Off Season

by Anne Rivers Siddons

Genres: Women's Fiction; Family Life

Synopsis

For as long as she can remember, they were Cam and Lilly-happily married, totally in love with each other, parents of a beautiful family, and partners in life. Then, after decades of marriage, it ended as every great love story does...in loss.

After Cam's death, Lilly takes a solitary road trip to her and Cam's favorite spot on the wild coast of Maine, the place where they fell in love, and where their ghosts still dance. There she looks hard to her past-to the simple joys of childhood; to a first love that ended in tragedy; to falling in love with Cam; to a marriage filled with exuberance, sheer life, and safety-to try to make sense of her future. It is a journey that begins with tender memories and culminates in a revelation that will make Lilly reevaulate everything she thought was true about her husband and her marriage.

Beautifully rendered and deeply moving, OFF SEASON is a story about those simple truths that often elude us, even when they are in front of our eyes-and the hidden places of the heart that continually surprise us.


From the Compact Disc edition.

Release date: August 13, 2008

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 368

Sample

Of all the fifteen summerhouses, the first one was the best. That’s what we all agreed on, for a while anyway… until we grew wiser, more measured in our joy, more careful with the doling out of praise. Funny, we rarely agreed unanimously on anything, but for years there had been no doubt about the Colleton house. At first glance it had seemed designed—brick, board, and shingle—for the girls of August.

A silly name for four women who, after a decade-and-a-half of never missing an August together, were adrift in middle-age, fretting over crows feet, and reaching for skin cream. It had seemed silly to us even when we were in our twenties, when one of our husbands… had it been Mac or Oliver? No one could remember… coined it, the first summer we’d taken a beach house together, back when our men were still residents in med school. We were not girls even then. Strictly speaking, I don’t think some of us ever were.

But it had been August. And somehow, after that first time, it always was.

Odd how that week—the second week to be exact because it gave us time to breathe before school and fall and the holidays—had cemented itself into our lives.

“It’s like Christmas, or goddamned New Year,” Mac had said once, when we had been invited by his friends the Copleys to spend the first two weeks in August aboard their yacht, the Spindrift, cruising from Savannah to the Bahamas and back.

“Why the hell can’t y’all just move it forward or back? I’ll never get another chance to fish for a solid ten days.” He blinked his eyes, a sure sign—I had come to learn over the years—of him being desperate to have his way.

We just can’t,” I said, knowing not why, only that we couldn’t. It felt to each of the girls of August as if the universe would tilt on its axis and no one would be the same if we adjusted the timing of our yearly gathering. “That’s just when it is. We’ve already rented the house. Go fishing with the Copleys, by all means. I’ll bet La Serenissima has a dozen itsy-bitsy teeny weeny bikinis.”

Mac snorted. Serena Copley in a bikini would have been as ludicrous as a hippo in a wetsuit. She was not fat, but at six feet and with shoulders as wide as a linebackers, some people thought she packed more muscle than Arnold Schwarzenegger. She was, as her dandelion-frail husband Dave said frequently, every inch an athlete.

“She could easily tow the boat in her teeth,” Mac groused. But he went fishing and I went, happily, to the Gulf Coast of Alabama.

In the early days, we always chose a spot along the northern Gulf Coast because it was within shouting distance of Nashville and Vanderbilt’s med school where, as Rachel was fond of saying, we were all stationed, as if life in med school was akin to military service. Given the long hours residents kept and the often life or death decisions they had to make, her military allusion bore some merit.

But back to that first trip, taken in haste—almost hysteria—because the girls had wanted to, I suppose, claim time as fiercely as our men did. Beautiful Point Clear, Alabama. The house had belonged to Teddy’s first wife, Cornelia, who would ultimately leave Teddy a few months after he went into private practice for a college boyfriend whose family boasted as much money as her own, taking her wonderful beach house with her.

Let me be clear. We did not mourn Cornelia. I don’t think even Teddy did. She was a lazy, drawling aristocrat whose sole persona seemed to be heavy-lidded amusement at the likes of the rest of us. But for a good long while we sorely missed her rambling gray-shingled beach house with its endless airy rooms reminiscent of a Ralph Lauren ad, surrounded by a picket fence drooling rosa rugosa and dipping its feet into the warm green sea.

We each took turns finding the next August’s beach house, but we perpetually complained that none were as House Beautiful-perfect as the Colleton’s. Perhaps our affection for the place was like a first love. It takes the long view of history to snuff out the glow.

