The Summer of Owen Todd Read online

  A hymn starts. “Holy Spirit, Font of Light.” The organ is big, but the choir’s pretty thinned out. Mrs. Huff is a strong soprano, but she’s not here, and a few of the other good singers are already rehearsing in shows—summer stock is big on the Cape—so the hymn is pretty ragged.

  We shake hands at the Peace, but stay in our seats, so nothing happens until communion. Sean comes up with the last people on his side, and I go up with the first on my side, so I’m close enough to sneak ahead of a couple families and kneel next to him.

  He’s alone.

  “Where’s you-know-who?” I whisper to Sean when Ginny plunks down between us.

  “You skipped ahead!” she says wetly in my ear.

  “Shh,” I say as Sean and I take our hosts from the warty deacon’s chalice, place them in the palms of our right hands.

  “Filling coffeepots,” Shay says. He leans over after the deacon passes. “Last chance to bust this party up. Paul has me on doughnut patrol. I can’t eat doughnuts! The guy’s totally trying to kill me.”

  Ginny raises her flattened hands between us and pretends to pray. “You’re not supposed to talk!” The priest is there now with a chalice of grape juice. I dip the host. He doesn’t offer Ginny the chalice, but blesses her instead. Sean dips. We get up, our hands folded.

  “I have to go to the track now,” I whisper to him.

  “Win a race for me.”

  “And me!” says Ginny.

  And that’s it.

  Shay slips out to the hall to begin patrolling the doughnuts, and I wait for Dad in the rear of the church. The choir is wandering around some new tune I can’t identify. Dad hustles toward me, nodding us out to the car.

  “Leaving church makes you feel good,” he says as he breathes in the warm morning air. “Leaving early, I mean. Don’t tell Mom that.”

  I laugh. “Never.”

  Even before we get in the car, he starts whistling softly, old songs I don’t know the names of, with this wheezy kind of hissing Mom doesn’t like, but it means he’s happy. He loves summer at the track as much as I do.

  When we arrive at J&D’s, there are already a couple of kids from the high school rolling out the karts, hanging the OPEN banner, kicking traffic cones into position, generally setting up for the day. The track opens later on Sundays than other days, but it’s still early, just before ten. Dad hops into the office, where my Uncle Jimmy is opening the cash register.

  I feel a little guilty not having Shay with me. A little guilty, but not a lot. I mean, I used to invite him more often, but he’d have to say no because his mother doesn’t like the track. Last summer when she brought him and he spent time in the garage with me, someone swiped his controller (maybe thinking it was a mini tablet), and she’s certain it was one of the Monomoy boys who work there. When Sean’s pod ran out, the alarm wouldn’t stop without the controller, and he had to use a backup pen to inject more insulin. It was a mess. Sean’s mother completely freaked, imagining how easily he might have passed out, which I guess he could have. She took him home and won’t let him come back.

  The truth is, I like it better being at the track by myself. It’s me and my dad’s place, and the couple of times Sean did race, he was not the greatest driver. He was timid in traffic, and traffic is the best part for me. He was too shy to overtake and just cruised around the outside instead of charging in at the corners.

  Even if he were a better driver, it’s not like Sean and I can spend too much time on track anyway. When my dad is really hustling and the line of customers doubles up and weaves around before getting to the gate, I spend hours doing nothing but spritzing the seats of the double-seated cars used by parents and their small kids.

  I was “volunteered” to do that last summer after a lady complained she sat in pee. She freaked out. Then one of the high school boys laughed and said, “At least it’s kid’s pee and not old-man pee.” And she shrieked louder. Dad had to refund her the drive, and cleaning seats instantly got added to my job description. Dad pays me, of course, but what’s minimum wage for pee detail?

  Still, the track is my place.

  I love the smell of the gas and oil on a warm day, and the sputtering roar of the motors, how each kart has its own sound. I love to work the pedals and feel the fat steering wheel in my hands and the motor throbbing my back as I roar around the track. Whenever I can, I pick number seventeen, since it’s the fastest of the karts and even faster when I drive it. On a really hot day, the noise and the smell and everything are even better.

