Summer Nights

I wasn’t really sure what had prompted mom to pull out all of the old photo books, relics from the era before everyone having a camera in their pocket, and go through them after Thanksgiving dinner. Me, mom, my step-dad, step-siblings, and all their spouses and children were here, eating turkey and getting wine drunk. Or sugar high, depending on the generation.

The kids were mostly distracted with video games and iPads, and the husbands watching football, but mom had me join her and Mark with two of my step-sisters and start flipping through the pages.

The first book was of my mom and Mark’s wedding. My step-sisters who were several years older than I stood with me as bridesmaids. My step-brother and Mark’s brothers stood as groomsmen. Mom and Mark beamed at the camera. My siblings and I all looked happy enough, given the situation. Their parents had been divorced almost 10 years at this point, if I remembered correctly. I wore a full length dress. It looked a little odd for 12-year-old me, but at the time I was super self-conscious about the leg that never healed right after the crash that killed my dad.

1000 pictures of them and every passing acquaintance the two had in their finest clothes had mom naming off every person and how she knew them. I tried to look attentive, but had to go get the wine bottle to get through that one with an excuse for my glazed over eyes. Mark made comments too, here and there. My step-sisters helped me with the wine.

Most of the rest of the books were shorter or incomplete. My step-siblings school photos. My prom. My baby pictures with mom and dad. One of my sisters had put together an album from her time in cheer. Someone’s retirement party. I was desperately wishing we were a family who played card games or did puzzles by the time we got down to the last book.

“Oh my goodness, I had forgotten about this one!” mom said, having stared blankly at the first page of pictures for a long moment. “Jenny, your Aunt Laura put this together as a graduation gift! It was all the pictures she had from when you stayed with her each summer!”

My stomach twisted from too much wine as she pushed the book towards me. From age 8, just a few months after my dad died, until I was 16 and old enough to stay home alone all summer, I had spent at least the month of July, if not most of August as well, with my dad’s sister Laura, her husband Josh, and their three kids. Kevin, who was older than me by four or so years and I had never been close. Then Jackson, only older than me by 5 weeks, and Mickey, younger by not quite 2 years.

The three of us had spent the summers together for those 8 years, entertaining ourselves in the woods and fields surrounding their house in the middle of nowhere, almost half an hour from the nearest town, which didn’t have a stop light.

I slowly started flipping through the book. My first summer there, holding a fish that Mickey and Jackson had helped me catch, then taught me how to clean. The two of them on rocks I couldn’t climb, the damage to my leg still too recent. Us setting up a “campsite” in the backyard one Friday night to sleep in a tent and roast marshmallows over a fire that Uncle Josh maintained. I was smiling by the end of the summer in those photos.

The first few years all looked more or less the same, Jackson and I finishing elementary school and going to middle school. It wasn’t really until 6th grade that we started noticeably changing. I had hit my growth spurt first. Jackson started working out for the football team. But we were still smiling, sun burned with skinned knees.

“I had forgotten how close the two of you were,” mom said as we flipped through the pages, me occasionally going through the back story of some picture or another. My step-sisters had gone back to the photo book from cheer, commenting on people they had kept in touch with in the years since. Mark had gone to check the football score.

It was the summer after 8th grade that the pictures dropped off sharply. The few that there were were mostly of Jackson and I laying under the big elm tree, napping, or Mickey and I doing something.

I knew what it looked like. Like Aunt Laura had just cut back on the photos as we got older. But really, we had stopped doing stuff during the day. That was when the partying had started. Jackson and I had started going after dark, sneaking out to hang around a fire, drinking whatever, smoking whatever, until the sun started to rise, and then slept it off during the day.

I had enjoyed it, to start. It was exciting, being around the older teens, doing things we weren’t supposed to. It seemed harmless. I was sick of it by the end of summer, always hungover and smelling of smoke. I kept trying to talk Jackson out of it, but he called me boring. It was fun, he insisted. It was cool, to be with the older teens, and sometimes young 20-somethings. Sure he had to make sure I kept an eye on my drink and was never alone, but it was worth it.

It was the first time I was eager to return home at the end of the summer.

The next year was worse. Jackson was only in three photos. High in them all, and by that point he had moved on from more than cigs and joints. We’d had a shouting match over it. That had ended with my arm bruised from where he grabbed it and threw me to the ground, telling me he didn’t need a useless cripple telling him what to do.

I’d spent the rest of the summer with Mickey, learning how to play Magic the Gathering and reading about Roman infrastructure.

“He died a few years after that, remember?” mom said, looking at the last photo. “A drug overdose.”

My heart clenched this time, not from the wine. My best friend, the one I looked forward to each year, counting down the weeks until I saw him, and he fell to the epidemic that so many others did in those small towns with only one stop light. I hadn’t gone to the funeral, too angry at him.

Mickey and I occasionally sent each other memes on Facebook. He’d gotten out, gone to be a software developer. Kevin was still there, last I heard, working with his dad as a heavy equipment technician. Aunt Laura and I sent Christmas cards.

But we weren’t close, my tie to the family long since gone.

“Yeah,” I said. “I remember.”