“Old Mobile money, you know,” Teddy had said asininely when he first introduced his rich golden girl to the rest of the group. I, unfortunately, had already met her, but that is another story. She officially came into the group fold, as it were, on Mac’s birthday. I’d cobbled together enough champagne and crepe paper to throw him a proper party in our cramped apartment that was within walking distance of the hospital.

“How nice for you,” I’d purred to Teddy. None of us had much money; the guys, of course, were still residents. The idea of finding practices to join, or trying to start their own, was nothing but a distant dream. Only Mac and I were married then, newlyweds full of blush and blather, though Rachel and Barbara were very much in the picture. Their weddings to Oliver and Hugh followed soon after ours.

“Madison, dear, don’t worry. We’ll wait till the fuss about yours dies down,” Cornelia had said silkily, just after our wedding, a champagne glass sparkling in her exquisitely manicured, alabaster hand. “I’d hate for Teddy’s and mine to be upstaged by the memory.”

“Yeah, right,” Rachel had whispered in my ear in her froggy New Jersey voice as she made her way to the canapés, which I’d made together myself, sacrificing sleep but gaining pride. “You wait,” Rachel growled. “Hers will upstage Di and Charles’s.”

And in many ways, I thought that it had. Their wedding was held on the lush emerald lawn on a late spring day at the house on Point Clear, against the backdrop of rioting rosa rugosa and green waves curling onto pearl-white sand, with eight bridesmaids (none of us among them) dressed in billowing blue tulle and Cornelia herself in layers of diaphanous white silk that blew in the rose-scented wind like the petals of a flower.

Teddy, startling in a cutaway and wickedly starched collar, looked as if the wind might pick him up and whirl him into Mobile Bay. He was so pale that his relentless five o’clock shadow stood out like a pirate’s beard, although I was sure he had shaved hardly an hour before. He seemed tossed like flotsam in the sea of silks and satins and flowers and wondrous, huge-brimmed hats that surged around him.

I stood with Rachel and Barbara—our men were Teddy’s groomsmen—and realized that I had seldom seen him in anything but green scrubs. This, sadly, was not an improvement.

But oh, the house! That wonderful, wind-riding, sea-drinking house! When it became clear that our group, which was surviving the rigors of med school thanks to inky coffee and cat naps stolen on the fly, would inevitably be blown asunder by the advent of far-flung job opportunities—no more Nashville, no more “I’ll be right over” when one of us was in crisis—Rachel, Barbara, and I had determined that a week-long getaway, possibly yearly, was in order. The men’s residency schedules, we knew, would eventually be overtaken with careers and the detritus of life. So one late Friday night, as we chatted around a table cluttered with empty wine bottles, we insisted that no matter where the future took us, we would reserve one week for ourselves.

“Always and forever,” I had said.

“Here, here!” Barbara and Rachel had chimed in unison, and to seal the deal, we clinked glasses.

Cornelia, who in addition to being transparently beautiful in the way of fair-headed blonds, was inordinately nosey, so she caught on to our harried plan in nothing flat. Not to be left out, she offered her summerhouse for free. Of course, that meant she would join us. But we could handle that. We could deal with her old-money mannerisms and, we naively thought, perhaps make her a better woman.

Sadly, the Colleton manse—as soon as we laid eyes on it—became the standard by which we judged all of the subsequent getaway houses. Under the spell snobbery sometimes casts, we would find a perfectly lovely summer home and spend much of our week carping that it wasn’t as pitch-perfect as Cornelia’s . Even though some were warm and happy houses (and some, frankly, dreadful, like the one on the Outer Banks that had oil drums and a defunct gas pump behind it), Cornelia’s home stalked our imaginations like a lion in the veldt.

However, its perch among the rugosas and on the sweet warm Gulf fortunately gave rise to a rigid criteria that did serve us well: whatever house we would choose in the future, it had to be isolated and oceanfront.

Years later—after it became clear that some of us were cursed with empty wombs and some of us had to work harder than others to keep our marriages afloat and some of us found ourselves occasionally gazing in the mirror, wondering if there wasn’t something else we should be doing with our lives—it dawned on me that I had not really liked that house. Not really.Rather, it seemed like a duty to like it, and I could not put my finger on the reasons why.

