Just 18 Summers Read online

  “Oh.”

  “I don’t mean this to be awkward. I know you’re kin and all that. But I’m trying, you know? I just thought you might have some, like, tips. What can I do to help them like me more?”

  “What makes you think they don’t like you?”

  “I read body language pretty well. It helps in the pizza business.”

  Butch cleared his throat. “Well, um, I don’t know. It’s gotta be hard to know your daughter’s marrying—I mean, getting married, so maybe that’s what you’re sensing.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Okay. Well, my advice is . . .” Butch stopped for a moment. What advice did he have? He searched the corners of his mind for any tidbit of anything that resembled advice. Then he remembered a conversation he’d overheard Jenny and Ava having when Ava was around four. She’d come home from a birthday party crying that nobody would play with her or talk with her. Jenny had stooped down, taken her little hands, and given her a five-minute talk, probably an eternity to a four-year-old.

  Butch looked at Marvin. “My advice to you is to be yourself, you know? God created you the way you are, just exactly like you’re supposed to be. They’ll come around eventually and see what a great kid you are.” He swallowed. “Man, I mean.”

  Marvin looked engrossed. “Wow. Yeah. Deep.”

  “Then I’ll see you tomorrow?” Butch asked.

  “See you then.” Marvin smiled and left.

  Butch shut the door and took the pizza into the living room, where Ava was still absorbed in the TV show. He grimaced. “What is that?”

  “It’s calamari, Dad. Before they cut it up and fry it. That’s squid, you know.”

  “Oh. Yeah. Well, good thing they fry it. They serve it with marinara, right? Speaking of marinara . . .” He gestured formally to the pizza box.

  Ava flipped the lid open, pulled out a piece, set it on her lap, and began picking the pepperoni off.

  “You don’t like pepperoni?”

  “Not really.”

  “I’ve ordered pepperoni pizza every night this week. Why didn’t you say something?”

  “I just take it off.”

  “Do you like cheese?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then I’ll have them make it half-cheese tomorrow.”

  “Okay. Also, this is the time that you should tell me not to put my pizza in my lap.”

  “Oh . . .”

  “Because it leaves grease stains.”

  “Right. Yeah, need to buy some paper plates. Sorry.”

  “We have regular plates, you know.”

  He did know. But he hadn’t opened a cabinet since Jenny died. He remembered the day she found the dishes, 80 percent off, on clearance. It was as if she’d struck gold. She was so proud to have matching plates. Finally.

  Ava was back to watching her show. Some cooking contest, with the contestants being very dramatic about how they served their food. Such formality. For squid?

  Butch walked to the kitchen, his appetite suddenly waning. He stood there a moment, catching his breath, trying to separate Jenny from the dishes. At some point he was going to have to use those dishes. But that meant washing them too. He hadn’t loaded or unloaded a dishwasher since the day he married that wonderful woman.

  With one big, deep breath, he opened the cabinet and took out a plate. As he walked toward the living room, he got a little idea. It reminded him of what Jenny would do. She was good at capturing the awe of children. She was like the pied piper. Kids flocked to her, and she loved being around them.

  On his way out of the kitchen, Butch snatched the dishrag. He flipped it over his arm and put his nose in the air as he rounded the couch.

  “Madam, your plate.” It was the worst British accent ever attempted.

  Ava smiled. “Daddy, what are you doing?”

  “For your pizza, madam.”

  She took the plate and grinned. “I would also like some water, please, sir. The fancy kind of water in the fancy kind of glass.” She sounded perfectly aristocratic.

  “It would be a pleasure.” He laughed all the way back to the kitchen, grabbing the nicer glasses from the back of the cabinet. Last he’d heard, Ava wasn’t allowed to use them, but he didn’t really care about preserving the crystal. When he returned with the stemware, Ava looked truly impressed.

  She sipped the water carefully, her pinkie floating away from the glass like any proper princess. “Very fine water. Thank you. Also, I am old enough to use a knife.”

