Birds of Summer (8 page)

“Going back to Connecticut?” Summer said. “But what about …” What she was really thinking was, “What about my bank account?” but what she said was, “What about the horses?”

“If we can find a place with a stable, I’ll probably take Scimitar and Greybird with me, but I’m afraid we’ll have to sell the others. You see, there’s been a decision to enlarge the New York plant, and Richard will have to be there full time for at least a year. Now that I’ve made the decision, I feel very good about it. California has been good for us but our roots are back East—family and many old friends. But we’ll miss this place tremendously—and the horses and all our special California friends.” She reached out and put her big smooth hand with its heavy rings over Summer’s. “We’re going to miss you, my dear. As a matter of fact, Richard and I were discussing the possibility of taking you with us.”

“With you?” This time there was absolutely no pretense in Summer’s reaction—her astonishment was real and complete. “But …but …” she stammered and then, stupidly, “Clear to Connecticut? But where would I live?”

“Why, with us, of course. Summer, dear …” Nan leaned forward, and her smile said she was going to talk about something personal.

Summer felt herself tensing. She knew that kind of smile—smugly sympathetic. People had smiled at her like that before, and it usually meant they were getting ready to say something about Oriole. Not kids so much. Some kids thought there would be advantages to living with a mother like Oriole. But adults usually mentioned Oriole in the same tone of voice they used when there’d been a death in the family or someone had come down with an incurable disease.

“We’ve made some discreet inquiries, dear,” Nan said. “Of course we’d heard rumors before, but we wanted to know a bit more about your background.”

Summer managed to control her face, but as usual her body betrayed her—stiffening and pulling away. Nan smiled understandingly. “Don’t worry,” she said. “It doesn’t change our opinion of you in the slightest. In fact, quite the contrary. We think you deserve even more credit than we’d realized. Richard kept saying that it reminded him of his Grandfather Mahoney’s story—a case of God-given gumption against all odds. What we’ve been thinking is that we’d just continue as we have here, except that you’d be living in, which would mean that you could spread the work out and do a bit every day after school instead of just on Saturdays.” Nan’s smile was wide-screen benevolent. “I know,” she said. “You must be feeling quite overwhelmed. You don’t need to decide right away. We won’t even be putting the house on the market for several weeks, so in the meantime we’ll go on just as before. But you think about it, won’t you?”

Summer said she would. She thought about it all the rest of the day while she dusted the gleaming furniture and vacuumed the deep soft rugs and swept the peacock droppings off the patio. And the more she thought about it, the angrier she became. Nan’s unspoken comments about Oriole made her angry, and the “discreet inquiries” made her angrier, and the “God-given gumption” made her angriest of all. But before she went home that afternoon, when she told Nan good-by, she gave her a sincere, serious smile and said she was still thinking about it.

That much was true. She had thought about nothing else all afternoon, and on the way home she was still thinking about it. But what wasn’t true was the implication that she was undecided. Not that there weren’t aspects of Nan’s offer that intrigued her. She had to admit to that and even to a long-standing fantasy in which she was, in some vague, undefined way, a part of the Oliver’s peacock world. But the part she’d envisioned herself playing in that world was not that of live-in maid and certainly not in Connecticut—three thousand miles away from Sparrow and Oriole. Her answer would be no. All that remained was how to say it so that the Olivers wouldn’t be angry. She wanted to keep the job as long as possible.

That had been the first event that had made the past week one that almost demanded to be recorded, and the second one took place only a few days later. It began with Pardell asking her to stay after class again. Even though there was no reason that she could think of and certainly no possibility of another misplaced letter, she had been uneasy. As she waited for the rest of the class to file out, she could feel the fluttery tightness beginning in her stomach.

“Well,” Pardell said, when the other students had all gone, “don’t look so apprehensive. There’s no problem. It’s just that I’m about to offer you a summer job.”

“A job,” she repeated blankly, wiped out by surprise.

