Fifteenth Summer

By the time I woke up the next morning, there were only a couple hours left in the morning. I smiled lazily and stretched.

After our first frenetic weeks in Bluepointe, with all the educational outings and sporty field trips, our family’s pendulum seemed to have swung in the other direction. Life had seriously slowed down. And all that togetherness? That had tapered off too. Abbie had decided to train for a triathlon—because that was her warped idea of leisure—so her ninety-minute swim workout had expanded to include a couple hours of running and biking, too.

Each day, Hannah commandeered the swing on the screened-in porch so she could check another line off her to-read list. (I’m pretty sure she snuck in some naps on the porch swing too. It was impossible not to.)

My dad holed up for a few hours in the makeshift office he’d set up in Granly’s bedroom. And I did my afternoon shift at the Mels or hung out at Dog Ear or the beach.

My mom’s to-do list was to go through Granly’s things—her clothes, her mementos, her artwork and wedding china and egg cups . . . the whole life she’d suddenly left behind here.

But somehow something else always seemed to come up.

There was the afternoon of antiquing she’d scheduled with an old high school friend.

“I have to see her. It’s been years,” Mom said as she put on makeup for the first time since we’d arrived in Bluepointe. Abbie and I sat on the bed watching her get ready, the way we used to do when we were little. “It’s been years!”

“Who is she again?” Abbie said.

“ZiZi Rosbottom,” my mom said. “From high school.”

“Never heard of her,” Abbie said. She turned to me. “You?”

“Nope.” I shook my head.

“Yes, you have,” my mom protested. “We edited the yearbook together. ZiZi!”

“I think we would remember a name like ZiZi Rosbottom,” Abbie said.

“Yeah, because Abbie would have made all sorts of disgusting jokes about the fact that her name had the word ‘bottom’ in it,” I agreed.

“Well,” Mom said lightly as she breezed out of the bedroom, “maybe that’s why I never mentioned her.”

She made other excuses to flee the house too. She had to go to three different stores to get the right jars for making blueberry jam—even though blueberries wouldn’t be in season until the end of July.

Or she passed a field full of sunflowers en route to the grocery store and had to go back and capture it with the tripod and the good camera.

This morning she was sitting on the living room floor surrounded by mounds of clothing. Most of the items looked so small, they couldn’t possibly have been Granly’s.

“What is that stuff, Mom?” I asked. I stood in the doorway between the living room and the hallway. I wasn’t sure yet if I wanted to go in.

“Your baby clothes!” Mom said. She held up a tiny pink onesie with a duck on the front. “Well, yours and Abbie’s and Hannah’s. I’d forgotten they were here.”

“Why are they here?” I asked.

“Oh, Granly and I used to say we were going to make a quilt out of them,” Mom said, picking up a fuzzy little blanket and rubbing it between her fingers. “But it seemed like there was always something else to do.”

“Oh,” I said quietly.

Even as my hands gripped the door frame, I realized my body was tilting backward, poised for flight. I didn’t want to think about yet another thing Granly wouldn’t get to do. Or see.

Mom didn’t seem to want to think about Granly either. She was lost in our pink, ruffly past.

“Oh!” she said, reaching for a hot-pink dress with a ribbon of orange tulle around the hem. “You and Abbie both wore this at your second birthday parties.”

“Oh, yeah!” I said. “I remember the pictures.”

“This would make the perfect center square for the quilt,” Mom said, pawing through the tiny outfits. “And then the colors could get lighter and lighter as I move toward the edges. I can just see it!”

The thing was, I couldn’t. Of course, I understood why my mom was nostalgic over baby clothes. She got all misty-eyed every time she thought about our babyhood, to the point that I sometimes felt kind of rotten about having grown up.

“You know, I should just do it,” Mom announced. She began laying little dresses and sun hats and bodysuits out on the rug, organizing them in their full range of color, from powder pink to bubble gum pink to shocking pink.

“Ooh,” Mom crooned. “I remember bringing you home from the hospital in this . . . .”

She was technically talking to me, but in reality I think she forgot I was even there; she might remember me as a baby with no teeth and chubby thighs and a little orange afro, but I didn’t.

When I turned to go, she barely noticed.

