In the first summer of my second summer, I was regretting. I regretted that that summer was only two months long and I regretted that summer was a whole two months long. I had been thinking a lot. I thought about St. Mortiz, and Gelatos, and Aunt Sandy, and Uncle Max, and Belen, and Keisuke, and Mari, and Gutherie, and Lila, and Switzerland. I thought about them as during the summer as much as I had thought about my family when I was in Switzerland. I missed them all so much. But I had missed Crick, and Stella, and Stella's baby, and Mom, and Dad so much. And now I was with them. And they hadn't replaced me, they had hugged me and told me how much they had missed me and how they were so happy I was back home. Right now, home was Great Rock Town, Oregon. Stella wasn't in Great Rock much though. She was living with her husband and their baby in the city. They came to visit quite a bit and I held her little baby in my arms and listened to mom sing to him. She said, 'I sang this song to you when you were a baby too, Dinnie',
I thought a lot about the night before I had flown to Great Rock City, and what Belen, Keisuke, and Gutherie had talked about while I wasn't there. My decision to stay home had been the worst one I had ever made, even worse than not going to the top of St. Mortiz. I had missed a chance to spend time with them, and now I might never see them again. Writing just wasn't the same. I asked Belen how she was doing away from Keisuke, and she asked me to please not mention him incase her parents intercepted her mail. Keisuke's letter's droned on and on about how much he missed Keisuke and how much he was looking forward to summer's end, when he would see her again. "We will be going to St. Mortiz again, and there will not be stupid avalanches to make us almost die anymore. And no more The Pistol!" he'd write. In someway, I greatly envied Keisuke and Belen, they knew that in a brief time they would be back in Switzerland, together. I still didn't know if I would. Belen and Keisuke wrote often, almost every other time Mom got the mail there would be a letter from one of them, I'd rip it open and drink in every word on the paper. Then I'd write back immediately and run to the post office to send it as fast as possible. I signed each letter with a 'write back VERY soon', and they'd write back soon. Gutherie wrote more than regularly. Every single time the mail came there would be at least three letters from him. He'd go on for pages and pages about everything that happened to him, everything he was thinking, asked me what I was thinking. Even on paper he seemed to have such GUSTO! His letters went on page after page, it often took me hours to read them all. He'd ask me a hard thinking question, and then write 'think about it'. I would, and then I'd write it all out to him. I'd tell him what was going on with me, tell him anything I'd been thinking that his questions hadn't provoked me to think, and ask him any questions I could think of. They were dumb, baby questions, I could never think of anything good to make Gutherie think, but he still wrote long answers to all of them.
One day I was looking through the mail and I found a letter from Gutherie. One short letter from Gutherie. But what it said made me think more than I ever had, I could have written a book of what it made me think. The letter read:
Are you going back to Switzerland in September?
Gutherie.
Gutherie had asked me the question I had been asking myself all summer. And I still had no answer, so I just wrote:
Are you?
Dinnie
He wrote back:
I won't tell if you won't!
Gutherie
That was the last letter I got from Gutherie all summer. Belen and Keisuke and Mari kept on writing, and they told me they would be returning to Switzerland. I still didn't know. Until I did.
The summer was almost over when Mom called me in to talk to me.
"Uncle Max and Aunt Sandy just called. They're about to buy the plane tickets, they need to know if you're going to go back,"
Everything I had been thinking slipped out of my mind after she said those words. A whole summer of thinking disappeared, all that I did was squeak out, "Can I?"
"You can if you want to," was all she said.
My family hadn't replaced me over the last school year. They never would replace me. Crick was going back to flight school. Stella still lived away with her husband and Baby. But Mom and Dad…
The phone rang and stopped my thinking train. It rang again. The noise was so annoying. I picked it up, "Hello?"
"Dinnie!" It was Aunt Sandy, "It's Aunt Sandy, Me and Max are about to buy the plane tickets, did you talk to your parents about coming back? Are you?" she asked.
I looked at my mom. She must have known who it was because she smiled. And then, I don't know how it happened, but my mouth opened and said, "I'd like to go back."