Summertime Living Is Easy

His favorite name was Gina. I often wondered if it was the reason he liked my name so much. “Nina, as in Nina Simone,” he’d say, playfully punching my arm before his voice trailed off into soft, meandering verses of “Summertime” as he exited the living room, tickling the keys of the piano as he walked out and leaving behind him a great big shadow of doubt.

He’d told me so many times about Gina and her love of horses and the crappy way she made poor man’s French toast with mounds of cinnamon and sugar on un-melted butter, I felt I knew her. And maybe in some way I knew even back then her story was yet to fully be told. “She was this Spanish-Italian goddess,” he’d say, “with black hair and green eyes that would lock into your soul.” It was so repetitive by now that every time he’d start up about her, I’d turn around and mouth along the words and roll my eyes. I often wanted to say he was making her sound like a serpent but figured my own fangs would be showing.

Yet any time I challenged him and asked him to show me a photo of this mythical muse, prompting him there was no way on Earth he could get a woman like that, he’d quickly change the subject as if ‘photo’ was a word he didn’t understand. “Did you look into that check engine light on the car?” he’d ask, while looking for an old newspaper on the dining room table to pick up to try to find more material to work with to divert attention away.

I mean an ex-girlfriend you dated all throughout high school, there’s bound to be a scratchy yearbook photo next to the achievement of “most likely to not exist.” Or an ugly pastel explosion prom photo tucked into an old wallet. A student ID card even? But all I had was my own mental mug shot to work with, which basically was Cindy Crawford in a Catholic school uniform. Okay, I started to get it.

It really was the lip mole that made me look twice. I was on the couch flipping channels late at night while having my own existential crisis about wondering where the water supply would come from in 2050 after all the icebergs melted and just as I imagined the proposed nightmare of having to home detox our dirty bath water the cat jumped in front of the TV, knocking over a remote and changing the channel, which rustled me out of my eco-coma. “Coming up next on Cold Case Files…” It was the story of a woman named Gina Lionetti. Black hair, green eyes. And that goddamn lip mole. I imagined this was just me in the throes of 2 am paranoia, so I turned up the volume a bit more. Her name was probably been Regina, I assured myself, laughing at my stupidity.

“It’s the case of the summertime slaughter,” began the host as the audio faded into that good old jazz standard I knew so well. “Oh shit.” I mouthed the words. He was asleep down the hallway and I wasn’t quite sure I wanted to see him awake. Now, or ever. “Gina Lionetti grew up an unassuming life in the quiet suburb of Everlane…” The details after that get a little blurry. I remember something about her working in advertising, marrying an oil scion and having four precious dark-haired children that she reared in some waspy Texas mansion. That she had gone missing for 16 days. And that they found her body in the middle of a hot July night underneath the bleachers of the high school football stadium lit up by a synchronized circle of June bugs.

My mind though stopped at Everlane. I didn’t know much about my dad’s childhood. He was an only child and his parents died before I was born; grandmom from a rapid onset of breast cancer and grandad shortly after from a broken heart and a bottle of pills. Dad moved to get away from the pain he said, driving 450 miles due north in one night until he got hungry and stopped at a hot dog stand and met my mom who was working behind the counter. As he says it, she laughed at him for asking for mayonnaise on his ‘furter.

My knowledge of young Frank begins there, in the summer of ’79 a few nights before the fourth of July. As the fireworks started up, my mom screamed out the digits to her phone number and Frank hurriedly scribbled it down in a little black pocket notebook he was given as a boy scout and has held close to the chest ever since. “It’s where I put all my most precious information and all my secrets,” he told me once when I asked to see what was inside. “I’d have to kill you first,” he said letting out a big old belly laugh and playfully punching my arm.

Well that quick summer romance turned into an even quicker spring baby and my dad, who had just settled roots in this new town of Jefferson, had just as soon had to move again. Mom died giving birth to me and her parents, a restless couple who had I was told “had an attorney on speed dial,” accused young Frank of slipping whiskey into mom’s midnight tea as a way to get rid of the baby and had caused blood pressure spikes which led to her stroking out on the operating table. Fearing that mom’s parents might try to take me, off Frank went again in the middle of the night.

“My sweet Nina, no one could take you from me,” he’d write every year in my birthday card as a reminder of the past trauma.

Dad never remarried. He worked as a fireman until an accident at the local automotive warehouse straight out of “Backdraft” put him out of commission and forced him into early retirement. He’s now 75 and I help take care of him every day at our ranch in Montana where we have horses and green pastures as far as the eye can see. He seems happy enough, every day tending to the animals and making time to whip out the old songbooks and sit down for a sing-a-long. Sinatra, Irving Berlin and some Jerry Lee Lewis when he got “the fire back in him.”

But Everlane. Dad got some papers in the mail two days ago and the return address was from a town called Everlane in Texas. I had never heard of it before but thought it was pretty, like one of those android type names people were giving their babies nowadays. Unique but heartless.

“Anyone with info into the killing of Gina Lionetti is asked to come forward to Everlane police. A $20,000 reward will be offered for tips leading to a conviction.”

I suddenly had 20,000 questions.

I tip-toed to the piano across the living room where dad keeps his mail. The moonlight from the front window shone bright on the polished lid, enough to provide a flashlight to find the return address. Boom. Everlane. As I picked it up and tried to figure out how I might breathe heavy enough on the glue to steam open the envelope without dad knowing, something hit the ground.

In the moonlight I could see it was the black Boy Scout pocketbook. In my 35 years I had never been able to touch it, never knew where dad hid it. The piano of course. I never knew how to play the thing and joked with him, “those who play it have to clean it.” He knew I’d never touch it. My fingers gingerly poured over the Eagle emblazoning on the front as I hoped in my mind I could hide in its wings for fear of what I might find inside.

And there it was. Gina Lionetti’s prom picture in the centerfold. Her Everlane mansion address. A receipt for the purchase of a prized horse from our ranch, sold to Gina from an assumed business name — Simone’s Farm — and a driving log of hauling the steed down for retrieval in the local high school parking lot.

And tucked in between the very last two pages was a letter. “Frank, as you can tell I now know where you have run off to. You can no longer hide and you cannot take my daughter from me. She is not yours, she was never yours. This is not over. —Gina”

The black hair and green eyes and love of horses. She was my mother.

“My sweet Nina, no one could take you from me.” Dad’s words had a heartbeat as they repeated themselves over and over in my head.

“What’s going on out there?” Dad bellowed from the hallway, his heavy footsteps coming closer.

I had already dialed the numbers as fast as I’m sure dad did the night he met Gina at the hot dog stand.

“Hello, Everlane Police Department. How can we direct your call?”