Summer Fridays: A Novel
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Synopsis
Summer 1999: Twentysomething Sawyer is striving to make it in New York. Between her assistant job in publishing, her secret dreams of becoming a writer, and her upcoming wedding to her college boyfriend, her is plate full. Only one problem: She is facing an incredibly lonely summer as her fiancé has been spending longer and longer hours at work . . . with an all-too-close female colleague, Kendra.
When Kendra's boyfriend, Nick, invites Sawyer to meet up and compare notes about their suspicions, the meeting goes awry. She finds Nick cocky and cynical, and he finds her stuck in her own head. But then Nick seeks out Sawyer online to apologize, and a friendship develops.
Soon, Sawyer's lonely summer takes an unexpected turn. She and Nick begin an unofficial ritual—exploring New York City together every summer Friday. From hot dogs on the Staten Island Ferry and Sea Breezes in a muggy East Village bar to swimming at Coney Island, Sawyer feels seen by Nick in a way that surprises her. He pushes her to be braver. To ask for what she wants. Meanwhile, Sawyer draws Nick out of his hard shell, revealing a surprisingly vulnerable side. They both begin living for their Friday afternoons together.
But what happens when the summer is over?
Summer Fridays is a witty and emotional love letter to New York City that also captures the feeling of being young and starting out, uncertain what to do on your summer Friday. It’s also perfect for readers who remember when “going online” meant tying up the phone line, and the timeless thrill of seeing a certain someone’s name in your inbox.
Release date: May 28, 2024
Publisher: Dutton
Print pages: 427
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Summer Fridays: A Novel
Suzanne Rindell
1.
When her eyes catch on the little clock on the far wall beyond her desk, she realizes it’s already ten past noon.
She gets a sudden urge: she wants to take her bag lunch outside and eat it in the park. This seems wrong, to a certain extent—but then, everything seems wrong lately. Every time she scans the newspaper headlines or opens her email, she reads of another event canceled. It seems that no one feels right doing anything but staying home and feeling not right.
She glances at the clock again, and makes up her mind. She wants to be reminded of things that are simple: Trees. Sky. Birds. Squirrels. Bench. The way the park path bends around a big brownish-gray boulder. Things that haven’t changed, in a time when it feels like everything will never be the same.
From her office, it is a short walk to the southwest corner of Central Park. There are fewer people out than there would normally be in mid-September. No drummer guy merrily tapping away on his plastic buckets, no flower guy with the blue roses, ink stains on his fingers. But there are still a couple of snack vendors hunched over the stainless steel carts that are their livelihood, looking guilty for selling hot dogs. A handful of people dressed in office attire, clutching giant pretzels and cans of diet soda. Even a few joggers intent on a return to normalcy.
She walks a little bit of the way into the park—just to the bend in the path she was longing to see—and finds a bench in the shade.
People pass by. A middle-aged woman pushing a stroller. A man walking a golden retriever with reddish-tinged fur. An off-duty doorman smoking a cigarette, sweating under his heavy uniform.
After a while, two girls come along and settle into the opposite end of the bench, a polite distance away from her. She takes out a book and pretends to read it, between bites of her lunch. Potato salad that she made herself—extra dill. She eats the salad out of a Tupperware bowl with a plastic spork from the office kitchen.
She listens to the girls talk. They are young. She is young, too—probably only a few years older than them—but somehow they are youthful in a way that makes her feel already slightly invisible.
So, just like that, he’s back in touch? one of them asks the other.
Yes, the first girl replies. He wrote a long email. I got it that night. It was really sincere, actually.
He said the attacks made him think of you?
Well, yeah, I mean—in a roundabout way. He said it just put things in perspective. Made him think about what’s important.
Ah. So: you, the friend says in an approving voice.
I guess so, the girl replies.
Will you get back together?
I don’t know, the girl says. We might.
Hmm, the friend says.
After a pause, the girl adds, The thing is…I was thinking of him, too, when it happened. I know his office isn’t downtown and there shouldn’t be any reason he would have been in the area, but I still just…found myself thinking of him. Wanting to know he was OK. And wanting to talk to him again, I guess.
I guess it says something if you were both thinking of each other, the friend says.
Yeah, the girl agrees. We’ll see. I’m meeting him tonight for a drink.