I tried to explain it one afternoon to the real girls of August. Yes, the real girls. Cornelia had long since decamped with her Old-Mobile-Money scion (she’d lasted only a single season), and Teddy, within the year, had brought Melinda into our circle.

Melinda Marshall-soon-to-be Patterson promptly made up for a hundred imperfect beach houses. She was, down to her marrow, genuine and funny and smart. We welcomed her with the unbridled satisfaction that often accompanies the phrase, Out with the old and in with the new. Yes. Simply put, Teddy had done himself and us a big favor when he married Melinda.

So there we were—not knowing it would be the last time the four of us would be together—lolling about on the grand porch of a weather beaten charmer in St. Teresa, Florida, drinking margaritas and gazing at the languorous Gulf.

“That house just seemed to have way too many gewgaws… bibelots, I think Cornelia called them… simply too much… no chance to rest your eyes,” I said.

“If you looked at all that expensive crap the wrong way it would break. What the hell was wrong with us? Why have we spent so many years admiring a glass house when we should have been throwing stones?” Rachel had chimed in, rolling her blue eyes.

“Cornelia!” Barbara spit in her clear, precise schoolteacher’s voice, flicking a mosquito off her wrist.

“Right,” Rachel bobbed her head in agreement. “Snotty little bitch.”

“The oil cans and gas pump were better,” I said, swirling my glass, the clinking of ice underscoring my certainty.

“Pity I never met her,” Melinda murmured, staring out to sea, and I believe she meant it.

Melinda, of the heavy, coiled mahogany mane and aquamarine eyes and the smattering of copper freckles across her nose, the only real beauty among us. Melinda, of the laugh that rang like shattered Lalique and the tongue that could bite like a copperhead. Melinda, of the joyous heart that held us all like a mother’s hand. Oh, Melinda… for so long it was Madison and Rachel and Barbara and Melinda, we four, the original girls of August, for Cornelia never truly counted. How we loved Melinda! How, the very moment Teddy brought her into our lives, we all said, “Yes!”

And then, after fifteen summers, Melinda was gone, killed in a car crash on an icy, rutted, Kentucky backroad far, far, far from the sea. Teddy had been at the wheel. They’d gone to look at a horse he had planned on buying her. A Christmas present. Melinda, like me, was unable to have children, so to fill up that lonely space in her life, they had decided that Melinda’s love for dogs, cats, horses, and anything else that walked on four legs, should be sated with the acquisition of a prize filly. After leaving Rolling Hills Stable, to celebrate the intended purchase, they’d stopped at an inn and ate dinner. I’m sure Teddy had his requisite three scotches. The bitch in me feels absolutely, stone-eyed certain of that.

Black ice is a killer, you know. And so is disregard for how quickly a happy life can be snuffed out, especially in bad weather when you take a curve too fast.

He didn’t see the ice, of course, but he should have known it was there. As they sped towards home, the car spun out on the slick surface and he couldn’t regain control. Going sixty-miles-an-hour, they slammed into a tree.

Teddy was unhurt. The love of his life was dead. I do not know what that must have been like for Teddy. He was a doctor, for Christ’ sake, and he could not save his own wife.

And though the tragedy was deemed an accident, I think we all quietly seethed. If only, if only, if only…

So then, we were down to three again: Madison McCauley and Rachel Greene and Barbara Fowler, women teetering on the brink of their forties who were married to physicians practicing in cities across the South, linked by nothing more than the memories of fifteen houses on fifteen beaches in fifteen vanquished Augusts.

We exchanged Christmas cards, I know, but the long phone conversations gradually ended, as did letters and emails. It was as though, after all these years, the only thing that bound us together was the memory of Melinda. But we couldn’t deal with that. Her absence was as alive and painful as her presence had been alive and joyful.

When she was gone, there was no replacement. Period.

Wind whistled in my heart during those few years after Melinda’s death. I think it did in the hearts of Barbara and Rachel, too. We were lost. And besides, there could not be only three girls of August. The set was four, even if that came into being only through Cornelia’s selfish insistence.

So we stopped gathering.

*

“I can’t imagine having friends that long,” my niece Curry said to me during our last visit before she departed for the cold north and her first semester at Harvard. She was moving to Cambridge over the summer so she could get acclimated. She kept saying the word, as if trying it on, sometimes uttering it in a truly terrible bid at a Boston accent.

