Autumn’s December checkup was scheduled for the fifteenth, which was, cruelly and ironically enough, Summer’s birthday. She’d been planning on blowing it off, but when Nani found a letter from the hospital and blew a gasket, she knew she’d have no choice. On the fourteenth Dr. Caldwell called and made sure Nani was coming with her, which Autumn didn’t even want to think about. Caldwell said she’d noticed something from the last set of scans she wanted to investigate, nothing major, she just wanted to cover all her bases. Autumn said she understood and assured her that she would not come to the hospital alone. On the fifteenth Autumn woke and realized the date and it just descended on her, this cold, creeping dread that sank into her and made her want to lie in place for the rest of the day, like a stone falling through a dark lake and thudding into the muddy bottom. Summer should’ve been here today, blowing out twenty-five candles on a homemade Funfetti cake. She should’ve been alive. So to distract herself, Autumn took out her phone and made her New Years’ Resolutions. The list ended up looking like this:
get more attention, spend more time with my cats, lose weight until I can fit into my chemo clothes again, and forget the words Hank Basara forever.
By breakfast she had decided on a plan: she would pick herself from this train wreck of a breakup, dust herself off, and find the Calvin Harris to her Taylor Swift. He was right around the corner, she could feel it. After all, Taylor had gone through her batshit crazy cat lady phase, too, writing song after song about every guy who ever dumped her while sipping wine and loading endless Instagram photos of her felines dressed in weird scarves, and now she was a respected songwriter with eighty bajillion dollars and a Scottish DJ to boot. Cat ladies could have it all, too. They just did it with more cats.
An hour and a half before the big event, Autumn went to visit Uncle Spencer. She needed someone to talk to, someone to sit with, and since Summer wasn’t around and she basically had three friends now, two and a half of whom were fake friends, she couldn’t think of anyone else. Obviously she was too afraid to call Hank, even though they had meant so much to each other only weeks before. None of that mattered anymore. It was done. At the end of the day, all she really knew about life was this: the show must go on.
Her whole body shook as she walked up the two steps to Spencer’s tiny brown house deep in Neptune Beach. His house felt like home, and people always made their way back home. Spencer wasn’t really her uncle, per se, but he’d been taken in by Nani twenty years ago as a kind of surrogate son, and now he was as good as family. He’d been sent away by his very Catholic family after they’d walked in on him on his knees with another boy from church, and the relationship never recovered. Autumn’s grandparents were all he’d ever had in the world. Half of her grandfather’s ashes sat on his mantle, and he kissed the ugly maroon urn every night.
They hugged and exchanged niceties, both of them skirting around the cancer issue. He failed to compliment her hair, which had been cut the previous day, and she called him out on it. And as she sat on an old ottoman she realized just why she had been drawn here: she’d spent every holiday and half of every summer here, and this house was her childhood, just like Mary-Kate and Ashley VHS tapes were her childhood and rainbow Zebra gum was her childhood and Summer Johnson was her childhood. It was a life she had drifted away from, a set of years she could never get back. It was her past, irrevocably. And now that she was standing at the edge of the sea, looking out, waiting for whatever was coming next, she had run back to ground zero for one last sniff.
“So what’s new?” he asked. “Besides the whole appointment thing. How are your holiday preparations coming along? Are you still doing your specialty this year, you know, where you take a donut cheeseburger and stuff it inside a Turducken? What’d you call it again – a Donuducken?”
“Oh, come on, I only did that for, like, two years in a row, at most. And I guess I’m…fine.” She sighed. “Christmas is just no fun as an adult. The magic is gone, and now it’s just an excuse to hide in the break room at work, pretending I’m getting water but really stuffing my face with reindeer cookies. It all just makes me feel…old, and fat.”
“Speaking of that,” he laughed, “how’s work?”
“Oh, I just quit,” she smiled.
“You…what?”
“I quit.” As Spencer’s mouth fell open she saw herself walking into work that day, she saw the disappointed look on Lisa’s face at her news, she felt how big she’d smiled when they’d asked for her nametag back. “But I’ll be fine,” she said. “I have enough savings for four months or so.”
“And what about next year?”
