The Summer House

by Hannah McKinnon

  Over the years, the members rotated somewhat, but the premise never had. Outside of Ci Ci, Flossy and Judy were the two longest-standing members, which meant that they held some effect of rank. Though none of the women would ever dare to claim authority over any other, it was silently acknowledged when menus were discussed and opinions were sought. Flossy knew she was the member the others aspired to emulate in terms of presentation and detail. She knew which triple-cream cheese paired best with which region of grape. Her gardens were lush and robust, the hydrangeas deeper blue and denser than those of any other yard, a fact she suspected was due entirely to the sandy soil at the summer house, though when asked, she had perhaps on occasion made mention of salinity treatments. Judy, on the other hand, was known for the herb and fruit gardens that she tended and the menu she sourced from the suffocating interior of the greenhouse her husband, Ronald, had built for her. Unique, perhaps, but unnecessarily ostentatious, in Flossy’s opinion. Judy seemed to take great pleasure in complicating things, blithely tossing out culinary institutions that thus far had prevailed over every New England picnic blanket or dinner table. What had tartar sauce ever done to her?

  Judy’s homemade concoctions stemmed from untraceable lists of foreign herbs, an international assault on the tongue. Her grilled lobster sauce was like a forced marriage: why smother an unassuming crustacean with Kaffir lime rind when a perfectly good lemon from the grocery would suffice?

  Ci Ci Le Blanc, who held her Supper Clubs in the vaulted and chintz-upholstered sunroom of her cottage on the tip of Sea Spray, was the other longstanding Club member. The lone European in the group, she brought a Viennese flair to the menu. Or, at least, her cook did. Ci Ci’s most notable, and often-requested, contribution had been her stuffed oyster recipe. It was unlike anything Flossy had ever tasted; a fusion of creamed spinach and buttery mollusk that nearly melted on the tongue. The Le Blancs’ was the sole supper club meeting that Richard, who loathed being dragged to the weekly gatherings, had ever asked Flossy to attend, in the hope they’d be served the delectable dish. Sadly, Ci Ci had decided to move back to Austria with her husband, Hans-Peter, last May. As soon as Flossy had heard the news, she’d popped by to wish them well and to ask the question all the members had been wondering for years: would Ci Ci share the stuffed oyster recipe? She’d laughed, almost giddily, and for a moment Flossy had feared she would not. But Ci Ci assured her she’d write it out and leave the recipe card in Flossy’s mailbox before they closed the cottage for the season.

  In the interim, Flossy had checked her mailbox daily. On the last day of the season, she’d walked up the street and knocked on Ci Ci’s door. The movers were there, and Ci Ci looked positively flustered when she finally answered.

  “I left it in your mailbox,” Ci Ci assured her. “The red one with the gold whale on the side.”

  Flossy blanched. No one on the street had such a garishly colored box, let alone with something as tacky as a brass whale affixed to it, except Judy Broadbent. “That wasn’t my box,” Flossy stammered.

  Ci Ci was suddenly distracted by men coming down the stairs with an antique headboard. “Please do be careful!” She turned back to Flossy. “I’m so sorry, but I have to attend to things. Why don’t you just ask Judy? I’m sure she’ll be happy to give it to you.”

  But Flossy knew the answer to that. For twelve summers Judy had inquired about that recipe, just as Flossy had. Judy was proprietary about such things; when asked whether her salad dressing had a hint of rosemary or tarragon, she’d lift one shoulder noncommittally and smile. Judy guarded ingredients and measurements like a hawk guarded its nest of eggs. Judy would not relinquish the stuffed oysters easily. When Flossy finally did ask, her suspicions were confirmed. Judy claimed she could not find it. Lo and behold, at the last supper club of the season, what did Judy serve? Ci Ci Le Blanc’s stuffed oysters. Everyone had oohed and aahed. Flossy would have rather choked than eaten one. When she’d caught Richard standing by the greenhouse with one in each hand, she’d pinched him.

