“What cash?”
“Fuck. You.”
“Listen, I don’t even know if I’m keep—” Bess shuddered. “I don’t want anything from you, not a single penny. Shaking you down? Please. I’m letting you have the house, remember? The house we bought together but with my money.”
Both of their names had been on the deed, but they used Bess’s savings for the down payment. Brandon’s cash was all tied up in his new company, the business now dead thanks to a fight over code. This was how badly Bess wanted out. He was allowed to have everything she put into that marriage, including their home.
“So are you keeping the baby?” Brandon asked, growling at her from across the table.
God, Bess thought at the time, the things that happened in a Starbucks. Books written. Divorces decreed. Pregnancies revealed. Bess had read somewhere that meth heads frequented the private bathrooms. All of humankind, foibling in a Starbucks.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” Bess admitted. “But, rest assured, if I go ahead with the pregnancy, you won’t have to contribute a thing.”
“You’re not keeping it.”
“I haven’t made a decision but, like I said, I want exactly nothing from you, should I decide to … proceed. I just wanted you to know.”
“You’re not keeping it,” he repeated.
“I realize this is quite a shock and we’re not exactly in a place of mutual understanding.”
“You’re not having this baby.”
“I might, I might not,” Bess said, trying to keep her voice measured and low. “But you don’t actually have a say.”
Eyes were beginning to make skittish glances in their direction. Bess felt like she was back in the ED, battling a patient with “chronic back pain,” a patient who was desperate for oxycodone but who wasn’t going to get it, at least not from Dr. Codman. Brandon had that same jittery-irate-irrational vibe, as if his pulmonary system were about to rupture.
“Listen to me, you fucking cunt.”
He slammed both hands onto the table and stood.
“Hey, buddy,” said a voice. “You should…”
Calm down?
Excuse yourself?
Shut the hell up before I punch you in the face?
Bess didn’t hear what the guy said. The blood whooshing through her ears was too loud.
“Brandon!” she hissed. “Sit down.”
“If you have this fucking baby…”
“Shut. Up.”
“I want you to remember that thing was made when I was fucking a different whore every goddamned night.”
“You’re despicable,” Bess wheezed.
She took a sip of coffee, thinking it was water.
“The same dick that was inside of you,” Brandon raged on. “The very same dick that made that creature had been in a hundred other cunts before yours.”
Bess reached under the table for her bag, accidentally knocking over her coffee along the way. She didn’t bother to pick it up.
“The sperm that fertilized your pathetic egg,” he said, “is the very sperm I squirted over some bitch’s tits that same night. Your baby will have syphilis or gonorrhea. It will be half whore. Three-quarters whore, with you in the mix.”
By then, Bess was up on her feet, heading toward the exit. Brandon kept shouting. It would be the last time she saw the man she had promised to love forever. The last time she went into that Starbucks, too. Good thing Brandon wasn’t as well known in Silicon Valley as he imagined.
The next day Bess made an appointment to terminate the pregnancy. What Brandon said didn’t make any biological sense. She didn’t even need her medical degree for that. But Bess knew she’d never be able to stop hearing his words once she saw the baby’s face. Not ever having been a mom, Bess didn’t understand that the opposite would be true. A new child had a way of making the bad disappear, for a time.
“Do you still think it was the right thing to do?” Evan says now, all the way in Nantucket, on the other side of the country. “Telling him?”
Bess laughs sourly.
“Well, he called me a bunch of names,” she says, the furthest into the story she’ll go with Evan, or anyone else.
Not even Palmer knows the details of the coffee exchange. Maybe her cousin is onto something with the accusation of verbal abuse. Bess doesn’t know which is more reprehensible: that she can’t admit it, or that part of her believes verbal isn’t abuse enough to count. They should revoke her medical license for the very notion. She could give it to Palmer. Her cousin has limitless compassion and could figure out how to poke around in people eventually. That’s the easy part.
“After the name-calling,” Bess says, mind spinning with all she’s said, and even more so with what she hasn’t, “I felt pretty crappy. So the answer is no, I shouldn’t have said a thing.”