The friend giggles.
The girl doesn’t laugh. She gives a furtive, self-conscious glance across the bench. I kinda feel like a jerk, talking about my love life right now, she confesses to her friend. You know…with everything else going on in the city…in the world.
Nah. What the hell else are we going to talk about? her friend points out. The rest is too depressing.
Eventually, the girls get up and walk on, leaving her alone on the bench again. The potato salad is all gone and she isn’t pretending to read a book anymore. A glance at her watch tells her she ought to be heading back to her office.
On her walk back, she gets to thinking. She’s overheard the same thing a few times now—it’s in the air. People getting back in touch with old friends, old acquaintances, and old flames. Are you OK? they ask each other. I was thinking of you. I hope you’re OK. I wanted to hear your voice.
At her desk, she replies to a few work emails, forwarding an early review of a novel to the book’s author and cc’ing her boss, then responding to the marketing department, mostly to agree with the marketing director about which bits from the review make for the best pull quotes.
Then she sits for a moment, staring vacantly into the even, bluish-white glow of the computer screen, lost in thought again.
After a moment, she clicks on Internet Explorer and brings up the web portal for her personal email. She logs in, and clicks on the envelope icon to start a new email message. She doesn’t type in the address, not yet. She clicks on the body of the email. Start there, she thinks.
The blank message glows brilliantly white and empty, its cursor blinking like a character tapping their foot in a cartoon.
She stares for a long time. Minutes pass. She isn’t sure how many. The message remains empty. The cursor blinks in place, having never moved.
Finally, she closes the blank message, then the browser window altogether.
New York City
1999
2.
FRIDAY, MAY 28
The first surprise of the evening came when Charles didn’t have an opinion about her dress.
Sawyer knew that plenty of men didn’t have opinions about what their girlfriends wore, but Charles was not one of those men. He liked nice things. He respected style and admired design. Granted, he possessed a much wider array of in-depth opinions about men’s fashion than he did about women’s fashion—but either way, he had opinions.
Although Sawyer didn’t necessarily agree with all of Charles’s opinions, she appreciated that he always had one. A year earlier, when Charles first started as a junior associate at Wexler Gibbons, he’d been acutely sensitive to the fact that landing a spot at the prestigious corporate law firm had been like winning the lottery, and he’d wanted badly to make a good impression. He’d had plenty to say about what they both wore to company events. They’d made a ritual of it: Sawyer tried on the various possibilities and emerged from the bedroom in the back of their apartment to show him. Charles waited for her to ask what he thought, then proceeded to give her the carefully considered input of a true friend. Sawyer was grateful. Living in New York in your twenties meant trying to make your way in a mind-bogglingly expensive city while simultaneously paying off student loans. Looking the part on a budget required strategy, and having a huddle with your other half made it more fun.
So, when Sawyer pulled out the two dresses she was considering from their closet and held the hangers aloft to show Charles, she was thrown off to hear him say (after barely glancing at the dresses), “They both look nice.”
She tried one on. Then, the other.
“Sure. Whichever you like; they both look great.”
It was like a cliché scene in a movie: the husband’s flat, comical indifference to his wife’s appearance, the wife’s alienated frown.
This isn’t who we are, Sawyer’s brain protested, with a hint of indignance. They’d gotten engaged less than a year ago; they were hardly an old married couple. Usually, getting dressed up for a night out was an occasion to flirt, a chance to hint that there might be sex later.
But having changed out of both dresses, Sawyer stood there in her underwear, frowning through the open bedroom door to where Charles sat in the other room. He didn’t look up, not once. His attention was wholly trained on his company-issued laptop. The IBM ThinkPad was cracked open on the kitchen table, a heavy black clamshell with thuggish rectangular angles. Sawyer squinted, already knowing what she was likely to see—she could just barely make out a work-related legal document glowing on the screen.
She sighed and turned her attention back to the two discarded dresses now lying
on top of the bed. One was powder blue, with cap sleeves. The other was black, with spaghetti straps that sat tautly on Sawyer’s prominent collarbones. One was Jackie, the other was Marilyn. If Charles had actually looked at either dress when she’d tried them on for him, Sawyer knew he would have picked the Jackie.
