The Summers

by Iva-Marie Palmer

  I started to read the pages, laughing at how Grace-like the words were. “But, you could publish this,” I protested. A book about Grace’s path as an author would be a big deal. I’d buy it, of course, because the way she wrote, the book wasn’t just about writing. It was about life.

  She rolled her eyes. “What, another old coot with nothing new to say writing about her glory days? Things I’ve learned? Nah. Nobody knows anything.” She pulled the duvet away from herself. She was fully dressed with no bathrobe in sight.

  “You’re dressed. What were you doing in bed?” I asked.

  “Read the notebook. I’m dramatic,” she laughed. “You probably are a little, too, if you’re a writer.”

  I thought of my six-mile barefoot run to Carrier’s Bluff after the rehearsal dinner. I supposed I could be a touch dramatic.

  “How did the vows go by the way?”

  “The wedding was called off,” I said. “They’re still talking, though.” Eliza had reached out to Devin and they were trying to work things through. Eliza was not in a fix-it mode, for a change, and had gone to Devin completely apologetic and open for anything—to going back to just being boyfriend and girlfriend, to living separately, if it came to that. Anything to keep him in her life. She wasn’t worried about saving face, or pushing forward. She just wanted to be with Devin, I knew.

  “Oh really?” Grace didn’t want to seem overinterested, but I could tell she was.

  “I think part of it is that my sister’s only twenty-one. She just wasn’t ready.”

  “Oh God, you never told me that,” Grace said. “Of course she couldn’t write her vows. It should be illegal to write vows when you’re that young. You remember that, too. Maybe add it to my notebook.”

  Now, she put her arms around me in a tight hug. I was caught off guard for a second. For her eccentric bohemian vibe, she was not a touchy-feely kind of person. But I hugged her back, and it felt good.

  “Before you go, you’re going to help me set up my computer at the dining room table,” she said, leading me to the stairs. “And you’re going to give me your e-mail. I want all the sexy stories from Berkeley. No leaving the good parts out.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  THE BEACH HOUSE was spotless. The fridge was empty. Any woebegone container of leftovers from Becca’s and Tea’s shifts at Landrys’ had been eaten or discarded. I’d cleaned the studio of my things. Eliza had gotten a start packing some of Mom’s old clothes from the attic.

  Once the house sold, we’d be back to claim the more personal items, but the Realtor told Dad to leave the furnishings and art so the place gave off that “Cape vibe.”

  I was in my old room, the one where I’d seen Ryan on our first day back. I was going to take down the charcoal drawing of me that my mom had done. I wanted to bring it home now, so I could take it to school with me. We’d already packed up our favorites of Mom’s work to bring with us to New Jersey, and Tea had done a walkthrough of the restaurant with Mr. Landry to figure out where to hang the ones that he had bought. She’d already given the money from the sale to the charity she’d selected, and made the donation in our mother’s name. I was proud of her.

  Becca slouched into my room. She’d also already grabbed a few of her favorite shells and tchotchkes from around the house. “I can’t believe this is our last day here,” she said, flopping onto my neatly made bed. “The years that we didn’t come, I still knew we’d be back. But now we won’t.”

  I flopped down next to her. “I know. Did you tell Garrett?”

  She nodded. “Yeah, and he’s upset, but we’re going to try to see each other off season, too. It’s not that far a drive. He might come to homecoming with me.”

  I smirked. “Well, at least one of us landed our Landry brother.”

  “Whatever,” she said, poking my side. “You should talk to Ryan before we leave.”

  We didn’t have time to get into it, because Eliza ducked her head into my room. “I think I convinced Dad to stop at Laurel’s Diner on the way home to do breakfast for dinner. But we have to get a move on.”

  “You convinced him?” Tea’s voice floated in from the hall. “That was me.” She handed me an envelope. A thick envelope. “From Smokey. He said he’d told you there’d be bonuses and he never gave you yours.”

  I looked skeptically at the envelope. “It’s not illegal, is it?”

