Summerlong by Dean Bakopoulos Read Free Book Online

Charlie’s, after drying off and dressing and peeing and composing herself in the guesthouse/study she’d slipped into, he’d been asleep in a deck chair, covered in a large white towel. Looking at the bookshelves in the guesthouse she’d found, surprisingly, among the books in Gill Gulliver’s study an old hardcover copy of her first and only book, Everybody Wants Everything , and she had pulled it from the shelves and found a black marker and shehad, for some reason, signed it: To Charlie . She had almost stopped there but then she added something: Tell me what you want. Before putting it back on the shelf, she looked at the jacket photo, now nearly fifteen years old. Claire, in 1999, a black tank top, short hair swept back and slick, big hoop earrings, a wide black belt, faded jeans. Her face serious, not exactly a pout, but a pensive wince. She both hated and loved to see herself like that. Her publicist then, an Ole Miss graduate named Amber who, she was sure, no longer worked in publishing, had said, “You need an author photo that makes you look, pardon my French, like a good lay.”
    Sometimes she thinks that one comment is why she stopped writing.
    Now the light is in the sky, and Don moves Claire’s finger from his lips.
    “What’s going on?” Don says.
    “I thought you were downstairs watching Netflix.”
    “I wasn’t. I was just—”
    “Shh!”
    “Do you not want to know where I’ve been because you don’t want me to know where you’ve been?”
    “The kids will be up any minute, Don. We have to get home.”
    “Have you been swimming?” Don asks.
    She looks up at him, as if she hasn’t understood the question at all. As if it were a non sequitur, completely insane.
    “Why are we still married?” she says.
    Now a police car comes up alongside them and an officer asks them to get in. Don knows the officer. He calls him Steve. Claire is not sure who he is but follows Don’s lead.
    “You know Steve Halverson,” Don says.
    “Hello, Steve,” she says, though she doesn’t know him at all.
    Halverson explains that he and another deputy had arrived that morning to serve papers—strictly doing my sworn duty, Don, I wish it could be different. Foreclosure papers, a notice that the sheriff would be auctioning off their home in thirty days, and whatHalverson and his partner found, when knocking on the door, were two confused and sleepyheaded kids, neither of them knowing where their parents had gone.
    “I thought Don was home,” Claire says as they ride the few blocks across town. “Or I thought he was about—foreclosure papers? Don’t we get more warning about those? Weren’t you in the basement, Don?”
    “No,” Don says.
    “Well, ma’am,” Halverson says, “by this point in the process, the home owner has generally had numerous notices from the county. And for months before that, from the bank.”
    “I don’t understand,” Claire says.
    “Claire,” Don says. He reaches for her arm then pulls back. Looking at him, she knows that he knows the whole story, everything, and that there is no misunderstanding here at all, but a secret he has kept from her.
    “Anyway, ma’am,” Halverson says, “yes, you would have been given, according to the usual process, at least six months of warning. These days, people get longer. The system is backed up. It’s the least pleasant part of my job. Next to dead bodies.”
    Don smells of sleep, morning breath, sweat, beer, smoke. The dank smell of damp vegetation seems to come off him, as if he had stepped out of a leaf pile.
    “Not that we get many dead bodies around here,” Halverson says, “but when we do, it’s awful. It gets to you.”
    “Don? Where were you?” she asks.
    Don puts his hand on her knee and whispers. “We got the notices,” he says.
    “What?” she says, her voice a high involuntary whistle, like a broken flute. She thinks she might be sick in the back of the car. She wants to roll down the window. She feels as if it