Sawyer studied the two choices. Then, casting another frowning glance at Charles, she picked up the black dress with a hint of defiance and slipped it over her head. It had a slinky weight to it, and splashed down over the curves of her body like water. She took a moment to examine herself in the mirror, smoothing the fabric over her waist and hips and fiddling with the straps, wondering if she was actually brave enough to wear it.
The phone rang, its shrill cry seemingly able to snap Charles to attention when moments ago Sawyer had failed to coax more than a glance. He jumped up and grabbed the receiver from the kitchen wall.
“Hey—our car is downstairs,” he said. “Ready?”
“Just need to slip on shoes, throw a few things into my bag. Is it cold out?”
“Nah. It’s pretty much summer now. But who knows, bring a coat; it might get cold later.”
Whenever they were invited to a company event, Charles insisted they skip the train, and not just take a cab, but splurge on a car service. Tonight, he’d used the one they usually reserved for picking up her parents at the airport, the one with the phone number that ended in all sixes—hopefully that wasn’t an omen of anything in particular.
The car smelled of air freshener; the drive downtown was quiet. Sawyer gazed out the window, hypnotized by the city streets whizzing by. And then they were there, squeezing between the narrow streets of the old Dutch version of New York and being dropped off at Cipriani, the neoclassical columns of the restaurant brilliantly bathed in a regal gold-and-purple-colored series of floodlights that seemed to have been selected especially for the evening.
They stepped out, climbed the stairs, and went inside.
It was immediately obvious: the whole place had been shut down, reconfigured, and was now decked out for the Wexler Gibbons corporate dinner. In fact, it was less like a “dinner” and more like a gala of some sort. A band played in one corner. Hors d’oeuvres circulated on silver trays. There were items up for bid via a silent auction, raising money for children’s literacy. Campaign posters sporting blown-up photographs of adorable children holding books and pencils proudly announced that the firm gave millions annually to a well-known national foundation.
The building itself dripped with old-money intimidation: more neoclassical arches and columns, echoing marble, and an ornate, gold-laid coffered ceiling crowned with a Wedgwood dome at the center of it all.
“Wow,” Sawyer said,
immediately wishing that she’d opted for the powder-blue dress. They’d checked their coats. There was no going back now.
“I think we’re over here,” Charles said, steering Sawyer to one of countless tables wrapped with a white linen cloth tied with a purple satin bow. It was surrounded by a milling cluster of Wexler Gibbons’s younger, ambitious-looking employees. Charles hovered, squinting at the place cards.
No one was sitting yet. After a moment, Sawyer became dimly aware that Charles merely wanted to verify his position in the room. And verify who would be sitting near him. Sawyer followed his gaze.
The place card next to his read “Kendra Larson.”
The name “Kendra” put Sawyer in mind of a Ken doll—which was rather fitting, actually, because there was something Barbie-like about Kendra’s beauty that was simultaneously athletic and masculine. She was tanner and blonder than a New Yorker had any right to be, with broad shoulders and a strong jawline, and she carried herself like a beach volleyball player.
When Kendra took her place at the table next to Charles, she introduced her boyfriend. Sawyer caught the name over Charles’s shoulder—Nick Something-or-Other—and once everyone had been introduced, Charles and Kendra turned toward each other and more or less didn’t turn back for the rest of the night.
It was the second surprise of the evening. Charles knew that company dinners made Sawyer feel like a fish out of water, and he’d always been good about including her. When business talk left Sawyer on the outside, Charles worked a few of their stories as a couple into the conversation—usually a humorous anecdote that he and Sawyer could tell together. Conversation inevitably turned back to business, but by then at least Sawyer didn’t feel faceless. After, Charles always tenderly kissed Sawyer’s hand during the car ride home and thanked her for coming.
But that night, Sawyer found herself staring at the back of Charles’s head and straining to hear. At one point, she made a feint to pivot and make new friends by engaging the man sitting to her left instead, but he was already deep in conversation and facing away from her, too. So her options boiled down to choosing between the backs of two heads: the unfamiliar cowlick versus the cowlick she knew. At least straining to hear her fiancé’s conversation felt less like eavesdropping on strangers.
Or did it?
