Summerlong by Dean Bakopoulos Page A

to be fading; she’d had Kathy late and was already seventy, suffering from a bad kidney and heart disease) and once he had finished his book, had secured a contract for its publication, they could leave. Someone would hire him. After all, he’d been on ABC News once and National Public Radio twice talking about Ronald Reagan! He was, in academic terms, a rising star.
    They did not leave though. Instead, Gill applied for jobs each year, and failed to secure one. Eventually, Charlie’s parents took out a home equity loan, using the paid-for house as collateral, and had gradually built, at the rear of the large lot, a building housing Gill’s study and a small guest room. A small kitchenette and a full bathroom connected the two rooms, both of which looked out at an inground pool. On weekends and summer evenings, Charlie remembers playing in the yard, or swimming in the pool, constantly aware of his father’s omnipresence at that study window, a massive desk piled with books and papers.
    Charlie can still picture his father in the study, a wonderfully comfortable place to work, but Charlie knows well that Gill Gulliver had never pictured that room, which he loved, which may have been his favorite place in the world, as the kind of place that would stand, decades later, as a kind of sad storage unit: packed with all his books and papers and notes and letters and research, a labyrinth of unfinished ideas and in-progress projects, while Gill Gulliver rotted away, half mad, prematurely mad, in the local nursing home.
    They go into the room.
    Gill Gulliver is in a chair. He types away on a small laptop computer.
    When ABC walks in, Charlie right behind her, Gill stops typing. He looks bewildered for a moment and then clasps his hands to his face and says, “Oh my God.”
    Charlie and ABC walk toward the chair; Gill seems to have no idea of how he might slide his rolling tray table away from himself and stand to greet them. It is as if he is in an invisible prison. ABC turns to see Charlie, his eyes drowning.
    “Oh God,” Gill Gulliver says again.
    ABC stands back while Charlie goes closer to his father. She wonders if she should slip out now. She wonders what Charlie wants. Charlie tries to say something, but the only thing that comes out is a phlegm-crippled hey.
    “Oh, oh,” Gill Gulliver says. “ABC! ABC, it is good to see you. So good! Come here.”
    ABC goes toward Gill. “Charlie’s here too, Gill.”
    Gill says nothing about that, just stares at ABC in a kind of rapture. She moves the tray table and the laptop and coffee out of his way.
    He reaches out to her and she leans in and hugs him for a long time, and then, when she finally lets go, Gill Gulliver looks right at his only son, Charlie, and smiles and says, “Well, who’s this handsome man?”
    And then turning to ABC and winking, he says, “Whoever he is, he likes you. I can tell.”

8.
    In the haze of a dying afternoon, they walk home across the empty campus. In almost every building, from the original chapel to the shiny new fitness center, ABC can locate a memory of Philly, still burning, like the corner library table where she often sat with Philly, where Philly would sleep more than study, her head in ABC’s lap.
    What do you do when you can still smell her hair?
    Charlie and ABC sit at the kitchen island of the Gulliver house on two metal stools, drinking beers, side by side, and ABC finds herself swept up in some inner turmoil of both grief and urgent lust. Her whole body is a moistening sponge, sweating, ripening, and she presses her beer to her forehead and she focuses on this feeling so she will not cry or moan.
    “I should turn on the AC,” Charlie says, and he leaps up and does that.
    “It’s the humidity,” ABC says. “Blah! It’s too early in the summer to be this hot.”
    Charlie comes back to his stool, nodding, and says, “I tend to run cold so, you know, sometimes I don’t notice it. Maybe I’m used to the stage