Summerland

by Elin Hilderbrand

Genres: General Fiction

Synopsis

A warm June evening, a local tradition: the students of Nantucket High have gathered for a bonfire on the beach. But what begins as a graduation night celebration ends in tragedy after a horrible car crash leaves the driver of the car, Penny Alistair, dead and her twin brother in a coma. The other passenger—Penny’s boyfriend Jake and her friend Demeter—are physically unhurt, but the emotional damage is overwhelming, and questions linger about what happened before Penny took the wheel.

As summer unfolds, startling truths are revealed about the survivors and their parents—secrets kept, promises broken, hearts betrayed. Elin Hilderbrand explores the power of community, family, and honesty, and proves that even from the ashes of sorrow, new love can still take flight.

Release date: June 26, 2012

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 400

Sample

Nantucket: the name of the island brought to mind rolling surf, cobblestone streets, the brick mansions of whaling captains, a battered Jeep Wrangler with a surfboard strapped to the roll bars. It brought to mind cocktail parties on undulating green lawns, investment bankers wearing faded red slacks and dock shoes without socks, a towheaded little girl holding a grape popsicle that dripped down the front of her seersucker dress. Nantucket: it was the land of wealth and privilege, a summer playground for those with a certain prep-school, old-money, I-used-to-row-with-him-on-the-Charles type of pedigree.

So few outsiders (and by “outsiders,” we meant everyone from the casual day-tripper from West Bridgewater to Monica “Muffy” Duncombe-Cabot, who had been summering on the island since she was in utero in 1948) understood that Nantucket was a real place, populated by real people. Like anywhere else, it was home to doctors and taxi drivers and a police chief and plumbers and dishwashers and insurance agents. It was home to mechanics and physical therapists and schoolteachers and bartenders. They were the real Nantucket: the ministers and the garbage collectors and the housewives and the members of the crew that filled in the potholes on Surfside Road.

Nantucket High School had a senior class of seventy-seven students graduating on June 16. This turned out to be one of the first balmy days of the year—warm enough to sit on the football field and wish that you, like Garrick Murray’s grandmother, had worn a wide-brimmed straw hat.

Up on the podium stood Penelope Alistair. Although she was only a junior, Penny had been asked to sing the National Anthem. Hers was the voice of Nantucket, her tone so pure and ethereal that she didn’t need any accompaniment. We mouthed the words along with her, but no one dared to sing out loud because no one wanted to hear any other voice than Penny’s.

When Penny finished singing, there was a beat of thrumming silence, and then we all cheered. The seniors, sitting in neat rows on a makeshift stage behind the podium, whooped until the tassels on their caps shimmied.

Penny sat down in the audience between her twin brother, Hobson Alistair, and her mother, Zoe. Two chairs away sat Penny’s boyfriend, Jake Randolph, who had attended the ceremony with his father, Jordan Randolph, publisher of the Nantucket Standard.

Patrick Loom, valedictorian of the senior class, took the podium, and some of us felt tears prick our eyes. Who among us didn’t remember Patrick Loom in his Boy Scout uniform, collecting money in a mayonnaise jar for the victims of Hurricane Katrina? These were our kids, Nantucket’s kids. This graduation, like other graduations, was part of our collective experience, our collective success.

Twenty-three of the seventy-seven graduating seniors had written a college essay entitled “What It’s Like Growing Up on an Island Thirty Miles Out to Sea.” These were kids who had been born at the Cottage Hospital; they had sand running through their veins. They were on intimate terms with Nor’easters and fog. They knew that north was marked by the Congregationalists, and south by the Unitarians. They lived in gray-shingled houses with white trim. They could distinguish bay scallops (small) from sea scallops (big). They had learned to drive on roads with no traffic lights, no off-ramps or on-ramps, no exits. They were safe from ax murderers and abductors and rapists and car thieves, as well as the more insidious evils of fast food and Wal-Mart and adult bookstores and pawnshops and shooting ranges.

