Summer by the Sea

Author:SUSAN WIGGS
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MIRA
Published: 2015-05-30T16:00:00+00:00

twenty-three

The day dragged, each minute longer than the last. When the hour lurched to 5:00 p.m., she called herself an idiot for not getting off sooner. It was a weeknight, still early in the season, and business was slow.

During the long periods when no one was around, she took a paperback novel from her purse, perched behind the counter and indulged herself. If anyone came, she slipped the book under the counter and hoped no one noticed the hot-pink cover emblazoned with an embracing couple. Someone who was going to Brown couldn’t possibly be reading romance novels.

Several times she reached for the phone, intending to tell her best friend Linda who was back in town. But she wasn’t ready to share Alex’s reappearance with anyone just yet. Instead, she phoned home and left a message on the answering machine, letting her father know she would be late.

If only she had a mother or a sister, she thought wistfully. There were certain things for which a girl needed her mother. Getting your period or shopping for your first bra, for example. Those just weren’t the sort of issues you wanted to discuss with the nuns at school or your dad. And sometimes you were bursting to tell her everything inside you, like when Alex Montgomery came back to town, having transformed himself from a geek to a Greek god.

She served a noisy family who had just taken a beach rental on Pocono Road. Then a skinny woman with complicated special instructions about anchovies arrived. Rosa chatted with the retired guy who delivered the Chamber of Commerce papers for the rack by the door, but her mind kept wandering to Alex. She couldn’t believe how much he’d changed. She wondered if he knew he looked like a guy on the cover of a romance novel. Probably not. He was reading Bulfinch’s Mythology at age ten. He was probably reading Proust now. In French.

The clock somehow dragged toward evening. From her station at the counter, she watched the beachgoers pick up their straw bags and ice chests and head for their cars. In the slanting rays of the setting sun, the water turned to flickering gold. Far down the coast, the lighthouse blinked its signal—two long and two short, nine seconds in between.

And finally seven o’clock rolled around. A girl named Keisha came on duty to take Rosa’s place because, in the summer, Mario’s was open until midnight, seven days a week.

“Slow tonight, huh?” asked Keisha.

“Yes.” Rosa tried not to look hurried as she peeled off her apron and hair net.

Technically, Keisha was a summer person; her family lived in Hartford during the school year. Her grandfather had been a Black Panther, a fact that seemed to embarrass Keisha. Then he wrote a memoir and got himself elected to Congress, and suddenly they were a middle-class family. Her parents were both lawyers, and, fiercely intellectual, she was headed for Amherst College. Still, she never acted like the summer people who strolled around in their tennis whites.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.