I stalked through the laundry room and into the backyard. The sun was directly overhead, and the cicadas were grinding away from their invisible perches in the treetops. That sound, combined with too-long grass and the empty, dried-up garden plot, made the yard feel overheated and oppressive.

I found myself pacing back and forth along the stepping stones, my arms folded over my chest.

I should have been glad Mom had decided to do this quilt thing. I hadn’t seen her this happy and excited since we’d arrived in Bluepointe.

But . . . it just felt weird. This summer was supposed to be about Granly, not about baby clothes. She was walking down the wrong memory lane!

Not that I should have been complaining. I hated the thought of moving Granly’s stuff. I wanted her sewing box and photo albums to stay in the hutch forever.

So I should have been happy that Mom was leaving everything untouched, right?

But I just . . . wasn’t.

Because as long as we kept things just as they’d always been, we were in limbo. We were always in the process of saying good-bye to Granly . . . but never finished.

I heaved a deep sigh, then idly bent over the garden to pull a big clump of clover. My mom had done all that work turning over the soil in this garden, and then she’d abandoned that, too. Weeds were quickly creeping back in, and the dirt looked dry and cakey.

I pulled another few weeds, then cocked my head to give the garden a hard look. I went over to the shed and pulled open the squeaky screen door. I found a stiff rake, carried it back to the garden, and slammed it down into the dirt with a satisfying whumpf. Dragging the rake through the dirt broke it up, unearthed the baby weeds, and made a nice, straight, flat track of earth.

I could picture a row of tomatoes there.

I dropped the rake and headed back inside.

“Going to town,” I called to whomever cared. I dug my phone and a wad of tip money out of my dresser drawer, then slammed purposefully out the front door.

An hour later I returned with a rusty Radio Flyer wagon full of little plastic pots. Each held a feathery seedling. I’d gotten the plants at the fruit and vegetable stand where we always bought our corn and tomatoes. Mr. Jackson had given me a 75 percent discount because the planting season had pretty much ended.

“I don’t know if they’ll make it,” Mr. Jackson had said to me as he’d helped arrange the seedlings neatly in the wagon. The plants looked even more spindly in his big, meaty hands. “They’re pretty leggy—the ones everybody else passed over.”

“And I know nothing about gardening,” I’d said, biting my lip.

“Well, the good news is these are easy plants,” Mr. Jackson had said. “Tomatoes, cucumbers, squash, lettuce . . . I mean, all they want to do is grow.”

“Oh!” I’d said. “I forgot one more thing I wanted. Radishes. Do you have any of those?”

By dinnertime my pathetic little plants were in the ground. I’d followed exactly the instructions Mr. Jackson had written for me on a sheet torn off a yellow legal pad, spacing the tomatoes eighteen inches apart and tucking the radishes into two neat rows.

I grinned at my baby garden as I gave it a gentle spray with the hose. Then I pulled off Granly’s pink gardening gloves, went inside, and opened the spice cabinet in the kitchen.

“Cayenne pepper,” I whispered, finding a big bottle of the orange-red stuff near the back.

Mr. Jackson had sworn by it.

“Just sprinkle it all over the garden after you water each morning,” he’d told me. “Oh, that’ll keep all the critters away.”

As I dusted my garden with the red hot pepper, I pictured the beautiful basket of plum tomatoes, romaine lettuce, and crunchy pickling cucumbers I’d be pulling out of this garden in August. Not to mention the egg-shaped heirloom radishes.

I thought Granly would be proud of what I’d made of her little garden.

I couldn’t help but think about what would be different by the time these little sprouts were ready to harvest (if they made it past the first week).

The summer would be almost over.

I’d be saying more good-byes—to Granly’s cottage, to Bluepointe, to Josh.

But at the moment that seemed as distant and unreal as the idea that these little sprouts could grow into big, succulent vegetables.

So I just shrugged my shoulders, gave the garden one last shake of cayenne, and went inside.





I waited until the morning of the DFJ to tell my family about my date.

Mostly because it took me that long to be able to whisper the words “I have a date” without covering my mouth and giggling like an idiot.

The day of the fireworks started off feeling like any other, except for the fact that my dad was making us banana pecan pancakes instead of working.