“I started an Etsy shop,” she said, and he leaned forward.
“What? Get out.”
“Yep. Autumn’s Feline Couture and More,” she said, smiling. “It’s actually been surprising, the amount of bored housewives who are willing to spend their husbands’ money on frivolous pet accessories. Some woman in New Hampshire just spent $37.50 on a shawl for her Persian. I’m branching out into puppy dresses next week.”
He tried to smile. “That’s amazing, really, but…what about health insurance, and your car payment? Bills, living expenses? I’m thrilled for you, but as your uncle, it is my duty to rain on your parade with my matronly worry and concern.”
“Oh, I’m terrified,” she said, sitting completely still. “Absolutely, pants-shittingly terrified. But you know what? For the next few months, and hopefully forever after that, I am going to wake up every morning and look forward to work. I am going to get out of bed and do something I love doing for the rest of the day. Do you know how happy that makes me?” She paused. “Sure, I’m fucking paralyzed with the fear that I’ve made yet another bad decision and fucked it all up, but I’d rather bomb at something I loved than win at something that made me miserable. Because that’s not winning. That’s just misery.”
He crossed his legs, appraising her. “Wow – wise words from a wise girl.” He held out his hand, and she high-fived it. “Congratulations – you are now thirty-seven dollars and fifty cents closer to your dream of being the Bethenny Frankel of cat fashion.” He watched her for a minute. “What made you do it, though? I thought you’d given up on all that.”
She stared down into his fireplace. She’d been doing that a lot lately, staring at nothing in particular. Her eyes were on visions from the summer. “I don’t know. When I was least expecting it, inspiration struck. Something was moving me forward. I think I know what my muse was, though.”
“Explain?”
“Well, I guess that getting a glimpse of love, even if it all went to shit, made me realize how important it was to love your whole life.”
“No it didn’t,” he said plainly.
“What?”
“I said, no it didn’t. You found someone you loved, and yet you’re sitting here, and you’re not with him. Clearly you didn’t learn that much.”
“Um.” She sputtered and then swallowed, collecting herself. “You’re a bitch. You know that, right?”
“So I’ve been told.”
She tried to be mad, but something caught her eye. “Hey, Spencer?” she asked after a moment, staring at a photo on a side table of a young Spencer with an olive-skinned boy on top of some building in New York.
“Mhmm?”
“I just realized I’ve never seen you with anyone. Like, romantically.”
He seized up. “…Is that right?”
“Yeah. Who’s that? In the picture?”
His eyes clouded over, and he sat up a little straighter in his chair, rigid with nerves. Finally he sighed. “Okay. I guess I can’t lie to you anymore.”
“About what? And why not?”
“Well, I never told you certain things because, before now, I never looked at you and saw a young lady. I just saw a kid.” He motioned at her. “But you…this…this is a young lady.”
She sat a little taller, too. “I, um…I don’t know what to say. Nobody has ever called me that before.”
“Don’t say anything, then,” he laughed. “But anyway…I know this may come as a shock, but that was my…boyfriend.”
A little laugh popped out of her lips.
“What?”
“I mean, a shock?” Autumn asked. “Come on, Spencer. You dress like a Today show fashion contributor and you can arrange the hell out of a wild rose bouquet. It wasn’t that hard to figure out.”
His shoulders fell a little.
“Oh, God, I don’t give a shit,” she said quickly. “I couldn’t throw a rock at my group of friends without hitting twelve Lady Gaga tour T-shirts. No, what I’m asking is, why are you sitting here, single, with photos of guys you apparently dated?”
He watched her. “Fear, I guess.”
She harrumphed again.
“What is it?”
“It’s just that…well, I’m on the way to the hospital to find out if I have cancer, and you’re telling me that you know fear?”
He nodded. “I do know fear. You had cancer in your body, and that is the worst thing in the world. But fear was a cancer in my life. I found the love of my life, and I let him go. All because of fear. And now it’s just me.”
He threw a miserable glance at his pristine, untouched house. Autumn felt so sorry for him that she had to look down at her feet.
“…Well what happened?”
