The Summer House

by Hannah McKinnon

  She kicked off her running shoes and walked down to the water’s edge. The waves were gentle today, small frothy curls that rolled in over her feet. She stood, relishing the feel on her toes and stared out at the endless blue horizon, Ned’s words prickly in her ears. Wake up to what? she thought.

  Flossy

  Flossy sat at the dining room table, drumming her fingers on its cool mahogany surface. She glanced at her nails—the pink manicure she’d done the day before the kids had arrived was already chipped midway down each nail. They looked like she’d spent the last six days climbing the walls. Well, she thought.

  She sipped her tea, eyes roaming over the mixed-and-matched serving ware laid out before her. Richard’s mother had acquired many lovely pieces, all of which had been handed down to the two of them, since he was an only child. But Flossy and Richard were not formal people, and she’d always found it curious that her mother-in-law had kept such nice sets in the summer house, as the season was known for a more relaxed mode of entertaining. But entertaining was something Richard’s parents had loved to do during their long Rhode Island summers. Flossy had some tender memories of her own during their early courting days when she had been a guest at Richard’s parents’ dinner parties. She remembered having been introduced as “Richard’s special friend” by Mae. Mae was known to set up intimate gatherings in the backyard, the table dressed in white linens and the lead-crystal punch bowl that had belonged to Richard’s grandmother set in the center, always filled with a sparkling pink lemonade spritzer. Mae had handed down that very bowl and ladle, along with a copy of the drink recipe carefully written out in her elegant hand on a monogrammed card, tucked inside. Now, the bowl sat on the dining room table ready to be filled with the same recipe for the party.

  Flossy surveyed the rest of the dishes she’d selected for the birthday. There were the two-dozen Steuben goblets, lined up on the buffet like crystal soldiers. And the set of repoussé serving platters on which she’d planned to serve the oysters. Lined up were a host of large silver-polished forks, spoons, and serving knives in mismatched silver patterns. The overall effect was classic yet unassuming, just like the personal feel of the summer house.

  She checked her watch. Noon. Now, she could focus on the children. And on this week that was winding down too quickly! Paige was irritable, having dragged Ned out for a morning run. Sam and Evan seemed to be in some kind of tiff, though at least they were able to sit beside each other. Unlike David and Paige, who may have been in joint attendance at the beach or the dinner table, but who seemed to look past one another nonetheless. This worried her. Surprisingly, and thank goodness—Clem seemed happier than the rest of them. Suddenly so, in fact. Flossy had spent the better part of the last year worrying about Clem and Maddy and George. And she’d worried further about what this visit to the summer house would mean to them, as it was the first time since Ben had died that the three of them would walk through the door, across its sandy floorboards, and out back to the beach, no longer a foursome.

  Richard was outside doing something to the grill. “Honey, what are you doing?”

  “Just cleaning the grill. It needs it.”

  “Well, that’s very nice. But can it wait? We really need to wrap up a few details.”

  He nodded in agreement and waved at her, but kept scraping the grill grate. Behind him, the rangy, half-dead hedges rustled in the ocean air.

  She went to the screen door. “Since you’re out there, how about these hedges? I can go ahead and call Lucas to do it. The party is upon us.” When he didn’t answer right away, she added, The boys had the clippers sharpened. Shall we attack this project now?”

  Richard turned and looked at her over the rim of his glasses. “Thank you, but beyond your offer to retrieve the clippers, I don’t think there is any ‘we’ in this endeavor.” His tone was playful, but Flossy did not care for his message.

  “Richard. The party is in two days.”

  He returned his attention to the grill. “Yes, dear. We are all very well aware of that fact.” Yes, dear. Richard knew it drove her crazy. Almost as crazy as those damned hedges.