  “I got five hundred dollars,” she bragged. “And, yes, totally legal. I’m almost positive.”

  There was two hundred and fifty dollars in my envelope. “What?” I said, stunned. “I only worked there for two weeks.”

  Tea grinned. “Believe me, he can afford it. I helped him with his books,” she said, adding, “And he said that was for your books.”

  “Okay, guys, let’s go,” Eliza said. “Kate has to be in California by the end of the week, and you both start school tomorrow, so chop-chop.”

  I didn’t want to go. It was nice, having all my sisters crammed into my tiny room with me. But I knew Eliza was right. Fall and real life awaited.

  My dad knocked on the door, even though it was open. “Can I come in?”

  “Can you fit?” Becca asked.

  Tea piled in on the twin bed with us, and Eliza came farther into the room so my dad had space.

  My dad took a deep breath as he began. “I know this summer has been a hard one,” he said, looking first at Becca and Tea, then at me and finally at Eliza. “And I handled it by checking out and giving up.”

  We all murmured soft protests, but my dad held up his hand so he could go on. “No, I did,” he said, looking at me. “But Kate made me realize that this place isn’t just our past. It’s our future. I can’t run away from the memories with your mom because I won’t get new ones with her. I just need to make a different kind of new ones.”

  Eliza was staring at him. “Wait . . . Does this mean you’re not going to sell the house?”

  “I just called the Realtor and canceled everything,” he said, a slow smile spreading over his face. “We’ll still rent it over the winter, like always, and we’ll be back next summer.”

  Tea shrieked and Becca clapped. Eliza grabbed me off the bed and hugged me. It was the first hug we’d shared in a while.

  A few hours later, we stood on the porch. The porch where we’d return next summer, and the summer after, and many more to come. Maybe not all of us, every year. Maybe in different stages of our lives, with different concerns and issues and dreams. But the house was ours, and would be. It would always be here for the summer, whenever we needed it.

  No one was going to do it, so I did. I gave the door three soft knocks. My sisters and my father looked at me in surprise but then they said the words, without my prompting. “Thank you house. ’Til next time.”

  We’d loaded up the car. Becca had gone to the Landrys’ to say good-bye to Garrett earlier in the day. Tea was already complaining about being hungry and asking if we thought Laurel’s Diner would have soy milk. Eliza was checking the battery life on her iPad. She’d turned down the offer from the PR firm in the city, and had instead begun researching countries where she could teach English. She and Devin were going to keep talking, but they were taking some space.

  I was just about to get in the car when Eliza blocked my door. “If you don’t talk to him, we’re not going home,” she said. “You can just skip college.” She pointed over my shoulder. On the street, right where I’d first seen him this summer, was Ryan, leaning against his blue pickup.

  I was wearing cutoffs and a torn T-shirt from one of my cross-country meets. My hair was in a sloppy bun. I no doubt smelled after packing and cleaning. Ryan looked crisp and clean in dark jeans and a gray T-shirt. This was not fair. But he was looking at me so hopefully, and Eliza was clearly not backing down, so I made my way to his car.

  “Hi,” I said, registering him instantly. Whatever we had or di
dn’t have, were or weren’t, when we were together, I felt like we were electrons in a particle accelerator, eager to collide.

  “Hi,” he said, lifting a hand like he was going to touch me and then dropping it to his side.

  “We’re leaving,” I said, dumbly, as though the loaded-up car wasn’t incontrovertible evidence of our departure.

  “I know.” He turned his body toward mine, eclipsing me so our conversation instantly felt more private. “Just something’s been bugging me. I lied to you.”

  “Oh yeah?” I thought immediately of the night he’d told me he’d loved me, and how I was real, and Eliza just an abstraction. That was the lie. Why had I even come over here? Thanks a lot, Eliza, I thought.

  “Yeah.” He grinned. I couldn’t believe he was smiling. “You know how I told you I started planning our picnic the day you and I walked home from Smokey’s?”