  Of course, my dad lets me race for nothing, driving a bunch more laps than usual, but only if paying customers haven’t taken all the karts, and on “good days” in the summer there are customers pretty much wall-to-wall, so “good days” aren’t that good for me.

  * * *

  The J&D track is a slightly lopsided oval, with one end a shade tighter than the other. It sweeps a little upward from the parking lot, too, but hardly at all. I keep telling Dad they have to put in a real right-hand turn. An oval is the least fun kind of track you can have besides a circle, and it gets boring always turning left. One right-hand turn gives you two more chances to pass, if you twist the wheel properly.

  But my dad says why build new track when business is solid? Plus the karts have to be serviced and updated or retired all the time to keep in competition with Wareham and indoor tracks. Wareham does have right- and left-hand turns but it isn’t on the Cape, even Ginny knows that, though the people who run it like to think they are. Indoor racing, with lights and air-conditioning, racing without weather or sunshine or breezes, isn’t real karting, just oversize slot-car racing.

  But never mind. There isn’t going to be a right-hand turn in my lifetime. Dad loves the noise and the smell as much as I do, probably because he grew up the same way I did, loving karts from day one, and he’s also sort of convinced himself that he’s essential to J&D and has to be there forever.

  “I guess I’m a pretty good manager,” he said the other day over breakfast.

  “Daddy’s the best of anybody!” Ginny said, grinning at him. “Yay, Daddy!”

  “Fishing for compliments much?” my mom said.

  He laughed. “All I’m saying is that when business is good, it is good.”

  * * *

  And it’s good Sunday after church, too.

  I’m there for two and a half, nearly three solid hours, when my dad says, “We’ve been here since ten, and I don’t see any slow time for the next hour plus. Why not run over to the Star and get us something to eat?” He nods across the road, then draws his wrist over his sweaty forehead and adjusts his sunglasses. “Hang out in the AC if you want. I would.”

  “Really?”

  The Star Market is a grocery superstore across the street, separated from the track by the road from Brewster. There’s a crosswalk and everything, but my dad’s never asked me to go over there alone before.

  “Unless you want to wait an hour until your Uncle Jimmy gets back from the hardware store and I can take a break?” Because my uncle’s often there first, he tends to pop out a lot during the day. He’s older, so maybe he’s tired of being there? I don’t know. He used to be married but isn’t anymore.

  “I can do it,” I say.

  My parents, or one of them, or someone else’s, like Sean’s mom when she’s around, are usually always nearby and herding us along. “You’re only in fifth grade,” Mom says. And the Star is a place with lots of strangers and far to go out of anyone’s sight, which I would be for a while. I mentally go through the walk over, the ordering, the buying, the hanging out in a chilled store. I’m a fan of the idea.

  I repeat: “I can do it.”

  “Here’s a twenty. I’ll watch you as far as I can from the track.” He hands me his phone. “The office number is on here. I’ll run over if you need anything.”

  “I won’t.”

  “I’ll have a bottled water and a tuna fish on rye, lettuce, tomato, with a slice of white American.” He alway
s orders cheese on his tuna fish sandwiches.

  “Got it,” I say, already taking a step toward the road.

  I did try cheese and tuna once. Dad didn’t force me to. I didn’t care for it, the flavors didn’t blend for me. No, not the flavors, the textures. But maybe I’ll try it again. Cheeses are different in different stores.

  He goes back into the office as the next race starts. I check both ways. A brick-paved crosswalk goes from our parking lot to the market’s. The traffic is thick but slow, and as the summer revs up everybody gets pretty cautious anyway. There are just so many pedestrians, joggers, and dog walkers everywhere you look, not to mention all the extra cars, that drivers pretty much have to take it slow. I make sure everyone sees me. I trot to the other side. Phase One accomplished.

