4. Summer
Summer
At the bottom of Main Street, the road forks. To the left, the boardwalk runs along the beach. It’s the shorter way—but it goes right past the surf school. To the right, Shoreline Drive loops around the back of Crescent Beach, behind the waterfront houses.
I turn right.
I cut through the stand of redwoods. Five or six trees, but their dark red trunks rise so high the light barely gets through.
The air changes when you pass through—cooler, damper, thick with earth and bark.
As a kid, I called it my forest. Grandma would correct me, laughing, “It’s just a few redwoods, Summer.
” But to me it was a kingdom—my secret passage between the road and the house.
I get off the bike and walk it the last few yards.
The house comes into view at the back, by the porch—shutters drawn, wood siding gone gray in patches where the white paint has surrendered to the years. The roof looks intact, but the gutters sag and the shutters are in sorry shape. Weeds have pushed up between the warped deck boards.
It’s just a house. Four walls, a roof. A price per square foot.
My fingers find the pendant.
I prop the bike against the garage door and dig through my bag for the back door key. I try the lock. It sticks, swollen with moisture, then gives all at once with a dull thud.
The smell hits me: stale air, warm dust, dry wood, salt worked into the walls. And, almost gone, something softer underneath. Grandma’s soap, maybe. Or Grandpa’s coffee, which he’d leave on the living room table until it went cold.
I stop on the threshold. It’s too dark to make anything out. I turn on my phone’s flashlight.
The hallway looks narrower than I remember. White sheets cover the furniture—the side table, the coat rack, the little shelf. I don’t even know who put them there, or when. Everything’s frozen, like time stopped and forgot to start again.
The kitchen’s a little less dark—thin shafts of light filter through the gaps in the shutters.
My phone’s beam sweeps the empty counter, the closed cabinets, the sink. The faucet coughs and spits nothing but air when I turn it.
And on the drying rack… a mug.
A thin gray film covers it. My thumb brushes the surface. The dust lifts away to reveal a crackled glaze, painted in once-bright colors—blue, yellow, green—laid down by the clumsy fingers of a little girl who didn’t yet know how to hold a brush.
Best Grandma in Coral Bay
The letters are carved into the clay, a little crooked. The B leans, the G looks like a 6, the a in Grandma has a wild tail that flies up too high.
I made it in kindergarten, during a pottery class.
I wrapped it in pink tissue paper and gave it to Grandma the summer I was five.
She said, “It’s the most beautiful mug in the world, Summer!
” before tucking it in beside the others—the real ones—in the cabinet.
That was the one she reached for every morning.
My throat tightens.
You’re here to sell and leave.
I set the mug carefully back in the rack and open a cabinet. Stacked dishes, mismatched glasses, empty jars. I open another. Dish towels neatly folded, placemats with seashell patterns. Everything’s clean. Well... everything was clean.
I turn to the fridge. The door’s buried under a jumble of kitschy magnets—a Statue of Liberty I brought back from New York, Hokusai’s Great Wave pinning a yellowed discount coupon for Star Park...
Wedged under a Coral Bay magnet in blue letters, a Polaroid hangs crooked.
I straighten it without thinking. The photo’s faded, but I recognize them all—the gang, crowded around the lodge pool, the last summer we were all together.
We’d asked Hana to take it. Miles, pink hair, sticks his tongue out at the lens.
Luke, tanned to the tips of his ears, has an arm around Evan—Evan with his arms crossed, ramrod straight, even in swim trunks.
Sierra sits at the edge of the pool in a bikini, feet in the water, a book on her knees.
Noah, hanging back a little, his eyes too soft.
And me, planted in the middle—seventeen, but a kid’s body.
No chest, no hips, braces I’m trying to hide.
A tanned, muscled arm is wrapped around my shoulders.
I put the Polaroid back before I can look any longer. Underneath, half-hidden by the Star Park coupon... a sea otter figurine.
I go still.
The Monterey aquarium. The gang killed an afternoon there.
Miles played tour guide like he owned the place, unable to pass a single tank without explaining everything—habitat, diet, mating behavior—before capping it off with the Latin name, delivered with a professor’s seriousness. His dream was to be a marine biologist.
The sea otter figurine—someone else bought me that one, at the gift shop. He slipped it into my hand on the way out, without a word, like it was nothing. I stuck it on the fridge that same night.
I turn away and leave the room.
