28 Summers: The gripping, emotional page turner of summer 2020 by 'the Queen of the Summer Novel' (People) (30 page)

Mallory stutters, “C-c-candles. One of the candles must have fallen.” She thinks about the tapers, slim and elegant in a pair of silver candlesticks that Cooper gave her for Christmas last year (re-gifted from his most recent wedding, she suspected). One of the tapers was a little loose, maybe, and fell over onto the story pages.

“Is your son here?” JD asks. He looks around and that’s when he sees Jake. Mallory wipes the tears and smoke out of her eyes. Mick opens the door to the porch, and a welcome breeze blows through the house.

“Hey,” Jake says. He’s wearing only the boxer shorts, so there’s no real question what was going on.

Please don’t introduce yourself,
Mallory thinks.

It is
very
bad that JD has shown up, and here’s why. At the beginning of July, Mallory attended a graduation party at Corazon del Mar—it was, in fact, a graduation party for Abby Stewart, who was off to Sarah Lawrence—and Mallory saw JD there. JD and Tonya Sohn had long since broken up, and JD was known to be a confirmed bachelor, and although Mallory was still angry at him for spreading the awful rumor about her and Jeremiah Freehold, time (and margaritas) did their trick and Mallory and JD were able to talk, civilly at first, then fondly. He apologized to Mallory for the abhorrent thing he’d said to their driver in Puerto Rico—
Were you a Fresh Air Fund kid?
—something Mallory had tried to forget. The whole fire department had attended sensitivity workshops, he said, and now he had a new attitude. “Evolved, if you will.” Mallory won’t lie: She wanted to let bygones be bygones and get back in JD’s good graces. The island was too small for grudges. As the night progressed, real affection surfaced, and common sense departed. Mallory ended up going back to JD’s house and sleeping with him. In the moment, it had seemed harmless, possibly even sweet. Mallory had treated the whole thing as fun, a lark; she had left JD’s house at midnight so her babysitter could get home, and only when JD called the next day to see if Mallory wanted to go to Black-Eyed Susan’s for breakfast had she seen the error of her ways. In trying to make things better for herself, she had made them much, much worse.

She’d said,
JD, we can’t do this.

He said,
Why not?

She said,
Because we can’t. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to give you the wrong idea.

JD had hung up abruptly—of course he had. That was what he did, who he was. Mallory hadn’t seen him since then.

“Hey,” JD says. His voice is friendly, even chummy, and he shakes Jake’s hand. It’s all an act, Mallory thinks. “I’m JD. I remember you from…jeez, years ago, back when your friend disappeared.”

Jake nods slowly. He must realize that this is the guy Mallory dated. She didn’t tell Jake too much about him, though she should have—she should have!—so he would realize how dangerous JD is.

“But I don’t remember your name,” JD says.

“Jake,” he says. (Mallory closes her eyes and thinks,
This is where it all falls apart
.) “My name is Jake.”

JD nods. He doesn’t ask for a last name. He says to Mallory, “The safest thing is if we move the table out onto the beach. Then tomorrow when everything has cooled down, you can figure out how you want to dispose of it.”

“Okay,” Mallory says.

“The table is probably a goner,” JD says. “Which is too bad. I have some fond memories of that table.” He chuckles in a way that makes it sound like they had
sex
on the table—if they did, it wasn’t memorable—but Mallory doesn’t care. Jake disappears to put on shorts and a shirt; Mick, Tommy, and JD maneuver the table out the door, off the porch, and into the sand.

(Despite the fact that there was a fire and every fire is serious, especially in a tinderbox like this cottage, Mick Hanley wants to laugh. When JD saw the address come up in the alarm system, he hauled ass, shouting in Mick’s face to
Hurry the hell up
—even though Mick had both legs in his pants and JD had only one. It was
his girl
out in Miacomet, JD said, Mallory Blessing, it was her house that was on fire. Mick thought JD and Mallory had broken up back in the ’90s, but then again, what did he know? To come in and find her basically naked with some dude…well, she is
not
JD’s girl, that’s for damn sure, or not
only
JD’s girl, and Mick is planning on giving JD a hard time about it all the way back to the station.)