Some of us worried about sending these kids out into the wider world. Most of the seniors would go to college—Boston University or Holy Cross or, in Patrick Loom’s case, Georgetown—but some would take a year off and ski in Stowe, and still others would remain on Nantucket and get jobs, living lives not so different from those of their parents. We worried that the celebration surrounding graduation weekend would lead our seniors to drink too much, have unprotected sex, experiment with drugs, or fight with their parents because they were eighteen, goddammit, and they could do what they wanted. We worried they would wake up on Monday morning believing that the best years of their lives were behind them. The electric buzz they had felt the last four autumns during the first Friday-night football game under the lights, when they ran out onto the field or led the crowd in cheering—those moments were gone forever. Next September the Nantucket Whalers would play again, the weather would be brisk again, the air would smell like grilled hot dogs again, but there would be a new guard, and the seniors who were, as we watched now, walking across the stage for their diplomas, would be old news.

Alumni.

High school was over.

There was a bittersweet element to June 16, graduation day, and as we walked off the field at the end of the ceremony, some of us said we would never forget this one in particular, either because the weather had been so spectacular or because Patrick Loom’s speech had been so poignant.

It was true that we would always remember graduation that year, but not for these reasons. We would remember graduation that year because it was that night, the night of June 16, that Penelope Alistair was killed.

What? the world cried out in disbelief. The world wanted the Nantucket that resided in its imagination: the one with the icy gin and tonic resting on the porch railing, the sails billowing in the wind, the ripe tomatoes nestled in the back of the farm truck. The world did not want to picture a seventeen-year-old girl dead, but the world needed to know what we knew: Nantucket was a real place.

Where tragic things sometimes happened.

The phone had rung in the middle of the night. Nobody, and especially not the parent of a teenager with his own car, wanted to be woken up by that sound. But Jordan was the publisher of the island’s newspaper, the Nantucket Standard, and so the phone rang in the middle of the night in the Randolph household more often than it did in other households. People called with news, or what they thought was news.

Zoe had been known to call in the middle of the night as well, but that was always Jordan’s cell phone, and he’d taken to shutting it off when he went to bed to avoid unnecessary drama. Anything Zoe wanted to say to him at two in the morning would sound better at eight o’clock, once he was safely in the car and driving to the paper.

It was a Saturday night, or technically Sunday morning. It was eighteen minutes past one. Jordan had a pretty good handle on what was happening around the island at any hour of any day. At one o’clock in the morning on a Sunday in mid-June, the crowd would be spilling from the Chicken Box onto Dave Street. There would be a string of taxicabs waiting there, and a police cruiser. Downtown, there would be clusters of people on the sidewalk outside the Boarding House and the Pearl; there would be the inevitable woman who attempted to cross the cobblestone street in four-inch stilettos. An older, more sedate clientele would roll out of the Club Car once the piano player finished “Sweet Caroline.”

Jordan had been at the Club Car with Zoe a few years earlier, on the night they experienced what they now referred to as “the moment.” The moment when they both knew. They knew then, but they did not act. They didn’t act until more than a year later, on Martha’s Vineyard.

The phone, the phone. Jordan was awake. His mind was instantly alert, but it took him a few seconds to get his body to move.

He swung his legs to the floor. Ava was sleeping in Ernie’s nursery with her earplugs in and the white-noise machine going, and the door locked and the shades pulled. And the magic elixir of her nightly Ambien silencing her demons. She would be completely dependent on him to rescue her in the event of a fire.

Fire? he thought.

And then he remembered: graduation.

He raced to the phone. The caller ID read Town of Nantucket. Which meant the police, or the hospital, or the school.

“Hello?” Jordan said. He tried to sound alive, awake, in control.

“Dad?”

That was the only word Jake was able to say. What followed was blubbering, but Jordan was buffered by the knowledge that Jake was alive, he could talk, he had remembered the phone number for the house.

A policeman came on the line. Jordan knew many of the officers but not all of them, and especially not the summer hires.

“Mr. Randolph?” the officer, his voice unfamiliar, said. “Sir?”

She had flaws, yes she did. What would be the worst? There was the obvious thing, but she would set that aside for a moment. She would travel back to before her love affair with Jordan Randolph. What had been her faults before? She was selfish, self-absorbed, self-centered—but really, wasn’t everyone? She occasionally—but only occasionally—had put her own happiness before the happiness of the twins. There was the time she had left Hobby and Penny with the Castles and flown to Cabo San Lucas for a week. She had convinced herself, and Al and Lynne Castle, that she was suffering from Seasonal Affective Disorder. She had lied to Lynne and claimed that an off-island doctor, the mythical “Dr. Jones,” had actually “diagnosed” her with SAD and “prescribed” the trip to Cabo. The lie had been unnecessary; Lynne said she understood, and Zoe deserved a week away, and it would be no trouble at all for her to take care of the twins. Lynne didn’t know how Zoe did it, raising the two of them on her own.

