The Forever Summer

by Jamie Brenner

  “You told me the other night at dinner, loud and clear, that I’d never been a good enough mother. I didn’t teach you enough, I didn’t give you any guidance. And maybe I didn’t. But I’m trying to right now: That guy? Luke Duncan? He’s gorgeous. He’s smart. And from what I can tell from the way he talks about you and the way he’s acting, he’s really into you. So don’t blow it.”

  Rachel, taken aback, could only stare at her.

  “I’m not…hiding in the kitchen” was all she managed.

  She wasn’t hiding. She was busy—couldn’t her mother see that? And fine, maybe Luke hadn’t asked his ex-girlfriend to show up. And maybe he didn’t ask her to stay either. But the whole incident made her feel a hurt she’d never experienced before, and frankly it scared her.

  Carrying the fruit bowl, she headed to the living room with a glance back at Fran. Happy now?

  And there he was, tan and golden, his suit jacket off and his shirtsleeves rolled up. She looked away, but it was too late; accidental eye contact. He crossed the crowded room toward her. She ran back to the kitchen. To hide.

  Fine. Her mother was right.

  There was a first time for everything.

  Marin closed the door to her room. The space, her sanctuary all summer, had turned into the place where fate would deliver its verdict.

  Julian sat on the edge of her bed.

  “Marin, I feel really terrible that you felt you couldn’t call me when Kelly died. I would have wanted to be with you at the funeral.”

  “I couldn’t. Don’t you understand that I can’t get more emotionally invested in you? We might not get the answer we want. And then what? I know you must feel the same way because you haven’t exactly been calling or texting.”

  He nodded. “I’m sorry. I wanted to. I thought about you nonstop, but you’re right—a part of me was holding back. But I could barely wait for an excuse to come here. And if you had called me, I would have jumped at the chance to come sooner. It was wrong that you lost a friend and I wasn’t here for you. It was wrong that I showed up at the house too late for the funeral. It felt really, really wrong.”

  She held out the envelope, her hand shaking. “You open it.”

  He waited a beat, then took it from her. Their eyes met, and she swallowed hard.

  Julian glanced down at the envelope. And then he ripped it into pieces.

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  It was dark outside. All the visitors were gone, and the house was quiet, quiet in a way she hated—in a way only Kelly fully understood how very much she hated.

  Amelia didn’t know when the silence had become her enemy. Maybe it started in the days after Nick and Nadine first left. The silence came to mean loss. And now she would have nothing but silence.

  But for tonight, her family was here. Marin, Rachel, and Blythe, under her roof. And, of course, Nadine. Who was probably packing to leave at that very moment.

  Amelia didn’t regret her outburst earlier in the day, but it didn’t entirely sit well with her either. Did she really want her to leave? On some level, yes. It was frustrating to have her back and find how little had changed. On the other hand, Nadine was her only remaining child. It was Amelia’s job, her maternal duty, to make things right. She knew that if she didn’t, it would be a fresh emotional wound she would have to live with.

  She picked up Nick’s letter from her nightstand, handling it like glass. Then she took the stairs up to the third floor, flinching as she passed Kelly’s studio. Lord only knew how long it would be before she could set foot in there. If ever.

  Nadine’s door was open, her room empty. Amelia headed back down the stairs, checking the first floor and the living room. No one. The kitchen—empty. Through the window, by the big table, she saw the glow of a cigarette.

  The night had cooled considerably. Or maybe it was just her exhaustion that made Amelia shiver and hug herself. She turned on the porch light.

  Startled, Nadine turned.

  “I wish you wouldn’t smoke,” Amelia said.

  “It’s a bad habit. I’ve been living in Europe my entire adult life.”

