Page 1 of Summer After Summer

CHAPTER ONE

June 2023

On the day I leave Wes, I get into my car in a state of shock and drive out of New York without looking back.

It took longer than it should have to move out of our apartment, but it feels like less time than it takes to get to the Hamptons on a Friday in late June.

Though it’s been years since I’ve made this journey, I should’ve remembered how the snarl of the Long Island Parkway makes my heart race and my palms sweat against the steering wheel. How the unpredictable stops of the other cars mean that I’m constantly slamming on the brakes and skidding to a stop just before I hit their bumper, my eyes racing to the rearview mirror to see if I’m about to get rear-ended.

I should’ve left earlier, but it didn’t work out that way. Instead, I’m caught with all the other hopefuls, stop-starting our way to the first weekend of summer, trying not to cry.

My car is packed to the rafters with my things. I didn’t have time to sort/keep/toss; once I’d made the decision to go, I just needed to bounce. So, I threw as many of my belongings as I could into a set of suitcases I’m pretty sure are mine, and a few large black garbage bags, and stuffed them into my car. I don’t even know if I have everything I need for the summer, but I’ll figure that out when I get there.

Home.

I’m on my way to Southampton to help my father clear out the house my family’s owned for generations. I grew up in that house, but as much as I love it, I haven’t lived there for more than a summer since I went away to college.

The sale has been a long time coming, my father’s money draining away like a leaky boat. He’s never been good with money, though it’s his “job” to manage the family’s generational resources. Until the markets collapsed in 2008, he’d run the enterprise well enough to keep the roof intact and the grounds tended. Since then, there’ve been more and more financial hiccups, like the aftershocks of an earthquake. One year, the taxes weren’t paid. Another, the power got turned off for a week. You get the idea.

When asked what he was doing about it, my father would always stare off into the middle distance, as if he was trying to recall something from long ago, and not the five “Final Notices” from the power company sitting on his desk, unopened. Then he’d change the topic, telling some story about a friend he’d run into in town and how old he looked, how very run down.

But expounding on the neighbors’ physical deterioration didn’t solve the problem of too much property and too little cash flow. We’d been trying to convince him to sell for years, until the bank took the decision out of his hands. The sale was negotiated swiftly and without any involvement from me at my request, the bare details sent in an email. The closing is at the end of August. My father and all of the family’s possessions need to be out of the house by then.

My older sister, Charlotte—who still lives at home, but never made any effort that I’m aware of to stop the financial slide—called two weeks ago, in a panic, to tell me that he hadn’t even started packing.

“What am I supposed to do about it?” I asked, holding up a finger to Justine, the student I was working with after school in the music room.

“Come,” Charlotte pleaded. “Help.”

“Take over, you mean. Get it done.”

“Well …”

This is always the role I play in the family, even though I’m the middle child. I’m supposed to be the irresponsible one, but somehow, after our mother died when I was fourteen, it was suddenly my job to make sure the school fees got paid and we all had uniforms that fit when the semester started.

“I’ll help,” she said, but I doubted it.

“What about Sophie?”

“She’s got the kids. She already complains constantly about how they’re too much for her.”

I couldn’t help but nod in agreement while Justine pounded the piano keys in annoyance. She was eight and still thought the world revolved around her. My sister, Sophie, is the baby of the family, and she’s clung to that role fiercely, even though she was the first to marry and the only one of us to have kids. The truth is, I’m not close to either of my sisters, but that’s as much my fault as theirs.

“I can’t just drop my life, Charlotte. My husband. It’s going to take months to clean out that house.”

She ignored my reference to Wes. “Doesn’t the school year end in a couple of days?”

“So?”

“Well …”

I stared at the colorful wall, painted in a mural of dancing instruments. “Can you please say what you mean instead of speaking in ellipses?”

Charlotte sighed. “You know you’re the only one Father listens to. And you don’t want everything to end up in a dumpster, do you? Not all of Mom’s things.”

Now I wanted to pound the piano keys. Charlotte can be manipulative when she wants to be, which is more often than she should. “You’d do that?”

“Why should it be my responsibility? Just because I live here? He’s your father too.”

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