  I nodded, looking at the car, wondering how long this would take, and how bad I would feel when it was over.

  “Well, remember when I saw you in your window, that first day you guys got here?”

  “Yes,” I said, flushed to remember how I’d stared at him. How just the sight of him had made my body quake. He still had that effect and yet, this summer, my feelings had grown into so much more than an innocent childhood crush.

  “Good. Because that was the day,” he said. “That was the day it all started for me. I saw you and everything told me that I needed to ask you out. I’d ask you out again right now. That’s the effect you have on me.” He grinned his half grin and I smiled back. I didn’t know what to say, but I was glad he hadn’t taken back his “I love you.” Whatever happened, I wanted that night, and that moment, to keep as my own.

  “I didn’t kiss your sister, you know,” he said in my silence.

  “I know,” I said, and I did. Any residual doubt I had faded just by the way he was looking at me. “But it’s still awfully complicated.”

  “Maybe.” Ryan shrugged, coming closer to me. I felt his warmth surround me even with a good foot and a half between us. “I mean, I know you only liked me in the beginning because of your sister.”

  I rolled my eyes. “I’ve had a crush on you since I was a kid,” I said.

  “Yeah, but part of that was because I was with your big sister and you looked up to her.”

  I knew he was right. I spent so much time thinking about how Eliza got everything that I didn’t ever register that I really did admire her. And so often she played into my own insecurities. She took things over and laid claim to things she wanted, whereas I didn’t always know what I wanted or how to get my way. Some of my anger wasn’t toward Eliza for being the way she was, but toward myself for not being more like her. When Ryan and I had started dating, I’d fought so hard to believe that I was just protecting our relationship by keeping it secret. But I’d also been treating him like he was some bad habit of mine to get over. The bad habit wasn’t him, but my tendency to hold my life up against Eliza’s, and feel like I was coming up short.

  “You’re probably right,” I said by way of admittance. “And maybe this summer started out like that. Like, somehow I thought I could finally step out from under Eliza’s shadow if I just could see what it felt like to be her. And then I’d get past all my hang-ups and move on.”

  “So, we were just a summer fling to you, then?” Ryan looked right at me, his eyes serious. He didn’t want a lie, even if it was to make him feel better.

  Fortunately, I didn’t have to tell one. “No,” I said. “Maybe my motivations were wrong, and maybe I didn’t give you the fairest chance, but this summer and us, they’re the realest things I’ve ever known.”

  I looked at our house and the car, where Eliza sat in the front seat, tapping away on her touchscreen. She was human, I realized. She was different than me, but she didn’t have it all figured out any more than I did. I didn’t know if I was comforted by the thought, but I felt closer to her. “I just let the past affect me too much.”

  “Well, you don’t need to forget the past to move forward,” Ryan said. Finally, he touched me, pulling me in by the waist and kissing me. Kissing me exactly the way I needed to be kissed to guarantee I’d need to be kissed like this again. He pulled his mouth away and whispered into my hair, “So, we weren’t a fling, but you’re leaving in five minutes.”

  “Pretty much,” I said, going in for another long kiss, not even caring that my sisters and my father might have been watching. “But I’ve heard some people keep in touch, even across long distances.”

  “They do, do they?” Ryan said with a grin. “I’ve heard there are these things called planes, and you can use them to travel to people you love, wherever they are. . . .”

  I stood on my tiptoes, pressing my forehead to his, kissing his lips for the last time that summer but not, I thought, for the last time. He wasn’t a souvenir, like Ashley had said. Souvenirs were things you put on a shelf and forgot. He’d been my summer. And summers were part of you forever.

  “It’s true,” I said, smiling and wishing I could stretch the minutes out just a little longer. “And you know, we’ll always have the summer. . . .”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  IF YOU’RE A lucky person, you realize that you could use half your given words in a day saying thank you. I’m beyond lucky. I can and should bestow more thank-yous than I can possibly utter while still keeping this brief enough that someone might read it.