Curry was almost my own child. She was, in fact, Mac’s sister’s child, but Charlotte worked long hours and was often out of town, and Curry came to us as naturally as the air we breathed. It wasn’t unusual for her stay with us for several weeks, even a month or so. By that day when we sat on the guest room bed, which long ago became known as Curry’s bed, talking of friends and men, I thought of her as my own. Charlotte never seemed to mind. And when I looked into her bright blue eyes, I saw Mac, and I sometimes imagined that she really was our child. But then I stopped, because the longing hurt too much.

I did not know in whom the barrenness laid. Mac?Or me?And Mac was adamant that we not attempt to find out. “No one person to blame,” he said.

Melinda supported Mac’s viewpoint that we not know. And even though Teddy and Melinda had been in the same boat as Mac and me, our twin situations gave me no comfort.

Month after month went by and I grew ever more hysterical because the pee stick test—no matter how hard I willed otherwise—remained negative. When I’d had enough hurt, when the pain of not having a child grew unbearable, I lobbied for us to go to a fertility clinic.

But Mac stood firm. “There is no guarantee it will work. It can wreck your health, Maddy. And I don’t want either of us at any time to look at the other and think, ‘If it hadn’t been for you…’ That’s a marriage killer, Maddy. Let it lie.”

And so, after a good long while, I gave up. Oh, I had deep aches for my unborn many times, and I suppose Mac did too. But I alone had felt I would die of it. Our cure? We both sank deeply into our work, me first as an elementary school teacher and then as the busy owner of my own catering firm and Mac as a deeply dedicated family physician. We worked and we worked because it was the right thing to do. Sometimes it even kept our pain at bay.

And, of course there was Curry…

*

“Well, honey, of course you don’t know what it would be like to have friends as long as Barbara, Rachel, and I have been together because you’re only eighteen,” I said to Curry that morning in her bedroom. I was being artificially cheerful because, though I was proud as punch that she was going to Harvard, I also didn’t want her to leave.

“But you’ve known each other for twenty years. Maybe more. That’s like being married or something,” she said, slipping her hand into mine.

“Well, you know we haven’t seen each other in three years, not since Melinda…” I trailed off and with my free hand traced a bloom on the magnolia-patterned spread. “I sometimes wonder if we’re friends at all anymore.”

In the past two weeks, in our usual bent toward haste, Barbara, Rachel, and I had decided—after a flurry of emails had turned into a blizzard—that in the wake of Teddy’s new marriage, we would reprise the girls of August.

But sitting there with Curry, holding her hand and remembering Melinda, I wasn’t sure it was such a good idea. Three years is a long time. And we were falling into the old habit of allowing Teddy’s latest wife to enter our circle. None of us had even met her because none of us had been invited to the wedding.

“Friends don’t stop being friends,” Curry said, “just because one of you isn’t around anymore.” She said this with the authority of a much older woman and my heart broke open in a rush of fresh love for her.

“I don’t know, honey. We’ve barely spoken since the funeral. And we don’t know this new wife. What will we even talk about?”

“What did you used to talk about?”

“Oh, what we did together after we met,” I said, “and the guys. Of course we talk about our guys.” I couldn’t tell her that we talked about sex. She, being of an age where it was impossible to think of “old people” having sex, probably wouldn’t have even believed me.

“Well, yeah, Uncle Mac… I can’t imagine talking a solid week about him.”

“He wasn’t always just Uncle Mac, you know,” I said, smoothing back the unkempt straw-colored hair that was her uncle’s off her forehead.

“He was many things you’ll never know about, back then. Now too. And besides, what makes you think he was the only guy I had?”

“Oh, tell!” Curry squealed, throwing her long arms around my neck and pulling me toward her just as the sound of raindrops pinged, fat and cold, against the beautiful prismed panes of our old house in the Ansonborough district of Charleston.

“Not on your very young life,” I said around a sudden and surprising lump in my throat. “Even aunts are entitled to a little mystery.”

I gazed out the rain-splattered window as I rested in Curry’s embrace and an odd heaviness seized my heart. Yes, a little mystery…

CHAPTER 1

There were seven of us at Edgewater that summer, if you count my brother Jeebs. None of us did, really. Jeebs was thirteen and gone into another orbit of his own; he entered ours only when he had nothing else to do, and then grudgingly.

