The Book of Summer

by Michelle Gable

  “True story. But going through someone else’s mess? What a nightmare.”

  “Better than going through your own mess,” Evan says with a wink. “I won’t take no for an answer. Wow, this old house…”

  Evan walks farther into the home, focus shifting from floor to ceiling as he goes. Every couple feet he knocks on a wall or runs his hand along a molding, admiring the work.

  “It’s so beautiful,” he says. “And so much … the same.”

  “You mean the decor? Yeah, well, Cissy’s too busy raising hell to bother with renovations or keeping up with trends.”

  “Lucky house,” Evan says, and stops beneath the three-hundred-pound black iron lantern hanging thirty feet above.

  They are in the center hall, the heart of the home. Whereas everything else in the place is beginning to look tired, a little shabby, definitely worn, this room steals the show. Aside from the dark wood floors, it’s entirely white, the paint and wainscoting exquisitely kept. The hall is six-sided, two-storied, and has a staircase running in a spiral around its walls. Though the chandelier is daunting and grand, not to mention handcrafted in her great-grandfather’s factory, it’s the thirty transom windows and the Atlantic blue that illuminate the room.

  “I can see why you guys refuse to move,” Evan says, and meets eyes with Bess.

  “Oh, I want to move…”

  “No you don’t.”

  Evan hooks right toward the kitchen, but not before tapping the stair above the room’s entrance.

  “The kitchen is different,” he notes, once inside.

  “Yeah, well, everyone updates their kitchen. Even Cissy.”

  “It looks great.” Evan shakes his head. “This is such a stunning old home.”

  He sets down the bag, and then the tray of coffee. Bess counts three cups.

  “Where should we start?” Evan asks.

  He picks up his coffee, and takes a sip. Then he nods toward the other two cups.

  “Help yourself. I don’t think we drank coffee back in high school but I got you black. Figured it was your style.”

  “So you view me plain and dark?” Bess says with a small laugh.

  “Strong and unaffected.”

  Bess blushes. Already her tenderness toward him is returning. No use punishing the poor guy. He’s done precisely nothing wrong.

  “So which is mine?” Bess asks. “By the way, if the other one’s for Cissy, you’ve wasted your money. She’s been gone since daybreak. Where? Who knows. Trying to write up a proposal for some sort of geotube plot, I’d assume. They’re holding an emergency meeting tonight.”

  “Yeah I’ve heard. Repeatedly and with many curse words involved. Alas, both coffees are for you.”

  “Both?” Bess says. “Wow, the bags under my eyes must be getting worse.”

  “No, the two cups represent two options.”

  Evan points to one.

  “French roast from Claudette’s…” He gestures to the other. “Or decaf, if you’d rather.”

  “Oh brother.” Bess rolls her eyes. “Does this relate to my, uh, revelation?”

  “It does,” he says with a grin.

  “You’re really trying to get me to commit to a decision, aren’t you?”

  “You’ve already made a decision. I only want to know what it is.”

  Wobbly-stomached about why, exactly, Evan might want to know, Bess reaches for the decaf but then changes her mind and grabs the French roast. She takes a sip of neither.

  “I want to show you something,” Bess says, and jams the French roast back into its cardboard. “Follow me.”

  She leads Evan into the butler’s pantry.

  “Ah. Your famous escape route,” Evan says.

  He taps on these walls, too.

  “Yep. Also.”

  Bess gestures to a stack of yearbooks on the left-side counter. Some are Clay’s, some are Lala’s, but most are Bess’s.

  “My Nantucket High yearbooks,” she says, then immediately pictures the woman’s hoodie.

  Was she familiar? She didn’t seem familiar. Bess shakes her head.

  “Isn’t it wild that I still have them?” she says.

  “Lizzy C., the whole reason people purchase yearbooks is for keeping.”

  “We bought them? I thought they were forced upon us.”

  Bess flips open the front cover of Nantucket High School: 1996–1997. Acting as if she doesn’t know its precise location, Bess ticks through a few pages until she lands on Evan’s varsity baseball team photo. He’s in the back row, center. Royal-blue cap. White grin.

  “Look at that guy,” she says, tapping the photograph with an unexpectedly shaky finger. “He must’ve had all the babes after him.”

