Page 3 of Same Time Next Summer

“Thanks. We’ve got a lot going on, that’s for sure. Now come out back. We have a slew of old people with serious opinions about how close you should be sleeping to my daughter.”

My grandparents arethe best, hands down. They’re straightforward and familiar and not at all afraid to tell you what’s up. When they came from Pennsylvania to visit us the first Christmas after Jack and I moved in together, Granny was quick to criticize our muted, minimalist apartment: “I’ve seen prisons with more personality.” My parents gasped, and Granny and Gramps laughed and laughed. That’s how it is with both of them, machine-gun fire of thoughts and opinions and then a big laugh that tells you none of it mattered at all.

We find them on the porch, and they cry out, “The bride!” in unison. Someone has given Granny a kazoo, and she blows it.

My mom pours mai tais, which seem out of place but, I admit, are delicious. Each one is adorned with a handmade cocktail umbrella, found sticks glued to scraps of homemade paper. Jack immediately plucks his out and checks his glass for debris. I don’t know how to tell him that there’s a little bit of sand in everything at the beach. Also, glue.

There’s a toast and a lot of small talk, and I take in the welcome beauty of the Atlantic Ocean. Just beyond the porch, the thick run of dunes leads to a stretch of beach that leads to the shore. The sun is low and casts speckled light on the water. The gulls soar and dive as the waves roll in, one after another, reaching out and pulling back in an infinite loop. The endlessness of it all overwhelms me. I feel like the ocean should have stopped and changed when I did.

“Your boyfriend is here,” Granny is saying.

“Mother!” my mom scolds, and looks at me. The wordsregister first in my chest, which is suddenly tight and hot. She can’t mean Wyatt.

Gracie sits up straight.

Granny smiles over her nearly empty mai tai. “Oh, you know what I mean. Your old flame, Wyatt.” Then to Jack, “She lost her mind over that one.”

I am staring at a spot on the table, just beyond my hands, where my mom has placed a citronella candle in the shape of a conch shell. I’m afraid the heat from my chest and the panic in my eyes might melt it into a puddle of wax. “What do you mean ‘here’?” I ask without looking up. “Like on the East Coast? Or at the house?”

My mother briefly looks guilty. “Well, I meant to tell you. Right there at the house. I guess Marion didn’t rent it this summer, because he’s been there for a while.” She stirs the pitcher of mai tais and refills Jack’s glass.

“You know Wyatt?” Gracie asks me. Gracie’s asking me about Wyatt, and it throws me like a wave after a hurricane. Everyone is looking at me for a response. There is a loud ringing in my ears and the heat in my chest has spread to my face. Jack knows the story. And he knows how incendiary all of this is.

“Well, I’ve heard all about Wyatt,” Jack says. “The whole reason I became a doctor was so that I could compete with a guy with a guitar.” Nervous laughter titters over empty mai tais.

“I see him all the time,” says Gracie. “He lets me watch him surf. And he’s teaching me to play ‘Leaving on a Jet Plane’ on the guitar. He has a bunch of guitars up there.”

“Up where?” asks Jack.

“In the treehouse,” says Gracie. This makes Jack laugh, and I try to make sense of it. There is not one funny thing about that treehouse. Or Wyatt. Or the fact that I’m thirty years old and feeling panicked about seeing the guy who broke my heart when I was a teenager.

Wyatt’s dad helped his brother, Michael, and him build that treehouse in the oak tree between their pool and the dunes when they were ten and twelve years old, spending days at junkyards and shipyards all over Long Island. While I can remember falling in love in small moments all over the beach and while floating on the ocean, I lost my virginity specifically in that treehouse. At night, after my house went quiet, I would sneak downstairs and out the back door and through the dunes to the rope ladder that led to Wyatt. He’d say, “Hey, Sam-I-am,” and he’d kiss me, and I’d wonder if there were any two people in the world who were more right together.

The treehouse would last forever, Wyatt once told me, because there were no walls in the front or back. A storm would blow right through it. The tree itself grew to form a bit of a back wall, giving us privacy in case Marion and Frank happened to be peering out their bedroom window with binoculars. But the front was wide open to the ocean view, Wyatt’s beach chair next to mine. Eventually, just a jumble of bodies and blankets.

My chest is still tight, and I cannot wrestle my face into neutral. I study my drink and use my handmade umbrella to try to fish a tiny piece of pineapple out of my mai tai. I haven’t seen Wyatt since I was sixteen, haven’t spoken to him since I was eighteen. It was teenage infatuation, andDr. Judy even went so far as to call it addiction, but it’s been a long time and I’m a rebuilt grown-up person with a real live fiancé and a career. I recently contributed to a 401(k), for God’s sake. I can’t imagine seeing Wyatt now, introducing him to Jack and asking about life in Los Angeles.So hey, how’d that all work out?Wyatt is a locked-away memory of a time I don’t want to go back to and a person I can barely remember being. And somehow he’s thirty feet away, right next door. I’m not sure I would have come if they’d told me he was here. Which probably explains why they didn’t tell me.

“You know Wyatt,” I say to Gracie. Just to confirm. Just to nail down one single fact that will keep everything I know from blowing away with the next breeze off the ocean.

“Yep,” she says. “He knew who I was right away.”

Travis and Hughare late for dinner, but we’ve all had enough mai tais and cashews not to care. “Nice slacks,” is the first thing Travis says to me. I haven’t seen him since Easter, when he commented that I was dressed like a Delta flight attendant.

I hug Hugh before I say, “They’re called chinos in the catalog. I think they’re even called ‘favorite chinos.’ They’re what people who don’t surf all day wear.”

“Ah, I didn’t know they made catalogs just for tax accountants,” Travis says.

“Cute. How far did you have to chase the Hawaiian Punch guy to get that shirt?” I ask, and toss another cashew into my mouth. This is our love language, but Jackthinks Travis is threatened by how much I’ve made of my career when all he does is surf and pick out fabrics all day. Jack’s being overly loyal, because Travis and Hugh actually do really well. They have a booming architecture and design business in town, Travis being the aesthetic director and Hugh being the actual architect. My parents have expected their engagement for longer than they’d been expecting mine.

My dad barbecues sausages, and my mom’s made a salad and scalloped potatoes. We eat at the long table on the back porch, as usual, as the sun puts on a dramatic show of setting. I can do this for three days. As long as I can avoid Wyatt. He’s not going to just walk up onto our deck, and I could put Gracie on lookout and let her run interference for me. I take in my immediate family, my grandparents, and my handsome fiancé. We’ve sat like this dozens of times since Jack and I met, mostly in my parents’ cramped dining room in the city. But it’s different here, like a step back in time to who my family used to be.

“So have they started selling you on the Old Sloop Inn yet?” Hugh asks. “The garden can accommodate two hundred people and the food’s great.”

“That’s what we’re here for. To check out all our options,” Jack says, and gives my hand a squeeze. My mom smiles at the sight of our hands together.

“I think you’re going to love it. And it has thirty guest rooms for out-of-towners,” says my mom. And then, “Of course your parents would be welcome to stay here,” which stops my heart. Jack’s mom does not make her own paper. In fact, her paper comes in a lovely box with her initialsprinted in navy blue in the upper left-hand corner. Like a normal person.

Travis shakes his head. “I think it’s unbelievable that you haven’t nailed this down yet. I figured you would have laid all this out in a spreadsheet the day you got engaged.”

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