The Forever Summer

by Jamie Brenner

Blythe was beyond frustrated with her daughter.

  One minute Marin couldn’t wait to leave Provincetown; the next she was suddenly staying for the entire summer. And she didn’t even have the courtesy to tell Blythe herself! She’d had to hear it from Amelia, who, when she realized Blythe didn’t know, could only look at her with pity. After weeks of punishing rudeness, this was adding insult to injury.

  And where had she run off to this morning like the proverbial bat out of hell? Just wait, she’d said. As if Blythe had any choice. She would wait, if only to tell Marin that she could do what she wished with the rest of the summer, Blythe was leaving. She’d already checked the ferry schedule and booked a flight from Boston.

  She paced impatiently in Marin’s bedroom.

  “What are you doing in here?” Marin asked when she walked in, clutching her handbag to her chest as if expecting Blythe to snatch it away.

  “Waiting—like you asked me to. But I’m leaving in an hour.”

  “Just—sit, okay? Sit on the bed, and just…I’ll be right out.”

  Marin ducked into the bathroom and closed the door. Blythe sighed, crossed her arms, and perched on the edge of Marin’s bed.

  Marin emerged a few minutes later and sat next to her mother wordlessly.

  “As I was saying, Marin. I’m leaving in an hour. You’ll be officially unburdened by my presence and can enjoy your summer.” She stood to leave.

  Marin looked up at her, her big dark eyes wide with emotion.

  “I’m pregnant.”

  Marin walked along the water’s edge, just close enough to the ocean so it licked her feet when the tide rolled in.

  It was the hottest morning so far, but still she wrapped herself in a lightweight cardigan. She felt raw and vulnerable and would have hidden beneath a full-length ski coat if she could justify wearing one. The sweater had a hood and she pulled it over her head, though the breeze kept blowing it off. As she strolled, she hugged her midsection, newly aware that it wasn’t perhaps as flat as it had been two months ago. And no, she wasn’t imagining it; her jeans had gotten tighter.

  As angry as she had been at her mother all this time, she had to admit her mother had taken the news well and had jumped into action. She made Marin an appointment to see an obstetrician in Hyannis on Tuesday.

  She didn’t know how she would wait. The drugstore test told her she was pregnant, but it couldn’t tell her how many weeks pregnant. And the answer to that question was everything; timing was the only clue for Marin to guess who the father was.

  She hated to admit it, but there had been a brief window when she was still sleeping with her fiancé and also hooking up with Julian. It had been such a confusing time, she had mentally edited it out of her own history. But now there was no denying it. The baby might have been fathered by either Greg Harper or Julian.

  Tears welled in her eyes, and she brushed them away. She wasn’t going to feel sorry for herself. She didn’t deserve it.

  “Hey—Marin!”

  Rachel plodded toward her as quickly as the soft sand terrain would allow. Her long hair waved out behind her, and she held her ubiquitous flip-flops in one hand.

  Marin wanted to tell her she needed time alone, but from Rachel’s determined pace and her less-than-pleasant facial expression, she doubted she’d get off that easily.

  Rachel stopped in front of her, out of breath. Perspiration beaded at her hairline. It was hot already. Marin had barely noticed before now.

  “You have some nerve,” Rachel said.

  “I’m really not in the mood for this, so could you be a little more specific?”

  “You tell me that I’m chasing Luke just so I back off and you can go after him!”

  “Oh my God, that is ridiculous.”

  “Really? Like you didn’t make a beeline for him the second we got to the pier last night? How long did it take for you to throw yourself in his arms?”

  “Rachel, you have this all wrong. I have zero interest in Luke, and he has zero interest in me. Unfortunately, he doesn’t seem to have much interest in you either. But that’s not my bad. So if you want to keep wasting your time and making yourself miserable, be my guest. But if you don’t mind, I have bigger things to worry about right now. And I came out here to be alone.”