  “Not as far as I know. Only the babe who mattered.”

  Face hot, Bess claps the yearbook shut and stretches toward one of Grandma Ruby’s photo albums.

  “Check this out,” Bess says, changing the subject if not with deftness at least with speed. She pushes the album in Evan’s direction. “It’s so bizarre. My grandmother saved dozens of articles written by some friend of hers and I can’t figure out why this person was so important. Her name is in the book but Grandma Ruby never mentioned her at all.”

  Evan shrugs.

  “She was probably a friend from school. Nostalgia will get you every time.”

  “Yes it will.” Bess skims a few more pages and then closes the book with a sigh. “It’s like Ruby was stalking her.”

  Stalking and nostalgia: Both run in the family, it seems.

  “I didn’t know your grandmother well,” Evan says. “But she didn’t seem like the stalking type. She intimidated me, to be honest. I saw her as so regal and refined.”

  “She was both. A nice balance to the total spaz that is my mother—God love her. We bonded over the various manifestations of Cissy cuckooness.”

  “Your mother is a pain in the ass,” Evan says. “But she’s one of the greats.”

  “Exactly. Pain in the ass. Awesome. At the same time. That’s why she’ll drive you nuts.”

  Bess opens a box and begins sifting through it.

  “You know, there’s a lot to do,” Evan says, scanning the room and the kitchen beyond. “I’m thinking … sort out the memorabilia later?”

  “I know, I know,” Bess says. “But first…”

  She passes Evan a piece of paper, yellowed and thin.

  “My grandfather’s discharge papers from World War Two. I thought he was injured but this says he was discharged for ‘psychoneurosis.’” Bess frowns. “Could be code for alcoholic.”

  “You’re the doctor.”

  “We’re more specific these days. We can’t get away with general hysteria or run-of-the-mill batshit loony tunes.”

  Bess pitches the paper back into its box.

  “Grandma would hate this,” she says. “The packing up, the moving of Cliff House. Her mom conceived it but the house was Ruby’s through and through.”

  “Yes, she’d hate it,” Evan says. “And so do you, which is why you’ve done such a crap job packing.”

  “Hey!”

  “It’s true. Hell, I hate it and my own father is the demon single-handedly trying to thwart Cissy’s efforts to preserve it.”

  “Yeah.” Bess snorts. “Your father is a demon all right. We shouldn’t even be in the same room.”

  “You miss her.”

  Bess looks up.

  “Ruby?” she says, though the question, and therefore the answer, is clear. “Yeah. I do. I miss her a ton.”

  “Come on,” Evan says, and grabs Bess’s hand. “I have an idea.”

  She looks down at his fingers meshed with hers. Her insides surge.

  “Shouldn’t we … finish packing?” Bess says.

  “Finish packing? I hate to break it to you, but you haven’t even started. Let’s go.”

  Evan slants his head in the direction of Baxter Road.

  “What’re a few more hours?” he asks.

 
“Uhhhh…” Bess says, her skin at once clammy. “A few more hours might be the difference between a full living room and half of one.”

  “So either Cliff House will be here when we get back, or it won’t.”

  “Okay, that’s not funny.”

  “At least you won’t be in it when it falls.”

  “Fair enough,” Bess says in a grumble. “Can I change?”

  “Why are you always so worried about your clothes?”

  Bess barks out a laugh.

  “That is the first time anyone’s ever accused me of being worried about my clothes. I wear scrubs for a job. Pajamas, basically.”

  Evan doesn’t respond, and with a soft and careful tug leads Bess back into the kitchen and down the hall.

  “I should at least put on a bra,” she insists, trying not to think of her hand, or how firmly it is being held.

  What would Ball Cap think?

  “I couldn’t rob Cissy of her hard-earned reputation for eccentricity,” Bess adds.

  “All right, princess.”

  Evan drops Bess’s arm, which falls to her side and then hangs there awkwardly.

  “Go find your coveted brassiere and meet me outside by the truck. This field trip shouldn’t take long but it’ll be worth the time.”

