The Summer We Read Gatsby by Danielle Ganek

Finn asked me. “I mean the Jasper Johns.” The one whose name I suddenly recalled was Sasha stopped in the doorway to coo approvingly at him. “Oooh. Good idea.”
    And then they were gone, out to the garage to gather the rusty beach chairs and striped umbrella for the beach. Finn and I were alone in the kitchen. I finished the omelet as he watched me, wearing the knowing smile I remembered from the previous night. Now it irritated me, smacking as it did of superiority.
    “What happened to the beard?” I asked him.
    He leaned across the counter toward me, his skin a rich, golden tan that caught the light nicely. “Beard?” he repeated, laughing. “What beard?”
    “I remembered you differently.” I knew I sounded rude, but it was true. I’d filed him away in my brain as an avuncular older friend of my gray-haired aunt, not this young, good-looking guy with the sexy voice who was annoyingly confident. “You kept calling me kid, like you were ancient. And you had that beard .”
    “I’ve never had a beard,” he insisted as he turned to rinse the pan in the sink. Fool’s House did not come equipped with such modern conveniences as a dishwasher. “You must be thinking of another guy.”
    He’d had a beard, I swear. That was how I’d always told it, in my head. “It’s been seven years,” I pointed out grumpily. “Maybe you did have a beard, and you just don’t remember. Maybe you’re having a memory lapse?”
    “Because I’m so ancient ?” He laughed. “I remember everything about that summer.” And he stopped washing the pan and turned around.
    “You could’ve introduced yourself,” I continued, wishing I didn’t sound quite so petulant. He seemed to bring out the worst in me. “You didn’t have to let me embarrass myself. I don’t normally . . .” Here my voice trailed off.
    “Don’t normally what?” he interjected. “Guzzle martinis and throw yourself at strange men?”
    “I certainly didn’t throw myself anywhere,” I protested. “And I was actually looking for you,” I tried to explain, unintentionally making it sound like a romantic statement. The man flustered me. “I thought you might know something about Lydia’s safe. And since that’s apparently why you’re here, why don’t you make yourself useful?”
    “Okay,” he said. “I’ll try. But she never mentioned it to me. I don’t even know where it is. Will you show me?”
    We were headed upstairs to the safe when Peck bounded back into the kitchen like one of Charlie’s Angels, two hands up in the air, holding what looked, surprisingly, like a gun.
    “Look what I found,” she cried out, pointing at us a dainty pearl-handled revolver, the kind generally thought of as a ladies’ gun, at least in movies and television shows. It was the sort of prop an elegant female spy might keep tucked into an evening clutch, but still, I imagined, it could get the job done.
    “Is that real?” I asked, slightly nervous. Peck was not someone I wanted to see with a gun in hand. “Where did you find it?”
    “That was Lydia’s?” Finn looked surprised. “You need a license to keep a gun.”
    She blew on the end of it and posed for us. “I always wondered what it felt like to hold one of these things. It’s so light. Hard to imagine it could do any damage at all.”
    “Where was it?” Finn asked her.
    “I’m not so sure I should tell you,” she said coyly. I shot her a look. “I was looking for the beach towels.”
    Finn reached for it. “It’s not loaded, is it? I don’t see Lydia keeping a loaded gun sitting around.”
    Peck pointed the gun at the screen door to the back porch. “How do I check?” She was about to pull the trigger—“I bet it is loaded”—when a slouching figure appeared through the mesh.
    The visitor was the inhabitant of the studio above the garage, the last in a long line of creative people Lydia called the Fool-in-Residence. They would live—as Finn Killian had done the summer we met