  Rachel crossed her arms, shaking her head slowly. Marin turned her back to her and walked off.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Blythe crouched over a shady patch of the backyard. After dampening it with water, she dug up a small sample with a kitchen spoon. She rubbed a bit between her thumb and index finger. Gritty. She tried molding a handful into a ball, and it fell apart. Amelia’s soil was too sandy, as she’d been warned. But the soil could be enriched, the problem fixed. She’d had the opposite issue in her backyard in Philadelphia—too much clay. And therein was the reason Blythe loved gardening; in gardening, unlike life, there was a solution to almost every problem.

  She was going to be a grandmother! Oh, how she was dying to tell Kip. But Marin insisted that she not tell anyone.

  “Not until I know more,” she’d said. Blythe would try to contain herself.

  In the meantime, her thoughts kept turning to the day Marin was born. Kip drove her to Lankenau Hospital at four in the morning, and she remembered wondering if he would leave her in a few hours to go to the office. She asked him if he would, and he shook his head. “Is that what you think of me?”

  Sadly, it was.

  Her parents drove in from Michigan, and the Bishops of course were there. Kip was not in the delivery room with her, and in the clutches of labor pain, she preferred it that way. She couldn’t imagine him acting like a typical father-to-be did in movies, holding his wife’s hand and mopping her brow and saying, “Push! You can do it!” The very thought was worse than the contractions bending her insides.

  After four hours of labor, Marin was born. Eight pounds, eight ounces, with a headful of dark hair and big gray-brown eyes. Blythe clutched her to her chest, and the tiny thing claimed her breast with an energy and confidence that flooded Blythe with a love she’d never felt before.

  Kip rushed into the room. He had tears in his eyes. She was shocked, genuinely floored, by the raw emotion in his face. He kissed her, then gingerly kissed the baby.

  “I love you,” he told Blythe.

  Blythe cried, completely overwhelmed. Kip sat on the edge of the bed. He took her free hand, closing it in his own.

  “We’re a family now,” he said. Blythe nodded through her tears.

  Kip’s mother proclaimed she’d never seen a newborn with dark eyes. Blythe’s parents happily decided she looked just like the Welsh Madigans. Blythe, of course, knew otherwise. And in the first, and last, acknowledgment of the man who gave her baby life, she named her new daughter Marin, “of the sea.”

  Blythe looked up; Amelia waved at her through the kitchen window. She was busy cooking away with Rachel, and Blythe was thankful they were too preoccupied to pay her much mind. She pulled out her phone and dialed.

  Kip answered his cell on the second ring. Then she realized: it was a Saturday and he was not at the office.

  “You back home?” he asked.

  “No,” she said. “In fact, we’ve decided to stay the summer.”

  Kip made a familiar, disapproving tsking sound. “This your idea, Blythe? I can’t see Marin making this decision.”

  “And why not?”

  “Because she is happiest when she is productive and working. She needs to get back to real life. Enough of this licking her wounds.”

  She sighed. “You are so infuriating sometimes.” The truth was, even this aggravating conversation was of strange comfort to her. As irrational as it was, hearing his voice made her feel like everything would be all right. It always had. “If you’re so sure what’s best for her and disapprove of what’s going on, then come out here for a day. I need to talk to you, and, more important, your daughter needs you.”

  “Don’t be melodramatic.”

&n
bsp; She couldn’t hold back. Marin might not want her father to know, but he should know. And if that’s what it would take to get him out there, Blythe would tell him.

  “Marin’s pregnant.”

  A brief silence. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  Rachel would not, as Marin had put it, waste her time and make herself miserable. No more hours spent pining after Luke Duncan. She’d come out there to get to know Amelia, and that was exactly what she was going to do.

  Especially now that Amelia had invited her into her ultimate domain: the kitchen.

  It was a foreign environment. Fran had told her one thing and one thing only about cooking: Don’t start. “Once you’re cooking for everyone, they expect it of you.” Her mother, Rachel’s grandmother Esther from Philadelphia, had been on call in the kitchen her entire life. “And what kind of life is that?” Fran said.

  She repeated her mother’s only culinary wisdom to Amelia.

  “I feel sorry for your mother that she would feel that way.”

