28 Summers

by Elin Hilderbrand

  Texting is dangerous, they’ve both agreed. It’s tempting, oh, so tempting, to shoot Mallory a message every time he’s thinking of her, but they both know people who have been discovered this way—entire affairs, secret relationships, double lives, et cetera, revealed on a cell phone bill. Jake sends Mallory only two texts a year—one at the end of August to let her know when he’s arriving and one when he’s in the rental Jeep on his way. She doesn’t text him at all.

  They eat the lobsters on the beach and wash them down with a bottle of very good champagne—this year, vintage Veuve Clicquot that one of her students gave her as an end-of-year gift. The champagne loosens him; it sends glitter through his veins. They finish their lobsters and fall back on “their” blanket—it’s the very same blanket they’ve used since the first year—holding hands, balancing plastic cups of champagne on their chests.

  Are they both still spooked by the proximity of Stacey Patterson? Yes! When Jake opened his laptop before dinner, he heard an unfamiliar ping! that turned out to be a Facebook message from Stacey: I could have sworn I saw you kayaking on Nantucket today. Are you here, or am I starting to lose it in my old age? Jake thought about responding with Stacey, you’re starting to lose it, but then he decided it was best not to respond at all.

  “What if we went away next year?” Mallory asks. “What if, instead of here, we went to Saskatchewan or Altoona? Someplace nobody knows us, someplace we can walk around in public?”

  “There’s always a risk,” he says. “Besides, I like it here. This is the home of our relationship. And Ursula has accepted my trip to Nantucket as a matter of course. She doesn’t question it.”

  “She might someday.”

  “She might,” Jake says. He pours them each more champagne. It’s better to acknowledge the possibility of Ursula finding out than dismiss it. At this point, Jake is far more concerned about Bess discovering his secret. She’s at the age when she’s just becoming aware of boys, and Jake would like her to believe they are trustworthy. A better man might decide to give up the relationship with Mallory out of respect for his daughter. But Jake finds himself unwilling—he would like to say “unable,” but he knows better—to do that, and so should Bess ever find out, he will admit to his failure. He conducts himself like a prince the other 362 days of the year in hopes that this will balance out his weekend “away” in some karmic sense.

  They finish the champagne, then head to bed, hand in hand. They are living inside a magic bubble, the kind that doesn’t pop.

  Sunday, it drizzles, and so Jake feels okay about driving up to Great Point, though he wears a baseball cap. Once they pass the Wauwinet gatehouse, they don’t see another soul. The sky is moody, striated “fifty shades of gray,” Mallory quips, and the water is a steel-blue plate. The eelgrass sways; the gulls dip and swoop unpredictably in the wind.

  On the way home, they stop to get the Chinese food. Mallory goes in alone. Jake sinks in his seat, pulls down his cap, waits for her to pop out of the restaurant holding the hood of her raincoat closed so it doesn’t blow down in the wind. She has been inside for only three or four minutes, but she grins at him with so much enthusiasm when she reappears that he starts laughing. If he ever has to explain himself to Bess, he will describe how good it feels to know there is one person on earth who is always happy to see him.

  Summer #21: 2013

  What are we talking about in 2013? The Boston Marathon bombing; Lean In; the fiscal cliff, North Korea; Roger Ebert; “I’ve never seen a diamond in the flesh”; Chris Kyle; Snapchat; the Met Ball; One World Trade Center; Danica Patrick; Frank and Claire Underwood; Sandra Bullock; John Kerry; Aaron Hernandez; The Goldfinch; James Gandolfini.

  Every day when Ursula wakes up, she checks her work phone (a BlackBerry), then her personal phone (the iPhone 5s), and then she gets on the exercise bike with her iPad and reads four newspapers—the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the South Bend Tribune. She would like to say she reads all four cover to cover, but she doesn’t have time. While Congress is in session and she’s in Washington, Ursula rises at a quarter after five and her mind is still half asleep, so who can blame her for skimming the headlines first? She normally ignores the Metro section of the Post and the Times because the murders and house fires of DC and Flushing, Queens, are low on her list of priorities. But on the morning of October 23, 2013, Ursula intentionally checks the Metro section of the Post because she has heard the most outrageous rumor. She heard from Hank Silver, her former boss at Andrews, Hewitt, and Douglas, that A. J. Renninger is considering a run for mayor of DC.