  No matter, Flossy had more pressing issues. They’d planned an intimate family dinner at the Ocean House. It was tradition, and this year it was also the eve of the birthday party, a night when the house would be cleaned and set up for the festivities, and she would not want to mess things up with any cooking. Plus, it would get them all out of the house and yard. How Flossy loved the low-key week loitering with sand between one’s toes and lazy afternoons lounging on the beach. These were the aimless, lazy days she looked forward to all through the New England winter. But now, they were worn out from one another and worn down by the heat. It would do them all good to get out into town and “blow the stink off them,” as her grandmother used to like to say. She called the Ocean House and confirmed their reservation: seven o’clock Friday evening. There. The only thing left to do was confirm Sandy. Sandy was going to cancel her catering contract if Flossy didn’t finalize the details. She’d hoped to leave a message or at least get an assistant, but Sandy herself answered.

  “That’s correct,” she informed Sandy. “Final headcount is sixty-one.”

  She listened vaguely as Sandy reviewed the menu, the linen service, the bartender’s fee, the takedown fee, and the server’s gratuities. She did not bother taking any more notes—her spiral notebook lay open in front of her like a relic of some kind of scullery war, its pages crumpled and tea-stained. She glanced at the last entry: Get Ci Ci’s recipe! and slapped the notebook shut.

  She and Judy had reached a Mexican standoff.

  “No, Sandy,” she said. “No, there won’t be stuffed oysters, after all. We’ve decided to go with the clams casino. Yes, I’m quite sure. Thank you.”

  Flossy knew that in the great order of things, this whole dilemma was ridiculous. A self-propelled dilemma fueled by the school-grade behavior of two grown women. She was better than this. And she should be ashamed. Her family had real issues to concern themselves with, and the refusal to grant a recipe by one book club member (however tyrannical) was not something that Flossy could afford to waste any more of her precious time and energy upon. She simply would not do it!

  However, before Sandy hung up, she asked for a clams casino serving count. And Flossy paused. Judy had said she was bringing a bushel of stuffed oysters. They really did not need the casinos. Flossy was merely ordering them to cover all bases, in case Judy fell through, fell ill . . . or just plain fell onto her knees and surrendered. Flossy couldn’t risk having no shellfish appetizers at all. After tiring of the nonsense, Paige had suggested she order a mere four dozen—enough for the guests to enjoy a little taste, whether Judy came through or not. But now Flossy pictured another scenario: Judy, arriving with her fleet of oysters only to stumble upon a table teeming with silver platters of clams. Lovely half-shell pillows laden with crisps of bacon and a smidgen of pepper. One hundred shells arranged in an elegant arc across her mother-in-law’s sterling repoussé serving trays. A lesser shellfish than the oyster, perhaps . . . but, oh!

  Flossy cleared her throat. “Enough for the entire guest list,” she said. “Just as many as we’d planned for oysters.”

  There. It was settled.

  Sam

  He’d been so intent on making headway with Evan and spending time with the family, being present, as their therapist liked to say, that he’d neglected to check his phone. Sam never forgot to check his phone.

  There were two voice messages. The first, from Adya, saying that the paperwork from Shanghai had come in, contracts were signed, and they were good to go. Sam exhaled in a half laugh, half burst of relief. It was done! He had to tell Evan.

  The second was a message from a Maryland phone number. The adoption agency. Sam’s chest compressed against his heart.

  The only words he’d managed to coerce from Evan since yesterday’s reveal at the beach had taken place politely in front of family. Here’s a beach towel. Dinn
er looks great. Pass the ketchup, please. It was infuriating and yet Sam knew he deserved it. Last night when they’d gone to bed, Evan had rolled away from him.

  “Ev,” Sam had whispered to his back. “Please. We’ve got to talk about this.”

  “Call Mara tomorrow and make it better,” Evan had replied. “Make her believe this was all a misunderstanding.”

  The thing was, it may have been a misunderstanding. Until Sam actually got a chance to speak to Mara, he had no way of knowing what she thought. Maybe she’d not heard the implied promise. Maybe all this worry was for naught.

  But there were other maybes that kept Sam awake as he listened to Evan’s deep, slumbering breaths. What if she’d gone to Malayka at the agency? What if she was counting on him following through with his offer. No, bribe, Sam chastised himself. If he was going to be honest it started with himself: he’d bribed her, and he fucking knew it.

