All Our Summers

by Holly Chamberlin

  Nancy seemed genuinely surprised at Carol’s negative response. Her companion looked flustered. Neither woman seemed to know what to say next.

  “Good evening,” Carol said, turning back to the bar, where her Manhattan was waiting.

  “They’re gone,” Judith announced a moment later. “Scurried out of here with their tails between their legs. But why did you say no? Surely it wouldn’t have been a big deal to make an appearance, sip cheap wine, and answer a few questions?”

  “That sort of command performance can be especially draining,” Carol explained. “It’s far easier to speak to a roomful of professionals than a gathering of admirers. Trust me.”

  Judith shrugged. “I’ll have to. No one’s ever asked me to give a talk about anything to anyone.”

  “Lucky. So, you’ll help me make my family party a success?”

  “Do I have a choice?” Judith asked. “You’re buying me dinner.”

  Chapter 39

  “How are things between you and your dad?” Nicola asked.

  Earlier, she had suggested that Sophie might want to go to a showing of the movie classic All About Eve at a tiny art theater in South Berwick.

  “You’ll love it,” Nicola had assured her cousin. “I promise.”

  But Sophie had just shrugged. “I’m not really into old stuff,” she said. “But we could go shopping in Kittery.”

  So, they had gone to the outlets in Kittery and were now having a late lunch in a family-style restaurant. Nicola had ordered a crab roll. Sophie had chosen fish ’n’ chips and was now working her way through an ice-cream sundae.

  “I want nothing to do with him,” Sophie stated, scooping up vanilla ice cream and chocolate sauce. “I wish he would just leave. I don’t know why Mom doesn’t kick him out. My friend Barry’s mother kicked out his father when he cheated on her.”

  Nicola took a sip of her iced coffee and answered carefully. “It’s not that easy. Your parents probably still love each other.”

  “I don’t see how they could!” Sophie declared. “If you love someone you don’t cheat on them. And if someone cheats on you, you have to be furious and throw them out.”

  Nicola smiled. “Is that the law?”

  “No, but it should be!”

  “Marriage is . . . Each marriage is unique,” Nicola said, cringing as she spoke. Words were so often so inadequate. “A betrayal doesn’t always mean that love is gone. Look, Sophie, it’s complicated. You have to let your parents figure out their relationship, okay? What I mean is, don’t write off your dad just yet. Or your mom.”

  “You’re lucky you don’t have a father,” Sophie declared. “Men are such jerks!”

  “Not all men,” Nicola pointed out. “Your grandfather wasn’t a jerk.”

  “He was different. He wasn’t a man. Oh, you know what I mean! He was Grandpa.”

  Nicola felt sure that in spite of her young cousin’s protestations of anger, she desperately missed her father. And how could she explain to Sophie what she had been feeling since Ken’s death, that without any information about her own birth father, she felt rootless? It was better to have an imperfect parent than to have no parent. Maybe.

  “I know what you mean,” she said finally. “I feel the same way about Uncle Ken, that he was special, apart from other men.”

  “The father you never had,” Sophie said. “Right?”

  “Right.” Nicola sighed. “Maybe you don’t want to hear this, but I’m going to say it anyway. I really believe it would be best for you to forgive your father and allow him to make things up to you rather than to cut him off for good. Okay, maybe you’re not quite ready to forgive him, and I get that. But please, Sophie, don’t refuse to be open to the idea. Life is too short to—”

  “To what?”

  Nicola hesitated. She thought of the wall she had put up against her mother. It was a case of the pot calling the kettle black. Do what I say, not what I do. “To be unnecessarily unhappy,” she said finally.

  Sophie rolled her eyes and ate the last bit of her sundae.

  “Okay,” Nicola went on hurriedly, “then think of it this way. If someone you cared about an awful lot decided to cut you off because you made one stupid mistake, how would you feel? Would you think it was fair?”

  “No,” Sophie admitted. “But Dad made a really big stupid mistake.”

  Nicola sighed. “Well, it’s your life,” she said. “You’ll decide what to do with it.”

