Summer People (9 page)

“Sometimes,” Garrett said. “But that scene gets old pretty quick. There are long lines and the people are fake, and you come home smelling like smoke.”

“Oh,” she said. She sounded crestfallen. “Really?”

He took a long moment to drink some wine. “Yeah. But some great bands play in the city. At Roseland and Irving Plaza. I saw Dave Matthews last year, and Fishbone.”

Piper lay back in the chaise and waved her wineglass in the direction of her father. “Save your money, Daddy!” she said. “I’m headed for the Big Apple!”

David groaned. Garrett looked at Piper’s ankles and let his eyes glide up her legs, over her tight shorts, the six inches of exposed midriff to her breasts, which he knew better than to stare at for too long, to her face. She was smiling at him.

“Want to go for a walk on the beach later?” she asked.

“Yeah,” he said. The wine made him feel like he was levitating. “Definitely, yeah.”

“There it goes!” Beth cried out. She leaned over the railing and pointed at the sun, which was just about to sink into the ocean. Beth led them in a round of applause. “Garrett, will you light the grill?” she asked. “It’s getting time to eat.”

Beth controlled the dinner conversation like it was a big, unwieldy bus that she had to keep on safe roads: What was it like to live on Nantucket year-round? How did Peyton like school? Where was Piper applying to college? Every time Piper opened her mouth, Garrett stopped chewing and listened.

“I’m only applying to three schools,” she said. “BU is my safety, BC is my probable, and Harvard is my reach.”

“Boston schools,” Beth said.

“I’m a city person. I wanted to apply in Manhattan, but Dad said no.”

Garrett looked at David Ronan. He was busy digging every last bit of potato out of the skin. He took a sip of wine and cleared his throat. “I have to keep the girls close otherwise they’ll never come see me and I’ll be left alone.”

“Where’s your wife?”

Everyone at the table stopped eating, or maybe it just seemed that way to Garrett who sat in utter confusion. The words had been right there in his brain, in his mouth, but he never would have had the guts to speak them aloud. No, it was Marcus who’d asked. Marcus who had already finished every bite of food on his plate and who was reaching for more salad had asked the question.
Where’s your wife?

Quietly, David said, “She’s on the Cape.”

Marcus loaded his plate with salad. “The Cape?”

“Cape Cod,” Beth said.

“We’re separated,” David said.

“My mom is a caterer now.” This came from Peyton, the younger girl, who, Garrett noticed, had a piece of meat stuck in the front of her braces. It was the first thing Peyton had said at dinner other than “please” and “thank you.” “She makes little quiches.”

“She makes a lot more than just quiches, Peyton,” Piper said. “She’s chosen to pursue her life’s dream, and that’s one of the beauties of living in this country. Freedom to change your life if you don’t like the way it’s going.”

“Freedom to leave your husband and children if that’s what your heart desires,” David said. Garrett watched him empty the contents of the wine bottle into his glass and then carry the empty bottle into the kitchen. “Shall we open the bottle I brought?” he asked Beth.

Beth was cutting her steak into tiny pieces and moving them around her plate, a trick she’d learned from Winnie, to make it look like she’d been eating. She turned her head in David’s direction; her cheeks were hot. “It’s on the counter.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t drink any more, Dad,” Piper said.

“Maybe you should keep your opinions to yourself, young lady,” David said.

“God, you’re being so confrontational, I can’t believe you.” Piper touched the diamond stud in her nose with her pinky finger. “You’re angry at Mom and it’s causing you to drink too much. Or maybe,” she said, “maybe you’re drinking too much because you’re nervous about seeing Beth.”

Garrett’s stomach flipped. He put down his knife and fork with a clang. “May I be excused?”

Piper’s eyebrows shot up. “Did my saying that
upset
you?”

David came back into the dining room, pulling the cork from his bottle of wine. “This is a Bordeaux,” David said to Beth as he filled her empty glass. “I hope you like it.” He threw a killer look at Piper. “You, my dear, aren’t making many friends at this table.”

Peyton, too, dropped her utensils abruptly and held her face in her hands. “She does this all the time.”

“I do
what
all the time?” Piper demanded.

“Make trouble for Daddy.”

“I wasn’t making any trouble,” Piper said. “I was merely defending our mother and her choices. She’s running her own
business,
for God’s sake.”

Suddenly, Marcus spoke up. “It’s my fault,” he said. “I shouldn’t have asked.”

“It’s not your fault, Marcus,” Beth said, and this made Garrett angrier than anything else that had been said all evening. Of course his mother would jump to Marcus’s aid, and
of course
nothing was Marcus’s fault, even when it was.

Beth tried to change the subject. The bus was swerving. “We have ice cream for dessert,” she said. “Ben & Jerry’s.”

“I’ve lost my appetite,” Piper said.

“You’re being rude,” David said. “I expected more from you.”

Piper flipped her hair in response. “I’m only playing the role you cast me in,” she said. “The difficult child? I hear you say so all the time.”