“He was killed,” he said with a dark laugh and a roll of his eyes. “Hate crime, or so we think.”
“Oh, God…wow. My apologies. But…didn’t you guys live in California at the time?”
He laughed his misery laugh again. “Oh, honey, it may have been California, but it was still the early ‘90s. Hatred is timeless, unfortunately. The police didn’t even care enough to investigate – they just declared it accidental and closed the case. As if someone ‘accidentally’ gets his skull beaten in. When I got the call, everything in me just fell into my chest. And I never got over it. As you can see.”
He stared at the photo, and in his eyes Autumn saw stories, novels, movies, all kinds of tales she had spent her whole life ignoring. And as she sat there, she thought: this is the world, a tapestry of overlooked sagas, a vast pool of ignored love. And in that moment she vowed to never look at someone and silence them with her eyes again. Because overweight cancer patient and one-armed army veteran: nobody would have ever looked at Autumn and Hank and given a shit about them, and yet their love had been the deepest thing in the world. They weren’t Brangelina, they weren’t beautiful, and their love would never be portrayed onscreen by a pair of pillow-lipped actors. But to Autumn, Hank was the tops. The love she’d felt for him was the most important thing in the world to her – it was a state of grace, and damn the world to hell if they didn’t treat her as being every bit as special simply because her body was slowly killing itself and Hank would never sign a modeling contract. She would treasure him forever, no matter what happened – and fuck every single person out there who discounted that because of their physical issues.
Spencer seemed to decide something. He fixed a stare on Autumn, a stare that said, Listen to me, young one. “Let me get on my Old Matronly Elder soapbox for a second. I know you don’t understand this now,” he said in his soft but convicting voice, “but I’ve been where you’ve been, and I know it’s hard. Nobody ever told you it would be like this, that you’d have to pay for your own water bill and that your tire would explode on the freeway and that one day you’d meet someone who would give you everything you ever wanted and then you’d run from them like your apartment was on fire. But you’ve gotta stop being so fucking afraid.”
“Afraid?”
“Afraid,” he said. “What kept Arman and I apart was the fear. The fear that what we had would never be enough – the fear that the world would get us. I mean, just using the pronoun ‘him’ – it has taken my entire adult life just to be able to say that out loud, and I still flinch. And let me tell you, every single morning is another morning I wish I could’ve been braver.” He sighed an ancient sigh that seemed to rise up out of the Earth below him. “I miss him more than anyone will ever know, and it’s all my fault. He broke down at a shitty café one afternoon and told me he loved me, and I said ‘thank you’ and then asked for the check. Can you believe that? That was the last time we ever spoke. He moved away pretty soon after that, and he was killed within weeks. I didn’t even know he was dead for six months.” He stared at the photo again, looking more haunted than anything or anyone Autumn had ever seen in her life. “We kept each other secret. I didn’t get to see his funeral. His family never knew about me. His friends never knew about me. But we’ll always have that summer…even if it’s the only thing we’ll ever have.”
And all it once it occurred to Autumn just how much more important the summers were than the winters. Summer was everything – it rode up into your memory on a hot wave of indelible joy and stayed there for the long haul. After all, who remembers winter? Who remembers lounging on a couch under grey skies? Who cared about January when a fleeting July meant so much more to a human soul? All you had to do was take the pieces of summer with you into winter, to remind you of what was, and what could be again. What if Autumn and Hank had a whole lifetime of summers in front of them? What if honoring Summer’s memory was as simple as opening her heart into Hank’s eyes and winning in love for her friend?
Spencer’s eyes glossed over, filling up with the ghosts of so many summers ago. “I am going to say this one time, Autumn. You will regret the love you didn’t give so much more than the love you did give, even if it leads you straight to hell. Lord knows the things that keep me up at night are the things I ran from, the people I shut out, the love I denied.” He took a breath, his eyes pressed shut and leaking from the corners. “This hurts so much to say, but don’t become me. Don’t make all the stupid mistakes I did. I know you’re guilty that you’re here and Summer’s not, but don’t let that make you sabotage yourself into oblivion. Live – no, love – enough for both of you.”
“Say that again,” Autumn said, sitting up straighter than a two by four.