  Her entire adult life. What an interesting choice of words. Because standing there, watching her sneak a cigarette just as she had thirty years earlier, Amelia had to wonder if her daughter had ever emotionally evolved past the resentful teenager she had been. Maybe, under normal circumstances, Nadine would have worked out her adolescent rage and become a better woman. But when Amelia fell in love with Kelly—well, Nadine had the perfect excuse not to grow. Not to learn about personal accountability. Looking at her middle-aged daughter, illuminated only by the yellow glow of a single lightbulb cutting through the dark, Amelia thought she might as well have been standing next to a fifteen-year-old.

  “Nadine, I’m not selling this house. Not for money. Not for anything.”

  “I get it,” she said, putting out her cigarette.

  “No,” she said. “You don’t.”

  Amelia handed her the letter.

  “What’s this?” Nadine unfolded it.

  “Your brother sent it to Blythe from Italy.”

  Nadine froze.

  “Go on—read it,” Amelia said. It took a moment, but Nadine finally bent her head over the paper. When she was finished, she looked up at her mother, tears in her eyes.

  “Why did you tell me he was miserable?” Amelia said, her voice tight. “Were you lying to me to punish me, or did you truly believe that?”

  Nadine cried softly. “We were never whole again after that last summer here.”

  “He was moving past it,” Amelia said.

  “Why be out on that dirt road in the middle of the night? It was reckless. It was asking for something bad to happen.” Nadine reached for another cigarette and then stopped herself.

  “Nadine, listen to me: You did a good thing inviting him out there. And that night, he was just a young man on vacation. He made a stupid mistake. It wasn’t my fault. It wasn’t your fault. You need to let go of all your anger.”

  Nadine leaned over the table, rested her head in the crook of her arm. Amelia touched her back. “Sweetheart, life doesn’t have to be as hard as you make it. There have been tough times. I’m partially to blame for that. But you ran away, and pushed me away, and that made it impossible to fix. Nothing is perfect—no one, no family. But look, in the end, we’re here together. This is what we have.”

  Amelia wiped away Nadine’s tears, a gesture she had not been able to make since Nadine was a little girl.

  “I’m sorry,” Nadine said. And then: “It’s good to be home.”

  Rachel sat on the front porch with the food and waited. It felt like the town should be quiet that night, everyone indoors mourning the loss of Kelly Cabral. But at nine o’clock, Commercial Street was loud with merriment, all the boys on their way to the clubs, couples strolling to and from dinner or headed for drinks on the waterfront. After midnight, the same tide would roll in drunken boisterousness to Spiritus Pizza. She hoped that by then she would be asleep, able to put the long day behind her. For the first time, she understood the expression bone tired.

  But the food. There simply wasn’t enough space in the refrigerator to store all of it. She called Bart, asked if she could bring the overflow to their house.

  “I can’t even carry it all. Do you have a sec to run over here and help me? It’s, like, four trays.”

  “Reinforcements on the way,” Bart said.

  She waited until she saw someone turn off the street to the house. She stood and waved. But it wasn’t Bart.

  “Hey. I heard you were in need of some manpower.”

  Luke.

  “I thought Bart was coming.” She clutched a tray like he’d arrived to steal it.

  “I offered to come instead.”

  She shook her head in annoyance. “You shouldn’t have.”

  “I think you’re being a little hard on me.”

  “Oh, you do, do you?”

  He took the heavy tray from
her hands and set it on the ground. “Yeah. I do.”

  “I might be young but I’m not stupid,” she said, instantly regretting the comment. It had a playground quality to it and made her sound, in fact, both young and stupid.

  “I never said you were stupid. Not even when I was busy finding the colossal strength to resist your charms.”

  She refused to let him be cute. “Stupid, naive—whatever I’d have to be to believe your so-called ex-girlfriend just showed up here after two months, uninvited. Without a word.”

  “Can we sit down for a second? Please?”

  “I don’t want to sit.”

  “Rachel, she and I had been together for a long time. Of course we were still in touch occasionally. And for the first month or so, I held out hope that she might change her mind about spending the summer here. But by the time you and I got together, I hadn’t texted or spoken to her in a few weeks. I’d accepted it was over. I had no idea that in her mind, she was moving toward trying to work things out.”