That left Harriet Randall, aged eleven; Ben and Carolyn Forrest, who were twins, aged ten; Cecie Wentworth, aged eleven; Peter Cornish, aged twelve; and Joby Gardiner, eleven. And of course, me. Elizabeth Allen Constable but called, by my own creed, Lilly and nothing else. I was eleven that summer of 1962 and stonily determined not to be confused with my mother, who was Elizabeth, too.

My mother: Elizabeth Potter Constable; painter, activist (in her own words), great beauty. She was sporadic and only adequate at the first two, but at the third she was spectacularly successful. Turned heads followed Liz Constable wherever she went.

It was the apogee of the frenzied Jackie Kennedy mythology, and even up here in this rural saltmeadow world almost untouched by fashion for a century, women wore their hair in carefully tousled bouffants and put on crisp white sleeveless blouses and Bermuda shorts to go to the post office or general store (which were one and the same). The yacht club cocktail-and-chowder suppers looked like a Norman Rockwell magazine cover of an idyllic girls’ camp. Into the middle of all the matched Lilly Pulitzer wrap skirts and T-shirts, the huge sunglasses pushed casually above foreheads to form chic headbands, my mother would drift barefoot like an idle racing sloop, her hair in its uncombed little Greek-boy tousle of curls, her white pants smeared with paint, the striped French matelot T-shirt she had affected since a trip to Cannes when she was sixteen daubed with it. There would not be a vestige of makeup on her pure medieval features, only a flush of sunburn on her high cheekbones and a slick of Chap Stick on her full, tender mouth—a Piero della Francesca mouth, according to Brooks Burns, two cottages down, who was a classical scholar and eighty years old, and had been in love with my mother, according to my father, since she came here as a bride.

“Eyes like summer rain on the ocean,” he would say. “Eyes like clear pond ice.”

“Eyes like a frozen February crust over Eggemoggin Reach,” I might have added, “especially when those black brows come together over them.”

But I doubted that anyone but my father and Jeebs and I had seen that. My mother’s brows were two silky black slashes set straight over her eyes, which were clear, light-spilling gray and fringed with black lashes. With her sun-streaked copper curls they were striking; you expected slender sienna arches. I had those brows, I was often told, and the gray eyes, too, but even to me they often looked stormy and sulky instead of mythic. I had seen my mother, in her studio just before she came out to join us for an evening, slick her eyebrows with some sort of cream, and lightly redden her cheeks, and finger-tousle her hair before the old seashell mirror that hung beside the studio door. Once or twice I saw her daub a sunset smear on her cheek or forehead, or stain her shirt lightly with it. The result was a careless beauty seemingly preoccupied with things more important than her looks. It served her well.

I spied on my mother shamelessly during the summer. I’m still not quite sure why. I think I was looking for revelations, epiphanies, a map for knowing where the real woman and mother lay. It seemed that if I found it, I would have the map for myself, could chart a course by it. But I never did, and after that summer I did not spy on her again. Instead, I set about trying to become the direct antithesis of the woman in her mirror. It got me in endless trouble with her, though not so much with my father.

“Let her be,” he would tell her from the rocking chair on the porch that was his regular summertime emplacement. “You wouldn’t want a perfect little copy of you, would you? I would think one is enough.”

“She could do worse,” I heard my mother say once, tightly, in the days when I still eavesdropped.

“Not much,” I thought my father murmured from the rocker, but I was never sure of that.

And yet she was not all artifice. All the children from the cottages around us flocked to ours as naturally as thirsty birds to a birdbath. All the cottages down on this particular cove were members of the Middle Harbor Yacht Club, in the old Retreat Colony up the road, and had full privilege to join the brown, scabby-kneed colony children on the dock and in the tenders and small Beetle Cats in the harbor, or playing Ping-Pong in the raffish old clubhouse, or camping out on the islands in the bay across the harbor. And sometimes we did, but summer friendships are cemented early and tightly, and we came to be regarded as privileged outlanders, “too good for us,” hanging around only with each other at Liz Constable’s cottage. My mother really loved children, or, perhaps, I thought that summer, the children of others, and never seemed annoyed or bored with our endless and obscure yelping games, or the little flotilla of kayaks and Shellback dinghies that were tied up all summer beside my family’s old Friendship sloop at the end of our dock. We were the only cottage in our settlement that had a deepwater dock. All the others kept their boats at the yacht club.