The Excellence in Teaching award goes to Bill Forsyth. It’s announced in assembly the afternoon of the first day of school and the kids go wild. It’s a good result for sentimental reasons. Bill will be retiring this year after forty-four years of teaching at Nantucket High School. It was the right choice, the only choice, Mallory tells herself. Bill Forsyth has been teaching longer than Mallory has been alive. Still, her anxiety ratchets up until there’s a high-pitched noise in her ears. She tries to calm herself: she is healthy and Link is healthy. He came home on Monday lean and tan, his hair sun-bleached to white blond, wearing a concert T-shirt from Anna’s former band, Drank. He has a newfound love of Impressionist painters. Anna was an art history major at Bennington, and this summer she taught Link all about Renoir, Degas, Monet, Manet, and, his favorite, Camille Pissarro. He has flash cards of paintings, which he showed Mallory immediately upon his return.

Mallory
has
the money for the roof
in the bank
and if she’s squeamish about blowing the whole nut, she can replace the roof in stages. She can start this fall with the half that has the leaks over Link’s bed and do the rest next year. Lots of parents of these very kids work two and three jobs just to make the rent or the mortgage, so Mallory has no right to complain. In the end, the harvest table doesn’t even need to be replaced—just sanded and refinished.

She’s fine. She’s fine. She’ll replace the whole roof. She can always make more money. If she gets into a tight spot, she can ask Fray for money. She should be more concerned about the way Link comes home at the end of each summer so
transformed
by Fray and Anna.

Or maybe she should feel grateful for that. She’s not sure.

Apple grabs Mallory’s arm, hard, after the final bell. “That was bullshit.”

“What?” Mallory says.

“Don’t repeat this.”

“Who am I going to tell?” Mallory asks. She and Apple have successfully escaped most of the politics of the high school because they have chosen to confide only in each other.

“I love Bill Forsyth, you love Bill Forsyth,” Apple says. “Bill Forsyth is a good teacher. But he has been using the same lecture notes for forty-four years.”

“Well, yeah,” Mallory says. “Biology doesn’t change.”

“It’s a science, not an art,” Apple says. She frames her forehead with her fingers the way she does when she just can’t wrap her mind around something. She lowers her voice and says, “You were supposed to win it. Right up until the last meeting, you were the favorite. Something must have happened. Someone must have had a change of heart.”

Mallory is tempted to ask if either JD’s cousin Tracey the ER nurse or his sister-in-law, Brenda, who had five kids in the system, was on the committee, but knowing exactly who JD turned against her won’t fix anything.

“It’s not the end of the world,” Mallory says. The end of the world would have been Jake saying, “Jake McCloud,” and then JD later Googling the name. “It’s fine, really.”

What are we talking about in 2012? The Kardashians; Whitney Houston; Joe Paterno; Uber and Lyft; the Kentucky Wildcats; Trayvon Martin; Lance Armstrong; Walter White, Skyler, Jesse, and Gus; Zumba; the Aurora shooting; Instagram; Sandy Hook; Hurricane Sandy; Noma; Barclays Bank; LeBron James;
Silver Linings Playbook;
kale; Jimmy Kimmel; “We are never, ever, ever getting back together.”

E
veryone Jake knows is on Facebook. Three times recently he has come back into the CFRF office after lunch and found his assistant, Sara, mesmerized by the screen of her computer—likes, tags, shares. When Jake clears his throat—they have a rule about personal business on the office computers that, clearly, everyone ignores—Sara looks up at him and says, “I can’t help myself. It’s like I’m in quicksand. I just keep sinking deeper and deeper.”

If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.

Jake asks Sara to show him how Facebook works. He brings up the site on his laptop and she helps him create a profile using his official headshot from the foundation.

“This is dull and corporate,” she says. “Most people use pictures of their families on a mountaintop skiing or at Disney.”