  “Don’t push it,” Butch said with a wink.

  She sighed but still looked delighted. That was what he hadn’t seen on her face in a very long time—delight.

  They ate in peace for a while and Butch found himself weirdly interested in the cooking show. He had no idea that the cooking world was so competitive.

  As Ava was finishing her pizza, she said, “Oh, I have to make cupcakes for Thursday.”

  “Wha . . . ?” His pizza slice, on its way to his mouth, fell limp like it had fainted. He set it down. “What do you mean?”

  “It’s the last treat day of the year, and it’s my turn.”

  “Well, we’ve got those Little Debbie—”

  “No.”

  “No?” Butch’s heart had that funny little tickle that turned out never to be funny. “We have to make them?”

  “Yeah, nobody likes the store-bought kind.”

  “I do.”

  “If I show up with store-bought cupcakes on treat day, you may as well give me head lice, too.”

  “Really?”

  “Just ask Payton Carter. She brought in celery with peanut butter one time. No one’s heard from her since.”

  “But—”

  “Also, Jacob Farrell is allergic to anything synthetic, plus all preservatives and most of the dyes. Makes him really hyper. His mom sent a note about it.”

  Butch swallowed. He’d met Jacob’s mother. He didn’t want trouble from her.

  “All right, I’ll make some tonight.” Cupcakes. How hard could that be?

  “Thanks.”

  “Sure.”

  “Also, Saturday’s my graduation.”

  “From what?”

  “Second grade. Last day of school is Friday. Ceremony is Saturday. I need a dress.”

  Butch waited for her to slap him on the shoulder and declare it a joke, but she just stared at him.

  “They’re . . . they’re actually having a ceremony?”

  “None of my nice dresses fit me anymore. I thought the black one might, but it was short and I looked like one of those girls Mom told me I shouldn’t ever look like.”

  “O . . . kay. Where do we go for that kind of a thing?” He tried to think. Did they have dresses at Dollar General?

  “The mall.”

  “The mall. Great. We’ll go sometime this week.”

  With that, Ava looked satisfied and ate happily in silence.

  CHAPTER 9

  BETH

  “ANOTHER TISSUE?”

  “No thank you.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s just that your first tissue has been . . . incapacitated.”

  Beth looked down. As she opened her right hand to see what he was talking about, the tissue fell to the floor like dandelion dust.

  She glanced toward the man sitting across from her, a notebook in his lap and a coffee mug next to his shiny, stoic leather chair. Dr. Reynolds’s dark, bushy mustache twitched with concern. He was tall, African American, with beautiful light-brown eyes and a voice that sounded like he should be making Allstate commercials. But he was sort of an intimidating presence. It was that mustache—black and dense and all-knowing—that made her squirm in her seat.

  “I’m so sorry,” Beth said. Her eyes were watering and her hair was hanging over half her face. Until this point, she’d managed to seem like the kind of person who makes a psychologist question why they’ve come for help. She seems so pulled together, she hoped he th
ought. But by the look on his face, it became clear that her five minutes of girdled normalism were gone. The seams had busted and she was hanging out all over the place.

  She grabbed a new tissue as she took in the office. She hadn’t really noticed it when she came in, too intent on making the impression that she was here out of choice, not desperation. It was a nice office. Cozy, with a good view of the parking lot. She liked the lamps, which painted the room in golden light. No fluorescents to be found. That was comforting because she did not look good under fluorescents.

  “What was I saying?” she asked, dabbing the corners of her eyes.

  “Well, I introduced myself and shared my credentials.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And then you introduced yourself and told me about your family.”

  “Right.”

  “And then you burst into tears.”

  “Oh.”

  “So you’re in the right place,” Dr. Reynolds said with a gentle smile, “but I still don’t know why you’re here.”

  “Okay. Well, I probably started crying when I said Robin.”

  “Robin. I thought it was Marvin.”

  “Oh, maybe that’s right. Maybe I said Robin and then Marvin and then burst into tears.”