“Right. You see, Meg, my wife, is due to go into the hospital in about two weeks. Nothing serious, just an old knee injury that’s been giving her some trouble recently. But she’ll be in a wheelchair and then on crutches for quite a while, which wouldn’t present any problem except that I’m committed to a summer school stint in Fort Bragg. So we’re going to need someone to stay with her while I’m away and help out around the house. Perhaps you already have plans for the summer but …” He broke off as Summer began to nod.

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, I’d like the job, that is. And no, I don’t have any other plans. That is, I do have a job already but it’s only for weekends, so I could be at your place during the week.”

Pardell said that was great, and they set up a time for Summer to go over to talk to his wife, and that was it. It wasn’t until she was halfway home that she realized he must have decided to ask her if she wanted the job because of that letter to Grant. There’d been a part in it about her bank account and the job at Crown Ridge Ranch—which obviously was the reason Pardell knew she was into doing housework. It was a disturbing thought. But at least he hadn’t mentioned what had given him the idea. Because if he had mentioned it, she would have had to turn him down.

Then, two days later, there had been the interview with Meg Pardell. Summer had gone to the house, a small Victorian on the north edge of the village, after picking Sparrow up at the elementary school. She made Sparrow wait for her in the front yard while she went in. She’d known Meg Pardell by sight for a long time—everyone in Alvarro Bay knew everyone else by sight—a small thin woman with a pixie haircut; but it was the first time they’d ever spoken. She turned out to be easy to talk to.

She led the way into the living room chattering away about how great it was that Summer was going to be able to help them out “I know you’ll do a wonderful job,” she said, smiling in a way that made it easy to smile back.

“How do you know that?” Summer asked. “Because I’m getting an A in English? I’ve heard that lots of writers are real slobs.”

“That’s probably true. But I wasn’t basing my expectations on just your English grade. You just seem to me to be the kind of person who does a lot of things well. As a matter of fact, I’ve heard as much. Such information is common knowledge in the school community, you know. By the time a student gets to be your age in a town this small, he or she has been discussed by a lot of teachers—not to mention teachers’ wives and husbands. The rumor is you’re a very competent kid. How about some apple cider?”

“Oh yeah?” Summer said, intrigued. The part about talk and rumors in a small town was certainly true, and teachers probably talked as much or more than anyone else. But she doubted the rest of it. She suspected that when teachers talked about the McIntyre kids, they were mainly interested in things beside grades and schoolwork. Like Mrs. Boswick, the third grade teacher, who happened to see Mr. Boswick talking to Oriole downtown one day and afterwards kept pumping Summer about the men Oriole was seeing.

“How about some apple cider?” Meg said again.

“What? Oh, yes please.” Summer said.

While Meg was in the kitchen, Summer checked out the room. Of medium size, with a high ceiling and long, narrow windows, it was slightly shabby-looking and cluttered with too many bookcases, a huge grand piano, stacks of newspapers and sheet music and various kinds of foreign looking art objects. In spite of the fact that it was much smaller than the Olivers’ house, it looked as if the Pardells’ might turn out to be a lot more work. But it was also going to be five days a week, and the money was going to make a big difference in the growth rate of the bank account.

When Meg came back with the cider, they discussed hourly rates and a starting date, and then Meg rambled on for quite a while about Jason, the Pardells’ son who was working in Washington D.C., and the operation she was going to have on her knee.

“It was injured in an automobile accident years ago,” she said, “and it’s been bothering me for a long time, but I kept putting off doing anything about it. I hated to leave Alan alone to cope—he’s a disaster in the kitchen—and to abandon my students for such a long time.” Meg gestured toward the piano. Summer knew about Meg’s piano students. Haley had been one of them, and probably Summer, herself, would have been if Oriole could have afforded it. “But it turns out I’ll only have to be in the hospital for a few days. Of course, I’ll be pretty immobile for a while, but I’ll be able to go on teaching. I’m awfully glad we’re going to have you here to help. As I said, Alan is absolutely useless around the house, and even if he weren’t, he’s going to be very busy this summer. There’s the summer school, and besides he’s had a positive response to one of his queries—on an article he’s been wanting to write about the politics of the classroom—and he needs to get in some time at the typewriter.”

“An article?” Summer asked. “Does Mr. Pardell write?”