  Sophie suddenly reached across the table for Nicola’s hand. “Sorry,” she said. “I mean, thanks for trying. And for lunch.”

  “Sure.” Nicola asked for the check and while she waited for Sophie to come back from the ladies’ room, she wondered why it was that she felt such a strong need to punish her mother. Maybe Carol Ascher had come back to Yorktide for more than just Ferndean.

  So, what if she had? Nicola didn’t owe her mother anything.

  Nicola cringed. What had she just said to Sophie about not writing someone off on the basis of one mistake? Even a big mistake.

  If Carol Ascher had made a mistake in sending her child to live with relatives. And it wasn’t clear that she had.

  “Ready to go?” Sophie asked.

  Nicola slid out of the booth and followed her cousin and her cousin’s four bulging shopping bags out of the restaurant.

  Chapter 40

  “What am I going to do?” Julie muttered.

  She was standing in her bedroom, a pile of discarded clothes on the floor. Trying to find something to wear that wasn’t in need of a wash and an iron, and that, more importantly, fit was a complete nightmare. How could she have gained so much weight in so short a period of time?

  And there was the fact that Julie hadn’t read any of the material Sara Webb had assigned. She had tried; she really had. But her powers of concentration seemed to have abandoned her.

  Julie felt a wave of panic rising in her. Maybe she should call in sick, though missing today’s workshop would only prolong the inevitable. The next meeting would come around and she would have to face this moment all over again.

  It was only with a supreme effort that Julie finally made it out of the house, wearing a pair of loose cotton pants badly in need of a pressing (she had been afraid to use the iron; her hands had been shaking so badly she was sure she would burn herself) and an old Oxford button-down shirt over a logo T-shirt that belonged to Scott. She hadn’t wanted to wear her husband’s clothes, but the Oxford shirt would not button across her chest and her own T-shirts were all stained or simply too small.

  She drove with more deliberation than usual, her hands sweaty on the wheel, her shoulders tense with concentration. It was a bit of a miracle that she arrived at Yorktide’s grammar school in one piece. She met no one going into the building and hurried through the corridors to the teachers’ lounge/meeting room.

  When she opened the door, she saw that her colleagues were already gathered. To a person, they were looking their best. She noted the bright pink blouse on Melanie, the seventh-grade math teacher. Thom, the foreign language teacher, had a new and flattering haircut. There was a diamond ring on the fourth finger of Shelly’s left hand. Could she have finally gotten engaged to her longtime girlfriend? Julie had always liked Shelly, an award-winning history teacher, but now she couldn’t work up an ounce of good feeling for her.

  Sara Webb called the meeting to order. She was an excellent principal, a figure of authority without the thirst for power, fair-minded and open to suggestions. She was not the sort to embarrass one of her staff—especially one hitherto highly efficient and responsible—for an unprecedented lapse.

  “No worries,” Sara said briskly when Julie was forced to admit she had not read the assigned material. “I would suggest you take the time to read it at some point, though.”

  Julie simply nodded. She knew it was clear to all in the room that she was not her usual self. Where was the happy and energetic person she had been last summer and the one before that? Where had he
r enthusiasm gone, her excitement about the coming semester, her eagerness to meet the new crop of little students?

  After what seemed like a painful eternity, Sara Webb called the workshop to an end. Julie’s colleagues got up from the table and began to chat in smaller groups, some pouring cups of coffee or nibbling on cookies. All Julie wanted was to hurry from the room but before she could make her way past the knot of fellow teachers sharing stories about their summers, Tessa Landry, the art teacher, stopped her. Back in the spring she had become a grandmother for the first time and her world now revolved around her grandson.

  “How are you doing, Julie?” Tessa asked, her voice gentle and low. Her obvious kindness touched Julie through the layers of shame and self-recrimination, and brought her to the brink of tears.

  “Okay,” she said with a small, quick smile.

  “If you ever want to go for a stroll on the beach one morning, call me, okay?” Tessa smiled. “I promise not to bore you with pictures of my grandson. Well, I’ll try not to.”

