Parker A REAL CATCH

WHY IN THE HELL DID Amelia have to bring this Harris guy here? I bet he got seasick. I bet he’d never fished a proper tournament in his life. I bet Harris knew not the first thing about the Cape Carolina Summer Splash & Fish, and yet here he was.

Now he’d be fishing with me and my dad and Amelia’s dad, and they’d get to be all chummy. Don’t get me wrong. I liked the guy. But I couldn’t get Amelia to fall in love with me if her rich, handsome boyfriend was around. This nonsense had me off my game, which is the only reason I could figure my mother tricked me into stringing lights in the town square.

“If you can, lift that strand just a little higher, Parker, darlin’,” Mrs. Stack said, breaking me out of my thoughts. All I could think about was that, when we were in middle school, we called her Mrs. Stacked. She’d been the subject of every Mrs. Robinson fantasy in Cape Carolina. Now the memory makes me cringe.

But lucky for her, we all started volunteering for the Summer Splash around the age of twelve, and, looking around and seeing that Watson, Spence, and even useless-ass Mason (who hadn’t been out of bed this early since last year’s Summer Splash) were here helping, it seemed like, no matter the original reason why, the action stuck.

I gave Mason credit: he was a bigger man than I was. Watson, Spence, and I were the reason the 2000 number one draft pick was living at home with his parents. I was still pissed at him for what he said about Greer last time I was home, but I was trying to let it go.

“Mace!” I shouted to my brother, who was on another ladder about twenty feet away from me. “Catch!” I threw him a strand that I had secured in my tree branch and he secured it to his, then threw it to Spence, and so on and so forth. After twenty years, we pretty much had this whole situation down.

I couldn’t see my mom or Mrs. Saxton or Trina. But I could hear them. Mom and Mrs. Saxton were continuing in the legacy of their mothers, the charter members of the Cape Carolina Garden Club, and Trina was the next generation to carry the torch. After four years, they’d finally gotten the town’s approval and raised the money to install a gazebo by the pond, and they were making sure that the flowers around it looked perfect. Or, well, actually, Robby was. Poor guy. He’d drawn the short straw. We’d all been there, though. Because the Cape Carolina Garden Club didn’t plant or prune; they pointed. Today, they were pointing at Robby.

By tomorrow, the entire square would be transformed with lights and flowers, food and wine, and, in the middle of it all, a dance floor with a band where the whole town gathered. Grandchildren danced with grandparents and neighbors with neighbors, couples and singles. Everyone had fun. I never got nervous about dancing because I’d been doing it my whole life with my mom and my grandmother, Amelia’s aunt Tilley, the girl with the pigtails in my third-grade class, and, yes, even Mrs. Stacked. Stack. Force of habit.