  “That seems correct. Well, let’s take it from the beginning.”

  “Sure. From when I started feeling bad about myself as a mom?”

  “Okay.”

  “It was probably when Robin, at the age of three, refused to potty train and I was crying myself to sleep at night. I decided to take a weekend with my girlfriends.”

  “That sounds healthy.”

  “And the next thing I know, she doesn’t know how to cook. I never taught her to make an omelet. I abandoned her at the most crucial and private time in her life—potty training—and now she doesn’t know how to pretreat a stain or deal with difficult people or fry chicken.”

  “How old is she?”

  “Twenty-one. She’s making the biggest decision of her life—who to marry—and I’ve completely failed!”

  “I’m to assume Marvin is the man she is going to marry?”

  “Yes,” Beth sniffled.

  “And Marvin is disappointed that Robin can’t cook?”

  “No. No, it’s not that.”

  “He likes eggs?”

  “He likes pizza.”

  Dr. Reynolds picked up his coffee and sipped it without taking his eyes off Beth. She dabbed her face but the tears didn’t seem like they were going to stop.

  “I’m sorry. I know this is confusing. I’m making no sense and shredding tissue like it’s cheese.” She laughed, but it didn’t sound natural, even to her. “Then again, we keep you in business, don’t we?”

  Dr. Reynolds slowly set his coffee mug down, placing it just right on the coaster. She saw that his mug read, I have CDO. It’s like OCD, but all the letters are in alphabetical order as they should be.

  She then noticed an entire shelf filled with various mugs.

  “I collect them. It’s a tradition of sorts. Whenever it is time for a client to leave me, I ask that they buy me a mug to remember them by.” She was so thankful at that moment that he didn’t say patient. He picked up his pen. “Now, back to you. You were saying?”

  “I don’t know what I’m trying to say. I’m just all messed up, Dr. Reynolds.”

  “I believe what you were trying to say is that your daughter has grown up and you feel like you’ve missed some crucial years. Now she’s marrying a man named Marvin and doesn’t know how to make an omelet, so how can she know if this is the right man? You’re wondering if it’s too late to make up for lost time or if it’s too late to talk some sense into her.”

  Beth nodded, her eyes wide.

  “Your other children are Nathan, who is eighteen, and Chip, who is fourteen.” He glanced at his notes. “And then there’s Marvin, whom your daughter is about to marry.”

  Beth nodded again.

  “And he likes pizza.”

  Beth blotted her eyes. “He doesn’t just like it. He delivers it.”

  His poker face blipped for a second, noticeable only by the mustache dropping a quarter of an inch. He seemed to understand, as if it would be his worst nightmare too for his daughter to marry a pizza deliveryman.

  But then his mustache twitched and it was back to business. “All right, Beth. I want to assure you that you’re going to get through this. Transition is hard. I also want to tell you this.”

  “What?” Beth felt a swell of hope because his mustache looked poised to deliver good news.

  “I used to deliver pizza. For a while between high school and college, I didn’t really know what I wanted to do with my life. I couldn’t decide what my passion was. But I found my way, and now I do what I love. Nobody wants to deliver pizza his whole life. Marvin will find his passion. In fact, he probably already knows what it is, and perhaps he needs a wife to show him that he’s got it in him.”

  Beth sank deeper into the overstuffed yellow chair, relief cradling her on every side. “I see.” She nodded and smiled. “You know, Dr. Reynolds, you don’t seem like the kind of doctor who would be interested in counseling women about plastic surgery.”

  A small, wise smile emerged from beneath the ’stache. “I’m not. But I have one patient who believes that since it was her issue, it is probably every other woman’s issue too. Word got around that I was a guru in this field, and suddenly 30 percent of my clientele are botched plastic surgery victims. But mostly I’m just a Christian counselor.”

  “Well, do you think you can help me figure out how to talk Robin out of marrying Marvin?”

  “My suggestion to you would be to let Robin make her own decisions about life, and we’ll help you accept them.”