  Julie nodded and Tessa moved off toward the coffee urn. One of the newer faculty, a young woman named Miranda, who had moved to Yorktide only the year before from New Jersey, was suddenly by Julie’s side. Julie had never really taken to Miranda, though she wasn’t able to put a finger on the source of her dislike.

  “Hey!” Miranda said brightly. She was wearing slim-fitting white jeans, wedge sandals that put her a good few inches over Julie, and a silky blue blouse.

  “Hi,” Julie said.

  Miranda tilted her head back and looked Julie over from head to toe. “You look like you’ve been enjoying the ice cream this summer,” she said with a laugh.

  The room was suddenly silent. Before Julie could form a reply—and what could it possibly be?—Miranda’s expression underwent a radical change from a look of jovial bonhomie to a look of shocked embarrassment.

  “Oh,” she said, reaching a hand toward Julie’s arm but not making contact. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean . . . I didn’t think . . .”

  Still looking shamefaced, Miranda hurried toward the refreshment table. The others in the room resumed conversations. Julie stood on her own, unable to move. Was she having another form of panic attack, the kind that paralyzed a person, leaving her unable to act on or react to the world around her?

  How could she ever go back to work in September in this condition? She had always loved being a teacher and it would break her heart to give up her vocation, but if she wasn’t competent to care for the children, what choice did she have? If she couldn’t eat sensibly, dress decently, make normal conversation, if she was paralyzed or left shaking uncontrollably by the smallest word said in passing, how could she go on?

  The worst of it was that Scott was not responsible for her predicament. Julie was the one responsible for allowing her emotional pain and her mental distress to dominate all of the good in her life. And she was the one who would have to be responsible for righting that situation. But she felt so very helpless.

  Suddenly, Julie’s right hand twitched. She purposefully flexed her fingers. She could move again. In truth, she had only felt paralyzed for seconds. Maybe no one had noticed her rigid stance. Maybe no one had cared.

  Julie hurried from the room. She was tired of being a spectacle.

  Chapter 41

  “A formal invitation card! Who does she think she is?”

  Judith shrugged. “I think it’s a nice gesture.”

  Bonnie tossed the invitation onto her kitchen table. If she were a drama queen like her sister, she would have torn the card to shreds. “Well, I’m not accepting, that’s for sure.”

  “Why not? I’m accepting. I think that for the sake of good karma you should as well. And Nicola and the rest of the family, too.”

  “Karma?” Bonnie frowned. “I don’t believe in that sort of thing.”

  Judith sighed. “What are you afraid of, Bonnie?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You’ve met up with Carol several times this summer. What’s the big deal about this dinner?”

  The big deal, Bonnie thought, was that her sister was acting as if Ferndean were already hers, and it most certainly was not. But saying yes to the invitation would, at the very least, get Bonnie inside Ferndean’s four walls again and allow her to see what damage her sister might have done to the house. “All right,” she said, grudgingly. “I’ll accept. But I’m not happy about it.”

  “And you’ll tell Nicola and Julie and her family to accept as well. Carol hasn’t seen Sophie at all this summer.”

  “Yes,” Bonnie said grudgingly. “I can’t guarantee they’ll listen to me, though.”

  “They will. Pull rank if you have to.”

  “I never—”

  Judith raised an eyebrow. It was enough to stop Bonnie’s false protest. Instead, she sat at the table across from her cousin.

  “Julie had a workshop at school this morning,” she said, glad to be off the topic of Carol Ascher’s dinner party. “She called me when she got home. She was very upset. First, she was unprepared, which is totally unlike her, and then someone said something hurtful to her—she wouldn’t tell me what—and she said she literally froze, couldn’t move a muscle.”

  “It sounds nasty. But I’m surprised she talked to you about what happened. That might be a good sign.”

  Was it a good sign? Bonnie just didn’t know. “I can’t help but feel that I failed Julie,” she admitted. “Why is she so terribly down on herself? I thought I taught my daughter the importance of self-esteem. Maybe I didn’t do a very good job. And maybe I failed with Nicola, too. Maybe one day she’ll find she’s unable to deal with a great injury done to her.” Bonnie considered for a moment. “Then again,” she went on, “she wasn’t devastated by her mother’s leaving her and that says something for her inner strength.”