“Yes indeed. He’s had several articles and short stories published, and, of course, there’s the novel. Or I guess there is. Whenever he’s faced with an unpleasant chore, or an uninspiring guest, he retires to his study to work on it; but as far as I know, no one’s ever seen it.”

They both laughed. “I’ve heard some stuff he wrote,” Summer said. “Sometimes when he’s reading assignments, he’ll read a really funny one—you know, full of puns and all sorts of crazy mistakes. The first time he did it, everybody was trying to guess who wrote it, but after that we always knew right away when it was one of his.”

“That’s Alan for you,” Meg said. “Instead of working on his great epic, he spends his time writing bad examples for his classes.”

When the cider was finished, Summer collected Sparrow, who was sitting patiently on the front steps talking to a big orange cat, and started home—listening to Sparrow’s chatter with half her brain while the other half figured out what her weekly and monthly income was going to be, and how much of it she’d be able to put away in the bank.

So—in just one week she’d been offered a new job in Alvarro Bay, a weird kind of foster child/upstairs maid position in Connecticut, not to mention another offer from Nicky—the usual one, in which she was given the opportunity to trade her virginity for a chance to go steady. So far that was the only one she had definitely declined. All in all there had been enough material to fill a sizable journal.

It wasn’t until Sparrow lost interest in the game of hide-and-seek and went into the trailer and Cerbe flopped down in the sun to sleep, that Summer took the pen out from behind her ear and began to write. It went quickly, and when she finished and read it over, she thought it was pretty good—Boswell, mostly, with a few touches of Pepys. It was too bad, really, that she couldn’t turn it in, but of course she wasn’t about to. She couldn’t let Pardell read it, or anyone else, for that matter. Suddenly she scratched out the title,
A TRUE ACCOUNT OF THE EVENTS IN THE LIFE OF SUMMER MCINTYRE, JUNE 2 TO 9
, and in its place wrote, “Dear Grant,”. She pulled the key over her head before she went inside.

The last day of school came and went with the usual celebrations, and the next morning Summer got up extra early in time to catch the first bus. Sparrow was still sound asleep. She didn’t move when Summer got out of bed, but when Summer tucked the blankets back around her, she sighed deeply and muttered something about Marina. Summer bent close.

Sparrow’s face twitched, her head moved from side to side, and once again her lips formed her friend’s name. Dreaming again. Just the night before she’d wakened Summer to tell her that Marina had looked in the window again and called her. Summer had had to get up and go with her to look all around the yard before she’d believe it hadn’t really happened. Poor kid. Losing Marina was probably only the beginning of a lot of things that would haunt her sleep. Summer waited, watching and listening and noticing the way Sparrow’s thick coppery eyelashes fringed her eyelids. She looked shiny and silky soft and new as an unopened Christmas package. When her breathing had become deep and steady again, Summer gathered up her clothing and tiptoed into the living room to dress.

There was no sound from the other bedroom either, but Oriole was there, all right. Summer had heard her come home—around two o’clock in the morning. There was nothing much in the refrigerator except the berries and tomatoes for Nan. It didn’t matter much. She’d eat at the Olivers, and there was enough granola for Sparrow’s breakfast. What Oriole would eat when she finally got up would be her problem. At least there was plenty of kibble for Cerbe.

She mixed the kibble with water and put it outside near the steps. Cerbe wasn’t around and she didn’t want to call him for fear of waking Sparrow. He wouldn’t be gone long—not at mealtime. There was nothing more to do but load her backpack and start off down the trail through the early morning mist.

It was a strange morning—the thin wispy fog drifting in ghostly veils among the trees, with here and there a slanting ray of sunlight piercing the shadows like a spotlight from another world. As she started down the path toward the Fishers’ road, Summer could feel a knot of tension like a clenched fist at the back of her neck, but as she walked through the awakening forest the knot began to unravel. She sighed deeply, breathing out worry and anger and breathing in misty shadows and spicy sun-touched warmth. She increased her pace, striding free and easy toward the road and the bus and Crown Ridge—and the summer that was just beginning. At the end of the path a heap of gray brown fur lay beside the road.