  Ursula feels this must be bad information. AJ—Amelia James Renninger, the six-foot blonde who transferred to the New York office and managed to escape the fate of nearly everyone else in the firm on September 11 by virtue of her eyebrow appointment—is now back in the District, working as a “freelance consultant,” which could mean any number of things. Ursula has heard bits and pieces about AJ over the years, none of it terribly positive. She suffered from PTSD after 9/11 and took a leave of absence from the firm even though they’d moved to midtown, and who could blame her? But then, apparently, she got addicted to something, probably Ativan, and there was a period when she dropped off the grid. She resurfaced back in DC a year or two ago and now she’s entering the political fray.

  Mayor of DC? Ursula can’t think of a more thankless job. She remembers that AJ grew up a military brat, her father a lieutenant colonel in the navy, so she doesn’t have a hometown, per se, and Washington is good at absorbing people.

  Ursula doesn’t see any mention of the mayoral race in general or of AJ specifically, though her attention does snag on a headline that reads “Baltimore Couple Killed on Beltway.”

  …pulled over to change a flat…wife stood beside her husband, presumably to alert oncoming traffic to his presence…both husband and wife hit by tractor-trailer…neighbor confirmed the couple was on their way home from a performance at the Kennedy Center.

  It was probably Yo-Yo Ma, Ursula thinks. She had wanted to take Bess but her schedule had been too busy.

  And then Ursula sees the names: Cooper Blessing and Katherine (Kitty) Duvall Blessing.

  Ursula stops pedaling. Cooper Blessing is dead? And who is Kitty? The newest wife? Ursula rereads the article and only then sees the ages—Cooper Blessing, 73, and Kitty Blessing, 72—and she realizes it’s not Cooper himself but Cooper’s parents. Ursula has met the elder Blessings three times; these were people she knew, or sort of (she’s not sure she could have picked them out of a crowd). They’re dead. Killed on the Beltway.

  Survived by a son, a daughter, and a grandson, it says in the last line.

  Ursula’s hands are ice-cold. The exercise bike is in the basement of their condo unit, and as Ursula climbs the stairs to the second floor, where the bedrooms are, she wonders how to break the news to Jake.

  She’ll wake him up gently, she decides, then hand him his reading glasses and let him see for himself.

  She eases onto his side of the bed and studies his face. His hair is more gray than brown now. When did that happen? She realizes that although she sees him every day, she never really looks at him. Long marriages have peaks and valleys, she knows, and while Ursula’s career has been one peak after another, their marriage is surviving solely because of Jake’s steadfastness and his unflappable demeanor. Anyone else would have left her long ago.

  When she touches the side of his face, he startles awake. It’s true that she never wakes him this way.

  “What is it?” he says.

  “I have bad news,” she says. “Here.” She offers him his glasses and points to the headline on the iPad.

  Jake accepts the glasses and takes the iPad; Ursula watches his eyes scan the screen. He sucks in his breath and recoils. He drops the iPad, falls back into his pillows. “Oh God.”

  “I’m so sorry, honey,” Ursula says. “At first, I thought it was Cooper, our Cooper, who died.”

  “It’s S
enior,” he whispers. “And Kitty.”

  “Were you…close to them?” It embarrasses Ursula that she doesn’t know the answer to this. “I mean, obviously I know they’re Coop’s parents and we’ve been to all those weddings. But did you have a relationship with them beyond that?”

  Jake shakes his head. “I’m sorry, Ursula,” he says. “Can you please give me a minute?”

  He’s in shock, he needs to process this; Ursula gets that. Unfortunately, she has a Judiciary Committee hearing at nine so she needs to skedaddle. She goes the extra mile by bringing Jake his coffee while he’s in the shower.

  “I’ll be home around seven, seven thirty,” she says. “Maybe in time for us to go to Jaleo tonight?”

  Jake says, “Not tonight.”

  “Oh,” Ursula says. “Okay.” She knows she shouldn’t feel rebuffed, but she does. “I love you.”