  So why not start there? Thank you for reading. Books are an addictive delight, I know, and if you’re even three percent like me, there are more to read than you can possibly get to, so I’m grateful you chose one of mine.

  Thank you to everyone at Alloy Entertainment. Sara Shandler, Josh Bank, and Les Morgenstein have always, always been a joy to work with; every author should be so lucky. And a special thanks is due to Joelle Hobeika and Hayley Wagreich, editors extraordinaire. Talking through this book with these two was a fabulous experience. Really, talking about anything with them is fabulous because they’re just great fun. And, readers, note, it is thanks to Joelle and Hayley that the sexy parts are sexier than I may have originally written them. (Ever wonder how much fun it is to have notes in the margin of your manuscript demanding “More Sexy!”? A lot of fun, I tell you.)

  Thank you to Courtney Miller at Amazon Publishing for her excellent notes and speedy turnaround of these pages. She’s been an ardent supporter of this book from day one and I’m so grateful.

  Thank you to Paul Almond for always looking out for me, and to my agent, Fonda Snyder, who proves that sweet and fierce are not mutually exclusive traits.

  Thank you to Shannon Peavey and Chris Petriello, East Coast–transplant friends who provided me beachy details and Cape Cod wisdom, plus are just fun people to have around.

  Thank you to my father, Bill Palmer, who reminds me with frequency that he always has my back. He’s always believed in trying to do something you really love and, yes, he’s right. He also would do anything for his family. It’s a serious stroke of luck to win the parent lottery like I have.

  Thank you to my son, Clark Stanis, who never lets a day go by without amusing or delighting me in some way, whether by modeling how anything in life can be turned into a hat, pointing out when the moon looks most like a cookie, or preparing an impromptu plastic-food picnic and insisting I take five to dine with him. He may only be three but he is a font of support, going so far as to wake with me at the crack of dawn and set up his “desk” next to mine. I couldn’t ask for a better, or cuter, collaborator.

  Thank you to my husband, Steve Stanis, who sees me at my very worst—and, let me tell you, it is not pretty, not at all. Puffy-eyed, dusty wretches at the low point of a period piece have nothing on me when I’m truly down for the count. That sometimes he has to use the same techniques on me that he uses on our son (“Deep breath.” “Count to 10.” “Do you want a red Popsicle?”) is maybe
something for me to think about. Thank you for always knowing how to fix things and making me laugh while you do so.

  Finally, I tend to, yes, be a touch flippant in all things. It’s not for lack of feeling that I jest; if anything, it’s often for too much feeling. I never thought I’d write something in which a character was dealing with a loved one’s death. I also never thought I’d lose my mom when I did. My mom, Debra Palmer, bravely battled a fairly rare autoimmune disease, scleroderma, for two years. (Treatment is difficult, and a cure nonexistent; find out more at scleroderma.org.) She was always, always one of my most passionate supporters, so much so that I can still feel it now. I wish she were here to read this, and anything after. (Flippant aside, she’d probably make a “More Sexy!” demand herself.)

  I wish I had thanked her more. So often we look at hopes as something for the future, so isn’t it odd that the strongest-felt wishes seem to be a chance to go back and say or do things that we didn’t?

  Photo © Shannon Peavey

  DESPITE BEING BORN on the first day of summer long before too much sun was considered bad for you, Iva-Marie Palmer possesses no capacity to achieve a decent tan (or its cousin, the sun-kissed glow). Still, she relocated from her native Chicago to sunny southern California nearly ten years ago and only regrets the choice on the rare occasions when she forgets to apply sunscreen. A former journalist who oversubscribes to periodicals, she loves books, running, cooking and eating elaborate meals, classic screwball comedies, food sold off carts and trucks, old movie palaces, word games and crossword puzzles, adventures large and small, indulging her curiosity and overextending herself. She lives with her husband, son and a seeming inability to take her sunglasses off her head when indoors. You can find her online on Facebook, Twitter (follow @ivamarie), and at www.ivamariepalmer.com.