Rules of Summer

It was almost four o’clock when Mr. Knox turned off the highway at Ocean Road and hooked a left for the shortcut east, going fast enough so that Isabel’s temporary driver’s license fluttered beside her on the seat. She’d passed—just barely—but passed, nonetheless.

“How do you think you’ll celebrate?” Mr. Knox asked. “Do your parents have something planned?”

“Not really,” she said. “I don’t think they even know that I had the test today.”

But Rory knew, she thought. Rory would have remembered, though she probably wouldn’t really care at this point.

“I know you go to school in Santa Barbara, but you should come down to LA and spend some time with us,” he said. “We’d love to have you.”

“That’d be great,” she said. “And thank you so much for today. You saved my life.”

“It was no bother,” he said. “Holly and Krista probably don’t even know that I’ve been gone. And congratulations. This is a big moment. I’m proud of you.”

He sounded so much like her father, she thought as his words hung in the air. Actually, she thought, he sounded so much better than her father. Her own father would never have said anything that heartfelt to her. She watched as he fiddled with the satellite radio.

“Why do Holly and I look so much alike?” she asked suddenly.

Mr. Knox glanced over at her. “What?”

“I mean, we look exactly alike,” she said. “Like we could be sisters. Haven’t you noticed that?”

Mr. Knox drove quietly for a few moments and then pulled over to the side of the road. “I’m not sure how to say this, Isabel,” he said, blinking steadily. “But I suppose it’s not your fault that your parents haven’t told you yet.”

“Haven’t told me what yet?” she asked. She felt the weird urge to laugh.

“That you’re my daughter,” he said.

Isabel laughed out loud and then covered her mouth. “What?” she asked.

Mr. Knox’s expression was painfully serious. “Back when your parents and I were friendly,” he continued, “your mom and I fell in love. At least, it was love for me. But for your mother… It wasn’t quite the same thing.” He looked out the windshield and shook his head. “I wasn’t very successful, and we were both married, and it was just too difficult for us to be together. Your mother did the best thing by you. She really did.”

Isabel leaned back against the seat “Please get back on the road,” she said. “I need you to be driving right now.”

“Uh, sure,” he said, and pulled back onto the road.

After a few moments, she said, “Is that why you came back? For my mom?”

“No,” he said. “I came back for you.”

Isabel stared at him.

“All these years, I’ve never stopped thinking about you. How you were getting on. Wondering how you’ve been. I’m sorry that this is how you’re finding out.”

She watched him ease his way into traffic. A fury that she’d never felt before rose up in her chest, and she had the crazy urge to open the car door and run down the highway, as far away from this place as she could get. And then she felt a balm settle over her, as if someone had just wrapped her up in a thick, warm towel after a dip in the pool. So this is why, she thought. This is why everything has always felt so weird.

Mr. Knox looked over at her again. “Are you okay?”

“I think so,” she said. “My mom could have said something.”

“Take it easy on her. She’s not nearly as strong as she pretends to be.”

“Does my dad know?” It felt odd to say my dad, but she didn’t know what else to say.

“He does,” Mr. Knox said. “Needless to say, he doesn’t like me a whole lot.”

Or me, Isabel thought. “So that day at the club, when I saw you hanging out by the tennis courts—”

“I was trying to speak to your mother alone,” he said. “About you. About how I can be in your life.”

Isabel tapped her fingers on the car door. “But don’t you already have two daughters?” she asked.

“I have three daughters,” he corrected her.

They crept forward in the traffic. Isabel picked up the driver’s license and held it between her fingers. Right now, it was the only thing in her life that was certain. “So you’re a big Hollywood producer now, huh?” she asked, hoping to change the subject.

“I don’t know about big, but yes, I’ve had a couple of successes.”

“That’s cool.” Isabel played with her charm bracelet. “Sometimes I think about being an actress.”

Mr. Knox glanced at her. “It’s a lot of hard work. A lot of rejection.”

“I’m getting used to that,” she muttered.

They were coming up on a farm stand by the side of the road. Parked in the lot by the side of the tent was a dark red, weather-beaten Xterra.

“Hey, can you stop here, please?” she asked suddenly.

“Here?”

“Yes.”

Mr. Knox pulled into the parking lot. Isabel looked at the car. From the scratches on the back and the black bumper sticker that read AIR AND SPEED SURF SHOP, MONTAUK, NY, she knew that it was his. She’d finally found Mike’s family’s farm stand.

“Can you wait here for a sec?” she asked.

“Sure,” Mr. Knox said. He seemed relieved to have a moment to himself.

She got out of the car.

The stand was actually a large tent that hung over tables displaying crates of heirloom tomatoes, strawberries, peaches, ears of white and yellow corn, and potatoes. Everywhere, people hustled past with brown paper bags, eagerly stuffing them with produce.

She walked up to a woman standing behind one of the tables. She was in her twenties, with dark hair, and she appeared to be helping the actual person in charge, who was an older, skinnier woman who weighed people’s bags on a scale and then tallied up their amount with frightening efficiency.

“Excuse me, is Mike Castelloni here?” she asked.

The dark-haired woman looked her up and down. “Just a minute,” she said gruffly, and disappeared through a gap in the tent’s walls.

