. She didn’t bake cookies, or tell family stories, or knit afghans. After having spent her life working a mindless factory job and caring for a now-deceased handicapped brother, she seemed to have traded her real past for several dozen fantasy lives she made up as she went along. My father, fifteen years her junior, was her only financially stable relative, and probably the one person with a place big enough to put the crazy aunt at one end and still stand to live in the other.

I didn’t mind Aunt Lute’s being there, really. I did my best not to be home, and aside from that, there was the fact that Aunt Lute’s presence irritated my stepmother. Aunt Lute’s memory wasn’t good, in terms of the recent past, so half the time she didn’t have a clue who Barbie was, which drove Barbie nuts. The four blond-haired in vitro munchkins running around the place were a complete mystery to Aunt Lute, as well. It was news to her that my real mother was off in Ecuador with a mission group led by our ex-pastor, and my father had a thirty-four-year-old wife with a ticking-like-a-time-bomb biological clock that had so far resulted in Mark and Daniel, then Landon, and finally baby Jewel, who was just now getting old enough to cast worried looks at
la tía loca
.

Tempting as it was to pretend I hadn’t gotten the nanny’s phone call, so as to continue with the golf lesson I didn’t really want to take, I couldn’t quite convince myself to do it. Leaving the Fearsome Foursome home with Aunt Lute amounted to child endangerment in any number of ways. Considering that even the nanny couldn’t handle them—the kids
or
Aunt Lute—there was no telling what might happen in the time it could take for a tow truck to extricate Barbara’s SUV from the jaws of Baby Bundles, and then bring her, and what remained of the vehicle, home. Left to their own devices, the Four would tear the house down brick by brick, then throw the bricks at one another, while Aunt Lute stood in the backyard in her artist’s smock, painting pictures of the sky, or wandered the house tipping all the framed art slightly off square, or sat in her room pecking away on her typewriter, composing memoirs of fantastical events that had never happened.

My bugging out of the lesson ticked off the golf coach, of course. He was the best money could buy, and not accustomed to such utter disregard. He told me I needed to get my priorities straight. “You want to keep that college scholarship, you’ve got to put in the time,” he said, and then he went on to lecture me about competition, and how not everyone was fortunate enough to get a University of Texas golf scholarship, and how my father had most certainly called in every favor he’d ever been owed, and blah, blah, blah. Meanwhile, my fifteen nanny minutes were ticking away like the countdown on a detonator. “It’s the flippin’ University of Texas,” Coach reiterated, and he gave me a narrow-eyed look that more or less indicated I was a slacker. “Talent’s not enough. Hard work beats talent when talent doesn’t work hard, Lambert. Considering your father’s reputation on the football field, you’d think you’d know that. Your dad wasn’t the biggest guy in the NFL or the one with the most natural talent, but he gave it everything he had. That’s what made him a great quarterback. You might . . .”

More nanny minutes rushed by while he lectured me about responsibility and the debt I owed my coaches, my father, Highland Park, and the golf club. Now probably wasn’t the time to tell him I was still trying to figure out how to confess to the world that the golf scholarship to UT was my father’s dream, not mine. Since Barbie’s brat pack was too young for collegiate sports, I was, athletically speaking, the family’s only hope, at least until the munchkins got older. But what I really wanted to do was take a year off and spend it bumming around the youth hostels of Europe with my best friend, Emity. Em’s parents didn’t think there was a thing wrong with postponing college in order to discover the world.

When Coach came up for air, I told him about Barbie, and the fender-bender, and the stilettos. Coach had seen Barbie chasing one of the Four down the fairway at our last tournament, so I guess he got a pretty accurate picture. He laughed so hard he had to yank off his hat and fan himself to keep from passing out. When you’re a fifty-five-year-old man who’ll never be able to afford a thirty-four-year-old wife, it probably feels good to know someone else’s sugar baby just wrecked the Escalade.

He was still laughing when I grabbed my bag and headed for the parking lot. No doubt the Barbie story was about to become lively conversation at the pro shop.

By the time I got home, the nanny was standing in the driveway with her tote bag in one hand and Jewel dangling under her arm like a chubby-cheeked Beanie Baby. I got the nanny rundown in ten words or less, in a mixture of two languages: The oldest three kids were locked in the backyard play area, the baby needed a diaper change, and
la tía loca
. . . Leaving the sentence unfinished, the nanny rolled her eyes heavenward and flipped her hand in a motion like a bird taking flight. Then she shoved the baby into my hands and snorted so hard I felt spray on my arm.

Hiking her tote bag onto her shoulder, the nanny told me to remind my father that she hadn’t been paid in three weeks; then she hurried to her vehicle, glancing nervously back at the house, like a horror-movie actress escaping the lair of alien possession. Only when she’d reached her car and planted one foot inside did she bother to tell me that Barbie had called, and that sometime during the fender-bender excitement, Barbie had felt like she was
sueño
, as in passing out, and the shop owner had taken her to
el doctor
. I was stuck with the brat pack until whenever Barbie felt better, or my father came home from his office, which was usually sometime around midnight, after he figured the Four had finally worn down and lost consciousness on the furniture somewhere.

No wonder the nanny was peeling away from the curb like an Indy driver leaving the pit. She was scared to death of being stuck in the insane asylum all night.

Whimpering, Jewel stretched her chubby arms toward the retreating nannymobile, as if she didn’t want to be marooned here without a responsible adult. No doubt even a seven-month-old could tell I was in no way qualified to take charge. Aside from that, I had plans tonight, which hardly included acting as zookeeper for a bunch of rug rats. Sometimes life could be seriously unfair.

I went inside, put Jewel in the high chair with some Cheerios, and started calling everyone I could think of—Barbara’s friends, everyone on the Barbie babysitter list, the teacher from Mark and Daniel’s preschool, the lady who kept the nursery at church, even a couple of my old schoolmates who were desperate for some money their parents didn’t know about. Nobody wanted to come over and take on the sibs. Around our neighborhood, the Four were legendary, which was saying something, considering that our neighborhood specialized in highly indulged showcase kids, and made no apologies for it.