“What? Survivor’s guilt?” he said, and all the pieces just fell into place.
Autumn swallowed the bubble in her throat as she stared at his fish tank, praying back tears. “Okay. I understand what you are saying. I think.”
“This boy you’re thinking of right now,” he said, startling her a little. “It’s the one from the phone call, isn’t it? You still love him, no?”
“Yes,” she said, and she didn’t even have to think about it. The answer just jumped out of her.
“Your Nani loves him, too.”
“What? No, she hates him. She was awful to him.”
“Silly girl,” he smiled. “She could see that you were in love with him the first time she saw you two together. She told me. She thought he was handsome and wise. She was just terrified for you.”
“God,” Autumn breathed, realizing just how similar they were.
“And do you miss him?” he asked.
“Abso-fucking-lutely.” She swallowed again. “Hank at his worst is still better than the best of anyone else I’ve ever met. Nobody can hold a candle. Not even one of those cheap birthday candles from Publix, and oh God I need to stop thinking about cake right now.”
“Ah. I figured.”
He leaned back, searching her. “So your best friend died,” he said finally. “That’s really fucking shitty. There aren’t many worse things that can happen than that, actually. But you can’t let it ruin you – you can’t let it make you become ruled by the fear she left behind.”
She started to object, but he held up a hand. “You think you’re so different, Autumn, but you’re not. Fear is fear. Some people use grief as an excuse to keep themselves away from the people they love. Some use cancer. Some use alcohol or anger or anxiety or depression. But we all have things that make us want to distance ourselves from each other and run from the world, and they’re all killing us slowly.” She tried to look away, but she couldn’t. “This boy isn’t going to die like Summer did, Autumn. Don’t let one death kill all the other relationships in your life, too. God knows I did,” he sort of snorted as he stared down at his shaggy carpet, which had probably not been stepped on by a visitor in months. Autumn looked at his pristine Christmas decorations and his immaculate rugs and thought of how sad it was that there was nobody around to mess it all up. And right then, Autumn made a promise to herself to hug Spencer before he left, no matter how awkward it would be. She had to stop pushing everyone away like this, shoving them away as soon as they got close – had she learned nothing from Summer? Actually, she’d gotten it totally backwards: she was leaving people before they could leave her. She was shoving everyone away when she should’ve been savoring them. People were like fireworks: blink, and they’re gone. And you will never be able to hug them again.
Spencer looked at her then, deep into her, regret burned into his face like a tattoo. “You will never regret loving a person, Autumn. Not really. You will never regret the choice to try. Let this boy love you, if he still wants to, at least. Like he did last summer.” His eyes were filled with horror and fear and loss but also something else, too: hope. Hope for Autumn. Hope that, no matter what happened with her health, she would right her wrongs and rescue all the love in her life.
He stared at her. She stared at him.
“If you hold onto one thing in your life, hold onto love, Autumn. So reach out. Call this boy. Love this boy. For me. For Arman. Just…for love, Goddamnit. I know you can. And Autumn?”
“Yes?”
His eyes were oceans of understanding, and she tumbled down into them. “No matter what happens at that appointment today, I hope you get the happy ending you are owed. Lord knows you deserve it.”
~
Five minutes later Autumn took out her phone on Spencer’s front porch with trembling hands. And it was love, not fear, that pushed her to call him. Because she wasn’t so afraid anymore. This was Autumn rising, soaring above her grief and self-hatred, transformed by the love she had tried her damndest to shoo away. But no more shooing. She would not become her uncle.
The funny thing was, Autumn had always been perfectly happy standing in her own skin. What she didn’t understand was that she could be just as happy fusing it with someone else’s.
And as she looked up Hank’s number, she slipped Summer’s photo off her keychain and kissed it, her tears splashing onto the plastic case. “Float on, Summer,” she whispered in the winter sunlight, dropping the photo into Spencer’s rosebushes. “I love you so much, but it’s time for me to be happy now. Happy birthday. I will keep you with me always. I promise.”
“Hank?” she said when she heard him pick up.
“Yes?”
“I know I fucked everything up, but I have an appointment in half an hour. Can you come?”