The Days of Summer

Evie clattered through the bottles on the cart. “Where are those silver things that go on the bottle necks to tell you which liquor is which?”

“Laurel thought they were necklaces. She put them on her storybook dolls.” Kathryn dropped her hands away from her strained face. “It drove Jimmy nuts, but he didn’t have the heart to take them away from her.”

Evie held up two of the bottles. “I wonder which one is the scotch.”

“The brown one.”

“Funny.” Her sister sniffed one of the bottles. “Bourbon.”

“I’ll take bourbon and Coke.”

Evie dumped bourbon into the glass and splashed a small bit of Coke over it.

“One night Laurel made me tell her what each necklace said. She named her dolls Bourbon, Scotch, Rum, Gin, and Vodka. Jimmy and I laughed about it.” Strange how his laughter was still fresh in Kathryn’s mind, and for just the briefest of moments, she didn’t feel locked in some dark, parallel dimension made for those left behind.

Here.” Evie handed her a drink and sat down, folding her legs under her. They didn’t speak.

Her years with Jimmy filed through Kathryn’s mind like frames in a documentary. His laughter, his fears, his tears of excitement when he first saw their daughter in her arms, squalling and hungry. She could hear him singing the songs he had written to her, and for her. She heard the first thing he ever said to her—and the last: Just one more night on the road, babe. I’ll be home tomorrow.

Her sister set her glass down. “Lord, that tastes good. Maybe a few drinks will wash away the bitterness of Julia’s tongue.”

“Do you think what she said was true?”

“I doubt it,” Evie answered. “But which tidbit of your mother-in-law’s viperlike wisdom are we talking about?”

“That society treats women without men as nonentities.”

“Oh.” Evie laughed bitterly. “The idea that widows should be strong because it makes people uncomfortable to see someone’s grief.”

“Well, she is a widow. She should know.”

“She’s a black widow. They eat their mates. She deals with her grief by denying yours. She also said single, independent women have their life preferences questioned.” Evie raised her chin and mimicked Julia’s husky voice: “‘You are a divorcée, Evie dear, and marrying a divorced woman is like going to the track and betting all your money on a lame horse. Divorcées are only fair game for men who want to get them into the bedroom but would never consider marrying them.’”

“You shouldn’t let her get to you.”

“You’ve had more practice dealing with her than I have, Kay.”

“I might be getting a lot more practice.” Kathryn rested her glass on her knee and stared into it. “Julia wants me to give up this place and move in with her.”

Evie turned sideways on the couch, facing her. “You cannot live in the same house with that judgmental woman who will suck every bit of life from you. Half the time I want to muzzle her. Even now, when I should feel terribly sorry for her, she can say something that makes me just want to pop her.”

“Underneath, Julia is as fragile as I feel. You saw her in the car. She needs Laurel, and with Mom and Pop gone, Laurel needs to know her only grandparent.”

“The woman is an emotional vacuum.”

“She’s never that way with Laurel. It’s sad, really, the way she was talking today about her son the star, as if all she had left of him would be those few minutes when some radio station played one of his songs. I have Laurel. Maybe Jimmy’s mother should, too.”

“You’re Jimmy’s wife. She should treat you better.”

“He used to say it wasn’t me. She couldn’t let go of him. I look at Laurel and I’m so scared about what kind of parent I’ll be. What if I cling to her? How do I do this alone? How do I know what’s right and wrong, and how do I protect her?”

“The same way you did when Jimmy was alive. You can’t completely protect her from everything.”

“Laurel doesn’t have Jimmy anymore, but if we move in with Julia, at least she would have his mother. This apartment isn’t the same. All the colors look so faded. Nothing is sharp or clear. It feels empty. I don’t know if I can stay.”

“You can stay with me, Kay. It’s wonderful on Catalina. The island is small and safe. The house is small, too, but we all can fit. There’s room in back to build a small studio for your kiln and wheel.”

“You said you were going to plant a garden there.”

“Who needs a garden? My faculty meetings are always in the mornings. I could watch Laurel in the afternoons and evenings while you work. Please. Think about it.”

“I love you for offering, but it would be a disaster. Besides the fact that you just bought the place, you have one bathroom. You know we’d be on top of each other.”