When he plopped a trio of them onto my plate, they each had two round ears.

“Dad!” I complained. “I don’t eat Mickey Mouse pancakes anymore!”

“Oh, lighten up,” Hannah said. “He made them for all of us.”

“Even me!” my mom said, coming to sit at the table with her own plate of Mickeys. “I don’t know. Somehow they taste better with those little ears.”

“Well . . . okay,” I grumbled. I poured a puddle of syrup into the space between my mouse ears, and said, “So . . . what are you guys doing tonight?”

Mom and Dad glanced at each other with raised eyebrows.

“What are we doing tonight?” Mom said. “Um, watching the fireworks with our three daughters, of course. Why, did you have other plans?”

“Well, yes,” I said. “I—I have a date.”

Mom and Dad looked at each other again, and their eyebrows went even higher.

“With this boy, Josh?” my mom said.

“Of course with Josh,” I said. “We’ve been together for, like, weeks now.”

“Together when?” Dad said. His fork was poised over his own plate, but it wasn’t moving.

“Well, that’s the thing,” I said. “We’ve only seen each other before and after work. And during, sometimes. So he asked me out for the DFJ. You know, fireworks, picnic, marching band music?”

“Marching band music?” Abbie snorted.

“It’s a figure of speech,” I growled. I sliced an ear off one of my Mickey Mouse pancakes and shoved it into my mouth.

“How old is Josh?” Dad asked. “If he’s your boyfriend now, we need to meet him.”

“That’s the whole plan!” I said. “He’s fifteen, and he’s picking me up at seven. You can meet him then.”

“Honey,” Mom said gently, “we were really looking forward to spending the evening with you girls. I mean, you’ve been working so much, and Hannah—well, who knows if she’ll be with us on the Fourth next year. Right after breakfast your dad and I are going shopping for a really nice dinner on the beach.”

“It’s not even the real Fourth of July,” I complained. “It’s just the Deferred Fourth of July. Anyway, when did this holiday—whatever it is—suddenly become as important as Thanksgiving? I don’t remember you ever caring that much about us being together for it before.”

“Well, that was before,” Mom said. Her lips went thin, and she dropped her fork to her plate with a clatter. “I’m not going to order you to have dinner with us. I’m going to ask you to do the right thing. You could always ask your friend to join us for dessert and the fireworks.”

“How about I have dinner with you, and then Josh can come meet you when we’re done?” I negotiated. “And then he and I can watch the fireworks by ourselves?”

Once again I watched my parents’ eyeballs do their silent summit.

“All right,” my mom said after a long moment. “Home by ten thirty.”

“You let me stay out until midnight when I go out with Hannah and Abbie,” I complained.

“Because you are with Hannah and Abbie,” my dad said pleasantly. “Don’t push it, Chels.”

I brooded through the rest of my pancakes, wondering how I was going to tell Josh that my parents were being ridiculously clingy.

I was just putting my syrupy plate in the sink when my phone rang.

“Hi!” I said to Josh, rushing out onto the screened porch and shutting the front door behind me.

“Hi,” he said. “Listen, I have something really awkward to tell you.”

“O-kay,” I said, feeling nervous heat prickle along my hairline.

“My parents have somehow decided that the DFJ might as well be Christmas,” Josh said. “And you know, my dad’s been in Chicago a lot for work, teaching that seminar at Loyola, but he has four days off in Bluepointe—”

“And they’re not letting you ditch dinner?” I interjected gleefully.

Josh cleared his throat.

“Okay, that’s not the reaction I was expecting,” he said.

“No, it’s just that mine got all weird about the DFJ too,” I said. “We’re in the same boat. I’m free for fireworks, though.”

“Fireworks,” Josh said. “I’ll make it happen.”

“Oh, but first you have to meet my parents,” I said. “I can text you to let you know where to find us on the beach.”

“Okay,” Josh said, sounding less assured this time. “I can make that happen too.”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “They’re not too scary. And remember I have two older sisters. By the time they get around to doing all the parental requirements on me—you know, making me eat my broccoli, scheduling extra teacher conferences, meeting boyfriends—they’ve kind of lost their steam.”