“Disney?” Jake says.

“Do you want to use one of you and Ursula?” Sara asks.

“Not a good idea.”

“Bess, then?”

“I’d rather not,” Jake says. What he doesn’t tell Sara is that he only wants a Facebook account so he can look people up. That’s what it’s used for, right? To reconnect with people from the past?

(Sara can barely hide her dismay that Jake is insisting on using his bland headshot as a profile picture and refusing to post a cover photo at all. Why is he even bothering with this? In the About section, he lets her list his job title—what a snooze!—then Johns Hopkins University; John Adams High School; South Bend, Indiana; and the fraternity Phi Gamma Delta. He lets her post his status as “married” but doesn’t add his spouse’s name, which Sara can, sort of, understand. She shows him how to upload photos, should he ever choose to do that.

“Now, you request friends,” Sara says.

“You do realize how pathetic that sounds?” Jake says. “
Requesting
friends? I thought I could just add the people I know.”

“You have to make a request and they can either accept or decline,” Sara says. Nobody in his or her right mind would decline a friend request from Jake McCloud. For Sara, it’s another story. She has one ex-boyfriend who declined her friend request and another who hasn’t made a decision one way or the other, so with Brad Bardino, she remains in what she thinks of as Friend Limbo.

“Thank you, Sara,” Jake says. “I’ll come find you if I have any more questions.”

“Good luck,” Sara says. She considers Jake getting on Facebook a positive development because now maybe he’ll understand why she can’t keep off the site on her lunch break. “I’ll friend you in a minute.”

“
You’re
going to friend me?” Jake says. “Why? I see you every day. You work ten yards from me.”

“Social media is a parallel universe,” Sara says.

Jake gives her a blank look.

Sara goes back to her desk and sends a friend request to Jake McCloud’s brand-new account. She will be his first friend.

He accepts. He’s not completely hopeless.)

Jake spends the better part of an hour on Facebook. He sees how easy it is to disappear down the rabbit hole. Just clicking on his chapter of Phi Gamma Delta brings up fraternity brothers Jake hasn’t thought about in eons. Ditto the Johns Hopkins Facebook page. Ditto John Adams High School. Ditto South Bend. Ha! Jake’s mother, Dr. Liz McCloud, is on Facebook. How does
she
of all people have time?

Jake sends his mother a friend request. His own mother! This feels extremely weird.

His father, Dr. Alec McCloud, is not on Facebook.

Jake checks to see if Ursula is on Facebook. She is
definitely
too busy for this nonsense. Yes, correct—but there’s a Facebook page for Ursula de Gournsey, U.S. senator from Indiana, that he can “follow,” and they’ll send him “updates” about Ursula’s hard work for all Hoosiers. Would he care to follow?

No, thanks.

Jake friends Cooper Blessing and, while he’s at it, Tammy Pfeiffer Blessing, Coop’s new wife. (Is it worth it? Jake wonders. Or will Tammy go the way of Coop’s three previous wives?) He figures out how to get into Coop’s list of “friends,” and he cherry-picks a few more Fiji brothers that way, as well as Stacey Patterson from Goucher—why not?—as well as Frazier Dooley, who has both a personal page and a page for Frayed Edge Coffee. Coffee has its own Facebook page? Jake decides not to follow this page even though he goes to the Frayed Edge Café in Dupont Circle all the time. He sends a friend request to Katherine “Kitty” Duvall Blessing. Coop is friends with his own mother, so maybe this is a thing. (To say something is a thing is now a thing, eleven-year-old Bess has informed Jake.)

Is
Bess
on Facebook?

No, thank goodness, and if Jake has anything to say about it, she won’t be allowed to get on Facebook until she’s thirty years old. It’s such a waste of time!

A waste of time, yes, especially since it’s taken Jake this long to get to the real reason he created an account.

Mallory, obviously.