Evie took her hand. “I wish you would.”

“I know you do.” Kathryn looked around. “Maybe I’m being silly and I should stay here.”

“Oh, hell, Kay, I don’t know. I can’t tell you what to do. I worry about you both living with that woman.”

The doorbell rang.

“Ignore it. They’ll go away.” Kathryn took a drink.

The bell kept ringing and ringing.

Evie shifted. “I can’t stand it. I’ll get it.”

“No. No.” Kathryn stood. “I’ll do it.” When she opened the front door, a flashbulb went off and everything was suddenly white.

“Star magazine, here. We’d like an interview, now that you’re Jimmy Peyton’s widow.”

“Leave her alone!” Evie was suddenly standing behind her, a hand on Kathryn’s shoulder. “Go away!” Evie reached around her and slammed the door, swearing.

Kathryn buried her face in her hands. “I don’t know if I can do this.”

“Mama?” Laurel was standing in the dark recesses of the hallway, a stuffed duck Jimmy had given her tucked under one arm.

Kathryn rushed to pick her up. “Are you okay, angel?”

Laurel nodded, hugging the duck, but she kept staring curiously at the front door.

“That kind of thing wouldn’t happen at Julia’s.” Kathryn looked pointedly at her sister. “She has the front gates and hired help.”

Evie nodded.

First and foremost, Kathryn knew she had to protect her daughter. Today people had said the stupidest things: It’ll get better with time. God needed Jimmy more. You’re young, dear, you’ll marry again. She could only imagine how Laurel might interpret any one of those comments. And how long would it be before the newspaper people finally left them alone?

“Mama?” Laurel framed Kathryn’s cheeks with her small hands and brought her face very close, the way she did whenever she wanted someone’s sole attention. “Those people at the door want to view you because you’re Daddy’s window.”

The words took a moment to register. Kathryn turned to Evie. “I’m a window.”

Her sister looked as if she were trying not to laugh.

“I’m a window,” Kathryn repeated—it was all so ludicrous—then laughter poured out of her, uncontrolled, like water running over. She couldn’t stop. It was just laughter, she told herself, a silly emotion, really, and panic edged it—a sound that was closer to shattering glass—and she knew then her laughter was anything but natural.

CHAPTER 3

Orange County, California

On that long stretch of land between LA and San Diego, towns grew quickly and sprawled all over one another. Amusement parks with gravity rooms and wild toad rides replaced boysenberry fields and orange groves where people could pick all the fruit they wanted for a fifty-cent piece. Tracts of shake-shingled homes with attached garages sold out before the houses were even built, and traffic signals sprang up on street corners suddenly too busy for stop signs.

Public transportation? It was an afterthought. Cars were necessary in Southern California, and oil was big business. Hammer-shaped oil pumps lined the coast highway all along Huntington Beach, where tar spotted long stretches of sand and stuck like gum to broken seashells, litter, and the murky green kelp that washed ashore. The locals called it Tin Can Beach—it looked like a dump, so everyone just used it as one.

If tar was the automobile driver’s grim trade-off for pumping oil up from the ground, so were the skeletal black oil towers on Signal Hill and the churning refineries off Sepulveda Boulevard, with their tall, cigar-shaped towers that spit white smoke and all those acrid smells into the sweet California air. A popular joke regularly ran through the LA nightclubs that Southern Californians paid the prices for their automobiles in dollars and scents.

But the truth was, people spent money on cars for mobility and freedom, so they could be in control of where they went and when. They bought homes because they liked to think they owned a piece of a place where the sun shined most of the time and movie stars lived large and died tragically.

The coastal resort town of Newport Beach was all prime property. The ocean was clean, the sand fine as sugar, and there was no litter anywhere. Pristine white yachts pulled into private docks along the isles, where sprawling California-style homes carried addresses as distinctive as those in Beverly Hills. Whenever the Santa Ana winds blew in, the scent from the eucalyptus trees above Highway 1 cleared the sinuses better than Bano-Rub, a petroleum-jelly-and-camphor mixture that helped launch Banning Oil into the petroleum by-products industry and gave Victor Gaylord Banning enough money to buy up a chunk of Newport’s exclusive Lido Isle with hardly a dent in his bank accounts.

