Page 148 of The Book of Summer

“Very funny.” Cissy rolls her eyes. “No, I think she was more of a ‘count your blessings’ sort, grateful to get one out of the mess.”

“That sounds like Grandma Ruby all right.”

Cissy crawls into bed beside her daughter, taking the space Evan left behind. Bess glances out the window. She notices Chappy out there, pacing by his car, checking for messages on his phone.

“Cis, I’m sorry for getting mad at you about Chappy,” she says. “I don’t completely understand the… arrangement… but I’m glad he’s made you happy. In your backward sort of way.”

“I love him, Bessie. I really do. I’ve loved him for a long time, practically my entire life.”

Cissy shakes her head and more tears slide out.

“I had such intense shame about my feelings. Sometimes I still do.” She laughs dryly. “We’ve been together fifteen years, but I loved him for ten years before that.”

“Then how come you never left?” Bess asks. “If you weren’t in love with Dad? I’m trying not to be judgmental about the situation, but it’s hard. Why not get divorced like a normal person?”

“Don’t misunderstand, a divorce isnotthe easy way out of a marriage.”

“You don’t have to tell me that.”

“I suppose I don’t.”

Cissy stares down at the bed, rubbing a corner of the thin white hospital sheet between her fingers. When she resumes speaking, she does not look up.

“My father left my mom once,” she says. “When I was little. I don’t remember the coming or the going, but he returned eventually. Because of me. And even though this meant he didn’t get to lead the life he wanted, I’m glad for it. Even now. It’s selfish and awful but I’m grateful he didn’t disappear.”

“I don’t know the situation with Grandpa Sam,” Bess says, though now she thinks that maybe she does. “But even if you got divorced, