The Book of Summer

“You’re here.”

Exactly as promised, Bess thinks. I would’ve loved to have been the person you settled for.

She wiggles away the thought of it, having already decided what can she really do? There’s no getting around what happened, or didn’t happen, and though she’d love to, Bess can’t exactly go back and unmarry Brandon. Neither can she jettison her job, sell her possessions, and take up residence in Sconset. They’d never work in the real world. Not for a single second, a fact long since proven. Just ask Evan: They’ve already made that mistake.

“Put me to work,” he says. “What can I do?”

He sets two cups of coffee on the round oak table between them, no spare this time. There is his cup, and there is hers, as denoted by “DECAF” scribbled in Sharpie on its side. Bess reaches for it, though she could very much stand the full caf. She is so tired her head is floating with lack of sleep. There is a gentle buzz that only she can hear.

“I brought my truck,” Evan says.

“Perfect. Some of this stuff, I don’t even know.”

Bess points listlessly to the corner. An umbrella stand. A planter. A vase Clay cracked with an oar in a bout of teenage hijinks before he understood how to operate his gangliness.

“What do you do with an umbrella stand?” Bess says. “Or ninety percent of this junk?”

“Do you have to move it all?”

“I can’t leave it here. It’d be like littering. Anyway, maybe you can start with the artwork?”

Bess gestures to a yawning seascape behind her, one of the many in the home. The painting is all large dunes and small waves, except for the shadow of a woman veering off toward the right side of the frame.

“Sure, I can move pictures,” Evan says. “Even if it is a huge waste of my notable brawn.”

“Ha! Don’t worry about that. You’ve seen the glass-encased Revolutionary War flag in the foyer. It’s bigger than my mom’s Defender so we should probably wait until your coworkers arrive. In other words, we need some muscle.”

“Ouch,” Evan says, walking to her side of the table. “I’ll try not to take offense. Okay, Lizzy C., whatever you need, I’m at your disposal.”

Though he’s going for his usual swagger and sway, Evan moves awkwardly, shuffling like a robot. What he wrote in the Book of Summer, it is the very most he’s ever given Bess. Or anyone else for that matter, though Bess doesn’t know this. What she does know, however, is that her heart is suddenly snagging all over the place, like panty hose after a day of med school interviews.

Bess jiggles her shoulders in order to wake up. High school loves are invariably bigger in your brain. It’s sentimentality, a certain kind of homesickness, really no different from what’s going on with Cissy and the house. Maybe Bess can find an engineer willing to move Evan closer to the road.

“All right,” she says. Bess slaps the table to bring herself fully into the right decade. “Go to it. Rip that sucker off the wall.”

“But isn’t there, you know, protocol, for moving artwork?”

“I’m sure there is, but who has time for protocol? Cissy is now more concerned with being a pain in my ass than the integrity of her personal effects so I’ll do whatever it takes. I need to follow Flick’s advice. ‘Get the shit out and be done with it.’”

“Your cousin is a smart lady,” Evan says.

He goes to inspect the back of the seascape, as if it might tell him something.

“I should inform you,” he says, “that Cissy’s outside. On a lounge chair in some sort of gingham, whaddya call it, tankini.”

“A tankini?” Bess gawps.

“I asked what she’s doing and she said, relaxing and sunning herself. You might have noticed it’s raining.”

“Jesus H., that woman. Because of course she’s sunning herself in a rainstorm.”

“Is she okay?” Evan asks, inspecting the seascape’s frame. “Because she seems a little—”

“Off her rocker? Batshit insane? Psychoneurotic?”

“More zealous than usual,” Evan decides on.

“You’re very polite. Cissy is not in a good place.” Bess wags a finger. “Thanks, in part, to your father.”

“My dad?”

“You know he dumped her, right?”

“I’m not sure he had a choice.”

“Oh, there’s always a choice.”

The words sound biting, though Bess does not mean them to be. This is about Cissy and Chappy and their AARP love affair. Meanwhile Evan looks like someone just criticized his throwing arm. Bess would know, because she’s criticized it before.

“Evan.”

She rests a hand on his forearm. He glances down, warily.

“Thank you,” she says. “For showing me that letter.”

“You’re not mad? Uh, and, I didn’t mean anything by it. It just seemed like something you should have.”

“Of course.” Bess clears her throat but still it’s closing up. “And I’m not mad at all. How could I be? Though you should’ve given it to me the day of my wedding. Or told me how you felt when we talked that afternoon. It would’ve saved heaps of grief, not to mention buckets of cash.”

Bess is trying to joke, but it comes out all wrong. She doesn’t give two shits about the money.

“I’m kidding,” she says, smiling awkwardly, no doubt looking like someone trying to hold in a fart. “I would’ve married him anyway.”

Would she have? Most likely. Bess was no Cissy Codman, but she’d inherited a few drips of the woman’s stubbornness. It’d be hard not to, with that strong a streak.

“Seriously, though,” Bess says.

Evan has turned away from her and is more or less ripping the painting from the wall. But if he leaves a hole, no matter. Only the hermit crabs will care.

“It was incredibly sweet and genuine and maybe if…”

Bess doesn’t finish the thought. Can’t finish the thought. Maybes are for moping and for regrets. And Bess doesn’t believe in any of that.

“You’re a great guy, Evan Mayhew.” She thwacks him on the back, like he’s just caught a forty-yard pass. “Every girl should have a high school boyfriend like you.”

“Thanks,” Evan mumbles, then tears the seascape down.

He leans it up against the table as he glowers, refusing to look Bess’s way.

“Where are the other paintings?” he asks, so obviously done with this conversation it makes Bess’s stomach dive. “The foyer? I remember something in the library.”

“Wait.” Although he is finished, Bess is not ready for him to leave, even if it’s only into some other room. “I want to show you something.”

She goes over to one of the boxes.

“Check this out,” Bess says, and returns to Evan, paper in hand. “Remember the articles I told you about? The ones Grandma Ruby kept, written by that Harriet Rutter person?”

“Rutter?” Evan’s eyebrows lift.

“Yep. Gram basically stalked the poor woman. Most of it’s just box scores and beauty tips, the odd piece on the war. But this.” She flicks the paper. “I found it in the bottom of an old jewelry box.”

Michelle Gable's books