Page 5 of Same Time Next Summer

“Sam’s a human corpse,” says Gramps, blowing his nose again.

Granny turns toward the water. She’s focused on a very specific spot. “Is that a dolphin or a person?”

While Granny sees pretty well for eighty-four, you wouldn’t exactly trust her to land a plane. I get up to have a look. The water is calm. It’s a paddleboarder moving parallel to the horizon, a big hat on his head. And I know. I cantell from the way he moves. Even though the Wyatt I knew didn’t paddleboard. I don’t even think that was a thing back then.

My heart rate quickens and my breath gets shallow as we stare. My memory fills in his features, his wide-set brown eyes. The way his hair curled up on the left side of his widow’s peak. The furrow of his brow. I wonder if he’d be doing that now, concentrating on the water.

“It’s him,” I say almost to myself, but of course to Granny because I need her help. “He feels like a ghost.”

Granny puts her arm around me. “And I bet he’s still holding a candle for you too.”

“Oh for God’s sake,” I say, wiggling out of her embrace. “No one’s holding a candle for anyone. That was over a decade ago, we were kids.”

“Oh my,” Gramps says. “Strong feelings.”

The two of them. Honestly the cutest people I’ve ever wanted to strangle. “Okay, enough. We’re going to pretend he’s not here and focus all of our energy on the man I’m actually marrying. The good one. The doctor.”

Jack sleeps untilnine, which surprises me. He’s normally up and at the gym by seven, but the garage apartment is dark and he slept right through. Jack works out four (never five) days a week in our building gym, alternating between push day, pull day, and leg day. On the other days we have Fritz come to our gym with high-intensity workouts that are designed to confuse our muscles into shape. It all feels completely counterintuitive, and sometimes I feellike my muscles are more than confused, but it’s an efficient workout and something we do together. Two nights a week, Jack plays tennis with his cardiologist friend Elliot, and Gracie comes over to eat ice cream for dinner.

I’m happy to skip the gym, because it’s beautiful on the deck, eighty degrees with the sunlight feathering the water. There’s a breeze coming through the dunes that hits me each time my skin starts to feel too warm. The breeze on my skin reminds me of something I don’t want to remember. I’m starting to feel the pull of the ocean, and on a day like this, I can’t imagine spending ninety minutes in a basement gym confusing my muscles.

I take Jack into town for lunch, and we share a lobster roll and a Caesar salad at Chippy’s. We walk down West Main Street afterward, and I point out the ice-cream shop where we used to go in the afternoons and the library where I worked that summer. Oak Shore has known me at every stage of my life—when I was seven and got scolded for running into Ginnie’s Bakery without shoes, when I was twelve and rode with the boys in the back of Wyatt’s dad’s truck in the Fourth of July parade, when I was sixteen and Mrs. Barton called to me at the end of every shift, “Time to go, your Wyatt’s outside.”

We walk by the Old Sloop Inn, but we don’t go in because my mom’s going to make us do a deep dive there tomorrow. “Rustic,” Jack says. Everyone knows “rustic” is nice for “needs paint.”

“Well, yes. It’s as old as the town.”

“I can’t really see you standing in a gown in front of that place.”

I look at the inn for a few seconds. “Neither can I. Let’s just look at it for my mom, then we can take her to Connecticut, and she’ll love it.”

“I don’t know why I was picturing the Hamptons.”

“You’re not the first,” I say.

Something’s off as we meander through town, specifically the fact that no one’s meandering. There’s a disproportionate number of people who aren’t in bathing suits and cover-ups. They’re wearing messenger bags and moving quickly.

Jack notices it too. “What’s with all the press?”

“Is that who they are?”

“Looks like it. I’ve seen three guys with camera bags. Think they heard Samantha’s back for a wedding venue showdown?”

“Ha.”

A smiling older woman approaches, and it takes me a second to recognize Mrs. Barton, our librarian. She drops her grocery bags and pulls me into a hug. “Sam! I can’t believe it! I heard you were engaged! Is this him?”

“I’m so happy to see you.” I hug her and breathe her in. If it’s possible to smell like books, she smells like books. “Yes, this is Jack.”

“So handsome! Your mother tells me he’s a doctor!” says Mrs. Barton, because maybe she’s lost her filter and her command of punctuation.

“It’s nice to be back,” I say. “We were just noticing all the press, what’s that about?”

“So much excitement. There’s an amateur music festivalat the Owl Barn this weekend. Lots of up-and-coming musicians are here for it. Usually happens in Newport, but your Wyatt told someone about Oak Shore, and here they are! Great for the local economy, though no one comes to the library.”He’s not my Wyatt.

3

I’m tired when we come back from the commotion of town, and Jack wants to read. Jack and I read a lot. He picks the books, literary fiction mostly, though I have veto power. We read a lot about historical figures, fictionalized to include children and relationships they never had. There are ghosts sometimes, and chapter to chapter, I have a hard time knowing who’s talking, but by the time I’ve finished I feel like I’ve accomplished something. Sometimes we buy two copies and read the same book at the same time. It’s a particular level of intimacy, reading a book with another person. Today we are readingWetlands of Westerleigh, and I’m forty-three pages behind where Jack is. We sit, feet up, on the back porch with our books and iced teas. I pretend to read.

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