Charles and Kendra spoke with a surprisingly giddy intensity. They talked over each other like old friends and laughed at each other’s jokes—a number
of which were decidedly inside jokes, leaving Sawyer to smile blankly while waiting for their laughter to peter out. She was able to gather that they had been assigned to the same team handling a big case—a huge merger between two big telecommunications companies. Charles had mentioned his excitement about being assigned to the case to Sawyer before, but had stopped short of naming the names of the players involved. I don’t know if I should be talking about this so much, he’d said. I forget; you work in publishing.
Yeah, Sawyer had joked cynically. I can see how editorial assistants who work at small literary imprints for twenty-seven K a year pose a real threat to Wexler Gibbons’s security.
No, but really, he’d insisted. One of the telecommunications companies has a serious media branch.
That had been a month and a half ago. Since then, Charles had not only left shoptalk at the office…he’d left himself physically there, for daily hours that stretched longer and longer. While she didn’t love his being at work all the time, Sawyer hadn’t given it too much thought; after all, you were supposed to prove yourself during your twenties—weren’t you?
But now, as Charles leaned toward Kendra and said in a low voice, “Oh my God, I’ve been dying to step outside for a smoke—you?” Sawyer felt herself bristle.
Kendra gave a sly, conspiratorial smile and nodded. Then her eyes grazed over Charles’s shoulder and fastened on Sawyer.
“Sawyer—go for a smoke with us?” Kendra asked, friendly, chipper.
“Nah, Sawyer hates being around cigarette smoke,” Charles answered for her. “She graciously puts up with my occasional cravings.” He looked at Sawyer. “Is it OK? I promise I’ll stand upwind, air out my jacket, pop a mint.”
Kendra laughed. “Do you want me to make Charles take a quick jog around the World Trade Center after, Sawyer?” she joked.
Kendra had struck the perfect tone of light, breezy…inoffensive. Sawyer forced a polite smile.
“Not sure you can ‘make’ Charles do anything,” she replied, equally light, breezy. “But maybe I’ve just never tried.”
“Sounds like you’re underutilizing the whole point of a boyfriend,” Kendra said
with a wink, as though she and Sawyer were suddenly on the same team.
“Hey!” Charles protested, grinning.
“It’ll only get worse after you’re married,” the man at Sawyer’s elbow with the cowlick piped up to point out.
“That’s right—dead man walking!” another guy teased.
The table laughed.
Charles shook his head affectionately. He turned to give Sawyer a peck on the cheek.
“Promise I won’t come back all smoky,” he said in parting.
Then Kendra and Charles were up from their chairs and absorbed in more chatter as they made their way toward the front exit that let out onto Wall Street. Sawyer sat, watching them go. She realized her brow was furrowed. She forced it to relax.
She turned back to the table, lost in thought, resisting the impulse to reach a hand to her mouth and gnaw at her nails. Across the space of two now empty seats, Kendra’s boyfriend sat drinking what appeared to be a glass of whiskey, poured neat.
She studied him for a moment.
His suit was every bit as nice as those worn by the corporate lawyers who surrounded them, but he wore it with less care, a few buttons undone. Sawyer had noticed earlier that, as she had strained to listen to Charles and Kendra’s conversation and interject polite commentary, Kendra’s boyfriend hadn’t even bothered. Instead, he’d sat there in his chair, staring antisocially into the distance with the kind of cool, condescending indifference typically perfected by rebellious teenagers. That kind of attitude normally annoyed Sawyer, so she was surprised to realize she found him very good-looking.
She cleared her throat, feeling oddly nervous.
“Nick—was it?” she greeted him, smiling awkwardly.
He took a swig of the amber liquid in his glass and held the sip in his mouth for a moment, tasting it as he turned to look at her with a bored expression. He swallowed, and wiped his lips with a wry, cowboy demeanor.
“They didn’t need to go outside to smoke,” he replied.
“Beg pardon?”
“You can smoke in here,” he said. “It’s a restaurant, not an office. See?”
Sawyer followed his pointing finger to where a cluster of people stood smoking at the bar.
“Everyone keeps talking about the smoking ban that’s been proposed here in New York.” He shook his head. “It’s never going to happen.”
Sawyer blinked, baffled. “Well…I don’t know. I don’t smoke.”
“My point is, they didn’t need to go outside to smoke.”