  Jake doesn’t respond. Ursula can see him through the steam of the shower just standing there, letting the water pummel the back of his head. “I love you, Jacob.”

  “Okay,” he says. “Thank you. Thanks.”

  For reasons that Ursula cannot fathom, Jake doesn’t want to go to the Blessings’ funeral.

  “Cooper is your friend,” Ursula says. “You go away with him every year. You’ve known him forever. You’ve stood up at three of his four weddings. You knew his parents. Why do you not want to go pay your respects?”

  “It’s going to be a circus,” Jake says. “There will be hundreds of people there. You, Ursula, are a major distraction. I don’t want to create a…sideshow.”

  “A sideshow?”

  “People will hound you, they’ll ask to take your picture, they will whisper. You attract attention in line at Starbucks. I don’t think it’s fair to inflict ourselves on the Blessings in their time of mourning.”

  “So you would go if it weren’t for me,” Ursula says. “You go, then, go alone.”

  “I don’t think I can,” Jake says. “It would be tough, emotionally, but also I’m supposed to be in Atlanta on Tuesday. Overnight. I’m meeting with the guy from the CDC. That meeting took me three months to get.”

  “Right,” Ursula says. “But this is your best friend’s parents. And it’s not like just one parent who was sick for a long time. This is both at once, suddenly. This is tragic. This demands your attention.”

  “I’ll call Coop today and set something up for week after next,” Jake says. “Once the crowds have thinned. You remember what it was like when your dad passed, Sully.” Sully; Jake hasn’t used that nickname in decades, not since they were in high school. He’s trying to butter her up. But why? “You wouldn’t have noticed if one person was missing.”

  “Still…” Ursula says. Something about this feels off.

  “It will mean more to Coop when it’s one-on-one,” Jake says. “I know I’m right about this.”

  Ursula disagrees—so much so that, after Jake leaves for Atlanta, she clears her schedule the afternoon of the funeral and drives to Baltimore.

  The parking lot of Roland Park Presbyterian is packed. There are signs directing people to park down the block; church vans will shuttle them to the funeral. When Ursula climbs into one of the vans, she wonders if maybe Jake was right. The other eleven passengers stop talking and gape at her. One surprised-looking older gentleman says, “Senator de Gournsey?”

  She gives him a somber smile. Says nothing.

  There’s a line to get inside the church. Ursula is impressed by the turnout. All these people, the accumulation of two lives—their friends, their coworkers, their neighbors, the mailman, probably, and the woman from the dry cleaner’s, fellow country-club members, their children’s teachers and coaches, the dog groomer. Ursula works twenty hours a day to ensure that American citizens are free and able to create this kind of community. But she’s jealous too. If Ursula died and her mourners were limited to those who felt genuine love and affection for her, the crowd would be three: Jake, Bess, and her mother.

  Funerals are sobering for more than one reason. Everyone must ask: What will people say about me?

  Ursula searches for someone, anyone, she recognizes. She attended three of Cooper’s weddings—there was one other, an elopement to the Caribbean somewhere—so surely she will find a familiar face. Cooper’s friend Frazier Dooley, the coffee mogul (Ursula remembers him because Jake pointed him out on the cover of Forbes), is there with his—girlfriend? wife?—who looks less like the punk-rock queen Ursula remembers and more like a proper trophy wife with sculpted arms and a Stella McCartney bag. Money will iron the kinks out of anyone, Ursula thinks somewhat sadly. Standing with them is a kid about Bess’s age, looking handsome but uncomfortable in his suit, blond forelock falling into his face. He must be Frazier’s son.

  Marriage material for Bess! Ursula thinks, to cheer herself up. She already jokes about Bess marrying money, which Jake finds offensive.

  She waits in line to pay her respects because part of the point of coming—the entire point—is so Cooper knows that Ursula cared enough to show up. It’s only Cooper and his sister receiving people. Ursula studies the sister; she can’t come up with the woman’s name. Maddie is what presents in Ursula’s mind, though she knows that’s not right. And what’s worse is the mortifying memory that seeing Not-Maddie elicits. The bathroom of the country club, Ursula in the throes of morning sickness when she was first pregnant with Bess, back when she thought—no, was convinced—that Bess was Anders’s child. And hadn’t Ursula nearly confessed this to Not-Maddie?