  The light in Cape Cod is different from any other place I’ve been. And I’ve been all over New England. New York twice, Florida, once. You don’t realize how special it is until you drive to the mainland, then return. It’s like someone peels a layer of bandages off your eyes. The minute you cross back over the Sagamore Bridge you feel you’ve been living in black and white, and now life is back in color again. Hopper caught the light, my mom says. Edward Hopper was a painter who lived here years ago. But right now the light is too bright and white and perfect and heating up the Star Market parking lot to think about anything else but today.

  I’ll save thinking for tomorrow, the last Monday of the last week of the last grade I’ll be in elementary school.

  It’s a straight shot between the lanes of parked cars. I look back every ten seconds or so to see if my dad is watching me, then I cut across the final spots and enter the store into a wash of cool air, the smell of pickles and pastry, the rumble of grocery carts, and a scratchy song on the sound system.

  Since I’ve usually gone in the Star with my dad, I don’t really know my way around the aisles, but I remember that deli counters are often at one end or the other of the store. After only one wrong guess, I find it! I take a ticket, wait till my number’s called, and order our sandwiches. I decide to try cheese on mine, too, which makes ordering simple.

  “Really, cheese and tuna?” the deli girl says.

  “You should try it,” I say. She winks at me.

  I wait at the counter until she’s done making our lunches, then I wander a bit to find the bottled waters.

  The phone buzzes. I answer. It’s Sean. “Hey,” I say. “Wait—how did you—”

  “I called the track. Your dad gave me the number.”

  “Stalker,” I say. “What’s up?”

  “Any fatalities yet?”

  “What?”

  “At the track?”

  “Ha. No. Not at the deli counter, either. I’m in the Star across the street. Alone, by the way.”

  “I know. Your dad said.”

  Then I look around. “And in the lady-products aisle, for some reason. I think I’m lost.”

  “I don’t know what those things are for,” he says.

  “Are you still home? With Powwwwl?”

  “Listen.” His voice goes very soft. “He left the bathroom door open.”

  He left the bathroom door open.

  So?

  Then I get it. “Oh … pewwww!”

  Sean scuffles his fingers over the phone, whispering. “Not that. He was peeing.”

  I try to process. “Either way, I’m not cleaning it up for you—”

  “With his pants all the way down to the floor.”

  I freeze. “What?”

  “Yeah. I saw everything.”

  I shiver. “Uck, Sean, gross. Did he leave the door open by mistake?”

  He snorts into the phone. “He looked right at me, just holding it.”

  Bugs come from nowhere and crawl all over me. “Holy crow. What’d you do?”

  “I pretended not to see. It was so disgusting. Not to mention he was like a forest. I gotta go. I want to throw up.”

  The call ends, the phone goes silent in my ear, I stand frozen in the aisle. Really. Frozen. I try to push the soles of my feet hard against the floor so I won’t fall over. Then I notice for the first time two high school girls standing behind me.

  One of them is giggling to the other. “Wrong aisle for you,” she says.

  “Sorry.”

  I pocket the silent phone and I stumble on, still searching for water.

  FOUR

  School ends Thursday in an explosion of kids running for buses and cars.

  Sean yells like a warrior—“Fifth grade is over!”—whooping and wailing his spindly way past me at the final bell. The parking lot is a riot of crisscrossing kids and blowing car horns that don’t stop until the principal runs out, red in the face but smiling, and yells something that no one hears, then waves his arms to direct traffic.

  When Shay and I dive into the back seat of his mom’s minivan, he commands her, “Mother! Get us home STAT! We need to change and get out in this day! As soon as we can! Or we will all die!”

  “Yes, sir!” She salutes in the mirror and edges into the line of creeping cars. It’s pretty slow in the lot, like all street traffic is getting to be. I have a mental flash of overscooped ice cream cones and slow ball games and fast karts and lying around on the beach. Sean’s mom sings silly songs—so completely unlike her I wonder for a second if she’s been taken over—for the normally ten-minute drive to my house, which takes twice as long because of the time spent oozing through the packed streets.

  It’s been four days since the naked-peeing incident.