“You know what I think?” Evan leans back onto both elbows, his face turned toward the ocean. “You weren’t sure. I think that’s why you told Brandon.”
“Could be,” Bess says. Her body softens as her brain winds down. “But seeing him solidified my decision to end the pregnancy.”
“Your decision is anything but solidified. I think it’s the opposite.”
“Oh yeah?” she says, squinting at him. “How’s that?”
“You won’t drink my beer.” Evan gives a wink. “And you’re never one to turn down beer.”
“Good Lord,” Bess says, and rolls her eyes good-naturedly. “Dr. Mayhew in session. So, if that’s true, then why didn’t I cancel today’s appointment? Especially after I knew I was headed to Nantucket? Travel is the perfect excuse.”
“You’re trying to kid yourself into being undecided, even though you know exactly what you want.”
“Yeah, well, whenever I’ve known ‘exactly what I want’ it turns out I’m dead wrong.”
“Just do it,” Evan says with a smile. “Have that baby.”
“Oh, sure. It’s so simple.” Bess snaps. “New person! Appear!”
“I didn’t say it’s simple. But, hell, you have a life, a career. You’re solid as hell.”
“I’m not the least bit solid,” she says. “I can’t even control Cissy!”
“Pretty sure you’re not expected to mother your own mom. What are you afraid of, Bess? Why can’t you raise a child on your own?”
“Oh, I certainly could,” Bess says with a sigh. “In theory. There are far more scandalous circumstances than a thirty-four-year-old professional, well-educated single mom. Like being a forty-year-old professional, well-educated non-mom.”
“So what’s the problem?”
“I don’t…” Bess sighs again. “I don’t know if I have it in me.”
“Of course you have it in you!”
Evan’s voice has always been so persuasive. Deep, powerful, as if coming from his lungs, or his heart. And those earnest brown eyes, like precious heirlooms she left behind. Bless it, Bess is falling for his old shtick. God, she hates when he does this. It’s so much easier to remember Evan Mayhew as the smug jerk from high school.
“I appreciate your faith in me,” Bess says, a little primly. “But this isn’t some novel where a major debacle turns out for the best and they all live happily ever after.”
“Why not?”
“Don’t get me wrong. It’s great to fantasize about,” she says. “If this was a novel, and you know people love books set in Nantucket, but if my life were a novel, I’d chuck my ED job in San Francisco, move on-island, and become a general practitioner dealing with jellyfish stings and wacky boating mishaps.”
“Cobblestone burn,” Evan adds.
“Fishhook removal.”
“You’d have a hard time competing with Tim, though. I can’t see you doing house calls for destitute drug addicts who pay in stolen guns. Or for John Kerry.”
“Dr. Lepore can have his house calls. Last time my mom went in for a tick check he was complaining that he’s perennially short-staffed because no one can stand this isla
nd for long. It takes a certain kind of weirdo to be cut off from civilization year-round.”
“Yes it does,” Evan says, brows peaked. “The kind only found in books.”
“Exactly. Anyhow, I could do the easy, in-office problems, and save the zany, contrarian cases for Lepore. Together we’d solve Nantucketers’ health woes and I’d raise my baby with Cissy at Cliff House. She’d watch him, or her, while I worked. My child would write her first words in Sarah Young’s Book of Summer.”
“Don’t forget … you’d also fall in love with your high school beau.”
“Oh, God!” Bess says, and laughs. Her eyes at once well up. “What an idea. However, I don’t think my French teacher from Choate lives around here.”
“That’s harsh, Codfish.”
“That’s harsh? Um, what was that personal philosophy of yours? Never make the same mistake twice?”
“Touché,” he says, and shakes his head. “It’s my only rule.”
“Swell.” Bess finds herself frowning. “Yet another reason this proposed novel could never materialize. Not to mention, Cliff House is now more cliff than house. So there’s a big old hole in the middle of my plot. Literally.”