She’s a friend of Coop, Kitty, and Fray. He clicks on her name, and, like magic, her face fills his screen. He…he…well, he nearly slams his computer shut because it’s so surreal. Her profile picture is a photo taken from the side on the front porch of her cottage. The setting sun makes her glow rose gold. Her hair is in a messy bun and he can see her freckles as well as some lines in her face. In Jake’s mind, she’s always twenty-four years old, but in this photo, she almost looks her age. She’s wearing a navy hooded sweatshirt that looks vaguely masculine and he wonders if she’s dating someone. Then of course there’s the question of who took this picture in which she’s looking so dreamy and pensive. How can he find out?

A notification appears on his screen:
Carla Frick has sent you a friend request.

Carla Frick, the chairperson from the event in Phoenix, has found him
already?
He’s been on Facebook for only sixty seconds.

Jake feels exposed but he accepts the friend request, and at nearly the same moment, Frazier Dooley and Jake’s mother accept
his
friend requests.

Jake laughs. Frazier is running a coffee empire and Jake’s mother is an ob-gyn. So what’s happening here? In between hysterectomies and C-sections, Liz McCloud is on Facebook? While overseeing a workforce of thousands, Fray is accepting friend requests?

Apparently so.

Stacey Patterson accepts Jake’s friend request.

It’s eerie. Will Mallory be able to tell that Jake checked out her page like a common stalker? He should click out of it but he can’t help himself. He studies her cover photo. It’s the view of Miacomet Pond. Because Jake knows what he’s looking for, he spies a glimpse of Mallory’s kayak overturned on the small beach.

In eleven weeks and three days, he will be paddling in that kayak.

Should he look at the pictures Mallory has posted? He’s afraid—because what if there’s one of her with the new boyfriend? Jake’s day will be ruined—his week, his life. But curiosity gets the best of him and he scrolls down.

There are only two pictures. One is of Link in a catcher’s uniform, leaning on a bat. The caption reads:
He made the ten-year-old all-star team!
The other picture is of Mallory and Link and an African-American couple with two little boys standing in front of the Old Mill. Jake knows this is Hugo and Apple, Mallory’s closest friends, and their twins, Caleb and Lucas.

Jake lets out a relieved breath. Maybe Mallory is new to Facebook as well? He sees that she has ninety-seven friends and he scrolls through them. There are a bunch of names he doesn’t recognize, but some he does: Leland Gladstone, Fiella Roget, Dr. Major. Jake sees the name Scott Fulton. That was the guy Mallory dated, the one who almost proposed to her. Jake is about to click on Scott Fulton when his good sense kicks in and he thinks,
Come on, man, enough is enough.

Katherine “Kitty” Duvall Blessing accepts his friend request. Jake is now Facebook friends with Kitty. What will Mallory think of that?

He wonders if Coop will accept or decline his friend request. If Coop accepts his friend request, does this mean things are okay? If he declines, does that mean things are irreparably damaged?

Jake moves his mouse over to the blue button on Mallory’s page that says
Add friend
. Should he add her as a friend? Social media is a parallel universe, as Sara said, and in the parallel universe, it would be perfectly reasonable for Jake and Mallory to be friends.

She would kill him, he thinks. She would most definitely decline the request.

He closes Facebook and tucks his laptop into his briefcase.

Later, when he’s leaving the office, he stops by Sara’s desk.

“Hey, thanks for your help today. With Facebook.”

“Use responsibly,” she says. “It’s a drug.”

On August 31, 2012, Jake takes the direct American Airlines flight from DCA to Nantucket. This is risky, of course—he could easily run into someone he knows on the plane—but it’s convenient. The trip is ninety minutes from wheels up to wheels down. Jake rents a Jeep and drives out to the no-name road. It feels like coming home.

Friday night: burgers, corn, tomatoes, Cat Stevens, candles that they extinguish with wetted fingertips and then double-check, triple-check, before they go to the bedroom.

The harvest table, Jake thinks, looks as good as new.