  This summer, with Richard’s seventy-fifth birthday on the horizon, Flossy was determined to get her hands on that recipe for his party. If only she could reach Ci Ci Le Blanc. Her communications with Ci Ci, while friendly, had been purely seasonal and held to matters of the gastronomic. Although the supper club had an email list of members for correspondences, when Flossy had tried, her message was returned as “undeliverable.” Apparently, Ci Ci had severed ties with the Internet in the same season she had with her chintz sunroom. Flossy made inquiries with some of the other members, but not one could procure a way to contact her.

  Briefly Flossy had wondered about social media, such as they called it. She, herself, was not on The Facebook or that Twitter. Though Judy likely was. Judy probably posted pictures of all her kids and grandkids propped up against the dunes in matching white linen shirts and khaki bottoms, an assemblage of towheads and teeth. Didn’t people realize khaki blended in with the sand? Nevertheless, Flossy had made a call to Sam; he could help her explore The Facebook. But that only ended in a maddening slew of unreturned calls that were finally answered by Evan, who, bless him, had not only offered to help her create her own page (Lord, no!) but had then spent a two-hour phone call searching for Ci Ci Le Blanc. Alas, the search proved futile. The woman had vanished along with her stuffed oyster recipe. There was no other way around it: Flossy would have to call Judy Broadbent.

  Sam

  The sounds next door awoke him. If he’d ever truly been asleep, that is. In recent weeks, all Sam had managed through the night were long stretches of dozing, interrupted more and more by periods of wakefulness. Like the one he was experiencing now. He could hardly blame the loud music next door.

  Their second chance was what was weighing most heavily on him. They’d gotten the word from the adoption agency six weeks ago about an expectant nineteen-year-old named Mara. Did they want to meet her? It had come more quickly than Sam had expected, and had only moved faster since. Evan was buoyed. Sam wanted to share in his enthusiasm, for both of them, but he still couldn’t seem to shake Austin.

  Things seemed to be going well; Mara was still in the process of deciding between prospective parents. They should hear something soon. But it wasn’t just the waiting that was keeping Sam awake that night. He tried to push the thought away.

  He rolled over and reached for Evan, who was sleeping facing the other way. Evan’s broad back was warm, the sheets pulled snug around his waist despite the balmy summer night. Sam rested his hand at the base of his husband’s spine, feeling his deep, slow breaths. How he envied Evan’s restfulness.

  Outside, animated voices rose and fell, coming in muffled bursts from the beach below. Probably a group of teenagers like he had once been a part of. Sam closed his eyes, picturing the bonfire crackling against the sand. The illuminated faces twisted in laughter and enveloped in smoke, the flash of crumpled beer cans littering the stony base of the hastily made fire pit. In spite of his pressing worries, he smiled against his fatigue at the memory. The summer house had a way of doing that to him; it brought everything back.

  * * *

  When they were teenagers, Richard had turned a mostly blind eye to the antics they had pulled during the summers at the house. Well, mostly Sam. Clem, being the youngest, had given them a run for their money by the time she’d reached that age. Paige, as eldest, had given them little to wonder about. For such a smart girl, her lack of imagination was sorely disappointing. It was Sam who had had to not only pick up the baton but carry it, and that he did, starting around his thirteenth summer, when he’d begun working in town on Bay Street. He’d met some older teenage boys, summer kids like himself, who were more interested in having fun wherever they could find it, and if that was on the shores of a private and mostly protected beach, all the better. Small and wild with dune grass, it afforded the teens a nightly gathering space that was not likely to be seen by residents like the larger Charlestown beach or tourist-trafficked Misquamicut. Sa
m liked to think they took him up on his invitation to come to the beach because they liked him; Sam was easygoing at work, sarcastic, and quick to draw laughter from even the older teens. He doubted they knew he was gay, but he was still wary. He had been since Brad Aaron. Brad was Sam’s age, but where Sam was lean and leggy in body, Brad was burly in the way of his father, who worked at the mill in town, just as his father had before him. The boys had become playmates simply by way of geography; on their quiet road, he was one of only a handful of kids Sam’s age.

