I was fired, obviously. No more Push Socks, Push Socks. I took off my name tag and stuck it in my pocket, wondering what kind of charges would await me when I got home. I wondered if you could get arrested for an assault with a Smurf shoe at a mall. If I’d go to jail. If I could go home.
But soon I wasn’t thinking about that anymore, or about the woman or the Hot Summer Deals Sidewalk Sale. I leaned my head against the slippery wood behind me and thought of better times, of that summer in Virginia Beach. I thought about Sumner running through the sand, chasing a Frisbee as it flew over his head. About the way he made Ashley human and shrimp cocktail at the hotel restaurant and my father’s pink cheeks, his grinning as he slid an arm around my mother’s waist, pulling her close. I thought of Ashley’s high, singsong laugh and that ride down in the Volkswagen with beach music on the radio and the stars overhead, the summer so new with so many days left, each sliding into the next. I wished I could go back somehow and start it all over again, with me and Ashley by the curb waiting and listening for the putt-putt of the Bug to come around the corner. I’d live each of those days the exact same way, when I was no bigger than a minute. When my parents were still in love and Sumner held us all together, laughing, until the day Ashley sent him away without even thinking of what would happen once he was gone. No more laughing, no more drawing together from the opposite sides of the house, all coming together to Sumner’s voice, his laugh. I missed who we all were then. One summer and one boy, and suddenly things weren’t the same.
I walked home. I’d fallen asleep under the slide, dozing off in the mossy quiet, only to wake up confused, having forgotten where I was, the sun slanting down hot on my head. Some little boys were sliding down above me, their voices high and giggly, calling out to their father to watch. He was wearing sunglasses, reading a paper by the tire tunnel, and looked up each time they told him to. I waited until they were gone before I slipped out and unfolded myself to my true size.
I went into the house through the back door, hoping to avoid seeing anyone; but of course there was another power meeting going on at the table, with Lydia and my mother hunched over the clipboard that seemed attached to my mother’s hand lately and Ashley sitting in the doorway that led to the living room.
“Well, obviously we’ll have to replan the whole wedding party,” my mother was saying as I stood on the other side of the glass, invisible. “We can’t have five ushers and four bridesmaids. Somebody’s got to go.”
“I’ve seen it done before,” Lydia said, tugging at her sequined shirt. “Four bridesmaids, three ushers. But it never looked right to me. You need symmetry in a wedding party. You’ve just got to have it.”
“I still cannot believe this,” Ashley grumbled into her hair, which was hanging down one side of her face. “I’m going to kill her, I swear.”
“There’s no time to think about that now,” Lydia said in her loud, brassy Floridian voice. “We can hate Carol later; now we’ve got to come up with some kind of a solution. Quickly.”
“Okay,” my mother said, flipping through some pages on her clipboard. “How’s this: we just find another bridesmaid. Ashley, you could ask one of your friends, right?”
“Mother,” Ashley said in that annoyed voice that I’d heard way too much of in the last six months, “the wedding is tomorrow.”
“I know that,” my mother said wearily.
“There’s no time to get a bridesmaid, get a dress, get it fitted.... We can’t do it. There’s no way.” Ashley picked at the fringe of her cutoffs.
“How about bumping an usher?” Lydia suggested. “There’s got to be somebody we can ask to bow out. For the sake of evenness.”
“We can’t throw someone out of the wedding,” Ashley said. “God, that would be so horrible. ‘Oh, thanks for renting the tux and everything, but we won’t be needing you. Get lost.”’
“Of course we wouldn’t say it like that,” Lydia said sullenly, and they all got quiet, their minds working this over.
I figured this was the best time of any to come in, so I headed straight across the kitchen, over Ashley in the doorway, and made a quick dash for the stairs.
“Haven?” My mother was already after me. I heard her pushing her chair away from the table, that familiar scrape, and then her footsteps coming down the hallway behind me. “Haven, I have to talk to you.”
I stopped in the middle of the stairs and turned to look down at her. She seemed very small. “What is it?”
“Well,” she said, starting to climb up, step by step, “I got a strange call from Burt Isker. Did you have some sort of problem at work today?”
“No,” I said, turning back around and taking the rest of the stairs, then heading to my room only a few paces away.