  “Her mother didn’t leave her, Bonnie,” Judith said sharply. “Stop adhering to that narrative. It’s not true, and the more you cling to it the more damage will be done.”

  Bonnie’s cheeks flushed.

  Judith reached across the table and patted Bonnie’s arm. “Let’s not worry about Nicola right now,” she said. “She’s fine. Let’s focus on you. Bonnie, you’re not responsible for your daughter’s handling of her life. You were a good mother; you are a good mother. Julie is her own person and she has been since she moved out of your house and started her own family.”

  Bonnie put her hand to her temple. “It’s just that lately, so much of my energy has been directed toward this stupid stalemate with Carol. I haven’t paid proper attention to what really matters. My child. And my grandchild, for that matter.”

  “That might be true,” Judith conceded. “But it doesn’t make you responsible for Julie’s depression. She has a history. I’m not being harsh, just honest. She knows she needs to be on watch for the signs of distress and when they rear their ugly heads, it’s her responsibility to call for help.”

  “Not everyone can call for help,” Bonnie countered, “not once they start to sink.”

  Judith sighed. “I know. I’m just trying to lighten the load of guilt you’ve heaped upon yourself. But maybe it’s not my place to do that.”

  “You’re never not a parent,” Bonnie said softly. “It’s supposed to get easier, but it never really does.” I so wish Ken was here, she added silently. But he’s not. When am I ever going to get used to that?

  “Yet another reason I’m glad I opted out of parenthood,” Judith said as softly as Bonnie had spoken. “I could never be sure I had what it would take.”

  “I don’t think anyone is sure when they start out,” Bonnie said. “Ken and I had a baby because that’s what married people did. At least, the married people we’d grown up around. You always assumed that one day you would be a parent, so there wasn’t a lot of thinking about if you had what it would take to be a good one.”

  “I grew up around those same people,” Judith pointed out. “But given the fact that I knew I wasn’t going to be
getting married to a man and having a baby the good old-fashioned way, the opportunity to think through the idea of parenthood was pretty much thrust upon me.”

  “Of course. I never thought of it that way.” Bonnie realized that she felt a bit ashamed of her ignorance. Or was it lack of imagination? Neither was a good thing.

  “You didn’t have to,” Judith pointed out. “Be thankful for small favors.” She rose from her chair and stretched. “I’ll be on my way. I’m going to a lecture at the library.”

  “What about?” Bonnie asked.

  “I’m not sure, exactly. Something to do with the current state of artificial intelligence.”

  “I didn’t know you were interested in that sort of thing,” Bonnie noted.

  “I’m not. But at my age I’ll take any opportunity to keep the mind active. If the lecture forces me to use the old gray matter, good. See you around.”

  Bonnie continued to sit at the kitchen table after Judith had gone. What she had not admitted to her cousin was that on some level she was annoyed with Julie. Scott had done wrong, but he hadn’t killed anyone or bankrupted his family or been caught torturing innocent animals. Yes, Bonnie felt compassion for her daughter, but she also believed that as a parent Julie had an important job to do, one she was not performing.

  Back when Julie and Scott had gotten engaged, Bonnie told Ken her worries about their daughter marrying a man with Scott’s reputation for playing the field. “If Julie trusts him,” Ken had said, “then we should, too.” That was Ken all over. Kind. Open-minded. Sometimes too lenient.

  Not long after the wedding, Julie had admitted to her mother that Scott had cheated on her once before the engagement. Bonnie had kept that bit of disturbing information from Ken, but maybe she had been wrong to do so. Maybe if Ken had known of Scott’s transgression he could have taken him aside for a man-to-man talk and . . .

  Bonnie sighed. She felt sure that if her husband was alive now he would be more disappointed in Scott than angry with him. He would have tried to broker a peace between his daughter and her husband; he would not have wanted the marriage to end if it could be saved. And Ken might well have succeeded where Bonnie never could.