Evan nods as tears glint on his lashes. Is he crying? Or about to? Bess pushes the thought away.
“So,” Evan says, and hops up onto his feet. He brushes off the back of his jeans. “I should take you home. Any more beer for me and you’d have to drive.”
“Wouldn’t be the first time.” Bess smiles. “But I have a bike, remember?”
She points toward the one she found in Cissy’s shed, blue and rusted near the handlebars.
“You Codman broads and your bikes.” Evan picks it up and launches it into his truck. “Nah. I’m driving.”
“Cliff House is, like, a mile away.”
“It’s getting dark. Plus, now that I know you’re in a delicate condition…”
“Why do I feel like you’re going to use that against me?” Bess asks. “As if I don’t have enough problems. Fine. I’ll permit you to drive me home.”
Bess jumps down and walks around to the passenger’s side of the cab. He starts the truck, which sputters and then groans into life. Bess checks her watch. They’ve been at the jobsite for over an hour, probably closer to two, but Bess isn’t ready to leave. She’s not prepared to drive the mile to Cliff House and greet the problems looming over the bluff. So when Evan turns to her and suggests a bite to eat, Bess is quick to agree. And she is grateful that her old friend can still read her in exactly the right way.
30
Wednesday Night
“So,” Bess says as they pull away from the Sconset Café and head toward Baxter Road.
They talked all through dinner—short ribs and burgers, nothing fancy—but despite topics worn to the bone and that dang growling engine, things are still too quiet in the cab for Bess.
“Any idea how I can get Cissy out of the house?” she asks. “That’s why I hauled myself out to bother you at work. Am I a typical girl or what?”
“Oh, you’re hardly typical.”
“I went to you for advice about someone else’s problems and ended up blathering about myself.”
Evan smiles, tight-lipped and forlorn. “I’d say Cissy is very much your problem.”
“Well, you’re right about that. See? Who has time for a baby with my mother around?”
Bess gazes out the window, watching several homes pass before she speaks.
“Seriously though,” she says. “What am I going to do? About my mom. It was enough of a battle when we were on the same page. Now Cissy’s my antagonist. I pack up the dishes, she puts them away. I throw perishables in the trash, she digs them out or buys more. It’s infuriating.”
“Just take what matters, and let Cissy deal with the rest. She’ll come to her senses. She always does.”
“That has not been my experience. And ‘take what matters’? That’s Cissy! And we already know that she’s not going anywhere.” Bess laughs and leans into the headrest. “Oh Lord, I’m in trouble.”
“You can grab the book,” he says.
“What book?”
“That guest thingy everyone writes in?”
“Oh, the Book of Summer. Well, yes, that’s a given. In the ranking of stuff that counts in that house, the ‘guest thingy’ is number two, behind Cissy. Though if she keeps acting this way, I might have to reverse the order.”
“I wrote in it, you know,” Evan says.
“You wrote in it?”
Bess sits upright and then eyeballs him while making a snorting-baby-piglet sound that would’ve caused her to blush had she not been so flippin’ tired. Maybe this pregnancy is affecting her after all.
“Yup,” Evan says. “I sure did. The night of your wedding.”
“Okay, that’s a lie. Admittedly I haven’t read all of the entries, but I’ve read all of Ruby’s and certainly every single one written around the time of my wedding.”
“Not all of them.”
They roll up in front of Cliff House.
“Yes,” Bess says. “All of them. Twice, even. Three times.”
Evan jams the truck into park and kicks open his door.
“Not mine. Because I ripped that sucker out.”
Bess blinks and then hears the crunch of his work boots on the shelled drive. She slides out of the cab, eyes on Cliff House. A million memories worm through her at once.
Back in high school, Evan didn’t usually drive her home, living across the street as he did. But he always walked Bess to the door. Then, later, he could frequently be seen (though never by Cissy) escorting Bess right back out of the house via the butler’s pantry. Hands locked together, they’d creep past the flagpole and around the privet hedge. He’d bring Bess home sometime before dawn.
The flagpole.
