28 Summers

by Elin Hilderbrand

  Summer #18: 2010

  What are we talking about in 2010? Haiti earthquake; the Tea Party; SeaWorld; The Hurt Locker; BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico; Elena Kagan; El Bulli; Rahm Emanuel; Don’t ask, don’t tell; Chilean miner rescue; Alexander McQueen; 127 Hours; WikiLeaks; Leslie Knope, Ron Swanson, Chris Traeger, Tom Haverford, April, Andy, and Ann Perkins; “I see you drivin’ round town with the girl I love.”

  Her favorite moments of the year are the moments right before she sees him. He’s on the ferry. He has boarded the plane. He’s on his way. His rental Jeep is going to be speeding down the no-name road toward her cottage, bringing a cloud of dust and dirt and sand. The anticipation is ecstasy. It’s a perfectly ripe strawberry dipped in melted milk chocolate; it’s a roaring fire on a snowy night; it’s a double rainbow; the green-glass barrel of a wave; the first sip of ice-cold champagne.

  And then…he arrives, he’s there. They lock eyes; he rushes out of the car—forget the luggage, worry about that later—wraps his arms around her, picks her up off the ground, sets her down, holds her face in his hands, and they kiss.

  Stop time, she thinks. Please, God.

  It’s the inverse when he leaves. The most excruciating pain she has ever known is watching him drive away, knowing it will be 362 days until she sees him again (and a day longer in leap years).

  What will change in that year?

  Will anything happen that will keep him from coming back?

  Mallory’s fortune: An acquaintance of the past will affect you in the near future.

  Jake’s fortune: Feeding a cow roses does not get extra appreciation.

  Part Three

  Forties

  Summer #19: 2011

  What are we talking about in 2011? SEAL Team Six; Osama bin Laden; the Affordable Care Act; Nicki Minaj; the Penn State football scandal; the debt ceiling; Gabrielle Giffords; Cam Newton; Occupy Wall Street; Don and Betty Draper, Peggy, Roger, and Joan; cake pops; Rory McIlroy; Eleven Madison Park; Anthony Weiner; Andy Rooney; “Rolling in the Deep”; Steve Jobs; Moneyball.

  At the end of the school year, Dr. Major announces that the high school has received a large monetary gift from an anonymous donor that is earmarked to reward excellence in teaching. One teacher will be chosen each September to receive a seventy-five-thousand-dollar cash prize—which, in Mallory’s case, is the amount of her current salary. A committee of parents and community members will convene over the summer to evaluate candidates, and the winner will be announced the first week of school.

  “You’re going to win the first one,” Apple says. “I can feel it.”

  “Thanks for jinxing me,” Mallory says. “I know I’m a good teacher. I don’t need outside validation.”

  “But you do need seventy-five large,” Apple says.

  “Yes,” Mallory says. “Yes, I do.”

  It was a cold, windy, rainy spring on Nantucket, and the roof of Mallory’s cottage leaks. She had a roofer named G-Bow come look at it and he found extensive rot and places where the wind had blown off shingles. It’s waterfront, built in the 1940s, G-Bow said. Roof was probably replaced sometime in the 1970s. It’s time for a new roof.

  Mallory asked how much it would cost.

  Not much, he said. Forty to forty-five grand.

  Mallory has the money that Aunt Greta left her conservatively invested, but she has dipped into it for various home improvements and a new Jeep to replace the K5, which died on Eel Point the summer before.

  Technically, Mallory has the money to replace the roof, but it will leave her very depleted.

  She could ask Fray for the money, or part of it. He’s generous when it comes to Link; the child wants for nothing and Mallory knows that college will be handled. But it’s not Fray’s job to support Mallory. She’s the mother; she has primary custody. The roof over their heads is her responsibility.

  Kitty and Senior?

  No, never.

  Announcing the teaching award was cruel, Mallory decides. It’s all she thinks about now. She wonders who’s on the committee—any parents of the kids she’s taught? Well, she’s taught everyone’s kids, so the answer is yes and it’s true that most parents love her. At Christmas, Mallory always receives the biggest haul of gifts—pumpkin muffins, scented candles, bottles of Sancerre, hand-knit scarves, monogrammed toiletry cases, cookies, cookies, cookies, gift certificates to Mitchell’s Book Corner, fancy hand lotion, Christmas ornaments, Whitman’s samplers, Bacon of the Month Club. Some of it is bribery—Mallory writes as least two dozen college recommendation letters each year—but most of it is due to genuine gratitude and affection. In teaching, as with everything in life, you get out of it what you put into it.

