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Before Summer's End - Stories to Touch the Soul

By Johnnie Alexander, Brenda S. Anderson, Eleanor Bertin, Sara Davison, Deb Elkink, Stacy Monson, Marion Ueckermann

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Chapter One
If you know who you are and where you are going, life can throw you no curve balls. No surprises.
~ Mama

Nancy Elizabeth Williamson gripped the floor to ceiling metal post to the right of her seat as the subway train screeched to a stop at the station. The doors slid open with a loud exhalation of hissing breath.
With her free hand, Nancy tugged her gray blazer into place as passengers streamed out and others pushed past them, anxious to squeeze through the opening before the bell chimed to signal the imminent departure of the train. A skateboard clunked against her knees as a heavily-tattooed teenager shoved by her, and Nancy winced and shifted slightly to one side. The doors slid shut and they lurched forward. In seconds they were flying through the underground tunnel again, graffiti-covered walls flashing past the windows in streaming ribbons of colorful letters and even more colorful language.
Nancy ran her palm over the front of the dress pants that matched her blazer. A bell chimed again and a staticky, pre-recorded voice, gratingly cheerful, announced her station. Still gripping the pole, she reached down and grasped the handle of her black leather briefcase.
After twenty-five minutes underground, she was momentarily blinded by the sudden onslaught of brilliant sunshine when she stepped out onto the Toronto sidewalk. Even now, at 8:40 am, the July sun was warm. Too warm for a suit, really, but the office was always cold.
Ten minutes later, she extricated herself from the hordes hurrying past her place of work, slipped through the doors of a tall, cement skyscraper, wedged her small frame into the last tiny space at the front of the elevator, and rode it up to the seventy-second floor.
A little of the commute-related tension left her shoulders as she exited the elevator and strode down the long aisle between cubicles. Her cubicle for the last six years was the third from the end, on the right.
The repetitious strains of one of last year’s top hits, “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?” drifted from the ghetto blaster in a cubicle halfway across the windowless space. Nancy tried to ignore it as she set the briefcase on her desk and sank onto the wheeled chair. She pressed the two small buttons on the front of the briefcase and the locks clicked open. After lifting the lid, she withdrew the pile of file folders she had taken home with her last night and slid the briefcase into its spot beneath the desk.
In the artificial glow of the fluorescent lights set into the ceiling, numbers appeared before her eyes when she flipped open the top folder. Nancy ran a finger down the first column, rapidly typing into her calculator as she went. When she reached the bottom of the column, she leaned back with a satisfied sigh. They added up.
Which was what she loved about numbers. They didn’t lie. They could be controlled. And they brought order into a world filled with chaos.
A strawberry-blonde curl had worked itself free from the tight bun at the back of her neck, and Nancy absently tucked it behind her ear. Control. That’s what life was all about.
That’s what her mother had taught her, anyway, and Nancy believed it. After all, it was that philosophy that had carried Mama through raising four daughters on her own after her husband unexpectedly left her for his pretty blonde secretary the year Nancy turned five.
Apparently he had another family now, although Nancy wouldn’t have heard that news from him. She hadn’t seen or spoken to him since the night he packed a suitcase and walked out of the house, the slamming of the door behind him rattling the family portrait that hung on the wall in the entryway.
The next morning, school had begun. Their mother had shoved back her shoulders and launched into a staunch campaign to indoctrinate her daughters in the Four Keys to Success in the World—education, a career, careful financial planning, and a strict aversion to any kind of romantic entanglement.
“Miss Williamson?”
Nancy jerked, sending the calculator tumbling to the tile floor with a clatter. Her cheeks warmed as she pushed back her chair and fumbled beneath the desk for it. When she grasped it and straightened, more curls had sprung loose from their captivity and bounced around her face. “Yes?”
Lucinda, her boss’s secretary, flung her head to one side, sending the hair feathered back from her face in the latest Farrah-Fawcett-inspired style rippling over her shoulders. “Mr. Peterson asked me to give you this.” She held out a white envelope. “And he would like to see you in his office right away.”
Nancy’s mouth went dry. Why had Mr. Peterson sent an envelope to her personally? It was pay day, but the envelopes were always delivered by an intern just before quitting time. And the delivery had never been accompanied by an invitation to the boss’s office before.
Lucinda cleared her throat and shook the envelope in her direction.
Nancy swallowed and reached for it. “Thank you.”
Was that a flicker of sympathy in Lucinda’s eyes? That couldn’t be good. Before she could determine for sure, the woman had turned and flounced away.
Nancy set the envelope on the desk and shoved the wayward curls behind her ears with both hands. Should she open it? As long as she didn’t, she was free to imagine that it contained some kind of commendation, recognition of the commitment and dedication she had shown to the company and its clients. Summoning every ounce of courage she had, Nancy walked her fingers across the smooth wooden surface of her desk and slid one into the opening of the envelope. It wasn’t sealed, so she lifted it a little, enough to catch a flash of pink, before she yanked back her hand.
Not a commendation, then. She was being let go. But why? Digging the toes of her gray pumps against the tiles, she shoved back her chair and rose. No sense speculating. Better to go straight to the source and get the facts so she could deal with them in a rational manner. On slightly trembling legs, she made her way down the long hallway to the spacious entryway where management presided. Lucinda had resumed her seat at the desk outside Mr. Peterson’s office. She offered Nancy a slight nod as Nancy stopped and knocked lightly on the door. At the gruff, “Enter,” she pushed open the door and stepped inside.
“Ms. Williamson, thank you for coming.” Mr. Peterson waved a hand at the door and she closed it softly behind her. “Have a seat.”
Nancy forced herself to cross the few feet of carpet and lower herself onto the brown leather chair in front of the enormous oak desk. “You asked to see me, sir?”
Mr. Peterson clasped pale, vein-marked hands on the desk. “Yes. I’m afraid I have bad news.”
A strange humming noise filled Nancy’s head then, drowning out most of what Mr. Peterson was saying. From what she could make out, he’d launched into a long spiel about restructuring and the company taking a different direction. Through a thick haze of disbelief, she struggled to comprehend the words flying out between his dry, cracked lips like drops of spittle. Once in a while she managed to grasp hold of one, like severance. That did make sense. As though her job was being severed from her like a hand or a foot, leaving a gaping wound.
And an entire sentence, near the end, did manage to separate itself from the others and work its way through the fog.
Mr. Peterson tugged a handkerchief from the breast pocket of his three-piece navy suit and wiped his glistening bald head as he muttered, “In any case, you’re free now.”
Those six words played through her mind like an out of tune melody as, chin high, she walked back to her desk, loaded her few belongings into her briefcase, and exited the building. They hovered around her like a protective shield as she trudged along the sidewalk and stumbled down the stairs to the subway. The crowds had thinned a little, and no one jostled her as she slipped between the doors and sank onto a seat, clutching her briefcase to her chest as the words danced through her head.
They stirred a memory, long dormant, of running through fields of wildflowers with her sisters and dressing up in their mother’s clothes before acting out one of the fairy tales they’d read in a big, hardcover book on the shelf in her bedroom. Nancy blinked. What had happened to that book? She couldn’t remember it sitting on her shelf after the night their father had left them.
Something else that had been lost that day and never seen again.