It was a Thursday afternoon, maybe three o’clock, and Victor was home in the middle of the day, facing a wall of windows—all that stood between him and the civilized edges of the wide blue Pacific. He stared at his reflection in the glass, seeing only the physiognomy of the one person he vowed he would never become. His father had been weak, unable to succeed in anything except failure.

Victor grew up in a house of discontent, with only his sister, Aletta, as champion against a mother whose elusive approval he could never capture, because she saw in Victor only his father standing there in miniature, a constant reminder of her bad choices. It was Aletta who paid the biggest price for their father’s failures. She died a useless death when there was no money to save her, and Victor was abandoned by the one person he depended upon.

For his mother, Aletta’s death was complete devastation. She couldn’t bear to look at the only child left, so she would lock him in the closet for hours. Eventually she saw suicide as the only release from her agony. She didn’t want to live in a world with only her weak husband and his look-alike son, who, try as he might, would never be a substitute for the girl child she truly loved. To Victor’s complete dismay, he cried for days after his mother killed herself, unable to control his emotions. The Banning legacy was jagged and sharp and part of him, no matter how he tried to prove otherwise.

Today, his cheeks and eyes were proof that sleep escaped him. He hadn’t shaved since yesterday, when he went to identify the bodies of his son and daughter-in-law, filed in long stainless steel cabinets at the LA morgue. Until a few days ago, he hadn’t seen or spoken to his son, Rudy, in almost ten years. His only source about anything in Rudy’s life had been Rachel. What Victor was feeling at that very moment—had he allowed it inside—would have brought him to his knees. Grief was crippling. Allowed in, it made the strong weak.

At the sound of his Town Car pulling in, he moved to a narrow window where he could see the driveway through the waxy leaves of a fat camellia bush. Next to his Lincoln the boys stood side by side, wearing similar striped T-shirts and stiff new jeans cuffed up. Although four years apart, they looked like Bannings: blond hair, square jaws, and wide mouths, all inherited from his own grandfather. Their skin was pale, their expressions thinly serious, and they had their mother’s thick, dark eyebrows. Cale, the younger, took hold of Jud’s hand. They looked like bookends that didn’t quite match.

Victor saw only their vulnerability, as they clung to each other like scared little girls. They would never be able to stand on their own. Rachel had ruined them. He’d seen enough and walked away, wondering exactly what he would have to do to turn them from pussy little boys into the men they needed to be to make it in his world.

Soon he heard the hushed voices of the help, and the hurried steps in the entry hall of children he had never spoken to. His driver came into the room, his chauffeur’s cap in his hands. “Your grandsons are here.” Harlan wasn’t a huge man, but he was stronger than an ox and looked a little like one. He was an ex–middleweight boxer with a flat, broken nose and porcelain front teeth Victor had paid for. “Do you want me to take the boys upstairs?”

“No. I’ll be out in a minute. They didn’t give you any trouble?”

Harlan shook his head. “They sat in the backseat whispering about riding in the limousine. Thought it was pretty special.”

“Is the MG back from the paint shop?” Victor asked.

“Yes sir.”

“Check the paint job on the running boards and the hood.”

“I checked it this morning.”

“Good.” His son had loved the MG, but that had been back in the days before Rudy threw the car keys at him and walked away from everything Banning. “Let the boys wait in the entry for now,” Victor said evenly. “I’ll be out soon.”

Harlan left, and Victor poured a scotch, wanting to be somewhere else—a sweeter time—the few in his life he could count on one hand. Under his feet, the wood floor creaked, and he looked down at the hairpin edges of a trapdoor to the fallout shelter, something his architect insisted he needed. But it was a useless hole in the floor that did nothing to protect him from the real fallout of his life: his son had died hating him. A scotch didn’t help. Mistakes wouldn’t dissolve in alcohol—although Rudy had certainly tried. So Victor remained there, his feet on the cracks of the trapdoor, a useless drink in his hand, facing the largest ocean in the world and the worst of his sins.

