The Summer List. Amy Mason Doan

And how old is your little girl? Elle, you said? Not that I mean she’s the same as a pet...” I needed to stop talking. Or at least rehearse every sentence in my head a minimum of three times before letting it exit my mouth.

      Casey waited for me to stop. No “no worries,” an expression it seemed the rest of the world used ten times a day. No “don’t be silly.”

      “She just turned ten. She’s been with us since she was five.”

      “Can I see her picture?”

      Casey pointed to the photos hung on the stairwell. “You can see dozens, we’re running out of room.”

      I walked up the stairs to examine the pictures while Casey crouched and scratched Jett’s stomach. Jett was in textbook passive pose, on her back, paws limp. Casey had already won her over. At least she was making an effort with my pet.

      I didn’t have to hunt long for the little girl’s face. She was all over the wall. A plump child with wavy brown hair and brown eyes, younger in the photos closer to the center, older in the ones crammed around the edges. There she was with a smiling Casey, fishing. There she was with her face red from a Popsicle. Carrying a backpack in front of my old elementary school.

      “She’s adorable,” I called.

      “Thanks.”

      Alex had started the wall the September after she and Casey moved in, first with a handful of framed photos clustered where they were easily visible from the middle step. The collection had grown outward, the spacing tightening over the years as real estate got scarce.

      I knew so many of the images. Casey blowing out birthday candles at three and four and seven, her cheeks round, her eyes bright. Casey jumping off dive blocks at swim meets, her age only discernible by the length of her blurry legs. Casey and Alex on the trip to Mexico when Casey was fifteen, toasting with their margarita glasses in some awful spring-break club. Casey in the garden, pretending to mash herbs with Alex’s mortar and pestle, her raised eyebrows showing just what she thought of Alex’s pagan phase. Alex at her pottery wheel, squinting into the sun, her cheeks and forehead flecked with white clay. Alex as a toddler on the beach in San Francisco, the ruins of the Sutro Baths behind her. I looked at that one closely, trying to identify the old Victorian up the hill that Sam had turned into his shop, years after the photo was taken. But I couldn’t find it.

      I’d once been on the wall, too. Prominently featured. By senior year I was in ten pictures. My favorite had been positioned eight steps up. Me and Casey in the kayak, raising our paddles over our heads and laughing, water pouring down in shining streams around us.

      But that one was no longer there, and neither were any of the others. I’d been curated out of the gallery.

      I walked down the stairs, smiling so Casey wouldn’t know what I’d been thinking.

      “My mom still has them.”

      “Has what?”

      “The pictures of you. She keeps the one of us in the kayak in her studio.”

      I nodded. What was I supposed to say? No worries?

      “So,” Casey said, walking to the kitchen. “Wine? Rosé all right? And I wasn’t kidding about the cheese. I didn’t know what you’d like so I got it all. Hard, soft, everything in between.”

      “What, no cookie dough?” I followed Casey across the living room.

      “Cookie dough?”

      “You know, trio of cookie dough.”

      She turned to face me.

      “Trio of cookie dough,” I said. “Manicures. Crank calls?”

      “What are you talking about?”

      And I realized it even before my hand closed around the invitation in my pocket.

      The invitation Casey hadn’t sent.

      I’d handled the hot-pink envelope so much over the past three weeks it had gotten soft. I passed it to Casey and she pulled the card out. After one glance she walked over to the rolltop desk in the corner, so fast I didn’t have a chance to read her expression.

      She handed me a piece of filmy blue stationery. “We’ve been had.”

      The handwriting’s resemblance to mine was impressive.

      “‘Dear Casey, I’ve been thinking about our friendship a lot lately, and missing you. Would you mind if I came for a visit? I’ll be in town on...’”

      I didn’t need to read any more.

      “Your mom,” I said.

      “I’m going to strangle her.”

      “Do you want me to go?”

      “Do you want to go?”

      * * *

      When Casey stomped to the refrigerator for the rosé she found it had been replaced by a six-pack of Bartles & Jaymes wine coolers with a fat manila envelope taped on top. Girls, it said on the outside, in Alex’s unmistakable curly handwriting.

      Alex had even remembered our flavor preference from senior year. Junior year our favorite had been Snow Creek Berry, but by the fall of 1998 we’d transitioned to Peach Bellini, and that’s what she’d bought.

      We sat on the sofa with our drinks, Alex’s envelope between us. Casey studied her bottle’s label, circling the round B&J logo with her index finger.

      “Do you want to open it?” I said.

      “You’re the guest, you should have the honor.”

      “I need a minute.”

      “She turned in a pretty goddamned good performance of acting surprised when I showed her the letter,” Casey said. She swigged her Peach Bellini, her grip on the bottle so tight her knuckles blanched. “I mean, Golden Globe–worthy.”

      “She took that acting class in Pinecrest,” I said softly. When was it? Sophomore year? It didn’t matter, but it was all I could handle at the moment, that one fact, so I concentrated hard until I pulled it from my memory. Spring of sophomore year. Endless monologues from Uncle Vanya and Streetcar.

      “Right. Then suddenly she said it would be better if she wasn’t here, if the two of us had ‘quality time’ together. And today she blew town with Elle.” Casey’s cheeks had reddened. Her angry clown look, Alex had always called it.

      I could leave.

      But Casey hadn’t kicked me out. She’d hot potato’d the question of what to do right back at me.

      In the Stay column, at least Casey was sharing a piece of furniture with me.

      In the Go column—she could not be farther away. The sofa had two big seat cushions, and while I sat in the middle of mine, Casey was so far away, wedged against the opposite arm, that she’d made her cushion lift up in the center of the sofa like she was raising a little padded drawbridge between us.

      Another for the Go column—she was gripping her wine cooler so tight I could see the raised outline of the delicate center bone inside her wrist.

      I sipped my sickly sweet peach drink.

      Jett settled on the floor between us. Casey stretched her leg out so her heel could rub circles around Jett’s fluffy midsection. I put the fact that she was petting my dog in the Stay column. “Let’s at least open the letter.”

      “You do it, I’m too pissed.” Casey took another swig of her drink and set it on the coffee table. She squeezed her left hand into a ball, then radiated her fingers out again like a magician in the “abracadabra” moment of the act. A de-stressing technique I used myself sometimes.

      I set my bottle down a respectful distance from hers and tore open the envelope. Alex had taped a hundred-dollar bill to the top of a handwritten