Page 76 of Seven Summer Weekends

Addison found it a bit rich, given the circumstances of her own love life.

“I bet the man I saw in Montauk, whose whole face lit up when he spoke about you, is working through his shit and coming back. If you give him the chance.”

Suddenly, Addison pictured Ben and Sally knocking on her door at the beach, waiting for no one to answer, and walking home with their tails between their legs. It broke her, totally broke her.

“What time is it?” she asked, not even waiting for an answer.

She barely made the ten thirty boat.

Addison took off her heels and ran to her street in full third-act rom-com mode. She waited till she’d reached the corner ball field to stop to catch her breath so that she wouldn’t walk in like a hot mess.

The street was asleep—literally every house was dark. She didn’t care. There was no way she was waiting until morning. She looked at her watch. It was 11:11 p.m. She made a wish before knocking.

Chapter Thirty-six

Ben was tossing and turning in his lonely king-size bed. He had composed and deleted ten different apologies to Addison since returning to the beach the day before. For an author, he was having an unusually hard time putting his feelings into words. He had gone home to the city to get away from her but, apparently, out of sight, out of mind was ineffective when it came to Addison Irwin.

In the city, the day before, Ben had stopped at Zabar’s to pick up a babka before heading over to Julia’s parents’ place on Central Park West for their sacrosanct Sunday brunch. After her death, Ben had continued the tradition whenever he was in town. At first it was out of guilt, because Julia’s father had asked him to, but later, after Julia’s sister, Nora, had had a baby, it was more about his wife’s adorable little namesake, Juliette.

Ben’s heart had been like a bear in hibernation until the first time he held Juliette. The love he felt for this little brown-haired, blue-eyed baby, who shared Julia’s DNA, poked at the cold, deadorgan in his chest and alerted him that it was still viable. Of course, now, after having met Addison, he was fully aware of the viability of his heart—or more accurately, of the chance of it being broken again. He was sure if that were to happen, he would drop dead on the spot, or worse, have to live once more with the unyielding misery he waded through for so long after Julia had passed.

“Hi, Henry,” he greeted his in-laws’ doorman with a casual wave as he entered their building. Henry, who had been the doorman ever since Julia was a baby, wore his heart on the sleeve of his uniform for everyone to see. He had watched Julia and Nora grow up and was devastated by Julia’s death. He once told Ben that he always thought he would go first. At the time, Ben was in his asshole stage of mourning and had to stick his fingernail into his arm, nearly drawing blood, to stop himself from laughing. He still had more than a little of that “screw the world and everyone in it” sentiment running through his veins, but those feelings that once ruled his every thought were seldom now.

“They’re not here, Mr.Morse,” Henry informed him.

Ben corrected him for the seven hundred thousandth time—“Call me Ben”—before looking at his watch. He was a bit early.

“I have a book, I’ll wait,” he said, moving toward the couch in the lobby.

“No, no. They’re really not here, they’re in Italy. Back Labor Day weekend, I think.”

Ben felt overly embarrassed. He hadn’t been in touch much that summer. It wasn’t unusual to arrive on Fire Island and forget that the rest of the world existed.

“I forgot,” he fibbed.

He took his babka and headed out of the building and then out of the city.

An hour later, Ben parked his car at the Wellwood Cemetery out on Long Island, to visit Julia’s grave. It had been seven weeks since he had been there, a record for him. He wondered if Nora, who often stopped there on the way home from the Hamptons, had visited in between. Each of them gave a beachcomber’s twist to the Jewish custom of leaving stones and pebbles on the graves of their loved ones by placing shells and beach glass on Julia’s headstone instead.

It had become obvious that the two of them were the only regular visitors. Both believed that, while their relationship with Julia had moved from physical to spiritual, it still very much existed.

A few months back, Nora had begun arranging their now massive collection of tiny sea treasures into words. She’d started out with mundane greetings likeHi, to which Ben responded,Yo, and advanced from there to more ghostly sentiments likeboo, to which he addedhoo. It worked well for each of them, sandwiching their sadness with the giving and receiving of laughter.

Today, the new phrase that Nora had last left Ben felt a little judgy. It read:Go away.

Ben analyzed what Nora meant by it and deduced that she thought him too long at the fair. He smiled as he thought it. “Too long at the fair” was the kind of saying that Julia would have edited right out of one of his novels.

Who are you? Mother Goose?she would have teased, before suggesting something like,Her sister thought it was time that Ben move on in life.

“Go away?” Ben had repeated it out loud before contemplating whether he had the patience, and sea glass, to spell out his reply—“Piss off, Nora!”

“Ooh, inappropriate cemetery language, Ben Morse!” Nora scoffed in the flesh. Juliette was strapped into a front carrier, kicking her feet in the air as if they were at a playground. It was the first time Ben and Nora had ever bumped into each other in the graveyard, though both of them carried on like it was a regular occurrence.

“Says the woman holding a baby in a cemetery.”

“Says the man holding a babka, like he is still sitting shiva.”

He laughed. He didn’t know why he had taken the babka from the car, except that he was hungry and thought maybe he would stay for lunch. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d eaten a meal there.

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