Second Chance Summer

“Maybe,” I said, sliding my hands around his waist and kissing him again. I was in a great mood—my dad had had a good morning, been up and alert and making terrible puns at breakfast, I didn’t have to work, I was with Henry, and there was a lot of frosting just there for the taking. Lucy was caught up in her latest boy—I had a feeling he wasn’t going to be around long, so I’d just taken to calling him Pittsburgh—so I knew she wouldn’t give me a hard time for not hanging out with her, which meant I had all afternoon to spend kissing Henry. Breaking the moment, my phone trilled in my bag across the counter. I listened for a second—it was the ringtone for the house’s landline. I started to go to answer it when I realized that it was probably Gelsey.

“Do you need to answer that?” Henry asked.

“Nope,” I said. I crossed to my phone and turned the ringer off so that it wouldn’t interrupt us again when she inevitably called back. “It’s just my sister wanting me to help her get ready.” When Henry still looked perplexed, I added, “It’s the first night of the carnival.” Gelsey had been freaking out about it all week, and she’d finally told me that she had a crush on a boy in her tennis group—which actually explained why she’d stopped complaining about her lessons recently. She, tennis boy, Nora, and the boy Nora had a crush on, were all meeting up for what Gelsey kept insisting was not a double date. Nevertheless, when she’d found out that I didn’t have work today, she’d assumed that I would be spending the afternoon helping her primp—by which she meant I would give her a makeover, using my makeup. And while I was willing to help Gelsey get ready, I was not about to spend four hours doing it.

“Ah, the carnival,” Henry said with a smile. He brushed some hair back from my forehead and smiled at me. “I remember the carnival.” I smiled back, pretty sure that we were both remembering the same thing. He kissed me again before we headed over to where the frosting was. “Cupcakes.”

Henry showed me the proper icing technique, and even though I insisted on tasting the frosting every few minutes, just to make sure it wasn’t going bad, we were soon making progress. “Not too hard, right?” he asked.

I nodded, admiring my handiwork. The bell dinged out front just as we were finishing the batch, and I realized that I should probably be getting home—I’d let Gelsey dangle long enough. I took a cupcake for the road and kissed Henry good-bye. I biked home, humming Warren’s tune under my breath, waving at the people I knew as I passed. Halfway home, though, I pulled out my phone to turn the ringer back on and realized that something was wrong. I had seven missed calls and two voice mails.

I started biking faster, hoping that it was just Gelsey wanting me to help and being a pain. But as soon as I stepped onto the porch, I could feel it in the air, a kind of crackling tension that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. My mother was on the phone in the kitchen, but she slammed it down when she saw me.

“Where have you been?” she demanded. Her face was red, and her expression was scared and angry in equal measure.

I swallowed hard, thinking of all the calls I’d ignored, just assuming they were Gelsey. A terrible dread was creeping over me. “Um,” I said, feeling my heart begin to pound. What was happening? “I was downtown. My ringer was off. What’s going on?”

“Your dad—” my mom started, but her voice broke and she turned away from me slightly, wiping her hand across her face. “He’s not doing well. I’m going to take him to the hospital in Stroudsburg and see what they say.”

“What’s wrong?” I made myself ask, even though my voice was no more than a whisper.

“I don’t know!” my mother snapped, turning back to me. “Sorry,” she said after a moment, a little more quietly. “I’m just…” Her voice trailed off and she gestured helplessly around her.

“Where’s Gelsey?” I asked, looking around the house, as though I was going to spot my siblings, like maybe they were just hanging out on one of the sofas while all this was happening. “And Warren?”

“Your sister’s next door at Nora’s,” my mom said. “And Warren went somewhere with Wendy; I haven’t been able to reach him.”

“Okay,” I said, making myself take deep breaths. “What can I do?”

“Help your sister,” my mom said, and I felt immediately ashamed of myself that I’d spent the afternoon trying to avoid doing exactly that. “And don’t tell her we went to the hospital. She’s looking forward to tonight. I’ll tell her when I get back.”

I felt my breath catch in my throat, noticing the singular pronoun. “But Dad will be coming back too, right?” I asked slowly.

My mother shrugged, her chin trembling, and I felt my stomach plunge. She pressed a hand to her eyes for a moment and took a deep breath. When she spoke again, she was more composed, back in her efficiency mode. “I’m going to need your help getting your dad into the car,” she said. “And then please be either here or by your phone tonight, in case I have updates.” I nodded, feeling a second wave of shame crest over me that I had been actively ignoring my phone all afternoon. “And,” my mother said, biting her lip. She seemed to be weighing something in her mind. “I’m going to need you to call your grandfather.”

“Oh.” This was not what I’d been expecting to hear. “Sure. But why am I doing that?” My father’s father was a former naval officer who now taught at West Point and had always reminded me of Captain Von Trapp from The Sound of Music—just without the easygoing personality or penchant for songs about flowers. He’d always terrified me, and the few times a year I saw him, we never seemed to have all that much to talk about.

“He wanted to know… when we got to this point,” my mother said. “He wanted to come and say good-bye.”

I nodded, but it felt like the breath had just been knocked out of me. “What point?” I asked, even though I didn’t really want to hear the answer, because I was afraid that I already knew it.

“He wanted to come,” my mother said, slowly, like she was having to think about each word before she spoke it, “when your father would still understand what was happening. When he would still… be here.”