  35

  Thursday Afternoon

  “A graveyard,” Bess says, following Evan through the Mount Vernon Gate and into the oldest section of Prospect Hill Cemetery. “To get my mind off the loss of my beloved family retreat, you’ve brought me to a place that is the very symbol of death?”

  “Earthly demise,” he says. “That’s all it is. Come on.” Evan takes her hand for the second time that day. “You need to tell a certain someone what’s happening. And then say farewell.”

  They head west, toward the Soldier’s Turn.

  “How do you know where we’re going?” Bess calls, trying to keep pace, trying not to get caught up in a bramble and find herself facedown on the final resting spot of some Eliza or Ebenezer.

  “I come here quite a bit,” Evan says. “So I know my way around.”

  “Wow … That’s, um, odd.”

  Evan pauses, partway between a Joy and a Pigeon. If Bess isn’t mistaken, his cheeks are slightly flushed. Probably because of the wind, which is growing stronger by the gust. According to her weather app, today they can expect gales of up to forty miles per hour.

  “I like the history of this place,” Evan says. “All of the island’s founders are buried at Prospect Hill. Right here we have the Honorable David Joy, who was an abolitionist. And then there’s Lucy Sturtevant Pidgin, M.D.”

  Bess leans forward, squinting. A female doctor born in 1850. She hadn’t known there was such a thing.

  “Across the path is Charles Robinson,” Evan continues. “He was the first developer in Sconset. You know that footbridge over Gully Road?”

  Bess nods. Anyone who’s spent more than a day in Sconset has used it. Bess must’ve a hundred times. With college friends or island friends, on summer nights they’d walk the full way from Cliff House to the Summer House piano bar and back again, both ways over Gully Road.

  “He built that bridge,” Evan says. “Come on, let’s keep going.”

  He directs Bess onward, past the families Luce and Cartwright and Wyer and Macy. They spy a Folger, a Murphy and, yes, a Hussey or three. DULCE ET DECORUM EST PRO PATRIA MORI, Bess sees on one headstone. Thanks to Choate, she knows her Latin and her Roman poems, too. “It is sweet and glorious to die for one’s country.”

  “This poor lady,” Evan says, pointing to Sarah C. Gardner. “Died soon after giving birth. She was depressed, apparently, and confined to the ‘child bed.’ She escaped from her nurse and ultimately drowned.”

  “God, how sad,” Bess says, thinking of Sarah C. Gardner and the others, too.

  So many women plus all those men LOST AT SEA or LOST AT WAR. And the children and babes—in the ground before they had a chance. The ache of sorrow tightens across Bess’s chest.

  Soon they pass by the Starbuck Gate, two large pillars holding up a rusty scroll. Bess hesitates at one gravestone. It’s thin, white, and rectangular, with clumps of moss growing beneath it.

  “‘While briefly in life’s book we are,’” Bess reads, “‘Death shuts the story of our days.’ Well, that’s cheery.”

  “It’s also true.”

  “Look at this one,” Bess says. “‘She was all a woman should be.’ Bummer. I was planning to use that epitaph myself. I would love to know what it means. She was a good housekeeper? Aces in the sack? What?”

  “Both I’d venture. Let’s get a move on.” Evan lengthens his stride. “I think it’s about to rain again.”

  Bess scrambles after him. Fantastic. More weather.

  “When’d you become an amateur historian?” Bess asks as they round the corner down the Macy Path. “It’s very cute, and you should definitely use that factoid on the ladies, but it doesn’t seem like you.”

  Or does it? Bess doesn’t altogether know.

  “Hey,” Evan balks. “Who ya calling an amateur? I’ll have you know that I’m the president-elect of the Nantucket Historical Society.”

  “What?” Bess says, gawking in surprise. “That is completely…”

  “Lame?”

  “No. Unexpected.” Bess smiles sadly. “Awesome.”

  With each hour, Bess grows ever more glum about her fake novel that will never come to pass. Evan Mayhew is still a handsome bastard and now he’s shown a snapshot of the old man he might become. Salty, quick-witted, and pestering island folk about family trees. That Costa Rican lady must’ve been some kind of idiot to let him out of her clutches. And Ball Cap—well, she’s doing okay. Apparently.

  “Ah,” Evan says. “Here we are.”

  “What now?”

