The Days of Summer. Jill Barnett

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      “You look so pretty,” Kathryn said brightly. “I bet you turned some heads tonight.”

      Her daughter looked at her as if she’d slapped her, then ran out of the room sobbing and slammed her bedroom door closed.

      “What did I say wrong now?” Kathryn said to the empty room. Everything had been so much easier when Laurel only worried about a Halloween costume or a book report or if she performed some complicated ballet position correctly. In those days, Kathryn had all the right answers.

      She tapped lightly on Laurel’s door. “It’s me.”

      “Just leave me alone, Mom. Please.”

      A blank white door stood between them, a wall of Kathryn’s wrong words and wrong choices. She heard Laurel’s muffled cries and reached for the doorknob, but a voice in her head said, Don’t barge in. She understood self-pity and despair, feeling helpless, confused, and frustrated—apparently the normal state for a mother with a teenage daughter. She sagged down into an overstuffed chair and stared at the empty hallway as if she could divine answers from there, a thread and needle for the worn and unraveling seams of their relationship.

      The awful truth was that the move here had made Laurel miserable. Laurel was miserable, but Kathryn wasn’t. She liked living in Evie’s house. It was well over sixty years old, with a small floor plan, tall ceilings, crown molding, and hardwood floors. Lazy beach furniture filled the rooms—Victorian wicker, an antique French daybed, rattan—so different from Julia’s formal white furniture. There had been little color in Kathryn’s life except her own blue bedroom.

      Evie had painted every room a different color. The place was all spring and sunshine, yellows and pinks. It felt like a woman’s house. Here she wanted to drink tea from a flowered mug instead of a three-hundred-year-old tea service, her mother-in-law serving her without ever asking whether she wanted the lemon and sugar.

      Moving to Catalina had freed Kathryn’s spirit. But her freedom came at a price, one Laurel had paid.

      Kathryn waited for the sound of crying to stop. This time she didn’t knock. Inside, a muted hanging lamp and sandalwood candles lit the room. In the corner, flat on the floor, sat Laurel’s bed, covered with an ethnic print throw and mirror-trimmed pillows from India. Evie was right. George Harrison, Ravi Shankar, and the Hare Krishna who stuck carnations in your face at the airport would feel right at home in this bedroom.

      But the candles flickered softly against the walls, where Jimmy’s guitar hung beside his records, some photos, awards, and framed copies of his handwritten music. Beneath this shrine to her father, Laurel lay curled in a lump on her bed, facing the wall and leaving no doubt that Jimmy’s daughter still belonged to the day he died.

      Kathryn sank down beside her. “You want to tell me what’s wrong?”

      “No.” Laurel gave a sharp, caustic laugh.

      She’s too young to be so bitter. It’s by my example. Her mouth was dry when she asked, “Do you want me to leave?”

      “No.” It was a while before Laurel spoke. “I want someone to think I’m special and beautiful and wonderful.”

      “I think you’re special and beautiful and wonderful.”

      Her daughter wasn’t rude enough to say, Big deal, but the words hung there in her silence.

      “I don’t know what I can do to make you happy.”

      Laurel reached out and touched her hand. “Look, Mom. It’s not your fault. Sometimes, like tonight, you just say the wrong thing.”

      “What did I say?”

      “It’s a long and miserable story.”

      “I’m not going anywhere. I have hours and hours.” She settled back against a couple of those gaudy pillows. It took a moment before Laurel started talking, and once she did, everything spilled out of her in a rush of emotion—the boy on the boat, the kids necking in the theater, the fistfight—all told with that double-edged intensity of youth.

      Laurel looked at her. “I feel like I’m completely invisible.”

      Kathryn had watched her grow up and felt so proud, and so scared. One day, not that long ago, she turned around and no longer had a child for a daughter. The years had turned into a white blur while her daughter became a beautiful young woman. She wanted to tell her she was far from invisible, but Laurel wouldn’t believe her. Kathryn pointed to a black-and-white photograph of Jimmy onstage with his guitar. To anyone who looked at the shot, it appeared as if he were looking at the audience. “See this photograph of your father?”

      Laurel nodded.

      “It was taken one night when he was playing in Hollywood, at this club on the Sunset Strip. I can’t remember the name. You were maybe three at the time. This was right after his third record went number one. He was about to start the final song and looked down at us. We were in the front row. He took off his guitar and came down to us, then stepped back on stage with you in his arms, set you down, picked up his guitar, and said, ‘You wanna help me sing, little girl?’

      “When you said, ‘Sure, Daddy,’ the place went crazy. They calmed down when he began to play and you stood there in front of hundreds of people, completely fearless. You couldn’t have cared less who watched. You sang with him just like you always did at home. Didn’t miss a single note.”

      Kathryn handed the photo to Laurel. “You had no idea, but everyone in that place, including your father, was looking at you and thinking how very wonderful you were.”

      Laurel sat cross-legged on the bed with the photo, then curled up with it as Kathryn stood. “Thanks, Mom,” she said in a small voice, already half asleep.

      But Kathryn didn’t go to sleep that easily. She tossed and turned, haunted by images of fiery car crashes and slashed canvases, and woke with the sheets twisted around her legs, her pillow damp, and Jimmy’s face in her mind. There were moments over the years when Laurel looked so much like him that Kathryn found herself imagining the worst: a mind-numbing fear that her daughter might follow her father’s path to a fateful, early death. Kathryn had to fight her innate and desperate need to overprotect. She didn’t want to be like Julia, who had taught her what it was like to live inside your child’s life.

      None of those fears ever materialized. Still, Kathryn hadn’t had nightmares in years. She put on her robe and left the room, then made cup after cup of tea. When the eastern skies turned purple and gold and the sparrows and robins began to sing, she still stood at her living room window, no better off really than she had been. Laurel was so very young, and she desperately didn’t want to be. She still believed and trusted the world that lay before her. Her daughter had no haunting consequences to keep her from running headlong down the wrong road.

      But Kathryn was overwhelmed by an uneasy terror as she watched the day break and sipped tea, which had a sudden, bitter taste. It needed lemon and sugar. She walked into the kitchen, doctored her tea, drank it, and went into her bedroom.

      She still tossed and turned, staring at the yellow walls, and told herself she was being silly, overreacting. Of course, fate had better things to do than to follow the Peyton women around, just to create havoc in two small lives.

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