The Fourth Summer. Kathleen Gilles Seidel

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СКАЧАТЬ no. Deciding if someone is innocent or guilty? If they deserve to be in jail? Talk about grown up, that’s above and beyond.”

      He had to go out and feed his parking meter. He offered to take care of hers. No, she hadn’t driven. Her mother had brought her; her grandmother would pick her up. “It’s like being fifteen again,” she said, “and having to call for a ride.”

      Oh, good, she didn’t want a car. He had been looking for an opening. “Remember if you’re fifteen,” he said lightly, “then I’m sixteen and have a license. I can run you home.”

      Sixteen... Memories suddenly started swirling in his brain, shapes in a snowstorm. Look up at me. Look at me with those dark eyes of yours and admit that you’re remembering too, remembering how great that third summer was because I could drive and we could go anywhere.

      What was going on in his brain? All this past stuff...he was a here-and-now kind of guy.

      But it was good stuff, wasn’t it?

      “It’s completely out of your way.”

      What? Oh, she was still talking about him driving her home. “All of ten minutes. And then maybe you will let me take you out to dinner.”

      He hadn’t been able to get a read on her. Was she going to agree to have dinner with him? He wouldn’t be surprised either way.

      “They are paying us a whole twelve dollars for our service today,” she answered. “I can buy my own food.”

      So it was a yes to spending the evening with him, but no to something that would make it seem like a date. He could live with that.

      The afternoon dragged on. People were talking to each other more, complaining. Seth looked at his email, then his social media accounts, watched a few videos that the up-and-coming kids had made and were always trying to get him to watch, checked on a couple of games he had going with friends, and then went back to his email.

      He could handle stress. Pressure, fear...bring ’em on. But boredom? He wasn’t so good at that. He wanted out of here. He’d take Caitlin with him if he could, but most of all, he wanted—he needed—to leave. Snowboarders weren’t supposed to be model citizens. They were rebels, outsiders, countercultural iconoclasts, not jurors.

      But Seth was the public face of his family’s company, Street Boards. It manufactured snowboards and skateboards. His parents, his sisters, and his brothers-in-law worked there; it supported all of them. So there was no way that Seth could be a jerk here in the jury assembly room. If the moms and dads of America thought Seth Street was an asshole, they wouldn’t let their kids put his poster up on their bedroom walls, and they certainly wouldn’t buy a Street Board to put under the Christmas tree. Seth had to act like a good citizen even if it was driving him nuts.

      There was a beverage station at the back of the room, just coffee and water. Seth didn’t drink much coffee, but he kept getting water just to have something to do. Caitlin was still working.

      By two thirty people were saying that if you didn’t get called for a trial on the first day, you weren’t likely to have to come back.

      At three o’clock there was activity in the front of the room. The Clerk came back in and started talking softly to the jury coordinator. Surely they were going to be dismissed. A trial wouldn’t start at three, would it? People at the tables started to put away their stuff, clear up their trash.

      But when the jury coordinator stood up, she asked them to line up by the door as she called their names. She kept calling name after name until everyone in the room was standing in a line that snaked toward the back of the room. Caitlin’s name had been called before his. She was too far ahead in line for them to talk.

      And then they waited. And waited some more. Someone stepped out of line to get chairs for the older ladies. Seth winced. He should have thought to do that.

      At three thirty, the jurors were all told to sit back down. At four o’clock, they were excused for the day. They could go home as soon as they signed for the little brown envelopes with their twelve-dollar payment. But the coordinator emphasized that they had to call the hotline or check the website later in the evening to see if they had to come tomorrow.

      “But we won’t have to come back, will we?” someone asked. “If you don’t get a trial the first day, you’re done, right?”

      The coordinator said that that was not necessarily so and that they needed to check with the hotline or the website. Seth didn’t like the sound of that.

      “I came thinking that this might be kind of interesting,” Caitlin said as they walked to the parking lot. She was carrying her computer in a messenger bag crafted out of an old Cub Scout backpack and a worn leather bomber jacket. “It wasn’t.”

      “You got a lot of work done.”

      “It probably looked like it, but what do you know about the trajectory of bullets on a gravity-heavy planet?”

      “Me? Nothing.”

      “The guy who designed the game apparently didn’t either. Now it’s too early for dinner. Do you just want to get a cup of coffee or something?”

      No, he didn’t want to get a cup of coffee. He wanted to spend the evening with her. He had already made a plan. That was one thing about three guys hanging out together. Someone needed to have a plan, or you never got out the door. “You remember the lake?”

      “No. Why would I?”

      She was being ironic. Of course she remembered the lake. “Let’s pick up some barbecue and go out there. My parents have a lake house now.”

      “Their own place? So we don’t have to trespass and eat on someone else’s dock?”

      “No.” Or have sex on a blanket back among the trees.

      Except they hadn’t “had sex.” They had made love. They had been in love.

      That last summer he and Caitlin had been together, he had feelings for her that he had never felt again. Of course it was probably that your first love always did feel the most intense, the most consuming, but still...

      * * * *

      They had had three summers together from the time he had been fourteen and she thirteen, until he was sixteen and she fifteen.

      He had grown up in the High Country of North Carolina and had started snowboarding when his uncles still had to lift him over the drifts at the edge of the parking lots. He had been a little meat torpedo in those days, fearless about height and speed, clueless about danger. At fourteen he had already been competing professionally for a few years. At the time he didn’t—he couldn’t—appreciate what sacrifices his family was making for his snowboarding. His dad worked in the furniture factory; it was a nonunion shop, and there wasn’t ever any overtime. His mom had done alterations for the local bridal shop.

      He had developed so quickly and so early that a lot of doors had opened for him. His mother had been great at negotiating tuition-free deals for him, but there was still travel and living expenses for both of them. In those days, few programs were set up for unescorted school-aged kids, so his dad had outfitted a pickup with a camper, and she made endless long drives, preparing meals in the little camper while he worked his way through the homeschooling СКАЧАТЬ