  By now, what Shay told me—and I’m only just beginning to forget the image of the babysitter’s eyes staring out while he stands over the toilet—seems more a weird accident than anything else, maybe to Sean, too. He hasn’t brought it up again. I find myself thinking—was Paul Landis smiling when he was in the bathroom standing like that? But it’s three icky seconds that will get a whole level ickier if I ask Sean that, so I don’t. I guess he doesn’t tell anyone else, either. It doesn’t seem like his mother knows. No, of course she doesn’t. She wouldn’t be singing songs. Maybe Sean doesn’t think it’s anything, after all. I let it go, too.

  * * *

  The next morning my dad wakes me up early. “Bus is coming! You’re late!”

  “Oh, jeez!” I jump out of bed. I stop. “Dad, come on! School’s over!”

  “Oh. Is it?” He grins. “Seriously, get dressed. Karts.”

  “But it’s my day off. You promised me a couple of days of nothing. I need to do nothing.” I slump back onto my bed. It’s still warm. I feel a magnetic pull.

  “Oh, well, too bad. I need a test driver. But if you’re not interested, I’ll ask Sean if he wants to come with me.” He starts to walk out.

  “What? Wait. Test driver for what?”

  He grins again. “I’m thinking of buying a kart off a guy in Chatham. I’m driving over to check it out. I thought you liked racing and all, but if you’d rather sleep—”

  “I’m up! I’m up!”

  * * *

  I throw on my clothes, call Sean, and within ten minutes my dad is swinging by his house in the pickup. Dad’s assured Sean’s mother that it’s a field trip and not a day at the track, so she’s okay with it. Shay leaps off his porch and bounces in the front with his backpack, yelping, “Thank you, Mr. Todd. Mom had already asked my sitter to the house, but had to call him off. It was sweet, listening to that. I think maybe he cried. Ha!”

  “Really, you don’t like him?” my dad says, giving Sean an odd look.

  I half wonder if Shay’s going to spill the beans about the pee thing, but his face shows no sign of it. Instead, he says, “You know what Paul told my mom and me? He said he broke his shin when he was small and it got infected. He was in the hospital for weeks and they were talking about cutting his leg off. He was scared, he said. My mom got all teary, and he nearly cried when he showed me the scar later.”

  “I’ll bet,” my dad says, pulling out on the street.

  “That�
�s pretty ick,” I say.

  Sean nods. “At least he’s okay now. Let’s drive!”

  And that was pretty much that. Paul Landis was okay now.

  * * *

  The guy selling the kart lived in an old ranch house down a piney dirt road off one of the routes outside Chatham, the elbow-tip of the Cape. His place backed onto a scrappy little pond called Blue Pond.

  Even before we swing into his dirt driveway, I spot not one, but three old karts on a side patch of lawn, lined up side by side like used cars. One is barely there. It has no wheels, no seat pad, no steering wheel, no roll bar, and at least one bent axle. The one next to it, a pale green wreck, seems more or less intact, but might be a hundred years old and is all dented and rusty, though it might be mined for parts. The third, however, is a racer. It’s dark blue, grimy and spattered with dirt, and the motor is black with caked-on oil, the tires worn to nothing, but you can tell even as it sits there that it has teeth.

  “Dad…”

  “I see it. Don’t gawk all over it. I do all the talking, please.”

  “Yes, sir.” I glance at Sean as we get out, slipping my J&D baseball cap on my head. “Ditto for you.”

  “What’s the big deal?” he whispers.

  “The blue one looks very good. We shouldn’t let on.”

  “Like I know karts. I should eat a snack anyway.”

  Sean doesn’t eat at regular times. I mean, he does, but he has to eat at other times, too, to keep his blood sugar at an even level. Watching him now, opening his kit, seeing the pricker thingy to stick his finger with, the check strip, the controller, all that, I get that his mom wants an adult around. Paul Landis, being an EMT, or an ex one, seems a smart choice. Sean checks, nods, takes a fruit bar and a can of tomato juice from his backpack. He’s been doing this for two years. I guess it either becomes so routine, or it always annoys you that you have to do it.