They spend Saturday morning out on the kayak, and the pond is just as Jake has been picturing it; they even see a pair of swans. They paddle all the way inland, then turn around. On their way back, they pass a woman with a little boy standing in the muck, casting lines. Mallory waves and calls out, “Good morning!” Jake gives them the slightest glance and he notices the woman staring at him.

He tilts in the seat and the kayak wobbles. It’s Stacey Patterson from Goucher, Coop’s old flame.

“Hey?” she says. “Jake? Jake McCloud?”

“Go, go, go,” Jake whispers, but Mallory doesn’t need any prompting, she’s paddling with swift, strong strokes while still managing to appear unconcerned.

Jake hears the boy say, “Who’s that, Mommy?”

“No one, I guess,” Stacey says. “Let’s catch a fish.”

Close call. They get back to the cottage and Jake tells Mallory that the fisherwoman was Stacey from Goucher.
Remember she met us that night at PJ’s?
Yes, Mallory remembers, of course. Then they sit in silence for a second, thinking the same two things.

It would have been bad had they not escaped.

It’s a miracle something like this hasn’t happened before.

Because of the Stacey Patterson near disaster, they decide it’s best if Mallory goes to the fish store to pick up the lobsters by herself. Jake misses her the entire time she’s gone, though it gives him a chance to poke around the cottage unobserved. He could also do this while she’s out running in the morning but usually he just sleeps with his face buried in her pillow, inhaling her scent. The reason he comes to Nantucket every year is to see Mallory, pure and simple, but there are so many other things he loves about this weekend, one of which is three days of unstructured time. There are no meetings, no calls, no agendas, no parties, no lunches, no daughter to drop off or pick up. He and Mallory have the things that they do, but they’ve adjusted these with age and circumstances. Maybe she feels as bereft about going to the fish store alone as he feels about having to stay behind, but she understands. She doesn’t want to be found out any more than he does. He’s safe with her.

His “poking around” includes studying the books on her bedside table—
The Paris Wife, State of Wonder
—then opening her closet and looking at her clothes. He pulls out a blouse, then a dress. He imagines her wearing them to school. All of her students, male and female, must be in love with her; he can’t imagine they wouldn’t be. The night before, he asked her if she was dating anyone, though he didn’t admit to seeing her wearing the navy sweatshirt on Facebook and wondering whose it was. Mallory said there was no one special. Jake couldn’t help himself; he asked if there was anyone “not special,” and Mallory confessed that she and Brian from Brookings had had a bit of a text flirtation that ended when Brian sent her a picture of his penis. She said she burst out laughing, then deleted the entire text thread. He’d sent ten follow-up texts asking if he’d crossed a line or offended her or if maybe it wasn’t “big enough,” and Mallory finally answered that she was forty-three years old, too old to be sexting, and when he responded that there was “no such thing as too old for sexting,” she said she thought they’d better stay friends.

Texting is dangerous, they’ve both agreed. It’s tempting, oh, so tempting, to shoot Mallory a message every time he’s thinking of her, but they both know people who have been discovered this way—entire affairs, secret relationships, double lives, et cetera, revealed on a cell phone bill. Jake sends Mallory only two texts a year—one at the end of August to let her know when he’s arriving and one when he’s in the rental Jeep on his way. She doesn’t text him at all.

They eat the lobsters on the beach and wash them down with a bottle of very good champagne—this year, vintage Veuve Clicquot that one of her students gave her as an end-of-year gift. The champagne loosens him; it sends glitter through his veins. They finish their lobsters and fall back on “their” blanket—it’s the very same blanket they’ve used since the first year—holding hands, balancing plastic cups of champagne on their chests.

Are they both still spooked by the proximity of Stacey Patterson? Yes! When Jake opened his laptop before dinner, he heard an unfamiliar
ping!
that turned out to be a Facebook message from Stacey:
I could have sworn I saw you kayaking on Nantucket today. Are you here, or am I starting to lose it in my old age?
Jake thought about responding with
Stacey, you’re starting to lose it,
but then he decided it was best not to respond at all.