Page 22 of Seven Summer Weekends

“Don’t mind him. He’s not a morning person,” Shep advised.

“That’s a generous way to put it.”

He had come prepared and handed her a black plastic lawn bag.

“He takes some getting used to—your aunt adored him, you know. She hoped you two would be friends.”

“Friends? You know, he never even introduced himself to me,” she complained as she shook the bag open, trying to exonerate herself for any rudeness on her part.

“He wouldn’t even know how—he hasn’t been himself for a long while.”

She didn’t care to ask him to elaborate. Whatever this guy was going through, it was inexcusable to first play her, then berate her. Shep here was the one who had lost his wife, and even though he couldn’t keep her name straight, he was at least being nice to her.

They finished cleaning up, and Shep showed Addison how to secure the cans with bungee cords—assuring her this would never happen again if she did it correctly. The sky turned dark, and a hankering for a cup of warm tea replaced her yearning for iced coffee. She washed up, put the kettle on, and brought her now favorite mug—the one from the Taj Lake Palace in Udaipur—out to the studio to work on her painting of Paresh. Once she was there, the meditation corner beckoned.

She sat down with her back against the wall and took a few sips of her tea before deciding to give it a go on her own. That man, Ben, had really taken away the zen that Paresh had left her with, and she was determined to get it back.

Putting the tea down, she swung one leg over the other like a yogi and practiced meditating. And while her mind ran to the things she needed to do for the renters (remake the beds, bakescones), how they were faring at work without her (she had received more than a few texts asking for her help, and Emma reported in almost daily) and replaying the incident(s) with her neighbor (jerk), she managed to reel it in each time and spent a few minutes emptying her cluttered mind. She was left with a single thought.

Addison stood, went inside, and called the real estate agent.

“I want to sell.”

When she hung up from the lengthy discussion, she was determined to make a dent in cleaning out the house. One step back into the studio, though, and she put it off.

Gicky had left what looked to be a thirty-by-forty-inch blank canvas on the easel, a photo of a beach scene taped to the top. The scale of the project made Addison wonder about her aunt’s state of mind before her death. It was a big canvas. Had it been sitting empty for months, or had Gicky set it up recently? If Addison had been living with Gicky’s diagnosis—leukemia, the bad kind—she would have set up something half the size. She bet that her aunt would have described the sidewalks as wide rather than saying the streets were narrow. It amazed her that life had not squashed Gicky’s natural optimism, and Addison made a silent pledge to be more like her, or at least to try.

Despite the overcast day, the light in the studio was fantastic. Addison thought about abandoning the painting of Paresh and taking a stab at the beach scene, but the vat of clay in the corner had been calling out to her ever since she arrived. Sculpting had always been Addison’s true passion. She even came home one winter break from college with an entire “I am a sculptor” speech memorized. It didn’t go over well. Her parents refused to pay for the rest of school unless she majored in something employable.Her mother, especially, could not bear her daughter being in the same field as her “wretched” sister-in-law. When Addison won the most prestigious award in the department for sculpting, her mother hardly acknowledged it. Addison had felt so guilty about winning it. She knew her peers were pining for the illustrious honor to jump-start their careers as artists, while for her it became a symbol of what could have been.

Paresh had spoken of Gicky describing sculpting as a form of meditation—how while her hands were busy, her mind couldremain quiet.Addison placed a block of clay on Gicky’s turntable and kneaded it with her hands until it became malleable. She felt a connection while working the mud-like material between her fingers, relishing the texture and weight of the clay in her hands in a way that was almost intimate.

In her first attempt at forming an object (since college, that is), Addison created a small bud vase. When she was satisfied with its shape, she meticulously carved ridges on it with a scalpel-like instrument she found sitting in a jar on Gicky’s table, as slowly as a surgeon performing surgery. She had been collecting cockle shells on beach walks, and they inspired the ridged pattern she imprinted in the clay. The cockles brought up a precious memory of collecting shells with her grandfather on the shores of Lake Michigan. He had taught her that each line across the width of the shell represented one growing season—not unlike the rings of a tree. So, a mollusk in a shell with two bands across it would have died somewhere between its second and third birthday. Addison had purposefully never googled this. She didn’t want to be disappointed in him again, if it turned out not to be true. One betrayal was enough.

Addison became lost in it, lost in the clay, lost in herself. She wondered if she would ever be found.

It was nearly dinnertime when she realized she hadn’t even eaten lunch.

The crappy weather held on the next day, and Addison continued to sculpt. Again and again, she became completely absorbed, losing track of time and the world around her. She felt a connection with the clay as she brought it to life that she had not felt in a long while about anything. Even creating her most successful campaigns, with their endless hours of planning and perfecting, did not compare to working with this lump of clay, giving it shape and texture and detail. How had she ever let this all slip from her hands?

Chapter Twelve

Katie and Jessie jumped on board the Long Island Rail Road leaving Pennsylvania Station for Bay Shore with seconds to spare. The train, headed for the southwestern end of Long Island, was packed with twenty- and thirtysomethings fleeing the city for the summer weekend. The women were lucky to find two seats together.

It’s a cruel secret, never mentioned by the real estate agents of NYC, that once you can finally afford to move out of your parents’ house and into an apartment, with its first month’s rent and last month’s rent and broker fees, and your half of a Craigslist couch, you have to start saving for a summer share.

When the temperature hits ninety, many postcollege, gainfully employed young New Yorkers do their best to hit the road—or the rails, as the case may be here. Jessie and Katie were of that breed. They had saved all year for a quarter summer share in the Hamptons. So far, they had only been once and had an OK weekend. They had spent a ton of time wondering whereto go and how to get there. They were excited to try Fire Island, known for its simpler choices and casual vibe.

Katie and Jessie were childhood best friends who now shared a Bookstagram account on social media. They called themselves the Spice Girls and only featured books with spicy sex scenes. At this point, they had over fifty thousand followers, making their account one of the most popular bookish destinations on Instagram. Sometimes they posted book covers, and sometimes reviews, but mostly whole paragraphs taken from novels, both old and new, with steamy sex scenes.

The two twenty-five-year-old women had booked their weekend on Fire Island after a chance encounter with a fragile-looking gray-haired lady waiting in line in front of them at a book signing at the Union Square Barnes & Noble, months before. Aside fromOn Fire Island, the title that came with the ticket to meet their favorite author, the two women each carried a bag filled with Benjamin Morse’s backlist—hoping for autographs on all. That’s how they got to talking with the gray-haired lady—she had originally been in line behind them.

“You should go ahead of us,” Jessie had insisted, adding, “We are gonna take a while.” She opened up her tote bag to flash her collection with pride. The woman obliged.

“We’re hoping he will sign them all,” Katie interjected before motioning to the line that was snaked in and out of the aisles on the third floor of the massive bookstore.

“I’m sure he will—he’s a sweet boy,” she said with more than a smidge of familiarity. They were so obviously starstruck; it amused the old woman.

“He’s my neighbor at the beach,” she admitted before reachinginto her purse and pulling out a card and handing it to them. It read:Gicky Irwin. Artist.

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