  “Oh, it’s fine. I’m just saying I really don’t have any cooking experience. My grandmother did cook a lot, but she lives on the East Coast and we see her only once a year for the Jewish holidays.”

  “Where was her family from?”

  “Russia. Poland. Eastern Europe. So her cooking was pretty meat-heavy—lots of brisket. And potatoes. And this stuff called kasha varnishkes.”

  “Did you enjoy it?”

  Rachel nodded. “I did.”

  “I bet if you had it right now, you would feel like you were at that house. And you would feel like a child again.”

  She smiled. “Probably.”

  “Food is so powerful. It connects us to the past. It sustains us. It’s personal but also communal. So I am happy, deeply happy, to teach you a few Portuguese dishes. We have such a rich culinary tradition.”

  “I love Mediterranean food,” Rachel said.

  “Our dishes use the flavors of Mediterranean cooking—the olive oil, the bay leaves, coriander, onions, paprika. But it’s the way these flavors are combined that make Portuguese dishes unique. Our food is influenced by many cultures going back centuries: the Phoenicians, the Turks, the Moors.”

  “Sounds amazing. I’m just warning you that I have zero technique.”

  Amelia laughed. “It’s not a matter of technique. We cook com gusto—‘to your liking.’ The way I do it might not be the way a neighbor does it. Forget about right or wrong. I’ll show you the way my mother taught me and the way her mother taught her and so on. And someday, you might show your daughter.” Amelia pulled out a white tin box from one of the cupboards. She lifted the lid and showed Rachel what had to be a hundred index cards separated by divider tabs.

  “You should look through here. Familiarize yourself. Let me know what interests you the most. It’s organized alphabetically but the recipe names are in Portuguese, so write things down as you go or you might lose track.”

  “Nadine’s lucky she grew up with this,” Rachel said.

  Amelia’s face clouded. “Nadine did not have much interest in the kitchen. Maybe she does now, living in Italy. I don’t know. But I did not get to share most of this with her—not the way I learned with my mãe.”

  “Oh.” She didn’t know what else to say. She looked out the window and saw Blythe digging around in the ground.

  “What’s Blythe doing?”

  Amelia glanced outside. “She’s trying to figure out a way to grow a vegetable garden back there.” She turned back to the task at hand. “So. The first meal. As you have seen, we cook once a week for Thomas. Bart has two jobs—running the art gallery and directing the theater company. And Thomas has bad days where he can’t get out of bed.”

  Rachel nodded. “Luke told me he’s really worried about him.”

  “We all are. This town has been so afflicted by the AIDS crisis. But we have learned as a community how to make this a place where people can live with the disease. Painters can paint and writers can write and not worry about where their next meal will come from.”

  “I want to help.”

  “And you will. We’ll make a roast chicken for tomorrow night. And Thomas likes my homemade cheese. It needs to sit for twenty-four hours, so we’ll get that going and then move on to the main course.”

  Rachel had never considered the notion of actually making cheese. Cheese was something that simply existed. She shared this thought with Amelia, who told her, “When I was growing up, making cheese was a weekly Sunday-afternoon activity with my mother. She took her cheese very seriously. When I first met my husband, Otto—your grandfather, by the way—and he came for lunch to meet her, he declined the cheese and I don’t think she ever forgave him.”

  Rachel laughed.

  “I’m quite serious,” said Amelia. “I’ll admit, it doesn’t look that pretty if you’re not used to it. But a good Portuguese man should have known better. It was a sign.”

  Cheese is important. Noted.

  “We only use three ingredients: whole milk, rennet tablets, and coarse salt.”

  “What’s rennet?”

  “Rennet causes milk to become cheese by separating it into solids and liquids—the curds and the whey.”

  “But I mean, what is it? Is it a chemical?”

  “No—it’s all natural. It’s an enzyme, usually extracted from the stomach lining of young calves.”

  What? Oh no. This was a problem. No, she wasn’t vegan—she would eat dairy and eggs. But this was pushing it. Really pushing it. She would have to refuse the cheese, repeating the bad juju started by her grandfather decades ago. “Um, Amelia—I’m a vegetarian. I can’t…I just…”

  Amelia shook her head. “What’s with all this vegetarianism? I don’t get it. If you ask me, women need red meat.” And then, maybe seeing Rachel’s look of agony, she relented. “You don’t have to eat the cheese. You just have to watch and learn. Deal?”