The trip to Cabo had been a onetime thing. (It shimmered in Zoe’s memory: the chaise longue by the edge of the infinity pool, the scallop ceviche and mango daiquiris, and the twenty-seven-year-old desk clerk whom she had easily seduced and slept with five out of the seven nights.) Had she felt any guilt about leaving her children that week? If she had, she couldn’t remember it. And yet in that moment when they both rushed into her arms, shrieking with happiness at her return, she swore she would never leave them again. And she had kept her word.

There had, however, been nights when Zoe opened a bottle of good white Burgundy and watched six episodes of The Sopranos in one sitting while the children ate cereal for dinner and put themselves to bed. There had been other times when Zoe lost her temper with the twins for no reason other than that they were two complex creatures and she occasionally found herself at a loss as to how to deal with them. Zoe had squandered most of the inheritance from her parents on a beachfront cottage, an impractical choice for raising a family. She never exercised, and she was addicted to caffeine. She had uttered the sentence “My husband is dead” to gain sympathy from certain individuals. (The police officer who pulled her over for going ninety miles an hour on Route 3 was one example.)

She had so many flaws.

Zoe liked to think these were, for the most part, hidden, though she understood that among islanders she was considered to be not only a free spirit but a loose cannon. She felt that her parenting was constantly being judged because she was too lax, too lenient. She had been leaving the twins at home by themselves since they were eight years old. When they turned nine, she allowed them to ride their bikes into town. There had been an isolated incident when Hobby rode all the way to Main Street without a helmet. The police chief, Ed Kapenash, had called Zoe at work and told her that by law, he should give her a ticket for allowing her son to ride a bike without a helmet. Zoe replied that she didn’t allow the kids to ride without helmets; since she was at work, she hadn’t been home to see Hobby leave the house without one on. As soon as those words were out of her mouth, she knew how bad they sounded. She thought, Ed Kapenash is going to call Child Protective Services and have the kids taken from me. I am not competent to raise them by myself, after all. Ed Kapenash had sighed and said, “Please tell your children they are never again to ride their bikes without wearing helmets.”

Zoe had left work right that instant. She was all set to punish Hobby, even spank him if necessary, until he told her that his old helmet was too small. Upon investigation, Zoe discovered he was right; there wasn’t a helmet in the house that fit him. He was growing so quickly.

Zoe was sure that the story of Hobby’s not wearing a helmet would spread, and that the citizens of Nantucket would have their suspicions confirmed: she was negligent. Not a helmet in the house that fit the boy! As if that weren’t bad enough, Zoe drove an orange 1969 Karmann Ghia, which she’d bought while she was in culinary school. Although people always honked or waved when Zoe passed, she was sure they were all secretly wondering why she drove two kids around in a car without airbags.

She didn’t buy organic milk.

She was flexible with bedtime and lax about movie ratings.

She allowed the twins to pick their own outfits, which had once resulted in Hobby’s wearing his Little League All-Star jersey five days in a row. It also once led to Penny’s wearing her nightgown to school over a pair of leggings.

But really, how could anyone criticize Zoe’s parenting? She had fabulous, talented kids! The marquis students of the junior class: Hobson and Penelope Alistair.

Let’s start with Hobson, known all his life as Hobby, born five minutes before Penny. He was the reincarnation of his father, also named Hobson Alistair. Hobson senior had been the incredibly tall and commanding man of Zoe’s dreams, a man as big as a tree. Zoe had met him when she was a twenty-one-year-old student at the Culinary Institute of America, in Poughkeepsie. Hobson senior was only six years older than Zoe, but he was already an instructor at the CIA. He taught a class called Meats and was a master butcher; he could take apart a cow or a pig with a cleaver and a boning knife and make it look as elegant as a ballet.

Hobby was big like his father, and graceful and meticulous like his father. Hobby was shaping up to be the best athlete Nantucket Island had seen in forty years. He became the quarterback of the varsity football team as a sophomore; the Whalers had gone 11 and 2 last season and had, most important, beaten Martha’s Vineyard. Hobby also played basketball for the varsity team; he’d been the top scorer since his freshman year. And he played baseball—ace pitcher, home-run king. Watching him, Zoe almost felt embarrassed, as though his prowess were something shameful. He was so much better than anyone else on his own or any opposing team that he commanded everyone’s attention. Zoe always felt like apologizing to the other parents, though Hobby was a good sport. He passed the ball, he cheered for his teammates, and he never claimed more than his share of the glory.