The living room is large, crowded with sheet-draped furniture. A big couch, a coffee table, shelves. The windows face the front, the ocean side, but the closed shutters block everything—light, sound, air.
I set my phone down and force open a shutter. It barely budges, then finally gives. Morning light floods the room and reveals the dust—thousands of particles hanging in the air, golden, almost beautiful.
I lift the sheet off the old floral couch. The cushions have sagged and the fabric’s faded, but I still recognize the round armrests, the too-deep seat, the dip in the middle where Grandpa always sat.
Trash. Along with the curtains, the doilies, and half the stuff down here.
How many days of work just to make it presentable?
Air it out, clean, repaint, sell.
I grab my phone and head upstairs. The steps creak under my feet—a low, familiar sound.
A steep staircase up to the attic, plus four doors. The bathroom, Dad’s childhood room, my grandparents’ room... and mine.
Ajar.
I move closer. The air coming out is warm, still, thick with dust.
Behind that door, there’s a bed, a ceiling I stared at for a whole night six years ago, my body burning, my head full of promises that weren’t. The most beautiful night of my life—and the stupidest.
I take a step back and head for the end of the hall.
My grandparents’ room is bigger, more neutral. A double bed under a checked bedspread, a dark wood wardrobe, a vanity with an oval mirror spotted with age. It smells like dried lavender—Grandma tucked sachets everywhere.
The window’s right in front of me.
I step forward, open the window, work the rusted latch that fights me a little, and push the shutters open.
The light hits like a slap. And with it, the sound.
First, a voice. A young man, singing. Not in English—long, open vowels. Hawaiian, maybe. The melody rises and falls, easy, carried on the wind.
Then the rest comes. The hiss of spraying water. The clack of a board set on a rack. Kids’ shouts—high, happy, the kind you hear from a long way off. I squint.
The Walker Surf School yard is right below. A hundred feet away, maybe less. Closer than I remember—or maybe the school’s grown, the clutter spread out.
The building is low, wood-sided, topped with a corrugated metal roof bleached by salt.
Dozens of boards are lined up on wooden racks—longboards, shortboards, foam boards for beginners. Wetsuits drip from a line strung between two posts, black and glistening. The ground is all sand and puddles.
Garden hose in hand, the singing man rinses a board. In his twenties, tall, broad, sun-browned skin, black hair knotted at the nape. Tattoos cover his arms and chest. He sets the clean board on the rack, grabs another, and starts waxing it—slow, circular strokes, in time with his song.
I’ve never seen him before.
Farther down, on the beach, a young woman with curly brown hair stands knee-deep in the water, ringed by four or five kids in oversized wetsuits. She lifts one of them by the armpits to set him back on his foam board, and her laugh carries up to me—open, warm, contagious.
Her, I don’t know either.
The Walkers’ old VW bus is parked near the entrance to the yard.
Red with a cream roof, dented, covered in dust and surf stickers—the same ones as six years ago, plus a few newer layers.
The same red-and-cream van he used to drive me around in—windows down, the smell of wax, the music too loud, my bare feet on the dash.
I swallow.
Next to the bus, an old turquoise trailer, sitting there like it’s always been part of the scenery, a small wooden deck out front and a board leaning against the side. I’ve never seen it before. Someone lives in the surf school yard, right under my windows.
The school’s still here, but the faces have changed. The tattooed guy, the woman on the beach—instructors who weren’t part of the picture six years ago.
Maggie Walker must have kept running the school, or handed it off to someone. He’s somewhere on the pro circuit. And Noah’s in med school in San Francisco, far from all this.
They’re gone. Life here kept going without them—and without me.
I lean against the windowsill and let the sea air fill my lungs.
Good. He’s not here. I can breathe. I can sell this house, wrap up my business, and leave without ever running into him.
Two weeks. You sell, you sign, you leave. He’s halfway around the world.
Ryan’s words finally click. “The beach is very active.” A kid squeals with joy as he topples off his board. “The immediate surroundings complicate things.” The tattooed guy launches into a new verse, louder. “Potential buyers are looking for a quieter setting.”
I look at the yard, the piled-up boards, the dripping wetsuits, the red bus, the turquoise trailer, the kids yelling.
Ah. So that’s it.
I close the window, then go back down, cross the dark hallway, and unlock the front door, on the beach side.
The yard explodes with light.