Isabel looked around. It was dusty here, and hot, and she realized how thirsty she was. She needed a drink. She walked over to ask someone if there was any water when she saw the wooden sign at the entrance to the tent. MCNULTY’S GREEN MARKET. McNulty, she thought. It was a familiar name, though she couldn’t place it.

And then an image popped into her brain: of her and Rory standing in her dad’s study that hot afternoon, and the feel of the letter between her fingers, the onionskin texture of the paper. The letter written to her dad threatening to sue. From Robert McNulty. The farmer who owned the property her dad had just bought. The farmer who owned this stand. The one where Mike worked with his family.

His family.

She had the feeling that someone was watching her, and as she glanced over her shoulder, she saw Mike walking toward her. Even with a crate of potatoes in his arms, he had the same lazy, sensual gait. As pieces of him came into view—his large brown eyes; his full lips; his narrow, muscular torso, clothed in a plain white undershirt—it was hard not to feel herself fall under the same spell that she had every time he’d driven into the parking lot at Main Beach.

He put the crate on one of the tables and ambled over to her. “Hey,” he said, brushing some hair off his forehead. “What are you doing here?”

“I saw your car from the road. Is this your family’s stand?”

“Yeah, why?” he said.

“McNulty’s your dad?”

“He’s my uncle.” He looked at her warily, and now she knew.

“So your uncle is the guy who is in this big dispute with my dad?”

He looked down at the ground and then over his shoulder. “Let’s go talk over here,” he said, nodding toward the parking lot.

She followed him to the lot. “Why didn’t you tell me?” she demanded.

“Isabel, just calm down—”

“Don’t tell me to calm down!” she yelled. “You break up with me with no explanation, no answer… and now you have this weird connection to my dad?”

Mike looked off into the distance and sighed.

“Does this have something to do with why you broke up with me?” she asked.

He pawed at a few stones of gravel with his flip-flop. “It kind of does, yeah,” he said.

She folded her arms. Calm down, she told herself. Just breathe.

“When I figured out who you were, I remembered that my uncle had sold some property to someone named Larry Rule, and it turned out to be your dad,” he said. “And I guess there’d been some back-and-forth, some problems with him, some stuff they weren’t sure about, and my family wanted me to see if I could get any info.”

She took a step back. “Info? On my family?”

Mike threw up his hands. “Yeah.”

“So this is why you dated me? To get info?”

“No. I was into you. From the beginning. That day on the beach. I thought you were the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen. But when I told my family who I was dating… I mean, what was I supposed to do? This land has been in my mom’s family for two hundred and fifty years. They’ve never sold to anyone. And they had a bad feeling about your dad. And when you said that he was gonna build a huge house on the property, I had to tell them.”

“So that’s how they knew that,” she mused.

“Just hear me out, okay? I didn’t know what to do. I really started to care about you, Isabel. The night we slept together for the first time, I knew that I couldn’t keep lying to you. That’s why I went to Maine. I needed to get away. And when I came back, I told my family that I wasn’t going to be telling them anything any longer. But then you invited me to your dad’s party, and I knew that I couldn’t go. And I knew you’d be upset. And that night I realized I’d just gone too far with it, you know? I couldn’t tell you the truth, because I was sure I’d lose you. And I couldn’t stay with you and hope that my family would leave me alone. So I did the only thing I could do. I ended it.” He finally looked her in the eye. “And I know that you probably don’t believe this, and I know that you probably think I’m just saying this right now, but I just want you to know that I did love you. I do love you. Still.”

Despite her anger and disgust, the urge to throw her arms around him and tell him that she loved him was almost overpowering. But as he ran a hand through his hair and looked at her sideways, fidgeting a little in that sexy way of his, something occurred to her. All the inscrutable mystery and deep pools of passion and barely expressed desire that she’d thought lay within him weren’t there at all. All this time, he hadn’t been hiding a smoldering well of feeling. He’d just been hiding a secret. Maybe Mike had fallen in love with her, like he said. But he hadn’t fallen in love with her enough to tell her the truth. And that was all she needed to know.

He reached out to touch her forearm. “Isabel, I’m sorry,” he said. “I love you.”

She stepped back. “Don’t. It’s over.”

“But I just told you—”

“You lied to me. I gave you everything, and you lied to me.”

He didn’t appear to fully understand her words. “But I just told you why I had to.”

She felt tears push up from the back of her throat. “I have to go.”

“Where are you going?”

“I’m not mad. I get it. But it’s just over.”

“Isabel—”

She stepped farther away from him and shook her head. “I have to go. Take care of yourself, all right? Have a good rest of the summer.” She turned and walked toward the car before he could say anything. She’d walked away from guys before when she’d ended things, and normally she never felt much, except the need to get as far away as possible. Now, as she trudged across the gravel, feeling his eyes on her, she wasn’t in the same hurry to be rid of him. She knew that she would always be attracted to him. She would probably always miss him. But she knew that she had no choice this time. All the times before, she could have stayed with the guy if she’d really wanted. But this time, Mike hadn’t given her a choice. She couldn’t stay. She had to walk away.

When she got to the Knoxes’ car, she turned around. “Oh, and thank you,” she called out.

“For what?” he asked.

For making me stronger, she wanted to say. But instead, she just shrugged.

“For all of it,” she said, and got into the car.