  Mallory susses out her competition for the award. There’s Mr. Forsyth, who teaches biology. At nearly seventy years old, he’s a legend; everyone adores him. One year, his students made T-shirts that said RESPIRATION IS THE RELEASE OF ENERGY IN THE FORM OF ATP. He’s the sentimental favorite. There’s Rich Bristol, the music teacher and choral director of the Accidentals and Naturals. He’s young and handsome and the theater girls love him; he’s their heartthrob, though this might work against him. And then there’s Apple, but she’s guidance and therefore not eligible, which is unfair, though Mallory is also a bit relieved, which makes her feel like a terrible friend and a bad person. She doesn’t deserve the Excellence in Teaching award.

  Yes, yes, she does. Positive thinking. One of the leaks in the roof is right over Link’s bed.

  If she wins, she thinks, she’ll pay for the roof and donate the rest to the Boys and Girls Club.

  Except she knows she won’t. Life has too many surprises for a single working mother to be that magnanimous.

  She goes back to Rich Bristol. There were whisperings about him and a student named Danielle Stephens. Too chummy, someone said. Red flag. Mallory thinks back to her second year of teaching and the incident with Jeremiah Freehold. She shudders. She was so young then, and now, of course, Mallory would no sooner take a student off the property in her car than she would lop off her own hand. But back then she had; she was in the same space then that Rich Bristol is in now, maybe worse. Do people remember about Jeremiah? Is it a stain on Mallory’s reputation that will never fully come out?

  Apple is asked to be the administrator of the committee. She has no decision-making powers but she will attend all the meetings. She will know the front-runners. She knows the committee members.

  “I can’t tell you a thing,” Apple says. “I shouldn’t even have told you I’m the admin.”

  “How about one thing?” Mallory says. “Is Mrs. Freehold on the committee?”

  Apple inhales and Mallory’s heart slips a notch in her chest. “No,” Apple says.

  Link is ten now, old enough to spend the entire month of August up in Vermont with Fray and Anna. Fray lives on Lake Champlain. He has a motorboat; they water-ski and fish for trout; they mountain-bike; they build fires to cook over. Link loves his Vermont summers, but this will be the last one. Fray is launching his Frayed Edge coffee brand this fall, and he and Anna are moving to Seattle.

  Link is a well-adjusted kid. He knows he has to make the most of his trip to Vermont this year and he’s also excited about eventually visiting his dad and Anna in Seattle. The Space Needle is there, and Pike Place Market, and the Seahawks!

  Mallory supposes Link will get used to flying cross-country. Fray will probably put him in first class—at least, until Fray buys a plane of his own. And here’s Mallory, trying to figure out how to replace her roof.

  Her obsession with the roof and the award and Link flying to Seattle in a G5 serve one purpose: The summer zips by. Labor Day is on her doorstep and Mallory vows that she will not worry about the roof while Jake is here. She will not worry about anything.

  Friday night, September 2, 2011: The burger patties are in the fridge covered with plastic wrap. The corn is shucked, the tomatoes sliced and drizzled with balsamic, the charcoal is a pulsing orange, turning gray at th
e edges. The hydrangea blossoms—three this year, the bushes were late due to the chilly, wet spring—are in the mason jar next to the one votive candle.

  “Can we have extra candles this year?” Jake asks. “My eyesight isn’t what it used to be.”

  There’s always a year’s worth of catching up. Where do they even start?

  “How’s Leland doing?” Jake asks.

