Page 16 of The Summer We Started Over

At least she had his attention. She picked up another book. “The Magnificent Chicken?How does that fit into your subject?”

William scratched his head. “I haven’t decided how to work that in yet, but I’m sure many poets, or their wives, kept chickens. Also, we live on a farm. I think we should have chickens. Think of the eggs.”

“Really.” Eddie skewered him with her gaze. “We have a horse. We have a dog. Do you ever feed them?”

“Well, no. Barrett does that.”

“Ever take Duke for a walk?”

“Sometimes.”

“What does Duchess eat in the winter?”

William looked nervous. “That’s not in my purview.”

“Yourpurview. Dad, you aren’t teaching any longer. You’re—”

She paused. She almost said,You’re using books to hide from the world.

But whyshouldn’the want to hide from the world? Three years ago, his son died and his wife left him. He’d probably used up all his optimism and energy moving them here from the town where they’d remember Stearns at every street corner, school, and café. Her father had done what he could. He’d done all any father could.

“I need to think about this,” Eddie said.

“That’s nice,” William replied, and returned to his book.

Eddie went to the kitchen and sat at the table, lost in memories.

—

The Grant home in Williamstown was a handsome brick house in a charming neighborhood with winding roads and mature trees. Theirfather taught English at a small but prestigious college in a storybook town. Their mother was beautiful and unhappy. She didn’t enjoy being a mother, which she considered menial work. She was dissatisfied with her social position in the college town and always angry because her husband earned so little money. In desperation, she decided to be an artist, and set up a studio in the attic.

The three Grant children were stairstep children: first Eddie, next Stearns, one year younger, and Barrett, one year after that. They were a close little trio, because they seldom saw their mother, which was okay. Their presence never made their mother happy. Once, when she took them shopping for school shoes, she paused in front of a store window displaying a satin dress with a rhinestone buckle.

“I would look stunning in that,” she told her children. “And if I didn’t have to buy so much for you three, I could buy it.” Her shoulders drooped as she left the window.

The children were stung and anxious. Was their mother going to cry here in the mall?

Sabrina didn’t cry. But she stared down at their faces and said, “Don’t ever have children. They will ruin your life.”

After that moment, after they had their school shoes and had returned to their house, after their mother escaped to the attic and her art, the children understood what would help make their mother happy.

Eddie became the taskmaster who told them to take baths, do homework, brush teeth, eat vegetables. Barrett and Stearns grumbled at her, but they always did what she ordered. Eddie worried about them constantly. Why was Stearns spending so much time alone in his room? Why couldn’t she make better dinners than boxed macaroni and cheese? One morning, on her way out the door, Barrett said she needed a parent’s signature on a form giving permission for a class trip. She’d forgotten to ask her father, and he was at the college now. Would Eddie get in trouble for faking their mother’s name? (Shedidn’t.) But it was an enormous responsibility. She never wanted to do it again.

Thank heavens for the Fletchers.

The Fletcher family moved into the large, classic Victorian next door with a turret, a wraparound porch, and stained-glass windows. They were wealthy and glamorous. Mr. Fletcher was an officer in a bank. Mrs. Fletcher sold real estate and drove a dark green MG convertible. When Sabrina Grant saw it, she burst into tears.

“I’ll never have anything like that,” she cried.

Stearns had tried to console her. “I’ll buy you one when I’m older, Mom.”

“Sure you will,” his mother had said bitterly and went up the stairs to the attic.

The Fletchers had one child, a gorgeous little girl with blue eyes and a waist-long tumble of white-blond hair.

Dove.

Dove Fletcher was a year younger than Eddie and a year older than Barrett, exactly Stearns’s age. She was magic. It wasn’t just her enormous house where the four played hide-and-seek for hours, or the little cottage her parents had built especially for Dove in the back garden. It was her imagination, her sparkling energy, her happiness. The rainiest day was a delight for Dove. She invented entire worlds where a cup became a chalice and an umbrella became a sword. Inside with Dove, Eddie, Barrett, and Stearns became superheroes with capes and masks, or doctors with a ward full of sick baby dolls, and it wasn’t just that Dove’s parents had given her doctor kits, it was the stories Dove invented, enclosing them all in their own realm. Outside with Dove, they slipped like spies through the neighborhood, leaving secret codes inside tiny porcelain boxes they’d purloined from the Fletchers’ attic and chalking signs on the trunks of trees. In the winter, they made snow people and an entire snow house for the four of them to live in, even though it was a tight squeeze and snow drifted onto their noses.On summer nights, when they crawled into the backyard tent Stearns had put together, they ate marshmallows and ginger snaps and made fun of their teachers and planned to run away from home, all of them together, in a VW bus like the one inLittle Miss Sunshine. Stearns liked to make graphic novels about the four of them. They all had enormous heads and tiny stick bodies, but it was amazing how he could make each face look like the real thing. He gave them adventures. All four of them riding a missile to Mars. All four of them floating in space with cosmic vacuum cleaners that sucked the excess carbon out of the Earth’s air. All four of them in a personal submarine blasting down to the ocean floor to meet creatures never known before to mankind. He gave each character a name. Eddie wasNice. Barrett wasFunny. Dove wasBeauty. Stearns wasGenius. The sisters agreed that Stearnswasa genius, and for the first time they became aware that Stearns had special feelings for Dove.

---