Free Souvenir by Therese Fowler Page B

all last night and this morning, then Savannah had a softball game this afternoon. I’m just getting a chance to make a sandwich and sit down for five minutes.”
    “Well, don’t sit yet—get the paper so you can see this.”
    While Meg tracked the paper to the den, where Brian had left it after his cursory glances at the front section and sports, Kara asked how their father was doing.
    “Haven’t you talked to him?” Meg said.
    “Not in about two weeks. He’s being pissy about us not being able to visit this summer. Screening his calls, I assume. But I know he’s fine or you’d have told me.”
    Of course she would think that; gatekeeper of information was Meg’s role, had always been her role. Her parents had left her to mind her sisters, and now her sisters had left her to mind their parents—parent, now—and always, she was to keep everyone informed. “He’s doing okay. Settling in. His left kidney’s acting up.”
    “Is he eating right? I swear, he’s so stubborn! What’s the deal with the kidney?”
    Meg pulled out the newspaper’s lifestyles section, where the engagement and wedding announcements appeared each weekend. “I’m not sure; I told him to call his nephrologist.”
    “There you go with the big words,” Kara teased. She was bright but not college-educated, having married Todd at nineteen, three years after meeting him at Meg’s wedding, where he’d parked cars for a few extra bucks before starting basic training. Four kids—all boys—had followed. Meg hoped Kara would prevail with her desire to come back to Florida; she missed her sister, who had been her closest friend besides Carson. She and Beth were close now too, and she could visit any of her sisters by plane if she could just find the time. Time, however, hid from her as well as Savannah had done in department stores when she was little. Anymore, time stubbornly refused to be found.
    Returning to the kitchen, Meg said, “Okay, so I have the paper—lifestyle section, I presume.”
    “Open it to page two.”
    Meg did, and there was the announcement. “Grammy winner Carson McKay to wed Miss Valerie Haas of Malibu, CA,” read the caption beneath a photographer’s picture of the betrothed couple. Meg closed the paper.
    “Well?” Kara said. “Isn’t she just as cute as you can imagine?”
    “Cuter,” Meg said. She finished constructing her sandwich, grasping the knife again and cutting the sandwich smoothly.
    “I never would’ve pictured him with a professional
surfer.
Have you ever heard of her? My god, it says she’s twenty-two! And he’s, what? Forty?”
    A professional surfer?
Meg hardly knew there
was
such a career, particularly for women. “Not yet—he’s thirty-nine until November.” Her own thirty-ninth was coming up in late June.
    “Wonder what they’ll do for his fortieth. Probably rent an island for a party and invite their hundred closest friends.”
    As Kara was saying this, an image of Carson on the old tire swing came to Meg; he was sitting with his legs through it, holding on to the thick rope they’d used to suspend it from a high branch of the oak near the swimming lake. He leaned back and, with bare feet, pushed himself in a lazy circle, while she watched from the shady base of the tree. “For your fortieth birthday,” he said, “I’m taking you to Africa on safari.”
    “Are you, now?” she asked, more interested in watching his naked back than in considering anything that might happen more than twenty years in the future.
    He said, “Yep. Count on it.”
    “What about for
your
fortieth?” she said.
    “Thailand,” he answered, “for lemongrass shrimp.” He let the tire sway then, peering into the oak leaves like their future was painted there, episodes of their life-to-be displayed for preview on each toothy leaf.
    Kara laughed. “God. Seventeen years.”
    For a second Meg thought Kara was talking about how long it had been since that day. Not seventeen years, she thought.