Mother vanished for long periods during the day, into her studio or at the desk in her bedroom, writing letters or phoning on behalf of her causes. They were good New England liberal causes, my father often said: birth-control information for young girls, Martin Luther King, Jr., and his incendiary young civil rights battle, meals for the infirm and disenfranchised of Hancock County, cleaning up the effluent-fouled streams and bays nearby.

I know she was serious about these causes. I had seen her in tears over some social injustice or other featured on the flickery old black-and-white television in the cottage living room. And I know that there were people in the colony, women mainly, who found her indiscreet and vaguely threatening and her causes as unseemly in our little nineteenth-century fiefdom as a fart at the Chowder Race. I know too that she honestly did not care a finger flick what people thought of her activism or her painting. But she did care, secretly and profoundly, about maintaining her role as a careless natural beauty, a warm, funny woman far above artifice and agendas. I could never fathom the why of that as a child; complexity is largely beyond children.

But I still can’t today.

At noon Clara Anderson, who “did” for us mornings and who was the third generation of her family to do so for mine, would make a tray of bologna and cheese sandwiches and lemonade and put it on the big side screened porch, and we would rush in and wolf them down and be off again in a chattering swarm, out to the water or to the badminton and croquet courts my grandfather had carved out of the woods behind the cottage.

The other cottage mothers in our cove knew where to call if they had need of their children. So far as I knew, none of them ever worried that their offspring might be a bother to my mother, or that they might be in any way unsafe. Of course it was Clara who had the day-to-day burden of us, but she too liked children and had three of her own, and in our defense we had not yet absorbed any of the early-blooming horrors creeping into the cities then: drugs, alcohol, promiscuity, revolution. In Carter’s Cove, as our little settlement was called, all that came much later. The only really malicious thing I can remember us doing was setting off cherry bombs in the shabby small bathroom of the yacht club’s steward, a tight-faced fireplug-shaped young man from one of the original colony families who had not been accepted at Yale and was coldly mean-spirited to our crowd because we were not “his” kids. When our parents found out about it, we were forced to pick blueberries and wash windows and mow lawns to earn enough money for a new and vastly superior toilet. It struck us as only fair, and so we did not grouse too much about it, except that the steward got a far better toilet out of the deal and smirked at us all summer.

“Why were you so down on your mother that summer?” Cam asked me once. We had been together two months and were still in the stage where the necessity to know everything about each other, tell everything about ourselves, was paramount. On weekends, over coffee in one of the many small, dark cafés; at dinners of pizzas and cheeseburgers and an occasional salad; at night in the carapace of his old Porsche Carrera between kisses so profoundly consuming that they left us both sweating and gasping, we talked and we talked and we talked. Everything we said to each other was miraculous: the fact that he had been in the National Spelling Bee and lost by misspelling “mackerel” (I don’t eat it to this day). The fact that I had once dyed my hair green with food coloring before the Cornwell Country Day production of Peter Pan. (“Were you Wendy?” “No, I was the dog, Nana. A green sheepdog. I was a great hit.”)

So when he asked me about my mother and my feelings toward her that summer, I did not hesitate to spill out to him the thing I had never told anyone. Not my various best friends, certainly not Jeebs. Not my father, of course. No one.

“One day early that summer I went running up to her studio to ask her something,” I said. “I forget what. Whether we could go somewhere or other, I think. The stairs and the third-floor hall were covered in sisal matting, and I was barefoot and was sure she couldn’t hear me. It was lunchtime. We were never around her at lunchtime.

“Anyway, I got to the door of her studio and it was closed, but it always was, so in my adopted mode as supersleuth I eased the door open and looked in. She was… she was standing in front of her easel, facing me, and she had her shirt unbuttoned to the waist and was holding it open, and old Brooks Burns was standing in front of her with his hands all over her breasts, crawling like old spiders. Every now and then he’d bend over and smack one of them, or suck at it. He was making a kind of whistling noise in his throat; I thought maybe he was dying. She was smiling at him. It was… a sweet smile. Tender, like she’d give a child. After a while she said something to him and kissed him on the cheek, still smiling, and buttoned up her blouse and turned back to her easel and picked up her brush. He stood there awhile, gasping like a gaffed fish, and started to turn and leave. I was out of there and down the steps before I could get a deep breath. Then I went into the bathroom and threw up, and stayed in my bed under the covers all that day. I couldn’t let anyone in, not Clara, not my father, not my summer best friend, Cecie Wentworth.

“After dinner, my mother came in with a tray of toast and milk and started to