Second Chance Summer

“It’s still very impressive,” Kim said, taking a sip of her wine. “If we get this show going, we’ll have to hire you on as a consultant.”

Wendy blushed, turning the same color as her headband. “Oh, I don’t know how much help I’d be,” she murmured.

“She’s just being modest,” Warren said. He put his arm around her shoulders a little carefully, like he was still getting used to doing this. “She knows everything there is to know about animals. Tell them what you told me yesterday. The thing about the elephants?”

“Oh,” Wendy said. “Well, Warren and I were talking about…” She paused and threaded her hand through my brother’s, up by her shoulder, and I saw her give his hand a quick squeeze before continuing. “Death,” she said, glancing at him once before looking back to Kim. “And I was telling him about how animals actually have grieving rituals, funeral procedures…. It’s not just limited to humans.”

“Really?” Kim asked, raising her eyebrows. “See, that’s just the kind of stuff that would be great to have on our show. What kind of rituals?”

“So,” Wendy said. She started to talk about llamas dying of broken hearts, of elephants trying to lift their dead babies, of gorillas sleeping in the nests of their dead parents and refusing to eat. And while a part of me was listening, I was really just trying to process a few things. One was that my brother had somehow found someone who liked facts—and sharing them—as much as he did. And the other was that he was talking to Wendy about death—which meant that he was talking to her about Dad, and what he was feeling. I thought about all the times Lucy had asked me if I wanted to talk, all the times that Henry had asked me leading questions about how things were at home, and how I had put them both off—with Lucy, by changing the subject, usually to one involving her love life, and with Henry, by kissing him. I had just assumed that Warren would have been the same way, and the fact that he wasn’t was, weirdly, making me feel a little betrayed—like he’d broken an unspoken agreement that we’d had.

Kim was now asking Wendy if vets ever lived above their offices—this was apparently one of the premises of the show, along with a wacky receptionist—when the first hiss of a firework sounded, and I looked over toward the lake. Sure enough, there was the first firework, streaking across the darkening sky like a comet, exploding with a loud bang and turning into a red, white, and blue light. Everyone on the lawn clapped, and then began moving as a group down toward the dock, the better to watch the show.

Fourteen people—and a dog—were probably a few too many for our dock, but we all crowded on and had more or less settled by the time the next firework shot up into the sky, almost directly above us.

I ended up toward the back of the dock, sitting near the chair my mother had carried down for my dad. I glanced behind me, to see if Henry was coming over from his house, but so far, no sign of him. I had no idea how long the work at the bakery would take, and all he’d told me about my surprise was that it would happen after the fireworks. But after checking for him a few times, I let myself just relax and enjoy the show. And maybe it was that I hadn’t seen a fireworks display on the Fourth in a few years (I’d been out of the country or trying to learn to speak another language), but it seemed pretty impressive. Certainly more so than I remembered from the last time we were up here to watch them.

I tipped my head back and just watched the bursts of color and light that were taking over the sky, reflecting on the water below. After a series of particularly spectacular ones, the group on the dock clapped, and the dog raced toward me at full speed.

“Sorry,” Davy, who’d been holding him, said as he turned back to me. I grabbed the dog before he fell into the water—we weren’t sure of Murphy’s swimming abilities—and picked him up. As I did, I noticed that he was trembling violently. “I don’t think he likes the noise.”

“I’ll bring him inside,” I said, pushing myself up to standing.

“Thanks, kid,” my dad said, giving the dog’s dangling paw a squeeze as we passed. “He probably doesn’t understand what’s happening. Poor thing must think he stumbled into a war zone.”

“Actually,” I heard Wendy say from farther up the dock, “dogs’ ears are amazingly sensitive. So what we’re hearing is being amplified ten or twenty times for him.”

I walked up to the house, feeling the dog flinch in my arms whenever a firework exploded. And I realized my father was probably right—if you had nobody to tell you we were only celebrating, you could easily think that the world was coming to an end. I dropped him inside the house, where he immediately fled down the hall to my room. Maybe it was because I had a bedskirt, but I’d noticed that the dog tended to hide under there whenever it was thunderstorming. It was, apparently, his safe place.

As I started to head down the hill again, I realized that the sound of fireworks had stopped—I’d missed the finale. And sure enough, I saw the group on the dock begin to stand and make their way up the hill. I continued down, figuring that I would probably be needed to help and not wanting to risk my mother’s wrath a second time.

Fifteen minutes later, I had helped my mom clean up, said my good-byes to everyone, thanked people for coming, and promised to call Lucy later and tell her what Henry’s surprise had been about. My father, exhausted, had gone right to bed, with Warren helping him up the stairs.

“I guess that’s it,” my mom said, as she picked the last abandoned plate up off the lawn and looked around, as though making sure that everything was in order. Gelsey was still on the lawn, darting from one citronella candle to the other, blowing them out. “Gels,” she yelled to my sister, “bedtime!”

In the light left by the last candle, I watched as my sister dropped into a low arabesque, her leg almost parallel above her. “Five minutes!” she called back, her voice slightly muffled.

My mother nodded and turned back to me. “And not too late for you,” she said. I nodded as well, feeling myself smile. I’d received a text mid-cleanup from Henry, asking me to meet him on the dock in twenty minutes for my surprise. Even though I had no idea what we’d be doing or how long we’d be out, my curfew, such as it was, had gotten very relaxed over the summer. All my mother had asked was that I come in at a reasonable hour, and quietly.