Zoe would overhear the other mothers say things like, “I guess the father was a giant.”

“Are they divorced?”

“No, he died, I think.”

Hobby wanted to be an architect when he grew up. This pleased Zoe. Hobby could be an architect and still live on Nantucket. She was afraid, most of all, of her kids’ leaving the island and never coming back.

“But you can’t force them to stay,” Jordan would tell her. “You know that, right?”

Zoe was certain she would lose Penny. Penny was a gorgeous creature with long, straight black hair and blue eyes and a perfect little nose sprinkled with pale freckles. She had tripped around the house in Zoe’s high heels at age three, had gotten into Zoe’s makeup at age four, and had asked to have her ears pierced at age five. And then, one day when Penny was eight years old, Zoe went to pick up the twins after school, and Mrs. Yurick, the music teacher, was standing out in front with her hand on Penny’s back, waiting for Zoe.

Zoe thought, What? Trouble? Neither of her kids ever misbehaved, so the trouble had to be with Zoe herself. But she wasn’t even late for pickup that day (though she had been late in the past, but never by more than ten minutes—not bad for a working mother). Zoe knew she wasn’t going to win any parenting awards, but she packed healthy lunches for the kids, and when it was cold, she always made sure they each had a hat and gloves. Okay, true, sometimes only one glove.

“Is everything okay?” Zoe asked Mrs. Yurick.

“Your daughter…,” Mrs. Yurick said, and here she put her hand to her bosom, as if she were too overcome with emotion to continue.

What Mrs. Yurick was trying to say was that she had discovered Penelope’s singing voice. A voice as sweet and pure and strong and clear as any Mrs. Yurick had heard.

“You have to do something about this,” Mrs. Yurick said.

Do something? Zoe thought. Like what? But she knew what Mrs. Yurick meant. She, Zoe, the mother of the child with the exceptional singing voice, had to take steps to develop it, to squeeze out every ounce of its potential. Already, Zoe had clocked countless hours at the ball field and the Boys & Girls Club watching Hobby play baseball, football, and basketball. Now she would have to do the same for Penelope’s singing.

And to her credit, Zoe had done it. It hadn’t been easy, or cheap. There had been a voice coach off-island once a week and entire weekends spent with a renowned singing instructor in Boston. Both the voice coach and the singing instructor were wowed by Penny’s talent. She had such range, such maturity. At twelve, she sounded like a woman of twenty-five. She sang “The Star-Spangled Banner” with the Boston Pops the summer following ninth grade. She got the lead in every school musical; she had solos in every madrigal concert.

She was a nightingale.

Zoe wasn’t sure where it came from; she herself could barely carry a tune. Hobson senior had liked music (the Clash, the Sex Pistols), but in their short time together, Zoe couldn’t remember his singing anything but “Should I Stay or Should I Go?” once, at a chefs’ after-hours party.

If Zoe was to be very honest with herself, she would have to admit she wasn’t sure that Penelope’s voice was an unadulterated blessing. At times, Penny seemed almost burdened by it. Her voice had to be cared for like some exotic pet—a macaw, maybe, or a rare breed of chinchilla. Penny wouldn’t eat spicy food or drink coffee; she wrapped her throat in a warm, damp cloth at night as she lay in bed and listened to Judy Collins sing “Send In the Clowns” over and over again. She couldn’t stand smoke of any kind; every winter she begged Zoe to get rid of the woodstove.

It was during the year that Penny turned thirteen, which was also the year that she started her period, which was also the year that Ava and Jordan’s baby died, that Zoe heard her sobbing in her bedroom one night. Zoe knocked, and when Penny didn’t answer, she walked right in. She found Penny sitting on the floor of her closet, hugging herself and rocking in a way that made Zoe think that this sobbing was a ritual that she had missed many times before. Zoe had to pull Penny from the closet and drag her to the bed before demanding a reason for her tears.

“What is it?” Zoe asked. “What’s wrong?”

Penny said that she felt like there was less love in the world for her than for other people. Because she had no father.

