Ever since Ashley had met Lewis, she had taken to using what my mother called Oprah phrases. Lewis talked the same way; he was a placater, a peacemaker, the kind of person who would hold your hand on an airplane if you were scared, able to quote verbatim the statistics about how it was the safest thing, honestly. I could only imagine what an entire Warsher clan would be like. They were from Massachusetts: that was all we knew.
She came back out in a white dress with a high neckline and a long flowing skirt that rustled when she walked. “Well?”
“You look too holy,” I told her.
“Holy?” She turned and looked in the mirror, to judge for herself. “God. This is awful. Everything is wrong.” She sat down beside me on the bed, crossing her legs. “I just want them to like me.”
“Of course they’ll like you.” This was one of the rare moments since her engagement when Ashley and I were just talking, not yelling or discussing the wedding or exchanging the odd nasty look on the stairs. I talked slowly, as if one wrong word might end it altogether.
“I know they’ll pretend to like me; they have to do that.” She lay back, stretching her arms over her head. “But they’re normal people, Haven. Lewis’s parents have been married for twenty-eight years. His mother teaches kindergarten. What are they going to think of Daddy if he gets all loud at the wedding and starts doing his Wizard of Oz thing? Plus I already told Mom she’s got to keep Lydia under control because they just won’t know what to make of her. I don’t even know what to make of her.”
“She’s Mom’s best friend.”
“I guess so.” She sighed, bouncing her feet against the edge of the bed.
“Do you think she’ll go to Europe with her?” I asked.
“I don’t know.” She sat up and looked at me. “It would be good for her if she did, though. All this stuff with Daddy has been harder on her than she’s let on to you. She deserves to treat herself.”
“I know,” I said, wondering how much she’d let on to Ashley. With that one sentence, I could feel the five years between us again. “I just think with the wedding and all ...”
“Haven, you’re in high school now. You should jump at the chance to stay alone for that long. I would have. God, I would have been wild.” She stood up and went behind the screen, tossing the holy dress over the top a few seconds later. “But you won’t, and that’s good. You won’t be like me.”
I thought back to Ashley’s long list of boyfriends from high school, all their names and faces running together until they ended with Lewis’s skinny nose and constant look of concern. I thought of Sumner again, suddenly, and saw him clearly in my mind on the boardwalk at Virginia Beach, the sunset fading pink and red and purple behind him. I heard the doorbell sound from downstairs and Ashley said, “Get that, will you please? It’s Lewis.”
I went downstairs and opened the door. Sure enough, there was Lewis in one of his trademark skinny ties and oxford shirts. He was holding a bouquet of bright purple flowers with yellow eyes surrounded by some creepy kind of fuzzy foliage. It was easy to get a complex from bringing flowers to my mother’s house, so Lewis usually stuck to exotic ones: orchids, tulips out of season. He wanted to bring Ashley things she couldn’t get at home; with my mother’s obsessive gardening, that left very little to choose from.
“Hey, Lewis,” I said. “How are you?”
“Good.” He leaned forward and pecked me on the cheek, something he’d taken to doing as soon as the engagement was announced. I was taller than him, and this made it awkward. He still did it, though, every time I saw him.
“You want me to put those in water?” I nodded to the flowers.
“Oh, sure. That’d be great.” He handed them to me. “Is she upstairs?”
I watched him go up, taking the steps two at a time. He moved through our house now with the ease of someone who no longer considered himself a guest, no sidestepping knickknacks and perching on the edges of furniture but walking easily across the floors as if he belonged there. It hadn’t taken long for Lewis to feel at home; he’d come along when we needed a man in the house. With my father gone and the three of us struggling to fill up the spaces he’d left behind, it was only natural that Ashley would find someone to hold her together, to take care of things. Maybe it was the very thing I hated about Lewis—his absolute dullness—that attracted Ashley most to him. After the divorce and all the craziness, she’d needed something normal and steady to ground herself. Maybe by then she didn’t want any more surprises.
Ashley always turned to a new boy when things got sticky or hard, or lonely. But she was never alone. She called the shots, easing people in and out of our door and our lives with the wave of one hand. The ones I liked and the ones I hated, they came and went at her whim with little or no explanation to the rest of us other than a slammed door or a muted sniffle that I could only hear late at night. Ashley kept it all to herself, even when she wasn’t the only one who was affected.
Ashley dated Sumner all that Virginia Beach summer and into the next fall, speeding around town in the Volkswagen and laughing all the time, filling the house with noise whenever they came breezing through. Whenever Sumner was over, everyone came out of their respective hiding places: my mother from the kitchen, my father from in front of the TV, all of us migrating towards his voice and laughter, or whatever it was that made everyone want to be around him. He and Ashley celebrated each month they’d spent together; he bought her a silver bracelet with a slender heart that dangled off of it and brushed against her watchband. I could hear them in the driveway just after curfew, their voices rising up to my window, and then the putter of the VW engine as he pulled away, that low, steady murmur that filled the entire street, humming. Ashley was happy and nice to me and things were good that fall as the days turned crisp and sharp and the weather on channel five was still being done by Rowdy Ron the Weather Mon, who was overweight, more than a little crazy, and no threat to my parents’ marriage whatsoever. A new family moved in down the street and Ashley had a new best friend, a girl named Laurel Adams, with freckles and a long drawl. Ashley and Sumner gave her a ride to school every day that fall after Virginia Beach and introduced her around; pretty soon she was breezing in the back door with them. Sumner imitated her accent and she and Ashley traded clothes and I hung around the edges of rooms watching them, listening to their voices through the house. Sumner would always look up and see me and call out, “Miss Haven, stop hiding and show yourself,” and Ashley would put an arm around me and tease Sumner about two-timing her with me. Laurel Adams would toss her long honey-blond hair and just say “Lawwwwd” the way she always did when she had nothing better to contribute. The weather turned colder and colder and my mother packed up all my summer clothes, shaking the sand of Virginia Beach from my shorts and tank tops before whisking them off to the attic until Memorial Day.