Chapter Twenty Two
By Thanksgiving morning, Summer had changed her mind three times about going to Lorraine’s.
The first decision had been made in bed, with Jonah’s hand warm against her stomach and the smell of coffee coming up from the machine he had set the night before.
They could stay here, she had thought. There was food in the house; there was no reason to get dressed for anyone.
Then her mother called to ask what time they would collect her. Summer gave the time they had agreed on, and the day began moving without waiting for her to become certain about it.
Jonah found her beside the kitchen window, holding a dish she had forgotten to wrap. He looked at the uncovered pastry and then at her face.
“You don’t have to bring it,” he said. He took a clean towel from the drawer. “Mom’s already made enough for next week.”
“I want to bring it.” Summer put the dish down before he could take it. “I just don’t know whether I want to go.”
He leaned against the counter, still holding the towel. From upstairs came the sound of his phone, which he left ringing while she waited for him to answer.
“We could be late,” he said. He looked at the clock. “Go for dinner and come home.”
“There’s always something after dinner.” Summer folded the towel over the dish. “Someone makes coffee. Then nobody wants to be the first person to leave.”
“I’ll be the first person.” He put a hand on her waist. “You can blame me.”
Summer turned toward him. They’d both said yes when Lorraine asked; she wasn’t going to send him out to the car while she stood at the door explaining why they had to leave.
“Let’s eat and come home,” Summer said. “I don’t want to bring all the leftovers back either. Tell your mother before she starts wrapping things.”
Jonah went upstairs to dress. By the time Summer came down in a soft brown skirt, he was fastening his shoes on the bottom step. She bent to kiss him and stayed until he caught her waist, drawing her between his knees.
At Lorraine’s, the kitchen windows were fogged from cooking.
Summer’s mother disappeared into a conversation about potatoes, and Jonah went to find his father while Summer stood in the hall taking off her coat.
There were photographs on the narrow table beside the stairs, school pictures and holidays she had learned to look past because knowing their dates would have required a different lifetime.
One showed Jonah and Kylie as teenagers. She had seen it before: a summer garden, Jonah squinting, Kylie with an arm thrown around his neck. Today it seemed to have moved closer to the front, although Summer knew that was probably only because she couldn’t stop seeing it.
Lorraine came out carrying a bowl. She followed Summer’s glance and set the bowl down so quickly that the serving spoon struck its edge. “I didn’t think,” she said. She reached for the frame. “I didn’t even remember that was still there. I should have?—”
“Leave it.” Summer’s voice was sharper than she intended. She looked toward the sitting room, where Jonah was talking to his father. “Please don’t make a thing of it while he’s here.”
Lorraine stopped with her hand above the frame. For a moment they stood close enough that Summer could see the flour on her sleeve and the red place beside her thumb where she’d cut it.
“I keep finding her,” Lorraine said quietly. She looked at the picture rather than at Summer. “In drawers. On the computer. I think I’ve put everything away, and then there’s another one.”
“Don’t tell him every time you find something,” Summer said. She picked up the bowl before Lorraine could decide what to do with it. “He knows how long you knew her.”
Jonah appeared in the doorway as Lorraine lifted the photograph. Summer felt her stomach drop, but he only looked at the frame and held out his hand. His mother gave it to him without explaining.
He stood with it for several seconds. Then he opened the drawer beneath the table, laid it facedown inside, and closed the drawer. Summer waited for him to say something, but he came and took the bowl from her because it was heavy, and carried it into the dining room.
There were five places set, with the good dishes and flowers in the middle. Summer sat beside Jonah and moved a spoon out of the way of his elbow while Lorraine found room for another serving bowl.
At first they talked too carefully. Jonah’s father asked about work, then looked as if he regretted choosing the subject; Summer’s mother began asking about Christmas orders, stopped in the middle of a number, and asked whether anyone wanted more water.
Summer could hear every attempt to leave an uncomfortable thing behind.
Then Jonah asked his father about a dispute with the neighbor’s tree.
His father began explaining, Lorraine corrected the first date, and within a minute they were arguing about something that had happened before Halloween.