  Not well, Mallory says. After she and Fifi broke up, Leland moved to Brooklyn, a neighborhood called Williamsburg, where property is nearly as expensive as in Manhattan. Mallory has a hard time believing this and she can’t quite picture Leland in an outer borough. Back in 1993, you couldn’t even get a cab to take you to Brooklyn. But now Brooklyn is gentrified; the people are artsy and liberal, and the restaurants are outrageously good. But although Leland has friends and a community, she pines for Fifi. Leland finally left Bard and Scribe and started an online journal called Leland’s Letter whose target audience is “strong, independent women from ages eighteen to ninety-eight.” She has fifty-one thousand subscribers and twenty-two advertisers. Even so, it’s not enough to make a living on yet, so she is also working as the director of the summer publishing course at NYU.

  “Has she got a new girlfriend?” Jake asks. “Or boyfriend?”

  “I wish,” Mallory says. “Either, both, doesn’t matter. I’m worried about her.”

  Jake says, “I haven’t seen your brother since his last wedding. When I call him, he’s perfectly civil but he never has time to meet me for a drink.”

  “He’s engaged,” Mallory says. She shakes her head. “To a woman he met on Match.com. Tammy. She’s divorced with three children.”

  “Is it going to last?”

  “Um…no?” Mallory says. “Though where the wedding is concerned, they’re doing the kind thing and eloping. They’re getting married in Tortola.”

  “Kind because I don’t have to watch you flirt with Brian from Brookings?”

  Mallory can’t hide her smile. Poor Brian—he was completely smitten with her but she indulged him only to make Jake jealous. “Kind because I don’t have to see you with UDG,” Mallory says.

  “Arrrgh!” Jake yells. “Why did I not just marry you after that first summer?”

  “We aren’t going down the road not taken tonight, my friend. Let’s watch the sun set.”

  Jake had taken his usual swim after they first made love and now he’s wearing only his board shorts. His muscles are a little softer, she notices, his middle a little thicker; his dark brown hair is shot through with silvery strands. Mallory can easily picture him as he was the summer she met him. She loves him more now for his age, the gray, the lines around his eyes and his mouth when he smiles. They’ve been doing this nineteen years without interruption. They have been so lucky.

  The sun sinks into the ocean. Jake grills their burgers. Cat Stevens is on the stereo, “Hard Headed Woman.” Mallory has started playing the CD for Link. He loves Mallory’s music—Cat Stevens, R.E.M., World Party—and he loves Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Soundgarden because of Fray. Musically, he’s a forty-year-old trapped in a ten-year-old’s body.

  Mallory lights the candles—three votives and two tapers in proper candlesticks.

  Jake says, “And what about you? How’s school?”

  She decides not to tell him about the award because talking about the award will lead to talking about the roof. “It’s like you and me,” she says, and she locks eyes with him. He’s here, he’s here, it’s him, he’s across the narrow table, she is going to crawl into bed with him tonight, wake up with him in the morning. It’s like a fairy tale. It’s like a game of Would You Rather? Would you rather have perfect bliss for only three days or a solid but dull relationship all year long? Mallory would choose Jake every time. “Each year I think there’s no way it will be better than the last, but then it is.”

  Jake blows her a kiss.

  “This past year I had a once-in-a-lifetime student,” Mallory says. “Abigail Stewart.” Mallory rises to get a copy of the short story Abby handed in for her final paper. It’s about a seventeen-year-old girl who dates a guy in a garage band. She accidentally gets pregnant at the same time that his career takes off. The story was so well done that Mallory initially worried that Abby had plagiarized it. She scoured the internet but thankfully found nothing. The voice of the story was similar to Abby’s other work, completely fresh and sassy and irreverent and smart-smart-smart.

  “I’m just going to read you the first paragraph,” Mallory says. She loves how Jake rests his chin in his hand and gazes at her as she reads, his face glowing with the candlelight.

  “Keep going,” he says when she’s done.

  She reads the first three pages, then stops because their food is getting cold. “You can finish the rest tonight in bed,” she says.

  Jake has been touching Mallory’s shin with his foot this whole time. They touch each other whenever they can, however they can. He’s here, he’s here.

  “I’m going to be too busy in bed to do any reading,” he says.

  “Oh yeah?” she says.

  “Yeah,” he says, and that’s it—they’re up, heading for the bedroom, dinner forgotten, Abby’s brilliant story forgotten.

  They have long since stopped going to the Chicken Box. The risk that Jake will bump into someone he knows is too great. After they make love, they doze off. They have done this in past years, then woken up at two or three in the morning to feast on cold burgers.

