I wrote the opening sentence to this story the opposite way the first time and it sat there looking at me and I sat here looking at it, something popped up on my screen about a fringed summer vest, I’m a sucker for fringes and vests and summer, then I came back to the sentence, switched it to this one, and kept going – the sun rose – and I finished it. So here. Dive in. It’s fresh as can be…

The One That Summer by Sherry Cassells

Everybody remembered Amy but I tried to forget her, or at least remember her in a normal way. I was hoping for amnesia – I know how that sounds and I can do worse – I was in need of an amputation.

I knew where my father kept relief. It was in a bottle under the kitchen sink, at the back, next to the Comet, some squeezed out rags, a jar of turtle food nobody would throw out because what if our missing turtle popped up from the couch one night during Bonanza like our hamster had, fatter than before, he could have lived forever on the crumbs in our orange sofa. My father was sprawled there some mornings, his fallen trousers exposing the striped boxer shorts I knew from the clothesline.

Amy came for the summer. Doesn’t that sound fun? Amy came for the summer. Lemon Up and fumbles. We were fourteen.

She was my mother’s best friend’s daughter and we knew each other but didn’t. We were chubby and spitty and distracted in a slew of photographs as impersonal as X-rays. We looked dirty and stupid, in one we had identical snot bubbles, some we were naked, every so often one of us in a Santa hat the other with a Rudolph nose, you couldn’t tell who was who, we were usually crying. Our mothers documented our babyhoods, one of them behind the shaky camera, one of them in the background wearing oval polka-dots, flares from the flash stuck to her wine glass as if she were holding a flying saucer, you couldn’t tell who was who.

That September I went to high school drunk, brave, and popular. My mother always watered down my father’s whiskey but with both of us doing it my father came out of his fog long enough to notice, he changed cupboards and our game of hide-and-seek began, it continues today, although I am approaching middle-age if I live to be 132.

Still I can’t forget Amy.

My father’s world is distorted in a different way now, our games involve his hide-and-seek memory, sometimes real things such as his glasses or his wallet, both useless but he wants them near, his short-term memory is shot to shit – who cares anyway what he did yesterday or last month, who came by over Christmas, what episode of Columbo – some things should be a muddle. But he remembers swimming in Lake Superior he dunks me over and over, again and again he tells me the way the world changed when he was in the water – and he did not mean his perspective but that the world actually changed shape for him – it became stark and joyful and beautiful. For real he said straight into my eyes and he, for that moment, returned.

Yesterday he mentioned Amy, not by name, he called her the girl I loved.

I am 66 and have loved many girls, I laughed, I asked him to narrow it down a bit and he said the one you got drunk with but I needed further clarification, that was well-danced terrain, so he said the one that summer.

Amy came into my head like a cool jewel, and I suddenly knew, I finally understood what he meant about swimming, for my world changed at the thought of her.

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