Bess gapes. It’s back. Damn it all to hell, Cissy has reinstalled the flagpole in the five hours Bess has been away. It is all so very Cissy Codman, this point she’s trying to prove. The woman is steadfast as anything Star-Spangled to be sure.
“F’ing Cissy,” Bess mutters as she tries to help Evan with the bike.
He, of course, won’t allow it.
“What’s that?” he says.
“What’s what?”
“You mumbled something about Cissy.”
“Oh.” Bess shakes her head and glares accusatorially, as if Old Glory had something to do with it. “The stupid flagpole is back. Does the woman ever stop?”
“Come on, Lizzy C. You know the answer to that question.”
“Right. The very minute she should throw in the towel, is the exact moment Cissy steps on the lunatic gas.”
Her eyes skip back to Cliff House in time to see the grasshopper gait of Cissy scamper by a window. Bess turns toward Evan, who looks exasperatingly hot right then, standing in the fuzzy moonlight, her bike against his hip.
“So what’d you do with it?” Bess asks. “Your Book of Summer entry? I’d like to read it.”
“Sorry, can’t help you there.”
“It was my wedding. My grand event.”
And it was both of these things, but strangely enough they almost eloped.
“Cissy’s driving me bonkers,” Bess said to Brandon one night, or something along those lines. “Well and truly nuts.”
“So let’s scrap the fancy to-do,” he suggested, quickly, like he’d been thinking about it for days. “Go down to the courthouse. Make it official, just the two of us, on our own terms.”
He made it seem so romantic. Just the two of us. You and me. Forever. We don’t need anyone else. She almost agreed to the courthouse nuptials but in the end wanted the Cliff House hurrah, same as her mother, same as Grandma Ruby. If she was being completely honest, Bess wanted it not merely for tradition but also for the guests who might come. She wanted it for Evan, so that he might see her on her very best day.
“You have to tell me what you wrote,” Bess insists. “It’s only fair. Like I said, it wa
s my wedding.”
“Sorry. Don’t have it. And are you sure it was your wedding? Because I could’ve sworn it was your mom’s.”
“Ha, well, you’re not wrong. Lala says she’ll never get married because Cis can’t figure how to be moderate. And if she eloped. Well.” Bess chuckles and lets her eyes wander back to the flagpole. “Forget Hurricane Sandy. The wrath of Cissy Codman would rain down like a hundred-year storm. For Lala, it’s better to live in everyday sin.”
“It usually is.”
Evan steers her bike through the gate, Bess dragging behind him.
“Here we are,” he announces. “Delivered to your front doorstep. Don’t let anyone tell you I’m not a gentleman.”
“No one needs to tell me that. I already know.”
“Hilarious.”
Evan leans in for a hug. Bess startles as if he’d grabbed her breast. Her hands fly up and she accidentally punches herself in the face.
“Don’t hurt yourself,” Evan says.
“Sorry, it’s just…” Bess tries to find the words. “Like I said. I’m ‘off.’”
“Stop kidding yourself. You’re more ‘on’ than you know. After all, you’re Bess Codman.”
“Doctor Bess Codman,” she says, kidding, though it comes out sounding pompous as hell.
Thank God Evan’s dad isn’t around. Chappy Mayhew would use this as exhibit A as to why every single person in the Codman family is a Summer Person to the core.
“Yes, well,” Evan says with a smirk. “The doctor part goes without saying.”
He has enough manners to let her obnoxiousness dissolve into the gloom.
“I’m shocked you can still look me in the eye,” Bess says. “After everything I’ve told you. I’m such a wreck.”
“Everyone’s a wreck,” Evan says. “Most are way worse than you. Admittedly, you’ve been through some tough shit. But it’s temporary. You’ll move on from here. Bess Codman can do anything. She knows what she wants and goes after it.”
“Let’s agree to disagree.”
“The girl I knew,” Evan says. “The girl who beguiled a poor, young local with her beauty and smarts, the one who scrambled him up for years—”
The Book of Summer Page 16