  Mallory—that’s her name!

  Ursula had come very close to confessing that hideous idea to Mallory Blessing, a complete stranger. She had stopped herself just in time because somewhere in her mind’s eye, she saw the trajectory of Mallory confiding in her brother and Cooper then feeling he needed to share the news with Jake.

  There’s a hand on Ursula’s back. She turns to see an attractive woman in head-to-toe black Eileen Fisher with a stylish asymmetrical haircut and a chunky statement necklace.

  “Senator de Gournsey?” she says. “I’m Leland Gladstone.”

  The woman’s voice is brimming with easy self-confidence; she announces her name as though Ursula might recognize it. Does Ursula know Leland Gladstone? The name sounds vaguely familiar. Is she a newscaster? A columnist? Ursula can’t think any further because now it’s her turn to pay her respects.

  Cooper sees her and his eyes widen; he checks behind her. “Jake’s not here, is he?” His voice sounds nearly hostile.

  Ursula hugs Cooper. “I’m so sorry, Coop. Jake is in Atlanta on business and couldn’t get away. He sends his condolences, of course.”

  Cooper nods. He looks overcome, exhausted and beyond exhausted, weary. “Of course,” he says. “Thank you for coming.” He looks past Ursula to Leland Gladstone, and his face softens. “Hey, Lee.”

  That’s it, then; Ursula has been dismissed. She feels a tiny bit put out. She is, after all, a United States senator, and she made time for this today. But that, she supposes, was Jake’s point; there are so many people here that no one is special, and to be a special person and expect special treatment is just obnoxious.

  Ursula moves on to the sister, Mallory. Whereas Cooper looks tired, Mallory appears absolutely devastated. Her eyes are like empty sockets; probably, she has taken a pill. She squints at Ursula hard, like she’s looking into the sun, and then she checks behind Ursula—looking for Jake, most likely. Because these are Jake’s people, not Ursula’s.

  “Hello?” Mallory says in a way that seems very nonplussed. But then she must remember her manners because she offers her stiff, cold hand. “Thank you for coming, Senator.”

  “Ursula, please.” She shakes Mallory’s hand, although she wants to give the poor woman a hug. How awful for her, losing both parents in one fell swoop like that. “Jake wanted to come but he’s away on business. He sends his condolences.”

  Mallory nods, though it’s not clear that she’s registering who Jake is.

>   “We’re very sorry, Mallory. Sorry for your loss.”

  “Okay,” Mallory whispers. She, too, peers beyond Ursula to see Leland Gladstone, at which point Mallory breaks down and the two women embrace and rock back and forth, wailing. Ursula looks on for a moment and feels nearly jealous. Ursula doesn’t have a single girlfriend she could cry with like that. She never has.

  An usher leads Ursula to the second row. She protests, whispering, “I should be in the back. I hardly…” But the back of the church is standing room only; the last available seats are up front. Ursula internally cringes. She hardly knew Mr. and Mrs. Blessing but she’s getting this prime real estate because she’s a senator. Jake was right; she shouldn’t have come. He always knows best. He’s a social genius; he can read people and situations better than anyone she knows. He should be an ambassador. Why is he not an ambassador? Ursula would like to walk right out of the church, but she’s made her bed, so now she has to lie in it; she sits down. The woman who was behind her in line, Mallory’s friend Leland Gladstone, takes the seat next to her.

  Leland leans in and whispers, “I have tissues if you need them, and licorice drops. Would you like a licorice drop?”

  Ursula is grateful for the kindness, however perfunctory. “Yes, please,” she says. “I’d love one.”

  Leland opens a fancy little tin, European maybe, and hands Ursula a frosted hard candy the size of a pea. “I’ve been Mallory’s best friend since childhood,” she says. “I knew Kitty and Senior my entire life. I can’t remember not knowing them.”

  “Mallory is lucky to have you,” Ursula says.

  Leland gives a dry laugh. “I don’t know about that,” she says. “I’m difficult.”