The Fourth Summer. Kathleen Gilles Seidel

The woman looked equally successful in a nicely cut black suit with a feminine white blouse. Her necklace was a twisted rope of silver and pearls.

      Caitlin didn’t want to have to judge these people. Or anyone. She didn’t belong on a jury. Why hadn’t she lied and said that her father had always said that all defendants were always guilty? Why hadn’t one of the lawyers asked her something that would reveal that she really had no right to claim North Carolina residency, that she was defrauding the state of California, and that she should be the one to need a jury of her peers?

      Eventually the lawyers were finished, and the judge began calling names, “Darrell Truckee, Susanne Nugent....” Was it good or bad to have your name called? None of them knew. He droned on and then finally said, “If I have called your name, you have been excused. Thank you for your service.”

      Her name hadn’t been called. She and the man in the first seat in the front row were the only ones left. Did this mean she was on the jury? Yes, it must. She had been selected, empaneled. Sixteen down to two, and she had been one of the two. How had this happened? Last night she and Seth were so sure that they wouldn’t be chosen.

      Why had they thought that? Because they were too young? They weren’t. She had started voting at eighteen and legally drinking at twenty-one. Wait, what about renting a car? If she was too young to rent a car without a premium, surely she shouldn’t be on a jury.

      She looked at Seth. He grimaced in sympathy.

      He’s twenty-five. He can rent a car. Pick him.

      Except there was no way they would ever select him. Forget the age thing. Who would want a snowboarder deciding their innocence or guilt? And even more important he was part-owner of the town’s biggest employer. Street Boards had taken over the furniture factory when it closed. Wouldn’t having a Street on the jury throw off the negotiations?

      Fourteen more names were called. They were questioned, and then twelve of them dismissed.

      The woman to Caitlin’s right was still seated at the end of that round. “They didn’t call my name,” she whispered to Caitlin. “What does that mean?”

      Caitlin turned to look at her. She was younger than Caitlin, and the slant of her thin chin gave her face a weak backwoods quality. “It means you have been selected.”

      “But that can’t be.” The girl was shaking her head. “I have a terrible time making up my mind about anything...why would they take me?”

      Caitlin couldn’t answer that.

      Seth was going to be able to go home pretty soon, and she would be stuck here. No skateboarding today. And what about the rest of the week? Was he going to stick around and fly to New Zealand from here, or go back to Oregon?

      It didn’t really matter, did it? Not really. She would miss out on some fun, but “friends with benefits”—when did that ever work? She’d seen people try it. Sometimes your “friend” was suddenly picking out china patterns with someone, leaving you feeling like a loser. Or neither one of you tried very hard to find someone else, and then whenever you were together, you both felt like failures.

      Why would she want to put herself through that? A one-night stand might be a better choice.

      * * * *

      They only had two weeks together during their second summer.

      By the time Caitlin got home from the first summer, her family knew that Trina was going to have a boy. Caitlin expected that Trina and Mom would have gone crazy decorating the fourth bedroom with rocket ships or little blue ducks. The two of them had always done all those things together, choosing paint color, sewing new throw pillows. The family’s furniture was very neutral, and each time they moved, her mom would pick out a bold color for the walls so each place felt exciting and not at all like a place you were only going to be in for three years. Caitlin was always dragooned into helping with the actual painting, but she never went to the paint store or the fabric store. Trina and Mom took forever to make up their minds, and they clearly had a good time taking forever, whereas Caitlin spoiled all the fun because she knew immediately that that white had too much yellow in it and that that wallpaper would make everyone dizzy if the ceilings and walls weren’t perfectly plumb.

      But when she got back from MeeMaw’s at the end of the summer, instead of the back bedroom being an explosion of baby froufrou, it still had her father’s desk and the pullout sleep sofa. The baby—his name was going to be Dylan—would sleep in Trina’s room.

      Except he didn’t sleep. He had to be jiggled. He needed motion to calm him down. One time, out of frustration, their dad had put him in his car seat and went on a drive, but Trina didn’t have her driver’s license. At night she had to jiggle him. Sometimes she would come into Caitlin’s room and wake her up. “Please, I can’t do this anymore, but don’t tell Mom and Dad.” Caitlin was stronger and so jiggling a baby didn’t tire her out, and honestly—although it made her feel pretty heartless—she could block out Dylan’s crying even when it was right in her ear.

      Trina was being homeschooled. The county sent a tutor a couple of days a week, but mostly it was on Mom, and so she had to nag Trina both to do her schoolwork and to get Dylan on a firmer schedule. Trevor, Dylan’s father, came over twice a week even though he clearly didn’t want to. His mother had to drive him, and she always came in. Before her visits there was a frantic forty-five minutes of tidying up, the sort of thing that they had never had to do in the past because before Dylan had been born, Caitlin’s mom had never been one to leave dishes in the sink or the newspaper on the kitchen table.

      Caitlin felt ignored by everyone in the family. If she hadn’t had the skateboard Seth’s father had made, she wouldn’t have been able to do anything or go anywhere. She started wearing black to school, hanging out in the art room, eating lunch alone. Finally one day about a month into school, her mother was handing her a load of laundry to put away when suddenly Mom stopped. “Caitlin, how are things with you?”

      “Fine,” Caitlin snapped and reached for the laundry basket.

      Mom wouldn’t let her have it. She put it back on top of the washer. “But this is your first year of high school, and we haven’t signed you up for any activities. Do you want to take ballet again? I could call the studio.”

      “No, I do not want to take ballet.”

      “What about that skateboarding that you’re doing? Would you like to see if I can find lessons?”

      “I already looked into it. The closest decent place is sixty miles away. Everything around here is all little kid shit.”

      “Caitlin!” Mom’s voice was stern. “I know that this is hard on everyone, but there’s no call for that kind of language.”

      Oh, for God’s sake. Her sister had gotten pregnant, and Caitlin was being scolded for saying “shit”?

      “Oh, I am sorry,” Mom apologized instantly. “I shouldn’t have said that.”

      “But you did.” Caitlin grabbed the laundry basket and stormed out of the room.

      She and Seth usually just kept in touch by trying to be on computers at the same time, but that night she took the family’s phone into the front hall closet and called him on the cell phone he and his mother shared.

      “I’m not having kids, not ever.” Dylan had a cold, and his nose was almost as disgusting as his butt.

      “Okay,” he said. “But you should get something out of this. Your mom feels guilty. If you want something, ask. She’s going to be a soft touch.”

      “I want everything to go back to normal, to how it was. That’s what I want.”

      “Well, good luck with that one. You want your own phone, don’t you?”

      “I don’t want anything from them,” she grumbled.

      “What about some other kind of dancing? Did you want to do that?”

      She