  Brad’s house was the most modest, an unchanged fishing cottage set across the street from the waterside, unlike the other houses, which had been tastefully enlarged and renovated over the years. But these were not things young kids noticed. What Sam did notice was that Brad’s parents were largely unseen; they did not mingle with the other, mostly summer residents on Sea Spray, never joining the back-deck barbecues or gatherings some of the other families hosted during the summer. Brad was what Sam’s parents referred to, in no prejudiced way, as a “year rounder,” a fact Sam had thought made Brad lucky. He knew that Brad stayed home alone while his parents worked during the day—his father at the mill, and his mother at a boutique in town. Richard had made a point to tell the kids not to comment on his rusted bike, though the thought had never occurred to Sam. His father had gone so far as to suggest Sam invite him to use the boogie boards they’d brought one summer and stored in the backyard up against the deck railings. Sam noted the way Richard inquired more about Brad than he did the other kids they played with, and the placating tone he used whenever his name came up. Flossy had once stated that being a “year rounder” didn’t qualify as an affliction, but Richard afforded Brad exceptions that he did not dole out to other kids in the neighborhood. When one of the boogie boards was found broken and dumped in their side yard alongside the trash cans, it was discarded and replaced without discussion. Sam felt it had to be Brad; but Richard insisted it could’ve been any of the kids.

  The few times Sam saw Mr. Aaron, he was in the driveway working under the hood of his Chevy or mowing the lawn. His expression was stern, his words clipped as he advised the boys to stay off the grass and out of Mrs. Aaron’s hair. But Sam never had the opportunity to get into Mrs. Aaron’s hair, as he’d not once been invited into the house. Brad was not his first choice of friend, but they used to ride bikes together in a small pack, frequenting the other summer kids’ backyards without invite or preplanning. It was the essence of summer on the shore.

  Unlike the others, however, Brad was a bit of a humorless child. He was the kid who plucked the minnows that Sam had caught from the rocky pools around the jetty from his pail and flicked them in the head, stunning them, before twisting off their fins. Whatever interactions they had over the years seemed to darken as they grew older. Brad picked on the smaller kids. He had a primal talent for sensing an insecurity in any given playmate and calling them out for it publicly. One time, he made Clem cry with a song about thumb-sucking babies, something she only ever did in the safe confines of her quilted bed at night. At first he exerted this power haphazardly—any kid on Sea Spray was fair game. But by middle school his focus had narrowed. Brad seemed to see in Sam a dissimilarity that others did not, and would not for years to come, and it instilled in Sam a primal wariness that he’d never felt among other boys until then. At that age, Sam’s burgeoning sense of self and sexuality was materializing, but it was still an uncertainty, even to him. However, if the subject of girls or summer crushes came up, Sam would sometimes catch Brad staring at him in a way that made him feel shucked wide open. Was he just being paranoid? At first, he hoped so. But Brad was the same kid who, years later during a game of keep-away, pinned Sam down in the dunes, shoved his face into the cool sand, and whispered into his ear, “You like it like that?”

  Sam was stunned. Had he somehow given himself away? Or was Brad just reaching indiscriminately for any kind of threat, and the one he pulled from his toolbox just happened to be sexual? Bullies weren’t particular.

  Sam had never told his sisters or anyone else about it, even when Paige found him wiping sand from his reddened eyes and grabbed his hand.

  “What’d he do?” she’d demanded.

  But Sam had yanked his arm away. He was angry with himself for letting a kid as dull-witted as Brad Aaron get the better of him. Brad was larger and huskier, twice the breadth of Sam’s narrow frame. Richard had taught them the power of the word, of the mind; Sam hadn’t anticipated how meaningless those things would be beneath the bulk of a sweaty-smelling twelve-year-old boy, and in that moment, he’d hated his father as much as himself. Over the years, there were worse things said to him, graphic things, dangerous things, but none had ever burned as long as that incident behind the dunes.

  Luckily, Sam had found he could lure others in, in the same way he and Richard lured in stripers when they surf-cast off Napatree Point at night. It came as naturally as his lanky gait and his deep laugh. It was just a part of who he was. Sam hadn’t realized the social prowess he possessed until he was a teen. Teachers would let him off the hook for missing homework, and their elderly neighbor, Thea Cribbs, gave him the keys to her house so he could water the plants when she went away on vacation, even though he helped himself to the snacks in her pantry and left the door unlocked on more than one occasion. If the adults gave any indication of their disappointment in him, it was at most with a resigned sigh. Sam took pride in the occasions when it was accompanied with a wry smile.