“Ha,” Josh said. “Wonder what my parents’ excuse is, then.”

I bit my lip.

Josh and I hadn’t talked much about his parents. All I knew was that his dad was a philosophy professor, which pretty much meant he thought of life as a series of hypotheticals.

“It’s when it gets real,” Josh had told me one day during a slow walk home after we’d both gotten off work, “as in a clogged toilet or remembering to go to the Bluepointe Business Association meetings, that he kind of loses interest. I don’t think any of his ancient philosophers ever had do stuff like stock bookshelves and break down the boxes.”

“Well, what about your mom?” I’d asked him. “I mean, Dog Ear is more her thing, right?”

“Yeah, but you know my mom,” Josh said. “She thinks if she makes things charming enough, people will forgive anything, even lack of electricity.”

“Maybe she’s right,” I said. “Dog Ear is the most amazing bookstore I’ve ever been in. You should feel good that you’re helping her make it happen.”

“You’re right, I should,” Josh said. “I wish I were super-passionate about Dog Ear. But like you said, it’s my mom’s thing. It’s not mine, really. Except now it has to be because it’s the family business.”

“And you are really good at doing all that organizing,” I told him.

Josh rolled his eyes.

“Glad I could impress you with my file labels,” he said. “I know they’re really sexy.”

I laughed before I pressed on.

“What about your posters?” I asked. “Josh, they’re really good. I can’t wait to see what you do with the Allison Katzinger.”

Josh had smiled in thanks but changed the subject.

Now he did it again.

“So, should I wear a tie or something to meet your folks tonight?” he asked.

“Oh, definitely,” I joked. “Bow tie, shined shoes, the works. And bring my mother flowers. Her favorite is the hothouse hyacinth.”

“Oh, Nicole,” Josh said, the way he always did when we quoted Coconut Dreams.

“Oh, Kai.” I gave him my standard reply with a giggle in my voice. “See you tonight.”





Instead of going to our usual beach that night, we went to the public stretch closest to town, where they’d be setting off the fireworks. My mom insisted we go early so we could stake out enough space for this elaborate picnic she and my dad had planned.

“Can’t I meet you there?” I said. “If we go early, it’ll still be all hot and muggy out. I don’t want to get all sweaty and gross for . . . for later.”

Which was kind of ridiculous. Most of the time Josh saw me, I was coming off six hours of hustling around Mel & Mel’s. Even though I took time to wash my face, redo my hair, and put on lip gloss before I saw him, I knew it could only help so much. I probably smelled like a combination of dishwasher steam and deviled eggs.

But on a date (okay, half a date) you were supposed to look different. You opened your door, and your guy did a double take because you’d done something different to your hair and put on jewelry. Your heels made you two inches taller. You were supposed to smell like shampoo and perfume, not like the fishy end-of-day wind that comes off Lake Michigan in the heat of the summer.

“Chelsea,” Mom said, putting her hands on her hips. I noticed a couple of Band-Aids on her fingers—she kept stabbing herself with pins as she pieced together the baby clothes quilt. “I’m asking for one thing—that we be together for the Deferred Fourth of July. Please? For me?”

“All right,” I grumbled.

It wasn’t until we set out for the beach late that afternoon that I realized why Mom wanted this family moment so badly. It wasn’t because of the (non) holiday.

It was because she’d decided that this would be Gatsby night.

Granly had always insisted that we do Gatsby night at least once every time we visited her. That was just her name for a fancy picnic where the adults drank champagne and the kids had sparkling grape juice in bowl-shaped goblets.

The food was always very fussy: crustless cucumber sandwiches, slivered carrots and celery with spinach dip, tiny pickles and expensive olives, hearts of palm salad, and baked oysters. It was something we’d always done—like the stack-of-sisters photo on the beach—that I hadn’t thought about too much. I’d assumed my mom had kind of taken it for granted too.

But obviously I’d been wrong.

As we all headed toward town that afternoon with a heavy picnic basket, blankets, and another basket full of clinking dishes and champagne glasses, I whispered to Hannah, “Why didn’t she just say it was Gatsby night?”

Hannah shrugged.

