“You? Walk on the beach?” she asked with doubt. “I thought you wanted to sketch me tonight.”
“Well, you look so nice all dressed up. It would be a shame to keep you locked up at home. I’d rather go for a walk, I think,” I said quietly.
*****
“This is nice.” Summer breathed deeply and sighed as she hugged my arm for balance in the uneven sand.
In the waning moonlight, she was stunning. I noted her slender neck, exposed beneath the simple coiffeur of her ponytail. The tilt of her head gave her the graceful arch of a swan where wisps of pale gold silk began. A small diamond pendant glistened and drew attention to the swell of her breasts where the sundress fell short of concealing them completely from view.
“It is nice,” I agreed as I patted her hand on my arm. I laced my fingers between hers and gave her hand a gentle squeeze.
We meandered along the water’s edge for a while before she spoke again.
“Sonny, I have a confession to make.” She glanced sideways at me with trepidation. “I want you to draw me.”
“You do? Why?” I asked somewhat puzzled by her admission.
“Because I think you are an amazing artist. And, because…well, I’ve always felt a little guilty about you,” she shrugged.
“Guilty about me…why would you feel guilty about me?”
“Do you remember when we were in college?” she asked.
“Sure. You were the most popular girl in school and I was…well, a bit of a renegade. What about it?”
“I always thought Dad was too hard on you. If he had shown you the same support and attention he showed me, there’s no telling who or where you would be now,” she explained.
“That’s just Dad, Summer. It’s different between fathers and sons. It’s a competition and God knows, I could never compete with Dad,” I said with a frown.
“You’re an awful lot like him, Sonny.”
“Me? Nah…Dad probably never made a bad decision in his life. I stayed in trouble back then,” I chortled.
She abruptly stopped in her tracks. “You are like him, Sonny. You look like him, just as handsome and strong. You’re more like him than you think,” she said as she laid a hand against my chest.
“You think Dad’s handsome?” I asked cocking my head at her in the semi-darkness.
“Dad’s a lot of things. Handsome is just one of them,” she said with an edge of irritation in her voice.
Summer’s change of tone sent a prickle up my spine. I’d never heard her utter a single word of criticism about Dad. Now, she seemed to be trying to tell me something about our father that I wasn’t understanding.
“Sonny, I know what happened to that picture you drew of me when we were young. Dad has it,” she said flatly.
“What do you mean, Dad has it?” I snarled in disbelief.
“He kept it, Sonny. All these years, he kept that drawing.”
“Why would he do that?” I asked.
“He saw how talented you were and he wanted you to follow in his footsteps. He didn’t want you to become an artist. He didn’t want anyone to see how much talent you had.”
“You knew this? You’ve known all along that he kept that picture and you never told me, Summer?”
My mind was reeling. Simply knowing the drawing still existed was a shock, but knowing Dad had deliberately tried to discourage me from the one thing I was good at was quite another.