Whoa: that answer had leveled her. Hobson senior had died of a heart attack when Zoe was seven months pregnant with the twins. Zoe had given birth to them alone; she had raised them out of infancy alone. She had hunted for a job as a private chef, and an opportunity on Nantucket had fallen into her lap. She had moved to the island, she had bought the cottage, she had put the kids in day care, and she had worked for the Allencast family on upper Main Street. The Allencasts paid her a generous salary that included health insurance and an IRA, they gave her flexible hours, and they introduced her to people who provided her with side jobs. Zoe suddenly had a role on the island: she was an elite personal chef, as well as the mother of two exceptional kids. There were certainly times when Zoe felt like she was doing nothing right, but there were also times when she felt like she was doing something right.

But watching Penny sob and hiccup and fight for breath that night because she had no father made Zoe feel certain she had done nothing right. Nothing in thirteen years.

She said, “I love you twice as much as any other mother loves her child.” She had grabbed Penny around the shoulders and kissed her fiercely in the part of her hair. “Goddammit, you know that, Penny.” She had feared the kids would grow up with an empty space in them. She had worried it would be Hobby who would suffer, but Hobby had always had men in his life—coach after coach, and the admiring fathers of his friends. Jordan was like a father to him, as was Al Castle. But it wasn’t Hobby Zoe had to worry about; it was Penny.

Zoe tightened her grip on her daughter and noticed how Penny seemed to slip through her grasp, like a handful of butter. Zoe had done all she could, but she couldn’t be two people at once.

Zoe took Penny to see a psychologist. It was one more thing for Zoe to fit into her already bursting schedule, one more thing for her to pay for, but it had to be done. The psychologist, a kind, plain woman named Marcy, met with Penny alone half a dozen times before finally talking with Zoe.

“She’s a terrific kid,” Marcy said.

“Thank you,” Zoe said. She smiled, waiting for more. Marcy smiled back, bobbing her head.

“That’s it?” Zoe asked.

“Well…,” Marcy said. She held her palms out, as if trying to show Zoe something—a baby chick or a milkweed pod—that Zoe couldn’t see. “Penelope has a heart made from the finest bone china. Just be aware.”

A heart made from the finest bone china? Zoe thought. That had been one of the rare times when she had craved a partner, a spouse, a husband, someone to turn to and ask, “Can you believe this crap?”

That was the end of Marcy the psychologist. “Just be aware”: ha! Zoe was aware of that and a lot more. She would take care of her daughter herself.

Zoe had heard warnings from other mothers since Penny was a little girl: “She’s cute now, but just you wait!” Something sinister lurked on the horizon; it would roll in like bad weather. Adolescence. But Zoe and Penny had remained close. They were best friends. As a parenting strategy, this was neither popular nor fashionable, but Zoe didn’t care. She loved her intimacy with her daughter. There were nights when Penny climbed into Zoe’s bed and the two of them slept next to each other, sharing a pillow like orphaned sisters. Zoe continually told both the twins, “You can tell me anything.” There would be no judgment, nothing to fear. She loved them unconditionally. “You can tell me anything.”

And right up until the day she died, Penny had told Zoe everything, or what Zoe had assumed was everything.

They flew to Boston, then boarded a shuttle bus that would take them to the international terminal. Jake’s father kept doing the shoulder thing. He didn’t touch Jake’s mother at all, not even accidentally, but that wasn’t unusual. Jake’s mind was spinning and flashing like a police light. Escape! Get back home! He was ten months away from his eighteenth birthday.

The dirt on Penny’s grave was as moist and black as chocolate cake. Grass would grow over it, but Jake couldn’t decide if that would make things better or worse.

Terminal E. Boston to LAX, LAX to Sydney. After that interminable trip, another six-hour flight to Perth. They were traveling to the other side of the world.

Their gate was filled with jolly Australians. Was there such a thing as a national temperament? Jake wondered. Or were there Australians out there somewhere who weren’t open and friendly and affable? Jake’s mother perked up as soon as she heard the accent. It was as if she had been transported into an episode of Home and Away, the Australian soap opera that she watched incessantly on the bootlegged DVDs sent to her by her sister May. She swung her hair around gracefully and said, “I’m going for a coffee. You want?”

“No, thank you,” Jake’s father whispered.

Jake shook his head.

