The Fourth Summer. Kathleen Gilles Seidel

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      “I’m a city girl,” she said. “I’m going to need bug juice.”

      “Oh, of course.” There were at least seven cans of insect repellent by the door. His sisters used all-natural products on their kids; his mom liked the scented products; his dad didn’t. Seth let Caitlin pick one, and he grabbed another for himself.

      Then a memory hit him again. That night in the park we only had one can for the two of us.

      What kind of romance had bug repellent as one of its highlights?

      His and hers.

      The property was bordered by birches, maples, and white pine. A few scraggly rhododendrons blossomed where the shade was the lightest, and one big oak tree sat off by itself. Seth’s brothers-in-law took turns mowing so there was an open, sunlit stretch of grass leading down to the dock and the big rocks by the shoreline.

      “So where on the lake are we?” Caitlin asked when they got outside. “I’m a little turned around.”

      “The public beach is that way.” He pointed.

      “Okay.” She was looking around, getting oriented. “So the place that you and I used to sneak into is over there...and is this the tree we could see from that dock?” She gestured over her shoulder toward the oak. “The one that we thought must be so great for climbing?”

      “It is that tree, and it is great for climbing, although it’s gotten harder since Dad had to take off the bottom branch last year. How much of a city girl are you?”

      “If you are asking if I can still climb a tree, I assume so, but you’ll need to give me a stirrup.” She cupped her hands, showing what she meant.

      He did so. She put one foot in his hands and then sprang up, catching a limb with her hands.

      How light she was, like a plastic beer mug, the kind that you’re expecting to be glass so when you first pick it up, you almost throw it over your shoulder.

      He looked up. Her calf muscles were strong and defined, curving down to her ankles. She was testing a big knot in the tree to see if she could use it as a step. He caught a glimpse of red panties.

      “Did you pick your underwear to match the juror tag?”

      She looked down at him, blank for a second. “Oh, right, yes. I called ahead.”

      In a moment she was standing on one of the limbs, holding on to a branch overhead, inching her way out to make room for him. He took another good look up her skirt, then jumped, grasped the lower limb, and hoisted himself up.

      “This is really stupid,” she said.

      “Why?”

      “We could fall.”

      “But we won’t,” he said confidently. And if they did...well, he had face-planted from a lot higher up than this.

      He gave her a hand so that she could sit down. It could have been a tricky maneuver, but she did it gracefully. You can take the girl out of the ballet studio, but you can’t... Then he reached through the leaves, grabbed another limb, and swung across so that he could sit facing her.

      She was trying to wriggle her skirt down over her thighs. The big watch on her wrist made her hand look small. “I’m not wearing the right clothes for this.”

      “I think you are.”

      She stuck out her tongue at him.

      It was nice, sitting here in the tree, watching the water. Bulldozers had been brought in to carve out the little public beach across the lake; everywhere else trees, grasses, and wildflowers sloped down to the rocky shoreline, the gray and brown rocks etching an undulated border between the patches of sun and shadows on the green slopes and the flat blue water. In the distance above the tree line were the Blue Ridge Mountains, their slopes covered with fine North Carolina hardwoods.

      Snowboards were made of layers of resin, fiberglass, carbon, and glue, but at their core was wood. Some pros liked wood from obeche trees, but that wood had to be imported from Africa. That seemed wrong to Seth, snowboarding on something from a continent so dry and hot. The core of his boards was close-grained yellow birch from the High Country’s cool mountain slopes. His dad always had a couple of trees in the commercial forests flagged, and he and Seth would watch their growth. For Seth that was part of the magic, knowing the tree, feeling like it was your partner.

      He heard the faint chug of a trolling motor, and in a few minutes a fishing boat eased around the point of an inlet, its little motor making a ruffled wake on the surface of the water.

      “You must have visited your grandmother after you all moved to San Diego,” he said. “Why didn’t you ever stop by and see my parents? They liked you.”

      “Seth, you dumped me. I wasn’t going to go sit in your mother’s kitchen and have your sisters feel sorry for me.”

      He winced. “I didn’t really mean to dump you. I was a mess.”

      “There’s no need to rehash this. We were kids. It was a teen romance. Teen romances end. That’s what they do.”

      “Apparently your sister’s didn’t.”

      She shook her head. “The teen-romance part blew up the minute she found out that she was pregnant, but they had to stay in touch because of the baby. Years later they came together as actual adults.”

      Seth was twenty-five. In plenty of places that qualified for being an actual adult. He changed the subject. “On this gravity-heavy planet of yours, why are people using something as low tech as bullets?”

      “It’s not my planet. I’m just paid to make it gorgeous, and who says that they are people?”

      “Good point. How did you get into this?”

      “I started in college, doing it for other students. After I graduated, I got what should have been a dream job in Silicon Valley. The work was good, but even though people wore flip-flops and board shorts to the office, it was still totally corporate with insane office politics and people stealing credit for your work. So I decided to go out on my own.”

      “Is it going okay?”

      “It’s a bitch and a half, especially in San Francisco, which is beyond expensive, but I’m doing okay. Now I’m ready to get down.” She was clearly done talking about her life in San Francisco. “How do we do that?”

      “You can climb down by the same route, but I’m going to jump. It’s faster.” He switched his hand position and then lowered himself, extending his body so that he could drop and land lightly. “Now scoot down your branch and I will catch you.”

      “Are you going to look up my skirt?”

      “You bet.”

      She eased herself down to the branch. He got hold of her legs as she dropped and eased her down, sliding his hands up her body.

      “You don’t have a car in San Francisco, do you?”

      She СКАЧАТЬ