  Mallory is dreaming about her old ten-speed bicycle. The chain has fallen off and she is trying to put it back on, messy work; she has grease all over her fingers that mixes with the dust and sand of the no-name road.

  “Mal.” Jake’s voice startles her awake. She sometimes dreams that he’s in bed with her when he’s not and it’s a crushing disappointment to wake up alone. When she opens her eyes, Jake is there, his warm body pressed up against hers. She can see the silver in his stubble. But then he curls up, alert, straining. “Do you smell smoke?”

  Yes, she thinks. The smell of the grill, maybe, wafting in through the open window. An instant later, the smoke alarms start shrieking and Mallory thinks: The candles! Jake yanks on boxer shorts and goes out to the great room with the comforter from the bed. The harvest table is on fire—Abby’s pages, the tablecloth, Mallory can’t see what else. Jake throws the comforter over the table and Mallory grabs the pot of water she used for the corn and douses the comforter. There’s a splash and dripping and hissing and smoke and a smell of melting plastic and charred wood and corn. Mallory is shaking. The smoke detectors are still screaming at them: How could you let this happen? She fills the pot again.

  “It’s out,” Jake says. “Mal, it’s out.”

  They both hear the sirens at the same time and all of a sudden it’s 1993 again and she and Jake are on the beach, screaming for Fray.

  Mallory hears voices, then the slam of a truck door. “Hide in the bedroom,” she tells Jake.

  Jake says, “Are you kidding me? I’m not going to hide. Go put clothes on.” Mallory is naked; she didn’t even realize. She grabs a robe off the back of the bathroom door and is just belting it when the door swings open. Three firemen in black uniforms, heavy army-drab jackets, and hats burst in. Mallory knows them: Mick Hanley, Tommy Robinson…and JD.

  JD sees Mallory and takes in the sight of the smoking, dripping table. “Thank God you’re okay,” he says. “Your alarm company automatically calls the station.”

  Yes, this is something Fray insisted on. The fire department has shown up twice before. Once for burning bacon, once for pine nuts that Mallory was toasting for a salad and then forgot about. After the pine nuts, Mallory invested in a hood for the stove, one with a strong exhaust fan.

  Mallory stutters, “C-c-candles. One of the candles must have fallen.” She thinks about the tapers, slim and elegant in a pair of silver candlesticks that Cooper gave her for Christmas last year (re-gifted from his most recent wedding, she suspected). One of the taper
s was a little loose, maybe, and fell over onto the story pages.

  “Is your son here?” JD asks. He looks around and that’s when he sees Jake. Mallory wipes the tears and smoke out of her eyes. Mick opens the door to the porch, and a welcome breeze blows through the house.

  “Hey,” Jake says. He’s wearing only the boxer shorts, so there’s no real question what was going on.

  Please don’t introduce yourself, Mallory thinks.

  It is very bad that JD has shown up, and here’s why. At the beginning of July, Mallory attended a graduation party at Corazon del Mar—it was, in fact, a graduation party for Abby Stewart, who was off to Sarah Lawrence—and Mallory saw JD there. JD and Tonya Sohn had long since broken up, and JD was known to be a confirmed bachelor, and although Mallory was still angry at him for spreading the awful rumor about her and Jeremiah Freehold, time (and margaritas) did their trick and Mallory and JD were able to talk, civilly at first, then fondly. He apologized to Mallory for the abhorrent thing he’d said to their driver in Puerto Rico—Were you a Fresh Air Fund kid?—something Mallory had tried to forget. The whole fire department had attended sensitivity workshops, he said, and now he had a new attitude. “Evolved, if you will.” Mallory won’t lie: She wanted to let bygones be bygones and get back in JD’s good graces. The island was too small for grudges. As the night progressed, real affection surfaced, and common sense departed. Mallory ended up going back to JD’s house and sleeping with him. In the moment, it had seemed harmless, possibly even sweet. Mallory had treated the whole thing as fun, a lark; she had left JD’s house at midnight so her babysitter could get home, and only when JD called the next day to see if Mallory wanted to go to Black-Eyed Susan’s for breakfast had she seen the error of her ways. In trying to make things better for herself, she had made them much, much worse.