Total pages in book: 18
Estimated words: 16403 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 82(@200wpm)___ 66(@250wpm)___ 55(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 16403 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 82(@200wpm)___ 66(@250wpm)___ 55(@300wpm)
The call came while I was grading papers in my office at the university, surrounded by stacks of undergraduate attempts at understanding nineteenth-century literature. My phone lit up with Gram's name, and I answered without thinking, which was my first mistake.
Gram doesn't believe in pleasantries, so she got straight to the point.
"Harriet, honey. I'm calling to let you know you'll be here the weekend of the fifteenth for my birthday party."
That's Gram for you. She doesn't ask. She informs, and she sounds like she's reading a subpoena while she's at it.
I had a polite decline loaded and ready. Work obligations, a conference, the department's annual review coming up, maybe some students need my help. Just responsible adult things that should have been more than sufficient to excuse me from a weekend at the lake.
Gram has never met an excuse she couldn't steamroll, but I figured I'd try anyway.
But no.
"Gram, I'd love to, but—"
"I won't be around forever, you know."
I'd like to put it on record that this has always been her trump card, even when I was still a child. The nuclear option. Delivered in the same tone she might use to mention the weather or ask me to pass the salt.
Gram's been threatening to die for as long as I've known her, and she's still here making everyone else's lives more complicated. Unfortunately for me and fortunately for her, the threat always works because someday it won't be a threat anymore.
So I folded, the way I always fold, and marked the weekend on my calendar.
I should have asked more questions. I should have specifically asked who else would be there, who else she'd invited, whether any childhood neighbors might be making appearances. I didn't. I never do.
Gram runs her house and her family exactly how she wants to, and she doesn't believe in over-explaining her decisions to the people who are going to follow them anyway.
The thing is, Heath and I grew up together in the way kids do when their every summer vacation gets spent in the same place.
His family had the house on the east side of Gram's place until they all moved when he graduated high school. Before that, we were in and out of each other's houses, sharing the dock and the fire pit and the big kitchen table where Gram fed anyone who showed up at mealtime.
He had a little sister named Emma who was three years younger and always trying to keep up with whatever we were doing. I was an only child, so the noise and chaos of his family was like a glimpse into some other way of existing—louder, messier, full of people talking over each other and laughing at nothing and making the kind of memories that stick to you for decades after.
At school, however, we were from completely different planets. Heath played football and baseball and ran with the popular group. Those people you see in movies. When they arrive, the crowd parts like the sea to let them through. Yep, those people.
And Heath was the hottest guy in high school. Everyone either wanted him or wanted to be him, including little ole me.
I was a glasses-and-braces girl who ate lunch outside the library and lived for honor roll certificates and early acceptance letters. In the hallways, we'd nod, maybe say hey if we passed close enough, but we never once hung out during the school year.
Summer was the only time the social ecosystem that ruled our days didn't matter. Two months of eating ice cream every day, helping Gram out, swimming in the lake, and just talking. That was one of the things I liked about Heath. I could talk to him about anything and everything, and he never diminished my opinions, thought I was crazy, or even laughed at me.
He listened, and that mattered way more than he probably thought.
The summer before we left for college, I let myself believe something between us was finally shifting. That all those years of growing up side by side had built something that might turn into something else, something worth the risk of reaching for.
I was wrong. It was all in my head, which is usually where these things happen for a girl nobody looked at twice. I couldn't blame him. He was on his way to bigger, better things.
Everyone knew he would make it to the NFL. I was just not … his match.
The last summer lives in my memory like a sore tooth I can't stop tonguing, even though I know it's going to hurt. I try not to think about it directly—just let myself skim over the surface, collecting impressions instead of diving into the whole humiliating truth.
The dock by the lake, salty fingers from the chips, the two of us talking about where we were headed in the fall—him to State on a football scholarship, me to what everyone kept calling "a very good school." The way his eyes kept dropping to my mouth when I talked. The certainty, sudden and bright, that he was going to kiss me.