Page 1 of Summer Ever After
ONE
DAISY
Shimmeringheat waves rose from the pavement around me. The handles from the grocery bags cut into my fingers, but each sweaty step took me closer to home. “Just keep walking. Just keep walking,” I whispered to myself as the cicadas buzzed in response.
Home was a nice way of putting it. Our rental – a single-wide trailer made at a time when orange and brown shag carpets were all the rage, was supposed to be a temporary roof over our heads. We were only going live there on Sunflower Lane until my stepmother Christina, was able to sink her claws into a man with some money. Only this time, it was taking her longer than usual to secure something luxurious.
My father died ten years earlier when I was thirteen years old. The marriage with Christina was short-lived, and I was convinced that she had something to do with his death – although I couldn’t prove it. Since then, Christina, my stepsister Chloe, and I have lived in all kinds of houses all across the country. My favorite was a historic cottage on the shores of Windswan Lake, but its owner, a man named Mike, died before Christina had the chance to insert herself into his will.
Windswan Lake was up and coming and home to many millionaires and a few rumored billionaires – a prime hunting ground for my stepmom. According to her, suffering through a winter in a leaky trailer was the price we had to pay. Christina took the main bedroom, and Chloe claimed the second. That left me with the sagging plaid sofa in the living room, but Christina liked to stay up late watching TV. The solution, which I liked, was setting up a cot in the insulated garden shed. It was my own space, and I had a stack of books to read. They’d been considerate enough to string an extension cord through the window. It ran next to the dripping air conditioner, snaked across the yard and into the shed through a hole in the window screen, so I could have a light to read them by. I kept a jar of peanuts next to my bed to feed the family of chipmunks living in the tree whose branches shaded my ‘home’.
I wiped the sweat from my brow with the bottom of my t-shirt. Sunflower Lane was at least two more miles down the road. Chloe needed the car we all shared to go to her nail appointment in the city, and had beenkindenough to drop me on the curb with a grocery list clutched in my hand.
My socks were soaked with sweat, burning up in my running shoes. I wanted to stop, but the milk had already been in the heat a little too long.
A man’s voice made me stop in my sweaty tracks.
“Shit. Fuck. Dammit.”
I rose onto my tiptoes in an attempt to see over the sunflowers, but it was futile. They were a couple of feet taller than my five-foot-seven self. My options were to either bushwack through the field or walk right past him. Hefting the bag onto my shoulder I slipped into the field of sunflowers, hoping their dinner plate-sized blooms above me didn’t give away my presence.
Whoever it was, they sure were angry at something.
“Come on you piece of crap.” The voice shouted and there was a clatter of metal meeting metal.
Driven by curiosity, I inched to the edge of the field and crouched behind a small knoll. A black and red motorcycle, leaned on its kickstand. A black helmet sat on the handlebars and the swearing man was seated on the ground, his head in his hands. A leather jacket was spread on the ground next to him and at first glance, it looked like his light blue shirt had a dark blue stripe down the back, but then I realized it was sweat.
It felt a little wrong, watching the man, but I couldn’t stop. He stood and turned, holding his cell phone up to the sky.
His voice was growly. “Of course, there’s no service. You think you’re so great, technology?” He spoke directly at his phone as if it could answer him back. “Without a signal, you’re as useless as a motorcycle that won’t start. You goddamn cocksucking, motherfucking state-of-the-art piece of shit.”
I had to clamp my hand over my mouth to stifle the giggle. I had been around rage and fury, and if this was that, I would’ve backed away as silent as a mouse – but this man was frustrated and exasperated. And, kind of funny.
The strap of the bag slipped off my shoulder and the heavy bag dropped onto some dried leaves. Sweary McSwear Pants looked over his shoulder. “Is somebody there?”
He was wearing boots and jeans. I was in running shoes. Odds were in my favor if a chase ensued, but I felt like I could read people, and the man in front of me didn’t seem to pose a threat. I rose and stepped out from between the stalks.
“Hi.” I waved, feeling a little more confident.
He made a yelping sound and whirled around, his hand on his chest. “Oh, thank god. I thought it was a wolf or something.” Immediately his face turned the same color as the tomatoes in my grocery bag. “How long have you been there?”
“Long enough to learn that a motorcycle is no good if it doesn’t start.”
He stood and opened one of the leather bags slung over the bike and pulled out a baseball hat, smoothing it over his sweaty hair. “I’m sorry about that. I didn’t know that there was…a lady nearby.”
“A lady?” I looked over my shoulder. “Where? We should find her. She probably fainted when you screamed out cocksucker.”
His lips turned up into a smile, but the red in his face intensified, matching the hue of the stripe on the motorcycle. “I’m really sorry about that. I’m usually pretty chill, but this bike has been nothing but problems since I bought it.” He patted the seat. “And I think that she finally beat me today.”
I set the bag on the gravel shoulder of the road. “My dad had one of these bikes.”
“Are you sure?” Sweary man’s brow knitted. “They’re pretty rare.”
Biting my lip, I blinked back surprise tears. “He was a collector, this is a BMW Airhead. The battery was always dying in his too. Yours is in pretty good shape.” I eyed up the motorcycle. “It looks original.”
“Wow.” Max shook his head. “What are the chances? Of all the people in the world who could’ve… stepped out of a cornfield in the middle of nowhere…” His voice trailed off as though he had just realized how strange it must have been to see me.
I cleared my throat. “It’s a sunflower field. Not a cornfield.”
