Summerlong Read Online Free PDF Page B

the house where she expects to see his van and she sees it. She sees the light on in an upstairs window, and she goes into the front yard and stands on the flagstone path, and then when she sees him, the man she had expected to see, the guy she’d talked to outside the Kum & Go, pass by the window in jeans and no shirt, holding a mug of coffee, she goes to the door and knocks.
    Charlie Fucking Gulliver.
    Behind her, she sees the glowing promise of a sunrise and the trees filling with it too, a spreading flame in the sky, and she remembers how much that once mattered to her, those brief moments of the new morning, when she had first moved back to the Midwest and was still in love with its light.

7.
    When Don Lowry wakes, just before dawn, he is dry-mouthed and fully erect, and his head buzzes with the strangeness of half sleep, but he knows exactly where he is. He’s in a hammock on the Manettis’ sleeping porch, hungover, maybe still stoned, hungry, and next to him is ABC. Her hand is under his shirt and on his bare stomach somehow.
    How does one exit a hammock without waking a second sleeper, also in the hammock?
    This is a question he’s never considered before!
    ABC shifts her hand as she stirs, moves it off his stomach, grazing it against the front of his pants, unintentionally, yes, but a pleasurable wince seems to rush up to Don’s forehead from the bottom of his spine. He rolls from the hammock and stands, straightening his clothes and watching ABC, still sleeping, as the hammock sways slowly back and forth.
    She’s probably pretending to sleep. She just wants him gone.
    He smooths his hands over his body, adjusting himself. Trying to make himself something like presentable in the waxing daylight. Her pants came off at some point in the night. Don Lowry, who considers himself a light sleeper, almost a nonsleeper, has slept the sleep of the dead.
    He has to pee, finds the bathroom, and then, holding his shoes, walks down the steps. His mouth is so dry and his head thumps and he makes his way into the spacious kitchen and seeks a glass of water, two Advil if he is lucky. He looks at a gleaming fridge—it’sa new kitchen, a significantly sleek set of appliances, butcher-block countertops, and custom-made cabinets that he had not imagined such an old home having: it would push this home over the $300,000 mark. Inside the fridge, he finds a whole shelf of bottled water, juices, beers, and cans of seltzer. He grabs one of these cans, pops the top, and then smells, in the distance, burning leaves.
    Shutting the fridge, turning around, he sees the white-haired Mrs. Manetti, Ruth, in her bathrobe, lighting up a joint.
    “Don Lowry!” she says. “You wanna burn?”
    “Um, sure,” Don says.
    He sits down at the kitchen table across from her, his sparkling water in hand. She hands him the joint. He takes it, and holds in the smoke, less smooth than what he was smoking upstairs. He thinks he remembers a morning hit is good for a hangover and he is hungover and will be all day.
    “Not easy to roll a joint with arthritis,” Ruth says.
    “I guess, what, it’s supposed to help with that?” Don asks.
    “At my age,” Ruth says, winking, “it helps with every goddamn thing. Do you have any big plans for the summer, Don?”
    “Um,” Don says, stuttering a bit. He has known Ruth Manetti most of his life, but he’s not made small talk with her in years. She had faded into the scenery of the town for him, another old lady he knew and whose house he would someday sell in order to settle an estate. “I guess we’ll probably go up to Minnesota again. Lake Superior.”
    “You still use the Merrick place every August?”
    “Good memory!” Don says. He remembers, now that he sees her face light up, Ruth had grown up along the North Shore of Minnesota. “Have you been back there?”
    “Almost a decade since I’ve seen that lake,” she says. “That’s a shame, isn’t it?”
    ABC walks into the kitchen in her