  Bess shakes her head. Though she knows exactly where they stand, she is fifty kinds of lost.

  “Right there,” Evan says, and shows her a stone: weather-beaten, grayed, and cracked.

  RUBY GENEVIEVE YOUNG PACKARD

  March 10, 1919–February 5, 1994

  Lived Respectfully, Loved Vastly

  Bess smiles.

  “Clay and I used to joke her epitaph should be: ‘Stop complaining. I don’t believe in it.’ God, I miss her.” Bess turns toward Evan. “Thanks a lot, jerk. Now I’m feeling even more ‘hormonal.’”

  “Hmm. Or are you just ‘feeling,’ period? What did you tell me last night?”

  “Uh, my jeans don’t fit? Don’t tell Cissy I hate oysters?”

  “Yes. That and you think half the problem with prescription drug abuse in this country is that people are afraid to feel stuff,” he says. “Then you promptly spent twenty minutes justifying your penchant for elastic pants.”

  “I’m not afraid to have feelings,” Bess says. “I feel all over the place. Chiefly about my sweatpants.”

  “Okay, you big feeler.” He taps the top of Ruby’s gravestone. “The two of you are due for a chat.”

  “But I already said good-bye.”

  “Not like this.”

  Evan takes a step toward Bess. He pushes a strand of wind-and-salt-tangled hair from her face.

  “Tell her about Cliff House, and about you,” he says. “Close the circle. It’s the only way to move on and make room for something new.”

  “I don’t want anything new. I like the old and the usual,” Bess says. Then adds: “I’m talking about houses, obviously.”

  “Of course,” Evan says with a smirk. “I’m going to leave you and your grandmother alone. I’ll wait for you up by the Soldier’s Turn. Take your time.”

  He gives her a gentle pat on the back and then walks away.

  As she listens to Evan’s footsteps fall off, Bess kneels beside Ruby’s headstone. She places a sprig of zinnia, clipped from the Cliff House gardens by Evan, in the place a heart might be.

  “Good thing Cissy didn’t see Evan cut this,” Bess says. “Or the Mayhew family would have a whole new
set of problems. I think he even used an old steak knife. Oh, Grandma.”

  Bess sighs and shakes her head.

  “Okay, this whole thing is ridiculous,” she grumbles, even as tears wet her lashes. “Gram, I wish I knew how to say this.”

  Bess lowers all the way onto the ground, sitting Indian-style beside Ruby’s marker. Yes, Indian-style, none of that “crisscross applesauce” garbage because that’s what it was called when she was a kid, before it was decided an entire ethnic group might be offended by what is a pretty comfy seated position.

  “I don’t know what to tell you,” Bess says, picking at the pebbles on the ground. “Other than things are in complete chaos. It started, well…” She stops. “God, it’s been twenty years since we last spoke. I guess it all started just after you died, when I got kicked out of Choate. Don’t get mad because, well, it was sort of on purpose.”

  36

  The Book of Summer

  Mrs. Mary Young

  June 7, 1942

  Cliff House

  Ruby’s hassled me about this book. I haven’t written in it for over a year, she says. A year. It seems shorter and longer both.

  “We have to keep the book going,” Ruby says. “Because we’re the only ones here. They’ve left the ship for us to captain. We need to take charge. Nothing left to chance.”

  Taking charge starts with this book apparently, peculiar as it’s not as though the boys spent much time jotting down entries. The book seems mostly the women’s, and these days Cliff House is, too.

  Sometimes it hits me with might, the startling reality that we are alone and the men more than a workweek away. In past years we spent more time preparing for their arrival than actually enjoying the fact that they’re here. Even now I have to remind myself that come Saturday, they won’t magically appear in the drive. It will only be the three of us: me and Ruby and of course Mama Young. What a lonely crew. My dear mother-in-law’s been moony as the night sky because of it. Can’t get a smile out of her to pay the postman.

  Not everything’s changed on the island. The boats still run from Woods Hole and New Bedford. The shops and restaurants have put away their “Closed for Winter” signs even though many speculated that after Pearl Harbor resort towns would close for the duration. Everyone is playing at business as usual despite the war raging overseas. In a week’s time they’ll commission the Yacht Club, and celebrate the raising of the flag.