  “Deal,” Rachel said, smiling.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  I can’t believe you’re still collecting all this crap, Mother,” said Nadine, watching Amelia carefully organize her latest beach finds into their appropriate bins.

  “And why not? As an artist yourself, you of all people should understand.”

  “It’s hardly the same thing.”

  Amelia rolled her eyes. Thirty years might have passed, but Nadine was the same recalcitrant daughter, always finding a way to needle her.

  “I would like to say I am extremely pleased to see that you’ve made a life of creative work. It feeds the soul even through tough times.”

  “Yeah, well, it feeds the soul but doesn’t always pay the rent,” she said. “And what can I say? It’s in my blood.”

  “That it is.” Amelia had the urge to reach for her, to pull her into her arms as she hadn’t in decades. But she didn’t want to push. “I was surprised to find that Marin and Rachel don’t do anything creative.”

  Nadine snorted. “Why? I mean, how do you know they’re really even related to us? Where’s the proof? These people just show up out of nowhere. You have to wonder about their motives.”

  Amelia felt her first flash of genuine irritation. “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Nadine. What motives would they have?”

  Nadine sighed. “Mother, please. I think you’re being a little naive here.” Nadine focused her eyes on her, eyes that were so much harder than Amelia remembered. Her skin was weathered, more so even than Amelia’s had been in her fifties. They loved the sun, all the Cabrals. But it was more than that. She’d caught Nadine smoking in high school and come down hard on her. She had probably never quit. Or perhaps she drank a lot. Whatever the case, she looked years older than Blythe, who was her peer. But her hair was still thick and cut in stylish layers, barely threaded with gray. And she was a handsome woman, moving with a confidence—almost aggressiveness—that gave her presence.

  Amelia didn’t want to take the bait in this conversation. She’d forgotten how dramatic Nadine could be, the way
she could triangulate between her and Otto to get what she wanted. It had caused a lot of arguments with Otto because Amelia had recognized it and Otto had not.

  And yet, Amelia found herself asking, “How on earth do you figure?”

  Nadine drummed her fingers on the corner of the easel. “Do you have any idea how much this place is worth?”

  Amelia laughed. “Oh, please. I don’t want to hear this nonsense.”

  “I’m sure you don’t. But I’ll tell you, it’s a good thing I’m here to be the voice of reason. Wake up, Mother. This isn’t the tiny fishing village it was when our ancestors bought this house. And you’ve made it into something extremely valuable. As your daughter, I would be remiss if I didn’t ask you what you plan to do with this house after you’re gone.”

  Amelia shook her head. “Oh, Nadine.”

  “What?”

  “Well, the house will go to Kelly when I’m gone. She’s my wife.”

  Nadine nodded. “Of course. I understand. But you two don’t have children together. So what will she do with the house?”

  “Nadine, you’ve been here all of forty-eight hours. After decades of silence. And I’m thrilled about it—I am. But frankly, this conversation is out of line.”

  “Is it? I think mothers and daughters have this conversation. I’m sorry if it makes you uncomfortable. But before the end of the summer, we should finish it.”

  Amelia walked to her studio door and closed it. “There’s a conversation we need to have that’s going to make you uncomfortable. What happened with Nick that summer in Italy?”

  Nadine stiffened. “You know what happened.”

  “I don’t. I heard nothing from you—nothing—until the day after you buried your brother. How could you do that?” Amelia found herself shaking. “I didn’t deserve that. For many years, I believed I did. But I don’t think that way anymore. And I’m sorry if you do. But now you’re here, in my house, under my roof, and the least you can do is tell me how my son killed himself.”

  “He crashed his motorcycle late at night. I told you this at the time. You want more details? Why don’t you ask your lovely guest Blythe? Mother of his child. Ask her why he came to me; no doubt he ran to Italy to get away from her. He was not in a good emotional state.”