  “She’s twenty-one. We’re not talking about whether she should wear the white or black dress to prom. This is a life-altering decision.”

  “Most are when you get to be an adult. One decision can affect everything and everyone around us. But it’s her life.”

  Beth crossed her arms. “And I suppose next you’re going to tell me I shouldn’t teach her how to make an omelet.”

  “Don’t you think that if Robin wanted to learn, she would ask you?” Dr. Reynolds set his notebook aside. “Beth, did you work outside of the home?”

  “Kind of. I was the lady who always got talked into selling the product of the parties I was invited to. Scented candles one year. Cute bags and purses the next. I’ve done makeup and pantry organizers and casserole mixes and bath towels and on and on. I’ve tried to bring in extra money as much as I can.”

  “Because the kind of guilt you’re experiencing usually comes from full-time working moms I see.”

  “I was there every day of their little lives. But somehow I got sidetracked.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t name it, see? I mean, I went wrong somewhere. Somehow. But with what? PTA? Maybe. What was the point of all that time on the PTA? I could’ve been teaching Robin to cook. Maybe if I’d stopped and played Barbies with her more, I could’ve been Ken and shown her what kind of husband Barbie was looking for. Instead she played by herself while I tried to keep up with the laundry, and somewhere along the way Ken became a pizza delivery boy and that was the dream. And now Nathan is leaving for college and it just went by so fast. They’re almost gone, all of them. You blink and someone you’ve seen every day of your life is . . . gone.”

  “Not gone. Just away.”

  Beth looked at the clock. Their time was up.

  She hated time. Jenny was not “just away.” She was gone. And because of that, Beth had to pay a man with a mustache eighty dollars an hour so she would have someone to talk to.

  CHAPTER 10

  BUTCH

  BUTCH HAD BEEN TRYING to remember what Ava’s bedtime was. He’d apparently been getting it wrong for weeks. A month ago her second-grade teacher, Mrs. Murdock, had called to say she was falling asleep in class.

 
; “I see.” Butch had tried to think of a question Jenny might ask. “Is she sleeping during her nap time?”

  Long pause. “Well, um, Mr. Browning, we don’t have nap time in second grade.”

  “Oh, right. Of course. Sorry. It’s just that Jenny used to handle these things.”

  “I understand,” Mrs. Murdock said. “You know, if you ever need any . . . advice . . . I’d be happy to help.”

  He didn’t know if she meant that or not, and he didn’t know if she understood how much help he really needed or the kind of help either. So he just said a polite thank-you and tried to get Ava to bed at a decent hour from then on.

  She’d finished her bath and brushed her teeth. Now he stood outside her door and listened. It was quiet. He didn’t know if that was a good or bad sign. But he knew, undoubtedly, that she needed to be tucked in, that he needed to kiss her forehead, kiss her stuffed bunny, and remember the stuffed bunny’s name.

  Mobee?

  Mopsy?

  No, Mobsy . . . wait . . .

  He was halfway into the room when he realized Ava was kneeling by her bed, hands clasped, staring at him.

  “Oh. I’m sorry.”

  “That’s okay. You want to pray with me?”

  Dread kept a smile at bay. No, he did not. But that was the equivalent of telling a kid you didn’t believe in God. He did believe in God. He suspected that God did not believe in him. And he really didn’t have very much to say to God anyway.

  “That was . . .” He took four steps backward. “That was kind of your and your mom’s thing and—”

  “You can say hi to her if you want.”

  If only he could. If he could just talk to her one more time. He’d give anything. But he understood Ava’s need to do this, to talk to the ceiling like she talked to her stuffed bunny. She could imagine her mommy talking back to her. Butch couldn’t. He glanced from the floor to Ava. Her eyes were round and full of hope.

  “Well . . .” There didn’t seem to be a good excuse coming, which was strange because typically he had a full arsenal of them for nearly any occasion.

  “Come on.” She beckoned him like she was the parent trying to coax a little kid into doing something he didn’t want to do.