“It was always kind of spontaneous when Granly did it,” she whispered back. “Y’know, like one morning she’d just snap her fingers and announce it, and we’d all spend the day pitting olives and peeling shrimp. Remember?”

I did. I remembered my sisters and me getting giggly and excited about Gatsby nights. We’d put on satiny “dress-up” clothes and steal Granly’s pink lipstick and say things like “Ooh la la!”

My mom was really different from Granly. Granly had always had a bright manicure, and she wore big rings with chunks of turquoise or lapis lazuli in them. When she talked with her hands, they made a clickety-clack sound.

My mother’s nails were always short and unpainted. The only ring she ever wore was her narrow platinum wedding bad. Her wavy, chin-length hair was as different from Granly’s wild red curls as hair could be.

When Granly threw a Gatsby picnic, it was fun, a little dramatic, and most of all effortless.

My mom’s Gatsby night came less naturally to her. It took more work.

So when we made it to the beach and laid out our fancy spread—with the votive candles and the tiny silver forks and everything—I think I appreciated it more than I ever had when Granly was alive.

“Now, Chelsea,” my mom said, arranging food on my plate while I texted Josh with our location, “I know you usually don’t like goat cheese, but just try a little with this pepper jelly. I bet you’ll love it.”

“Looks yummy,” I said.

My mom looked up in surprise.

“Really?” she said, giving me a skeptical smile. “Well, how about some smoked oysters?”

“Eh, let’s not push it,” I said with a laugh.

I didn’t really like the goat cheese either, but I didn’t tell my mom that. It didn’t matter anyway. I loved the olive tapenade and the artichoke torte and lots of the other fancy stuff she and my dad had made.

And Abbie cracked us up with a story about Estelle, the crazy art gallery owner, who’d had another one of her famous tantrums recently.

People we knew from town started claiming spots around us and saying sweet, funny things about our hoity-toity picnic.

Dad passed around a small bowl of the first blueberries of the season. They were tiny and on the sour side, just the way we all liked them. We nibbled them as we watched the sun go down. It was so fun and the sunset was so mesmerizing that I almost forgot to be nervous about my date.

So of course that was just when Josh showed up.

I didn’t realize he was there until I saw him standing at the edge of the picnic blanket, holding a cute little bouquet of daisies and gaping at our fancy china and champagne goblets and candlelight.

“Josh!” I said, quickly swallowing the blueberry in my mouth and hoping desperately that I didn’t have any food in my teeth. “You’re here!”

I jumped to my feet, smoothing down my yellow halter dress with one hand and tucking the frizz away from my hairline with the other.

As I gave him an awkward we’re-in-front-of-my-family hug hello, he whispered, “I didn’t think you meant it about the bow tie!”

“I didn’t!” I said with a laugh.

He was wearing a white T-shirt with a cool, faded American flag on it, rolled up khakis, and had bare feet. He gave our fancy dishes and silverware a glance, then looked back at me with raised eyebrows.

“Oh, this is just something we do,” I scoffed, waving my hand at the Gatsby picnic. “For a laugh. We’re not really fancy.”

“Speak for yourself,” Abbie said. She was leaning on one elbow, popping blueberries into her mouth.

“That’s my sister Abbie,” I told Josh. “And this is Hannah, and, um, my parents.”

“I’m Adam,” my dad said, standing up to say hello.

“And I’m Rachel,” my mother said as she pulled some dessert plates out of our picnic hamper. “We were just about to have dessert if you want to join us.”

“Oh, that’s okay,” Josh said. Then he seemed to remember his daisies and thrust them toward my mom.

“For you,” he said bluntly.

My mom and I raised our eyebrows at each other as Josh whispered to me, “I didn’t know what the heck a hyacinth was.”

“Those are perfect,” I said.

Which was true. They were simple and sweet. They were just the kind of not-fancy flowers my mom loved. She smiled as she gave the little bouquet a sniff, then plunked it into her water glass.

It made for an easy, guilt-free exit.

“I’ll be home by ten thirty, I promise,” I told her, crouching down to say good-bye. “Thanks for the Gatsby night. It was . . .”

I couldn’t say it was perfect. Because perfect would have included Granly.

“Well, I really loved it,” I said.

And that was the truth.