“That’s enough, Piper,” David said and Garrett could tell he meant business. Garrett’s own father never raised his voice; when Arch got angry he became cool and polite in a way that let you know you’d disappointed him, and then you’d be willing to cut off your left hand to make him talk and joke with you again.

Piper stood. “Garrett and I are going for a walk on the beach,” she said, and with that, she stormed through the kitchen and out onto the deck.

Garrett remained in his chair, returning the stares of the other people at the table: Peyton, Marcus, David, his mother.

“Go ahead,” Beth said.

He almost stayed put just to spite her—he didn’t need his mother’s permission to walk on the beach—but his desire to be outside with Piper overwhelmed him. He went.

She was smoking a cigarette and he wondered where she’d gotten it until he noticed a jean jacket lying across a chair and he figured there must be cigarettes and a lighter in the pocket. She was sucking on the cigarette in an angry way, like the young, jilted, male lover in an old movie, and Garrett understood it was high drama for his benefit.

“I can’t stand it when people smoke,” he said.

“Why should I care what you think?”

“You shouldn’t care,” he said.

“I don’t.”

“Fine. Do you really want to go for a walk or were you just using me as an excuse to leave the house?”

“I’ll walk.”

“If you’re walking with me, please put out the cigarette.”

She stabbed it on the sole of her sandal and flicked it down into the dune grass. “There.”

“Yeah, except you littered.”

“So call the police.”

“You
are
difficult,” Garrett said.

“As advertised,” she said.

At home, in New York, Garrett had success with girls, mostly because they weren’t important to him. Soccer was important, his grades were important, and his friends were important—and by putting these things first, Garrett found he could have any girlfriend he wanted. Girls loved to sit on the sidelines at Van Cortland Park watching him play striker, they loved it when he left beer parties early because he had a math quiz the next day. Morgan, Priscilla, Brooke—they all went out with him whenever he asked and allowed him to touch their bodies in various ways. He’d lost his virginity the previous Christmas to a girl named Anna, who was a freshman at Columbia. He met her at Lowe Library while he was doing special research for a paper on Blaise Pascal; she showed Garrett how to access the university computer system, then later invited him back to her room and once they started making out, Garrett discovered he couldn’t stop and she didn’t force him to. His father had given him condoms for his sixteenth birthday and made Garrett promise to always use them. “I don’t want anything to happen to you or anyone you’re close to,” he said.

Garrett didn’t see Anna again—she went home to Poughkeepsie for Christmas break and never resurfaced.

Garrett didn’t tell his father that he lost his virginity; he was too embarrassed.

He got an A on the Pascal paper.

As Garrett led Piper down the steep staircase to the beach, he felt his attitude about girls changing. Maybe because this girl was so beautiful and spoke to her father with exactly the same rage that Garrett felt for his mother. He wanted this girl. That was what he thought as they took their shoes off and stepped on the cold sand.

There was no moon, but there were millions of stars. Garrett craned his neck to get a good look.

“I never see stars like this,” he said. “In New York, the sky is pink at night.”

Piper pulled her jean jacket close to her body. “I can’t wait to go away to college. I can’t wait to get off this rock.”

“You were hard on your dad,” Garrett said.

“He drives me nuts.”

“Which way do you want to walk?” Garrett asked.

She pointed to the left. The beach was dark—only a couple of houses along the bluff had lights on—and the ocean pounded to their right. Garrett felt pleasantly buzzed from the wine, pleasantly buzzed from the way Piper had managed to set them free from the dinner party. He felt bold and confident—he took Piper’s hand, and she let him. They walked, but the only part of his body that Garrett could feel was his hand. He was so consumed by it that he couldn’t think of a single thing to say.

“Do you have a girlfriend?” Piper asked him.

“Not right now,” he said. “What about you?”

“I have lots of girlfriends.” She giggled.

He tightened his grip on her fingers. “Boyfriend?”

“Sort of.”

“Oh.”

“I’m breaking up with him tomorrow.”

“How come?” Garrett said.

“Because I met you,” she said.

Garrett sent a message to his father, whom he sometimes thought of as a satellite dish in the sky, always there to receive information.
Are you listening to this?

“He’s just a stupid football player, anyway,” Piper said. “He’s never been anywhere.”

Garrett imagined the hulking, unsophisticated brute who was currently Piper’s boyfriend. Garrett knew the type—the kind of guy who would pound Garrett into the sand like a horseshoe stake if he knew Garrett was holding Piper’s hand right now.

“If you could go anywhere in the world,” he asked. “where would you go?”

“I already said, New York City.”

Garrett had been hoping for a more imaginative answer. “I want to go to Australia. I’ve wanted to go there ever since I was, like, six years old. I’m going to ask my mom to let me travel after I graduate from high school. I might not go to college right away.”

“Really?” she said.

Garrett could tell she thought that was crazy. “I’m different,” he said. “My father used to tell me I thought outside the box.”

She coughed a hacky, smoker’s cough. “Your dad died, right?”