  As he’d lain beside Evan, falling in and out of fitful sleep, images and sentiments came to him. Old hurts—wounds he’d caused, wounds he’d denied. It had been years since any of these had found him, though nighttime was as direct a route as could be taken to arrive at the threshold of his conscience.

  His sophomore year of high school had been the first time Sam had been openly called out as gay by classmates. It happened on the bus, one spring afternoon.

  “Sammy likes the boys!” Jimmy Durant had jeered at him, from the back row of the school bus. There’d been stunned silence by some and whispers by others. His best friend, Cal, had sat stiff-lipped next to him and stared out the bus window, saying nothing. For a few days they didn’t talk until one afternoon in the locker room after track. Practice was over and the boys were planning to walk off school campus and meet across the street at Joe’s Diner, like they did every Friday. Cal waited until the locker room emptied.

  “So, is it true?”

  He didn’t have to add, what Jimmy said on the bus. Sam knew what he meant. He was tired of keeping it in, tired of wondering how others would react and if those who mattered most would accept him.

  “Yes,” he said, waiting for him to get up and walk away.

  But he didn’t. Cal remained on the bench, unlacing his shoes, slowly.

  “I wondered,” he said finally. Then, “You could’ve told me.”

  Sam looked at him for the first time. “Is this going to be a problem for you?” He hadn’t meant it to come out so edgy, not to Cal. Cal had been his friend since grade school. And he was here, still sitting on the bench. If anything, Sam knew it would be more of a problem for him if Cal couldn’t handle it. Because Sam couldn’t imagine not having his friendship.

  “No,” Cal said. “No, it’s not.” He’d grabbed his bag and stood. “Come on. If we hurry up, we can catch the rest of the team at the diner.”

  People’s reactions at school followed. Luckily, Sam was quick, as deft with verbal comebacks as he was darting past opponents in intramural basketball games. Still, he knew what others were saying, and he never escaped the feeling that he was only one fast break ahead on the court or one shove back in the hallway.

  There had not been, however, any official coming out at home. Paige knew, from school. She’d acknowledged this quietly by surprising him in his doorway one night while he sat at his desk doing homework. “You handling all this okay?”

  He’d hesitated. “Yeah, I think so.”

  “Good. You know, I think Mom gets it,” she added. “You could probably talk to her if you wanted.”

  “You think?” He honestly didn’t know what his parents thought, though he knew he’d have to face it at some point. They seemed open minded, Flossy especially, and Sam seemed to recall a gay male couple who’d attended a few of their holiday parties in years past. But still—he knew it was different when it was your own family.

  “Or me,” Paige had said softly. “You can always talk to me, if you want.”

  It was a small gesture of enormous proportion. “Thanks. That means a lot.”

  But spring ended and their annual trip to the shore approached, and he still had not come out officially to his family. He wondered briefly if he should do it at the summer house. But he hedged; maybe one more summer would give him the guts to do it when they returned to Connecticut.

  The safety he felt to be himself, mostly anonymous as any other fun-loving summer kid in Rhodey, was something he both looked forward to and took for granted until that summer.

  Sam was bussing tables at Olympia Tea Room, while silently counting down the hours of his shift until he got off. Then it would be he and a couple of kids from work, or the neighbors, at the beach. Swimming. Heading up to Narragannset Point. Building bonfires that stretched into the wee hours of the next day’s morning light, like the teenage drinking crowd that partied and danced around them. They understood he did not leer at the girls surrounding the bonfire, and he did not feel inclined to lie about a girlfriend back home. He simply shrugged off inquiries and they seemed to be let go. There were too many other distractions of summer to concern themselves with—as long as Sam hosted gatherings, rounded up kegs, and kept everyone laughing, he was accepted without further pressing. It was a sweet spot.

  Which is why the night that Brad Aaron from across the street showed up at a beach fire, Sam had no warning of what was to follow. A smaller group than usual had gotten together. Paige was there, along with the older Weitzman kids, their visiting cousins, and a couple of kids Paige worked with that summer. Someone had procured a bottle of Jagermeister that they passed around the circle and took swigs from when the beer ran out. The music was loud; to this day he could not hear Billy Idol’s Cradle of Love without his skin breaking out in a prickly sweat.

