The Summer List. Amy Mason Doan

dark little crescent lake where I’d grown up was nothing compared to this.

      The Bay could hold thousands of Coeur-de-Lunes.

      I headed slowly back downhill toward my building. My back was soaked, my chest tight. I was lucky I hadn’t rolled an ankle.

      And I hadn’t managed to cardio the invite from my head. Casey’s words were still in there, burrowing deeper. I could hear her voice now. The voice of an eighteen-year-old girl, plaintive beneath her irony.

       But seriously, please come.

      * * *

      I was sure the mermaid would be safely buried by the time we got back.

      But when I passed the mailboxes, there she was, staring up at me. Her tail was covered by a Restoration Hardware catalog, the top edge perfectly horizontal across her waistline. Or finline. Whatever it was called, it looked as if someone had tucked her in for the night, careful to leave her face uncovered so she could breathe.

      I reached down and, in one quick gesture, plucked the pink envelope from the basket.

      I couldn’t go.

      But I also couldn’t leave her like that, all alone.

      Coeur-de-Lune

      Thursday, June 23

      That was nineteen days ago. And now I was in Casey’s driveway, trapped. Too nervous to get out of my car, too embarrassed to leave.

      I blamed the mermaid.

      Once she’d escaped the recycling bin, the pushy little thing had managed to secure a beachhead on my fridge.

      For days, she’d perched there, peering over a black-and-white photo of a young 1970s surf god conquering an impossible wave: one of the magnets I’d designed for Sam, my favorite client and owner of Goofy Foot Surf & Coffee Shack out by Ocean Beach.

      As the date grew closer, the mermaid started migrating around my apartment. She kept me company in the bathroom when I flossed in the morning, and as I ate lunch at my small kitchen table. When I couldn’t sleep at night and passed the time brushing the frilled edges of the envelope back and forth under my chin, rereading Casey’s words. Trying to figure out why she’d written them now, after so long.

      I still didn’t understand.

      The invitation had said No RSVP necessary, and I’d taken her up on that, so she didn’t know I was coming. Until today, I hadn’t been sure myself.

      But here I was.

      I tunneled my hands into the opposite sleeves of my coat, hugging myself. I’d rolled down my window a few inches, and chilly mountain air was starting to seep in. Jett was in her sheepskin bed in the back, curled into a black ball like a giant roly-poly. I was stalling. Rereading the invite as if I hadn’t memorized it weeks before.

      I leaned over the steering wheel and stared up at the house as if it could provide answers. From the front it resembled one of those skinny birdhouses kids made in camp out of hollow tree branches standing on end: a wooden rectangle with a crude, A-shaped cap.

      But from the water it looked more like a boat, with rows of small, high windows—so much like portholes—and a long, skinny dock—pirate’s gangplank—to complete the effect. When the place started falling apart in the ’70s, some grumbly neighbor called it The Shipwreck, and the name had stuck.

      It was a love-it-or-hate-it house, and the Shepherd women had loved it.

      So had I. I’d once felt easier here, more myself, than in my own home. The Shipwreck hadn’t changed, but today it offered me no welcome.

      There was a silver Camry ahead of me in the driveway, so someone was probably home. They could be watching, counting how many minutes I sat inside my car. Trying to gather my courage, and failing. I didn’t feel any more courageous than I had when the invitation first arrived.

      “Wish me luck,” I whispered toward Jett’s snores as I got out. I shut the door a little harder than necessary, hoping the plunk would draw Casey and Alex outside. Then they’d have to say something to hurdle us over the awkwardness. “You made it!” Or “Come in, it’s getting cold!”

      But the front door didn’t budge.

      I walked slowly toward the house, past the Camry. The section of lake I could see beyond the house was at its most stunning, framed in pines, streaked with red and pink from the sunset. It was so ridiculously beautiful it seemed almost a rebuke, a point made and underlined twice. This is how a sunset is done.

      As I got closer I noticed something about the colors on the water; most of the red shapes were dancing, but one was still. And I realized why Casey hadn’t come outside when I pulled up.

      Of course. She was already outside.

      I walked past the right side of the house, where the ground became a thick blanket of pine needles. I’d forgotten that spongy feeling, the way it made you bend your knees a little more than you did in the city, the tiny satisfying bounce of each step. There were places where the needles were so deep I had to brush my hand along the rough wood shingles for balance. I hoped the neighbors wouldn’t see me and decide I was a prowler. I was even wearing all black. Tailored black pants and my black cowl-neck cashmere coat, but still. I could be a fashion-conscious burglar. It would be something to talk about, at least, showing up in handcuffs.

      Casey sat cross-legged on the dock, her crown of sunlit red hair just visible above the red blanket on her shoulders.

      It was the same scratchy wool plaid throw we’d used for picnics. The same one we’d sprawled on in our first bikinis as teenagers. In high school I’d hidden mine in my winter boots, one forbidden scrap of nylon stuffed down each toe.

      A duck plunged into the water nearby, its flapping energy abruptly turning to calm, and she said something to it that I couldn’t make out. Maybe we could do this all night. She’d watch ducks, I’d watch her, and once an hour I’d take a few steps closer.

      I walked down the sloping, sandy path in the grass and stepped onto the wooden dock. It was still long and narrow, the boards as old and misaligned as ever. Cattywampus, Alex used to call them. Casey’s mom was young—sometimes she seemed even younger than us. But her speech was full of old-fashioned expressions like that. “Cattywampus” and “bless my soul” and “dang it all.”

      The feeling of the uneven boards beneath my feet was so familiar I froze again.

      The last time I’d been here I’d been running. Pounding the boards, racing away from the feet pounding behind me.

      It was not too late to slip away. Take big, quiet steps backward. I could retreat along the side of the house the way I’d come. Return to the city and let the Shepherds sink back into memory, along with everything else in this town.

      But a subtle vibration had already traveled down the wooden planks, and Casey turned her head to the side, revealing a profile that was still strong, a chin that still jutted out in her defiant way. “Is it you?”

      “Yes, Case.”

      I walked slowly to the end of the dock until I stood over her left shoulder, so close I could see the messy part in her hair. It was a darker red now.

      The greetings I’d rehearsed, the lines and alternate lines and backup-alternate lines, had abandoned me. They’d sailed away, carried off by the breeze when I wasn’t paying attention.

      But Casey spoke first, her eyes on the water. “You’ve been standing back there forever. I thought you were going to leave.”

      “I almost did.”

      She tilted her head up to look at me. Scanning, evaluating, and, finally, delivering her report—“You’re still you.”

      Her face was a little thinner, her skin less freckled. There was something behind her eyes, a weariness or skepticism, that hadn’t been there