Cale Banning stood with his older brother in the hallway of a strange house, in a strange neighborhood, waiting to meet a stranger—the grandfather he’d never known he had until a few hours ago. Their suitcases and toys were piled up in the hallway, stacked in a hurry and looking as confused as he felt. He tugged on his brother Jud’s shirt. “How come I don’t remember this grandpa? Why wasn’t he ever around? Didn’t he like us?”

“Who knows?”

Cale stared at their things and thought they looked like they didn’t belong there.

Jud sat down on the stairs, his elbows on his long skinny legs, his hands hanging between his knees. “I remember his car,” he told Cale. “I saw it drive away from the house a few times.”

“Did you ever see him?”

“No.”

Cale searched the hollow room for something familiar. High on the wall above the staircase was a window of colored glass, like in church. “Look up there.”

“I saw it,” Jud said distractedly. “It’s one of Mom’s paintings.”

Cale studied the painting hung near the stained-glass window; it was huge. Once, when he’d asked his mother why she painted so big, she told him large canvases had bigger things to say, and he wouldn’t understand until he was older, so he should ask her again when he was Jud’s age. He looked at Jud. “Do you know why Mom painted big pictures?”

“No.”

“It’s supposed to say something.” Cale studied the colors of red and blue, green and yellow slashed across the painting above him. Her studio had never been off-limits. She usually smelled of something called linseed oil and her clothes were covered in paint splotches that made about as much sense to him as the paintings did. But inside her studio, the two of them would drink bottles of Coca-Cola, eat egg salad sandwiches and Twinkies, and she would talk to him while she painted with huge long strokes of color that involved her whole body and seemed to make sense only to her. As she stood back and away from her work, she told him there were messages in art about life and the way people thought and felt, that sometimes the messages were hidden, secrets only some had the eye to see, but the soul of the artist was always there if anyone chose to look close enough.

“Jud? What does a soul look like?”

His brother looked at him. “You’re weird.”

Cale sat down and rested his chin in his hands. “I miss her.”

Jud didn’t say anything, but slid his arm around him, so Cale leaned against his shoulder, because if his parents were really dead, then Jud was all he had left.

When he glanced up, a man stood off to the side. His father’s father was tall and looked a little like his dad. But his hair was a mix of blond and brown and gray. He was looking at him with an unreadable expression. Cale straightened. “Why did you bring us here?”

Jud stood up so fast it was like he had a fire in his pants.

But their grandfather remained silent.

Why didn’t they know him? Why didn’t he say anything? Why did their mom and dad have to die and leave them with no one but him? Cale wanted to hit something, maybe this grim-faced man who stood away from him. “How come I don’t know you? Are you really my grandpa?” Cale took a step.

Jud grabbed his arm and hauled him back. “Stay here.”

“You’re Cale,” his grandfather said finally.

Cale stood in the taller shadow of his brother. “Yes.”

“And you’re Jud.” His grandfather shook his older brother’s hand as if he were a grown man, but didn’t offer to shake Cale’s. “Come with me,” he said to Jud, then went out the front door with Jud following.

Cale was his grandson, too, so he ran after them, dogging his brother, who was beside their grandfather. Cale ran past both of them and turned, half-running backward in front of his grandfather. “Where are we going?”

“To the garage.”

“Why?”

“I want to show your brother something.”

He wanted to show Jud but not him. “What?” Cale asked.

His grandfather kept walking.

“What do you want to show him?” Cale stayed ahead of him because he was afraid if he stopped now his grandfather would walk right over him. “You don’t like me,” Cale said.

His grandfather looked at him. “Does it matter if I like you?”

“Yes,” Cale said.

“Why?”

“Because you’re my grandfather. It’s your job to like me.”

He laughed then. “Good answer, Cale.”

For just a second, Cale thought his grandfather might like him after all.

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

“You won’t talk to me.”

“Does that bother you?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because I haven’t done anything wrong.”

“So you think that you have to do something wrong for someone to not like you?”

Cale knew sometimes people had no reason at all not to like you. “I don’t know,” he answered truthfully.

“Think about it, and when you have an answer you can knock on this door and tell me.” His grandfather turned to Jud, holding the door open. “Come inside, son.”

Jud disappeared inside.

When Cale tried to sneak a peek, his grandfather blocked the doorway. “What if I told you that I like Jud because he’s the oldest?”