Summer ate while the conversation filled the room around her, grateful to be forgotten for a little while.
Beside her, Jonah reached for the potatoes. His cuff caught the handle of his knife, knocking it against the plate with a sudden clatter, and he flinched so hard she felt it through the chair. Everyone stopped speaking.
“It’s a knife,” he said, too loudly. He looked at the plate. “I know what it is.”
His father picked it up and handed it back. “I’ve been hitting that glass all afternoon,” he said. “Your mother put everything too close together.” He resumed the argument about the tree before Lorraine could defend the arrangement.
Summer kept her knee against Jonah’s beneath the table. He picked up his fork but left the potatoes where they were.
Afterward he went into the kitchen, and Summer followed with two plates.
She found him looking through the window at the dark strip of garden beyond the porch light.
On the sill stood a small ceramic bird she remembered from her first dinner here, when she’d been trying to decide whether his parents liked her.
“I’m ready to go,” Summer said, putting the plates down. “Unless you want to stay. We could go somewhere else if you don’t want to go home yet.”
“I’d like dessert,” he said. “I’d like to eat it without everybody watching me.” He stopped, then added, “You weren’t doing it. I don’t mean you.”
“I was doing it,” Summer said, coming to stand beside him. “I thought you were going to drop the glass. I nearly reached across and took it away.”
Jonah looked back through the window. In the glass, his mother passed behind them carrying a stack of plates; she hesitated outside the kitchen before continuing toward the sink. Neither of them turned.
“That was the summer I broke my wrist,” he said. “The picture in the hall. I was showing you the others, wasn’t I? There’s one where you can see the whole cast.”
“You’d drawn on it,” Summer said. “I thought it was a shoe. You said it was a car.”
Jonah laughed, rubbing his wrist. “You weren’t the first person to say that. I didn’t mean it to be so big.”
Summer took his hand and turned it over. There was a pale mark near the heel of his palm, which she’d noticed before without asking about it. He told her how he’d fallen, cutting across a parking lot on his bicycle, and she listened until her mother came to ask where they wanted their tea.
They went to the small sitting room at the front of the house. Summer’s mother brought their tea, and they stayed long enough for her to ask who wanted the rest of the pie.
“I said we weren’t bringing it all back,” Summer told Jonah. “You heard me this morning.”
“I heard you.” He held the pie dish while her mother found a bag. “You don’t have to eat any.”
On the way home, they dropped her mother off and took the longer road along the water. Neither suggested stopping. At the house Jonah went to put the kettle on, and Summer went upstairs to change, passing the little room where they had stored things they hadn’t known how to discuss.
She stopped in the doorway. Jonah had moved the old overnight bag to the top of the cupboard, where one of its straps dangled against a stack of folded sheets.
Last April, she had bought the pregnancy test on her way to his house.
All day she had been explaining the nausea to herself with things she could do something about: the coffee she’d drunk before breakfast, the heat in the kitchen, the leftover cream she had tasted because throwing it away felt wasteful.
She had been late before. By the time she reached the pharmacy, she had almost persuaded herself she was spending money to prove something she knew already.
Jonah had been downstairs, talking to his father on the phone.
Summer could hear him laughing at something through the bathroom floor.
The sound made the result seem more impossible, that he could be having an ordinary conversation while she stood looking at the end of the life they had only just begun to enjoy.
She had wrapped the test in toilet paper, then unwrapped it. Hiding it made no difference to what was underneath, and she sat on the closed toilet seat with her jeans still unfastened, furious that she had not thought to finish getting dressed before the result appeared.
“Summer?” Jonah called from the landing. He knocked lightly. “Are you all right? You’ve gone very quiet.”
She opened the door because she couldn’t think how to answer through it. His gaze moved from her face to the test, then back, and she watched him understand before either of them said the word.
“Oh,” he said. He held the door so it wouldn’t swing into her. “Is that—” He stopped, looking at the two lines she had examined until they seemed printed there before she had opened the box.
“Yes.” Summer tried to hand it to him, then withdrew it because it was an absurd thing to give someone. “I think so. I mean, yes.”