Killer Summer

3

From thirty-five thousand feet, the two pivot-irrigated parcels of farmland looked like large green eyes above a smile of curving mountains. Summer Sumner peeled herself away from the window of her father’s prized Learjet to glimpse him across the aisle, contemplating a laptop open on the collapsible mahogany table that separated a pair of leather club seats, each the size of a recliner. His Airphone was pinched beneath his chin. The Lear could seat eight, including Mandy, the flight attendant. Mandy wasn’t on this trip, however, which told Summer more about the family’s financial picture than her father, Teddy, probably intended.

Summer relished her father’s panic-stricken expression, as he ran his two-hundred-dollar fountain pen across a notepad. He wore his fatigue well; few would have guessed he’d celebrated sixty a few years earlier. The golf tan helped. So did Tanya, his personal trainer. Summer enjoyed hearing the tension in his voice. She turned her attention back out the window, but secretly kept an eye on him in its reflection. “If you know yourself but not your enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat.” And he thought she never listened to him.

“How much?” Teddy Sumner barked into the Airphone. “What exactly are we talking about short-term?” He danced the pen through his fingers, like some kind of circus act. To her, just another example of too much time spent at a desk.

He dared a look in her direction. She hoped he wouldn’t say anything. She had no intention of ever speaking to him again.

“Okay, seven’s doable,” he said. “How soon?” He listened for a moment. “No, not possible. A month at the earliest. Sixty to ninety days, is more like it.” He grimaced. “Listen, I would if I could, but this is my last trip on it. Let me get this straight: seven will put a clamp on it. Two-point-two to tie it off?” He ran his hand across his mouth, a gesture signaling pent-up frustration and potential anger. They knew each other all too well.

Summer wasn’t about to start feeling sorry for him. He’d explained their financial situation as being “fluid.” But she knew more than she should have: he’d cobbled together some television-commercial work to help pay preproduction costs of a feature film that was never going to get off the ground. He owed payments on several loans, all of them large. He couldn’t face that he was a one-hit wonder. Mastermind had been his only success, and without the foreign box office even it would have failed. Compounding his frustration, no doubt, his wife had started up that film, not him. Summer’s mother had been the successful filmmaker, and she was gone now. Gone for good.

She squirmed in her seat, wishing he’d allowed her to stay behind in L.A. She’d given in too easily. He had an Eleanor Roosevelt quote for that: “No one can make you feel inferior without your permission.” So when had she given him her permission, anyway?

“I know, I know, I know,” he repeated into the phone, his unpredictable temper barely contained. “I will, okay? Listen, we’re landing in a minute. I’ve got to hang up.” He paused. “Yeah, okay. You too.” He hung up.

She braced herself for what was coming. She became his verbal punching bag when things went south, which, basically, was all the time. He would apologize later, as if that made it all okay.

“So,” he asked, “what do you think? Pretty, isn’t it?”

She didn’t breathe. She’d not expected a tour guide.

“Are we going to go through the whole weekend with you not talking to me?”

He got his answer.

“It’s not right, not at seventeen. Somewhere inside, you know that. And don’t compare it with my meeting your mother because that was completely different, and we both know it. It was at a country club, our parents already knowing one another, having socialized together. It wasn’t some twenty-two-year-old Brazilian on the tennis circuit. Guys like that, sweetheart… that’s not you.”

But your hooking up with Tanya… she felt like saying. What kind of training was she supposed to be helping with, exactly?

“You’ll like it up here. It’s like Telluride, only… better. More to do. Really nice people. And, I promise, there’ll be all sorts of kids around. Everybody brings their kids along on these weekends.”

She hated him calling her that.

“I can still get us into the mixed doubles tournament. You know, we can whip some butt with that serve of yours. It’s all for a good cause.”

She thought it unfair that silence was her only available weapon. No matter how effective it was-and it was effective-she felt robbed of a voice. He treated her like she was still thirteen and that it was still B.C.: before cancer.

“Don’t sulk,” he pleaded. “Please, Summer, don’t do this. I’ve got enough problems”-she mouthed his next words as he said them-“without you acting like this.”

So predictable.

In the world according to Teddy Sumner, she was the cause of everything bad that happened to them. Somehow, he always managed to bring it back around to her.

Her head slipped too close to the window and her breath fogged the plastic. She doubted it lasted long enough for him to see what she traced into the fog with the tip of her index finger.

An L… for Loser.