His mother gave him a genuine smile, an event that was so rare it actually spooked him. She was the unhappiest person Jake knew, though she hadn’t always been that way. Before Jake’s infant brother, Ernie, had died, Ava had been normal and momlike, maybe a little annoying, maybe a little uptight and preoccupied with giving Jake a sibling. But there were pictures of Ava in the red photo album where she was making silly faces and kissing baby Jake and Jake’s father. There were pictures of her before Jake was born where she was deeply tanned and wearing a bikini, her golden-brown hair braided down her back. There were pictures of her surfing and kayaking and one of her leaping in midair, getting ready to pummel a volleyball. Jake used to stare at these pictures. That was the woman he wanted to claim as his mother. But since Ernie had died in his crib at eight weeks old, Ava had become jagged and shrill half the time, and mute and despondent the other half. Anger and bitterness—which were really sadness and deep, deep grief, his father said—lived inside her like a monster. Jake’s father pleaded with Jake to try and forgive her for the way she sometimes acted. But it was too much to ask, Jake thought. Jake had grown calluses over his nerve endings where his mother was concerned.

Ernie had a tombstone in the cemetery, just as Penny now did. Jake’s mother tended the plot at Ernie’s grave; she bought bouquets of supermarket flowers every week. When Ava was home, she sequestered herself in the room where Ernie had—for no good or explicable reason—stopped breathing. Ava either watched episodes of Home and Away or reread passages of her favorite book, which was, shockingly, not an Australian classic but rather that most American of novels, Moby-Dick, because her father had read it to her when she was a child. Ernie’s grave, the soap opera, Moby-Dick: these comprised 90 percent of the life of Ava Randolph. It was the other 10 percent, her interactions with the outside world, that glinted like shards of broken glass on the side of the road. There was her anger, which could take anyone’s eye out like an errant arrow. And there was her venom, which she seemed to save solely for Jake’s father.

Ava was present for the important stuff at school, such as Jake’s induction into the National Honor Society and the final night of the musical. This past year, the musical had been Grease, with Jake playing Danny and Penny playing Sandy. His mother had taken a shower and brushed out her hair. She had put on makeup and perfume. She had entered the auditorium with her head held high and her eyes defiant, his father trailing three steps behind her like a loyal servant. Jake had peered at them from behind the heavy stage curtain. He could hear the audience murmuring: Ava Randolph was out. Sightings of her were as rare as comets, and everyone knew why, so everyone kept a respectful distance—except Lynne Castle, his mother’s only stalwart friend. Lynne plopped herself down next to Ava and kissed the side of her face as though nothing were amiss, as though Ava weren’t capable of lashing out even at her, or of standing up and walking out of the auditorium for no reason at all.

Ava had seemed to enjoy the musical. She had clapped at the end, and when Jake and Penny took their final bows, she had joined in the standing ovation.

The only person who sought out Ava Randolph’s company was Penny. Some afternoons, after Jake had stayed late at school working on Veritas, the student newspaper, or at a Student Council meeting, he would come home to find Penny in his mother’s room, lying across the foot of her bed, the two of them watching Home and Away, Ava dutifully explaining the intricacies of the plot lines. Jake would be lying if he said this hadn’t worried him.

He’d said to Penny, “You don’t have to hang out with my mother, you know.”

And Penny had said, “Oh, I know. But I like her.”

Like her? Jake loved his mother—she was his mother, after all—but even he didn’t like her. He was afraid of her. On her best days, she was like a ghost that lived in the house with his father and him, occasionally haunting the dinner table and eating a few bites of whatever they were having. (They ate a lot of pizza and Thai takeout.) Ava floated around the house—mostly in the predawn hours—dealing with the cut flowers for Ernie’s grave. She slept alone in Ernie’s nursery.

Jake didn’t think his parents ever had sex. They didn’t touch; they barely even spoke, though there were nights when Jake would be awakened by the sound of the two of them screaming at each other.

Now, in Terminal E, Ava reappeared with her steaming latte and her sesame bagel. Jake checked with his father to see if Jordan found this behavior as remarkable as he did, but Jordan was staring into the middle distance, thinking about something, and Jake knew not to interrupt him. Used to be that he’d be thinking up headlines or lead-ins, or maybe trying to figure out how to justify raising ad rates or how to fire the sports writer, or where to find a new sports writer from among such a limited pool of candidates. Or he’d be pondering the death of newspapers in general. But what would he be thinking about now? He was thinking backward and not forward. Jake could tell by the glazed look in his eyes.

Ava