  It made sense; of course it did. But an alarm had been switched on inside of her, and she didn’t know how to turn it off. She’d spent so much energy figuring out how to get him, she hadn’t given any thought to the emotional risk she’d be taking if it finally happened.

  Hookups were easy; relationships were hard. That’s why she never had them. She realized, in the depth of her exhaustion and sadness, that after a lifetime of being let down by her mother, she never wanted to give anyone else a chance to hurt her. And then she’d met Luke, and for some odd reason—maybe it was chemistry or that people dropped their defenses when they were on vacation—she wanted him in a way she’d never wanted anyone before.

  “So what are you saying? Now it’s really over?”

  He nodded. “Yes. We talked, and it’s over. She was at the house barely an hour. If you don’t believe me, your mother can back me up.”

  “Yeah. My mother is a big fan.” He didn’t say anything, just focused those aqua-blue eyes on her. They had the same effect as that first day by the pool. She was defenseless. She bowed her head, and he tucked a lock of her hair behind one ear.

  “Can this really work?” she whispered.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “But I want to try. Do you?”

  Rachel looked away, up at the sky. It seemed every star was visible. She wondered if Kelly was somewhere out there, watching over the house.

  If she was, Rachel knew what she’d tell her to do.

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  The lettuce leaflings, a few inches tall, were ready for transplanting to the garden. And not a moment too soon; Marin was leaving that afternoon, and Kip was eager to get on the road as well.

  Blythe had planned to start the process much earlier, teaching Amelia and Rachel all they needed to know to keep the garden going long enough to harvest in the fall. And the better they understood things now, the easier it would be for them to replant in the spring. But Kelly’s death put all that on hold. Now, Labor Day weekend, it was gardening go-time.

  With Amelia next to her, Blythe soaked the ground, then dug a two-inch-deep hole with her finger, looking up to make sure Amelia was watching. She added some extra compost to help the soil retain moisture and gestured for the tray packed with leaflings.

  Amelia brought it and knelt beside her with the rows of lettuce in their square plastic beds. Blythe set the tray on the ground between them, and inched the first leafling free from its temporary nest.

  “Want to do the honors?” she said, holding it out to Amelia.

  “I don’t want to set it wrong,” she said, cradling the leafling as if it were a baby bird.

  “It won’t break—just place it in here and then bury it up to its leaves.”

  Amelia gingerly did as instructed. Blythe leaned close and followed her work with her own hands, pressing the soil down firmly, pinching it to make sure it was tight around the plant.

  “I’m so excited about this, I can’t even tell you,” Amelia said, sitting back on her heels. Blythe felt a swell of satisfaction; she was returning to Philadelphia in the morning, but she was leaving something behind for Amelia, something green and alive and nourishing. After all, Amelia had given her so much that summer. By taking them all in and keeping them under one roof, Amelia had given Blythe the chance to heal her relationship with Marin. And in confronting Blythe with her long-held, albeit mistaken, beliefs about what had happened to Nick in Italy, Amelia had literally forced the issue out of the back of Blythe’s closet, and now the decades-long chasm between Blythe and Kip was closed. Amelia had, in a sense, helped sow the seeds for the next season of Blythe’s marriage.

  “Hey, you guys should have called me out here for this,” Rachel said, bounding into the yard.

  “You really want to be in charge of the garden?” Amelia said. “It’s a big responsibility.”

  “Are you doubting me?” Rachel said, hurt.

  “No. I don’t doubt you at all. I just don’t think you realize how busy we’ll be in the spring if we open the inn—”

  “When we open the inn,” Rachel corrected.

  “The spring is a whole different issue,” Blythe said. “I’ll coach you through that over the phone. For now, the next few weeks are crucial. While it’s still hot, you really have to water twice a day. Whenever the top two inches of soil are dry.”

  “How do we know when to pick the lettuce?” Rachel asked.

  “You’ll see when it’s a full plant. You can either pick a few leaves at a time—you’d be surprised how little you need to make a salad—or cut the entire head at soil level with a sharp knife.”