  Even his peers fell under his spell. This proved most beneficial in high school, when he was no longer just wondering or worrying but indeed quite certain of his sexual preferences. Being different in any high school—sexually, physically, emotionally—was warrant for concern. Unlike the larger suburban schools where kids could fly beneath the radar, or at least establish security in numbers by finding those of their kind, there was no place to hide at Sam’s regional high school. Hugh McMahon was the only openly gay person in his class. While Sam didn’t know him particularly well, he was keenly aware of the razzing his classmates directed at him. Sam studied this from afar. Hugh was effeminate, and insisted on wearing brightly colored women’s scarves or ponchos to school. “It’s like he’s asking for it,” Pierce Warner once said. Though Sam doubted anyone ever asked for it, he had to admit he’d wondered why Hugh was so insistent on drawing attention, knowing it drew ire. On some days he found himself muttering, “Dude, just drop the jewelry.” But somewhere deep down, Sam envied Hugh’s grit. Thus far Sam had kept his sexuality to himself; he sometimes allowed himself to imagine how liberating it would feel to let his guard down.

  But he wasn’t ready. Instead, Sam worked feverishly to disguise any whiff of difference between him and the majority. He wasn’t stupid; he knew kids smelled fear. His efforts paid off, however. Peers fell into step with him in the halls, laughing at his outrageous stories or asking him whose house party they should check out for the weekend. Sam didn’t understand his ease in social groups any more than he understood the way he could solve long division quickly in his head; it just was. His awareness of it came with age. Mostly, Sam tried not to exercise his charm in a manipulative way. But there was no denying it; it helped.

  Paige had envied him this deeply. He grew to understand that as he watched her circle the same groups he did, both in school and at the summer house each year. She was affable enough, but there was something too earnest, too hungry about her that made others slide past her in the hall. Small groups of friends she could reach, if not quite grasp. It was a glaring difference between the siblings.

  “You have charisma,” Paige had once told him. It was a rare moment, as much for its generosity as for its intimacy, the two of them huddled over the kitchen island sharing the last of the Christmas libations, long after the others had climbed the stairs and retired for the night. Sam had momentarily sobered, thinking it a compliment. But this was Paige, and she had delivered it in pragmatic Paige-like fashion. She was noting a fact, in th
e same way she might note the bump in the center of his nose from a skiing accident. “Strong,” Evan had called it. A real compliment.

  “Be careful of charisma,” Paige had warned, her eyelids heavy as she swirled her glass of Malbec. “It brings people to your door. But it doesn’t mean you should let them in.”

  * * *

  He thought about that now, about Mara and their second chance at adoption, and he wondered if his charm was why she’d called them back. And if he was truly honest with himself, noting just the facts as Paige had, he’d have to admit that he’d wielded his so-called charisma as one does a sword. Had Mara been swayed by his colorful childhood anecdotes? Was she swept away by the delicate inquiries he made about her health? He was careful to never get too personal, but read enough of the What to Expect book he’d seen in her bag that first time the agency introduced them so they could make small talk and commiserate, as though he, too, were six months along and lamenting the swell of his ankles. He’d intended these things genuinely at first, just as Evan had with his soft questions about the kinds of parents she hoped to place her baby with, or what was important to her as to how her baby would be raised. But Sam had to admit he’d binged on the book’s early chapters on the drive in for their second meeting. In the same way, he’d forgotten how far along she was. Evan had corrected him in the car. These things were important to Sam in what his mother had often referred to as mailbox moments. Sam allowed family news to pile up. It was something he tended to ignore, keeping it safely tucked away in metaphorical envelopes until he was forced to clear the stack to access his desk. Only then did he pay attention to things that mattered so much to others. Just as only on the way to their meetings did he cram like a hungover student walking into a midterm exam. Yes, Paige had that on him. Like him, she knew his weaknesses better than his strengths. And he used the latter to distract from the former every chance he got.