Those six words still drifted in the air in her bedroom when she opened her eyes the next morning—thickly enough that Nancy could breathe them in, feel them flowing through the network of veins and arteries that traversed her body and working their way into her cells. Free? What would that be like?
She had never taken a vacation. For the most part, she was content to convert the days allotted to her for that purpose into a bonus at the end of the year. A bonus she then redirected into her RRSP fund to help ensure that her retirement years were as stable and under control as those that had preceded it.
Now the days ahead of her stretched out like an endless expanse of sea on a calm day, with barely a ripple to disturb the tranquility. What was she going to do with herself?
Twisting the tie off of the bread bag, she gave her head a little shake. What she would do with herself was look for another job. Already she had plucked the newspaper from the hallway outside her door and carried it to the table to peruse while she had her English breakfast tea and two pieces of toast with raspberry jam.
She would dig her old resume out of the cream-colored folder in the two-drawer metal filing cabinet in the spare room she used as an office. It would need updating, of course, but she could perform that task quickly enough on her Olivetti typewriter. With a solid cover letter and her six years of impeccable work records to accompany it, no doubt she would find herself gainfully employed in one of the thousands of other accounting offices in the city within the week.
The feeling this thought conjured up caught her so much by surprise that it took several moments of sitting at the table, her fingers clutching her cooling tea cup as she analyzed the sensation, before she could finally name it. Desolation.
In any case, you’re free now.
Nancy had only a vague idea of what that meant, let alone what it looked like in real life. What did a person whose strings of daily routine had suddenly been cut—setting every meticulously-recorded deadline and appointment loose to float into the atmosphere like so many helium-filled balloons—do with her time?
Absently, she took a sip of cold tea before the idea—one she couldn’t remember ever allowing herself to indulge in before—came to her, and she set the rose-covered cup onto the china saucer with a clatter. She wanted to go to a beach.
She corrected herself immediately. She didn’t want to go to a beach—she wanted to go to the beach. The one she had read about in a newspaper ad one time. Sunset Beach. The name had captivated her, conjuring up images of ribbons of red, orange, yellow, and gold trailing across the sky and splashing onto the surface of the water as waves lapped softly against the shore.
How many years had that wish simmered there, deep inside her, pressed down under the weight of spreadsheets and tax forms, calculators and slide rulers? However long it had been buried, the idea had wormed its way up through the layers like a flower escaping its seed and weaving through soil in search of the sun.
For the first time since the door had slammed behind her father when she was five years old, Nancy Elizabeth Williamson made a completely spontaneous, frivolous, non-future-plans-related decision.
She was going to Sunset Beach.
 

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