Sawyer understood his implication. She wasn’t sure what to say. “You could have said you wanted a cigarette, too, and joined them.”
“No dice. She knows I don’t like to be around them. Like you.”
“You don’t smoke?"
He shook his head again, but this time looked away. “I know someone with respiratory problems,” he said.
His tone warned Sawyer off from asking whom he meant, or more about the details. She thought for a minute.
“I’m sorry,” she finally replied.
This caused him to turn and study Sawyer’s face as if seeing her for the first time. Sawyer felt her cheeks involuntarily burning. She fidgeted.
“Charles mentioned that he and Kendra got assigned to a pretty big case. He said it was super competitive.”
Nick only continued to look at her, clearly unwilling to pretend interest in the case, much less the fact that Charles and Kendra had been assigned to it.
“I’m in publishing,” Sawyer blurted out, feeling an inexplicable pressure to keep the conversation going. “Well—that makes it sound like I’m important. What I mean to say is, I have an entry-level editorial job. But I guess I still find it pretty exciting that I get to read some interesting new books that aren’t out yet.”
Nick remained quiet. He tilted his head and looked at her with stoic bemusement, almost as though Sawyer were a space alien speaking a different language.
“What…uh, what do you do?” she finally asked, thinking a point-blank question might help poke the conversation along, or at least break his stare.
“Ad agency,” he replied, after a long pause. He drained the last swallow of whiskey in his glass. “Junior accounts manager.”
“Oh.”
The monosyllable was out of Sawyer’s mouth before she could stop it. She hadn’t meant to sound disappointed. She wasn’t sure exactly why, but for some reason she had gotten it in her head that he might be an artist of some sort. Something about the attitude and rumpled suit. But now it made more sense why—rumpled or not—it was still an expensive suit.
A look of irritation registered on his face as he detected her disappointment.
“Yep,” he continued, as though reading her thoughts. “That’s me—yet another sellout writing slogan copy for diet cola and hemorrhoid cream on Madison Avenue.”
“I didn’t mean to suggest—”
“What’s your name again?” he asked, cutting her off.
“Sawyer.”
He took this in, bobbed his head. Sawyer recognized instantly: he was not nodding in approval
He pursed his lips sarcastically.
“ ‘Sawyer’? Were your parents, like, Mark Twain fans or something?”
Sawyer cast her eyes down and didn’t reply.
“Wait—I’m right?! Are you kidding me?” Nick said.
He laughed. There was something mean laced into it, and Sawyer stiffened. She declined to join in, hoping he’d have a moment of self-awareness about what a jerk he was being.
But Nick proved impervious.
“What, were they teachers or professors or something? I can see it now: A pair of early American lit lovers, family vacations on Walden Pond. Moleskine journals in your stockings for Christmas. The kind of people who always assured you it was perfectly fine to take out student loans and major in English.”
Sawyer willed her expression to stone.
“God—I’m right again! Wow.”
As he continued to laugh, Sawyer began to suspect that he was the kind of guy who had been called a jerk more than once in his life, and instead of allowing himself to be shamed for it, he wore it like a badge of honor. A swaggering smart-ass, too cynical for apologies.
She decided to ignore him.
He picked up on her disdain.
“All right, all right,” he said, winding down his laughter. He sighed and glanced around the room. “Well, since it appears our waiter has forsaken us, I’m off to the bar.”
“Yeah, you seem like you could use more whiskey,” Sawyer muttered sarcastically under her breath—but not quietly enough. Nick offered a bitter grin.
“It’s twenty-five-year-old Scotch, actually,” he corrected, with a condescending wink. “And, an open bar.” He got to his feet, adding as though to gloat, “Cheers. Sorry about your name.”
Sawyer watched him stride away, fuming. It was clear from the way he said it, he didn’t mean sorry I was rude about your name. He meant exactly what he’d said—sorry ABOUT your name.
Asshole.
***
Charles and Kendra came back in time to hear a speech given by one of the firm’s senior partners. The conclusion of the speech was met with an uproar of applause. Then, entrées were cleared, and dessert came out. Sawyer joylessly poked a spoon at the molten lava cake and the miniature football-shaped pill of vanilla ice cream, watching hot and cold ooze together. She had given up on trying to listen to Charles and Kendra’s conversation, let alone join in.
