Summer and the City

Walt laughs. “I’m not surprised. Maggie hates everyone these days.”

“Why?”

“Because she has no idea what to do with her life. And she can’t stand anyone who does.”

Thirty minutes later, I’ve told Walt the whole story about Maggie’s visit, which he finds immensely entertaining. “Why don’t you come to visit me?” I ask, feeling better. “You and Randy. You could sleep in the bed.”

“A bed’s too good for Randy,” Walt says jokingly. “He can sleep on the floor. In fact, he can sleep anywhere. If you take him to a store, he’ll fall asleep standing up.”

I smile. “Seriously, though.”

“When are you coming home?” he asks.

“I don’t know.”

“You know about your father, of course,” he says smoothly.

“No.”

“Oops.”

“Why?” I ask. “What’s going on?”

“Hasn’t anyone told you? Your father has a girlfriend.”

I clutch the phone in disbelief. But it makes sense. No wonder he’s been acting so strange lately.

“I’m sorry. I figured you knew,” Walt continues. “I only know because my mother told me. She’s going to be the new librarian at the high school. She’s like twenty-five or something.”

“My father is dating a twenty-five-year-old?” I shriek.

“I thought you’d want to know.”

“Damn right,” I say, furious. “I guess I’ll be coming home this weekend after all.”

“Great,” Walt says. “We could use some excitement around here.”

Chapter Twenty

“This will never do,” Samantha says, shaking her head.

“It’s luggage.” I, too, glare at the offending suitcase. It’s ugly, but still, the sight of that suitcase makes me insanely jealous. I’m going back to boring old Castlebury while Samantha is headed for Los Angeles.

Los Angeles! It’s a very big deal and she only found out yesterday. She’s going to shoot a commercial and stay at the Beverly Hills Hotel, which is where all the movie stars hang out. She bought enormous sunglasses and a big straw hat and a Norma Kamali bathing suit that you wear with a white T-shirt underneath. In honor of the occasion, I tried to find a palm tree at the party store, but all they had were some green paper leafy things that I’ve wrapped around my head.

There are clothes and shoes everywhere. Samantha’s enormous green plastic Samsonite suitcase lies open on the living room floor.

“It’s not luggage, it’s baggage,” she complains.

“Who’s going to notice?”

“Everyone. We’re flying first-class. There’ll be porters. And bellhops. What are the bellhops going to think when they discover Samantha Jones travels with Samsonite?”

I love it when Samantha does that funny thing and talks about herself in the third person. I tried it once myself, but there was no way I could pull it off. “Do you honestly think the bellhops are going to be more interested in Samsonite than Samantha Jones?”

“That’s just it. They’ll expect my luggage to be glamorous as well.”

“I bet that jerky Harry Mills carries American Tourister. Hey,” I say, swinging my legs off the back of the couch. “Did you ever think that someday you’d be traveling with a man you hardly knew? It’s kind of weird, isn’t it? What if your suitcase opens by accident and he sees your Skivvies?”

“I’m not worried about my lingerie. I’m worried about my image. I never thought I’d have this life when I bought that.” She frowns at the suitcase.

“What did you think?” I hardly know anything about Samantha’s past, besides the fact that she comes from New Jersey and seems to hate her mother. She never mentions her father, so these tidbits about her early life are always fascinating.

“Only about getting away. Far, far away.”

“But New Jersey’s just across the river.”

“Physically, yes. Metaphorically, no. And New York wasn’t my first stop.”

“It wasn’t?” Now I’m really intrigued. I can’t imagine Samantha living anywhere but New York.

“I traveled all around the world when I was eighteen.”

I nearly fall off the couch. “How?”

She smiles. “I was a groupie. To a very famous rock ’n’ roll guy. I was at a concert and he picked me out of the crowd. He asked me to travel with him and I was stupid enough to think I was his girlfriend. Then I found out he had a wife stashed away in the English countryside. That suitcase has been all around the world.”

I wonder if Samantha’s hatred of her luggage is actually due to a bad association with the past. “And then what happened?”

She shrugs, picking out lingerie from the pile and folding the pieces into little squares. “He dumped me. In Moscow. His wife suddenly decided to join him. He woke up that afternoon and said, ‘Darling, I’m afraid it’s over. You’re binned.’”

“Just like that?”

“He was English,” she says, laying the squares into the bottom of the suitcase. “That’s what Englishmen do. When it’s over, it’s over. No phone calls, no letters, and especially no crying.”

“Did you? Cry?” I can’t picture it.

“What do you think? I was all alone in Moscow with nothing but this stupid suitcase. And a plane ticket to New York. I was jumping up and down for joy.”

I can’t tell if she’s kidding or not.

“In other words, it’s your runaway suitcase,” I point out. “And now that you don’t need to run anymore, you need something better. Something permanent.”

“Hmmm,” she says cryptically.

“What’s it like?” I ask. “When you pass a record store and see the rock ’n’ roll guy’s face on a poster? Does it make you feel weird to think you spent all that time with him?”

“I’m grateful.” She grabs a shoe and looks around for its partner. “Sometimes I think if it weren’t for him, I wouldn’t have made it to New York at all.”

“Didn’t you always want to come here?”

She shrugs. “I was a wild child. I didn’t know what I wanted. I only knew I didn’t want to end up a waitress and pregnant at nineteen. Like Shirley.”

“Oh.”

“My mother,” she clarifies.

I’m not surprised. There’s an underlying pulse of determination in Samantha that has to come from somewhere.

“You’re lucky.” She finds the matching shoe and pushes it into the corner of the suitcase. “At least you have parents who will pay for college.”

“Yeah,” I say vaguely. Despite her confessions about her past, I’m not ready to tell her about my own. “But I thought you went to college.”

“Oh, Sparrow.” She sighs. “I took a couple of night courses when I arrived in New York. I got a job through a temp agency. The first place they sent me was Slovey, Dinall. I was a secretary. They didn’t even call them ‘assistants’ back then. Anyway, it’s boring.”

Not to me. But the fact that she’s come so far from nothing puts my own struggles to shame. “It must have been hard.”

“It was.” She presses down on the top of the suitcase. There’s practically her whole closet in there, so