  Sam had had too much to drink. What he did remember was the blur of flames and the heat; he’d been sitting too close, talking too loud. Brad had suddenly walked up to their group, appearing as if out of the darkness. He’d been a neighborhood fixture in their earlier years, but Sam couldn’t say he’d even laid eyes on him in the last season or two. Brad Aaron was stocky, a kid who made up in breadth what he lacked for in humor or sensibility. He walked up and sat down on a log like he owned it. Sam vaguely recalled him grabbing the bottle of Jagermeister from a girl.

  What happened in the time after he arrived was nothing consequential. Brad Aaron was also loud, in an off-putting way. Those that had introduced themselves to him initially began edging away. His jokes were rude, drawing a few smirks from some of the guys. But Sam largely ignored him until he zeroed in on Paige.

  Paige was a junior that year. She’d finally grown into the rangy Merrill legs. It was August; like the rest she was tanned, her hair sun-bleached. Unlike the others, she was quieter, hanging back from the group. Which is how he probably got her aside.

  What Sam remembered was looking past the fire at one point, seeing Paige toss her hair back and laugh. But there was something about the fixed expression that told him it was a show. She kept glancing back at her friend, Anne, who was also watching.

  Brad passed her the bottle and held it to her mouth. This also got Sam’s attention. Paige didn’t drink the hard stuff. When she pushed the bottle away and turned her head, the liquor spilled on both of them.

  “Ah, fuck!” Brad shouted. But then he laughed and threw his arm around her. Paige jumped up. Sam remembers standing up. He remembers walking around the fire, surprised by how it swayed hard to the left then the right as he steadied himself before proceeding. And then the glow of orange on Brad’s face blocked out as Sam stood in front of him like an eclipse, the heat against his back.

  He didn’t address Brad. “Paige, you okay?”

  She glanced nervously away and took a step back toward her group of friends.

  “Oh, come on!” Brad jeered. “We’re just starting to have fun.”

  Sam turned his attention to Brad. He doesn’t recall the words that were exchanged. He knows there was some cursing. Then a shove. It came from Brad.

  The next thing he knew,
they were in the sand. Sam remembers the stars flashing overhead briefly then darkness as he was pushed into the sand, face first. He remembers the burn of the granules beneath his elbows, his knees, as they wrestled on the beach. Paige was shouting something. Then the stars, the fire, the roar of the surf in his ears. At one point he broke free and stood, swaying. Paige later told him that he yelled at Brad to just go home. That’s when Brad swung.

  This time Sam fell back, and Brad was on top of him. He remembers being flipped, so hard that the wind was blown from his chest, his arm pinned behind his back. He felt the cut of sand against skin on his face, in his eyes. And then Brad’s mouth pressed up against his ear, his hot breath coming in short puffs. Then the laugh. “Fucking faggot.” There was a blow to his side from Brad’s foot. Paige’s scream. And a scuffle overhead as others stepped in.

  The next day, Sam awoke in his bed ears ringing and hair full of sand. There was sand on his pillow. In his sheets. His mouth was as dry as the beach. When he looked in the mirror he saw the red scrapes along his right cheekbone, the cut above his eyebrow. His ribs throbbed. For days he’d wondered if they were broken. When Paige came to his door and knocked he told her to leave him alone. When Flossy called the third time for breakfast, he knew he’d have to go down or she’d come looking for him.

  When he walked into the kitchen Paige watched him worriedly from the table. Clem was the first to speak. “Oh my god! Look at Sam’s face!”

  Flossy was upon him. “What happened to you? Are you all right? Richard, come look at this.”

  Paige was saying something about the party, about a fight—it was no big deal. He’d been trying to break up some kids messing around. It had just gotten out of hand is all.

  Richard was sitting at the head of the table, wordless. He asked Flossy to calm down, told Paige to hush. He looked down the table at Sam. “What happened to you?”