Page 60 of Seven Summer Weekends
“I may love you too,” Ben said before searching the nightstand for the clicker.
Somewhere in the middle of episode two or three, they made love yet again. This time slowly, and with their eyes burrowing into each other’s souls. For real, it felt like that. Addison, in particular, couldn’t remember ever having felt that unguarded before.
“Want to help me with something?” she asked afterward, with a hint of seductiveness.
“Are you seriously not satisfied yet?” he asked. “I need a little time.”
She laughed. “It’s about the attic. I need to get up there before the white elephant sale.”
“Ugh. I should definitely take part in that this year,” he moaned.
“Well, if you help me, I can return the favor and help you.”
The color drained from his face, and he looked suddenly nauseated. She noticed, and thought of the sun hat on his porch and what Shep had said about him. She redirected the focus from his dead wife’s belongings back to her dead aunt’s.
“Don’t worry, I have most of it sorted. I just can’t bring myself to look in that attic.”
Her redirect worked. Ben laughed and declared, “By all means open up the attic, let the bats fly free,” before explaining that her aunt Gicky loved to say that. He thought it hysterical.
“I even put it in a novel,” he joked.
“Well, I hope she didn’t mean it literally. That’s kind of what I was afraid of.”
Now, a melancholy look settled on her face.
Ben clocked it.
“Don’t worry. I got you.”
“That’s not it. Everything I have learned about Gicky makes me so angry that my parents kept her from me. You know I hadn’t seen her since I was a little kid?”
“I know all about it. That’s how I went about convincing her to let me have the house for a song.”
“And what song was that? Was it something by Cheap Trick?”
“Very funny. C’mon. Let’s do this.”
Ben wiggled back into his shorts and took up the challenge. The attic was surprisingly bare—no bats, no raccoons, and very little stuff. He handed her a box of empty votives, a couple of throw pillows, and something resembling a polka-dot-covered papier-mâché deer’s head.
“CanIkeep this,” he asked, “as a consolation prize?”
“Sure.”
“Thank you!”
Addison laughed. “What’s up there—on top?”
“Hold my legs,” he asked, before standing on his tippy-toes and pulling down what looked to be a painting that wasbalanced on the attic’s wood frame. It was wrapped in brown paper, same as the two that Gicky had left for her friends. Ben read the names written on it as he passed it down to Addison.
“Beverly and Morty.”
She shook her head in disbelief. “It’s for my parents. Gicky left a few pieces of art for friends,” she added in explanation.
“And enemies as well, it seems,” Ben quipped.
“I don’t know if you would call them enemies. My dad once told me that his relationship with his sister, or lack thereof, was his biggest failure in life.”
“And you don’t know what caused it?”