Every molecule in her body was vibrating with irritation and awareness—awareness of swaggering, cantankerous Nick, sitting two bodies away from her, and his smug rudeness. Awareness of Kendra’s laugh, a breathy, tittering sound that rose and fell like a musical scale, floating over the top of Charles’s head. And awareness of Charles…particularly of his turned back.
When it was finally time to retrieve their coats from the coat check and leave, Sawyer was grateful to stand up and walk away from their table, and to be free of the enormous, echoing museum of a restaurant altogether. She was relieved to climb into a cab and hear Charles speak their address.
Hurtling toward home with Charles beside her, she felt her irritation melting away and her body loosening back up. It was just a lousy work dinner; Charles was expected to socialize with his team. She allowed her head to rest on his shoulder, where it was only occasionally jostled as the driver gunned it over the bumpy, potholed streets that led uptown. She smiled when Charles reached for her hand, and waited for him to kiss it, their usual ritual.
But after a moment she realized the kiss wasn’t coming. Charles was staring out the cab window, intensely preoccupied with his own thoughts. Finally, he squeezed Sawyer’s hand and cleared his throat.
“Kendra was able to get an inside scoop,” he said. “It’s looking like they want to push this merger through by September.”
Sawyer picked her head up off Charles’s shoulder, confused. She frowned. “Well, that seems like plenty of time, doesn’t it? It’s still May. We’ve only just hit Memorial Day weekend.”
“Well…I guess that’s my point,” Charles replied. “It’s looking like I have to go into the office this weekend, and to be frank, it’s going to be an intense summer. I won’t be able to take any time off.”
“Oh,” Sawyer murmured, her mind quietly reordering the information.
Charles squeezed her hand again. “If I pay my dues now, we’ll be set later.”
She was quiet.
“I’m only doing this because I want us to have a good life together, you know that,” Charles urged in a kind voice, gently jiggling her hand for emphasis. “It’s for our future.”
Sawyer understood
that the words coming out of Charles’s mouth were right. She wanted to be supportive.
“It’s just that…well, I’ll miss having you around,” Sawyer relented. She sighed, and allowed her head to rest again on Charles’s shoulder. Her nose picked up the scent of tar, tobacco, and chalky smoke embedded in his clothes. She set her mind on ignoring it.
Was Sawyer expecting him to say something in return?
She hadn’t thought so. But as Charles patted her hand, his touch felt strangely distant as he replied, “I know.”
She waited for him to add I’ll miss you, too. Or something about the trips they might plan in the future. But all he said was—“This case is such an amazing opportunity. We might have to go to Chicago for a week or two, though.”
Sawyer understood instantly: by “we,” he didn’t mean him and Sawyer.
He meant him and Kendra.
3.
FRIDAY, JUNE 4
In some ways, it felt like summer had turned up like an unexpected houseguest. Winter had lingered in New York like a bad hangover that year. Balding patches of snow crusted with black city dirt held fast to the shadier, narrower streets of Greenwich Village, all the way through the first week of May. Tiny buds appeared on the trees in Central Park, but remained shut tight against several spells of icy drizzle. The light, too, had clung to its wintery hue, leaning in against the brick buildings and wrought iron fire escapes in a shadowless, bluish haze. But then the seasons had lurched forward all at once, and the cool, reluctant spring had slid into an abruptly balmy summer. The light turned pink; the trees rained blossoms. And just as quickly as the light had turned pink, it turned golden. A canopy of lush, swampy green foliage covered the streets, and the air turned sultry and filled with mosquitoes.
Summertime in New York.
Now, on the first Friday after Memorial Day, Sawyer could feel the office around her mentally bedding down for the drowsy naptime state that the entire publishing industry was about to enter for the rest of the summer. It wasn’t as if business itself would grind to a halt. New beach reads would still come out and line the bookstore shelves like clockwork, every Tuesday. And work would still get done, of course—but mostly by the small army of interns and editorial assistants grinding away at the millstone of entry-level labor. Big decisions were put on hold until the right people came back from Europe or Bermuda…or Vermont, or Maine. As it was, even those who remained in town for the workweek were really only expected to work four days, as Memorial Day also marked the beginning of summer Fridays. ...
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