  She glanced at her watch. There were still other seeds to plant and all the maintenance to teach them. Tips for harvesting.

  “Will you come back in the spring?” Amelia said.

  Blythe nodded. “Sure. I’ll be back after the last frost or during the summer at some point—”

  “No,” Amelia said. “I want a promise that you and Marin will come back after the baby is born. Once the winter is past.”

  Blythe smiled. That’s right; by the spring, the baby would be here. “Of course. I promise. We’ll all be back. And when we are, I want to see this ground bursting with vegetables. Don’t be intimidated! Trust me, the plants want to flourish. They will reach for the sun. All you have to do is nurture them.”

  Her last morning in Provincetown.

  Marin woke up early and tiptoed around a sleeping Julian. Her bags were packed (how had she accumulated so much stuff in just two months?), the gas tank in her car was full, and she’d said her good-byes. Most of them.

  She’d left the most difficult for last.

  She hadn’t gone back inside Kelly’s studio. She thought maybe she wouldn’t, that she would preserve the memory of the room as it had been with Kelly alive and creating, full of blunt conversation. But to leave without one last visit to the space felt like unfinished emotional business.

  Still, every step up to the third floor was filled with trepidation. Marin opened the door to the studio very slowly. As quietly as possible. It felt like trespassing, like breaking in. She turned on the overhead light, and it flickered twice before it went on.

  The scent of spicy vanilla still hung in the air; this—more than the sight of Kelly’s art on the wall, the rows and rows of bins left filled with Amelia’s decades’ worth of beach collecting, the scattered blue tiles and smalti on the floor where Amelia had knocked them over the night of Kelly’s death—hurt.

  “Oh, Kelly,” Marin said, her heart seizing in her chest. She stopped in the middle of the room and pressed her hands to her forehead. She should leave. And yet she felt compelled to be there. After standing still and agonizing over it, she finally realized why.

  It took her a few seconds to find it.

  Kelly had set up a scrim, shielding one drafting table from view. Marin peeked behind it, knowing she would find the Beach Rose Inn sign. What she didn’t expect to find was a handwritten note on top.


  Hey, Marin—

  I knew you’d come back to finish this! You rock.

  Sorry for the hasty exit. But I think you understand. You have to know when it’s time to stay and when it’s time to go. Right?

  So: The mosaic. I know you can do it.

  Congrats in advance on the baby. It gives me comfort to know Amelia has something awesome to look forward to this winter.

  XO Kelly

  Marin wiped away tears. She traced the shiny arc of tiles forming the base of the rose. Okay, she told herself. It’s going to be okay. She put the note in her pocket, left the studio and closed the door behind her, then walked back to her room. Julian was just waking up, and he smiled at her.

  “Where’d you run off to?” he said. “Did I oversleep?”

  “No,” she said, kissing him. “It’s still early. But now that you’re up, I need help getting one last thing into the car.”

  Amelia knew the box was in the attic somewhere, one among dozens.

  The overhead light was out, so she went in search of a flashlight and then resumed her hunt through a forest of cardboard. Some were labeled Mãe, from back in the days she’d packed up the house after her mother’s death. Some belonged to her former husband, Otto. (She made a mental note to go through those and clear them out. It was time.) There were other, more generic labels: Books, Winter Clothes, even simply Hats. She knew one day she would add more to the pile, boxes labeled Kelly. But she was far from ready to do that. The very thought of it made her feel claustrophobic, and it was difficult to breathe. She had to force herself to push through; she was, after all, there for a reason.

  The boxes she wanted were near the farthest wall, underneath a pile of albums (Fleetwood Mac, Joni Mitchell’s Blue, Simon and Garfunkel’s Bridge over Troubled Water) and an old hat stand. After brushing off the dust and more than one cobweb, she slid a few boxes away from the congested corner so she could get a good look at the contents. The one she wanted was marked Nick/Baby.