Cale stood stick-straight, arms at his sides, like soldiers in tall red hats who guarded queens and refused to show people what they were feeling.

“Answer me,” his grandfather said. “What would you say to that?”

“I would say that you’re a stupid old man.”

His grandfather’s expression didn’t change. “Perhaps I am,” he said finally, and closed the door in Cale’s face.

Cale lay in bed, listening for silence in the hallway. A tree outside the window moved in the wind as he lay there, his heart beating in his ears, his breath sounding loud and hollow beneath the covers. His brother was all the way down the hall in the house of a man who said they were supposed to call him Victor. Not Grandfather or Grandpa. Victor.

When only silence came from the hallway, Cale bolted from the bed and went straight to the closet. He carried an armload of clothes back to the bed, pulled up the covers, then socked them a few times so the lump looked like him sleeping.

His grandfather’s bedroom was at the end of a long, dark hallway on the second floor. The double doors were slightly open and a shaft of bright light cut across the wood floor. Cale followed the sound of Victor’s voice coming from inside. His grandfather was yelling on the phone.

“What the hell do you mean you can’t get the paintings? What auction house? Where?”

Cale stopped two feet from the door.

“Tell them they aren’t authorized to sell. Those paintings belong to the family. Screw the contract! You’re my attorney. Stop that sale. Hell, if you have to, buy them all. I don’t care how much it costs. I want every last painting.” His grandfather slammed down the phone, swearing.

Cale waited until he saw Victor walk into his bathroom, then moved quickly toward Jud’s room and slipped inside.

Jud sat up on his elbows. “What do you want?”

“Can I sleep here?”

“Have you been crying?”

“No. I wasn’t crying,” Cale lied.

Jud lifted the blankets. “Come on.”

Cale ran over, jumped in the air, and rolled into the middle of the bed.

“Move over, you hog,” Jud said, shoving him.

“I’m not a hog.” Cale stared up at a black ceiling, worried that tomorrow would be as bad as today and yesterday. He pulled the covers up.

A second later the light came on, bright and blinding, and Victor stood in the doorway. “What are you doing in here?”

Cale felt instantly sick.

“Never mind,” he said in the same angry voice he’d used on the phone. He crossed the room and pulled off the covers.

Jud looked too scared to say a word.

“In this house, we sleep in our own rooms.” Victor pulled Cale up, put his hands on his shoulders, and marched him to his own room, where he flipped on the light and paused before he pointed at the lump on the bed. “You know what that tells me?”

I’m in trouble. But all Cale said was, “No,” in a sulky voice.

Victor threw back the blankets. “It tells me that you knew damned well you were supposed to stay in your own bed.”

Cale didn’t admit anything.

“You are eight and I’m a lot older. There isn’t a trick you can pull I won’t see through.” He threw the clothes into a corner. “Now get into bed.”

Cale crawled in and lay board-stiff, his eyes on the ceiling.

“Do you want the light on?”

“No,” Cale said disgustedly and jerked the covers up over his head as the light went off. He could see through the white sheet.

His grandfather filled the doorway, backlit from the hall light. “Banning men don’t need anyone, Cale. We stand on our own.” He closed the door and the room went black.

* * *

Jud awoke to a sound like someone beating trash cans with a baseball bat. By the time he reached the window, the neighbor’s dogs were barking. It was after midnight, and misty fog hovered in the air. Cale lay sprawled in front of the wooden garage doors, two metal trash cans lids next to him, one of them spinning like a top, the barrels rolling down the concrete driveway toward the street. His little brother had tried to look in the high glass panes of the garage doors. Jud opened the window and called in a loud whisper, “Are you nuts? Get back inside. Hurry up!”

Cale sat up, rubbing the back of his head. “I want to see the red car.”

“Moron! It’s the middle of the night.”

“I know, but he won’t let me see it. He won’t let me talk to you or sleep with you. Besides, he’s asleep.”

“I was asleep, but someone woke me up making more noise than a train wreck.” Their grandfather stepped out of the shadows and walked toward Cale. There was a threat in the way he moved.

Jud leaned out the window. “Don’t you hurt him!”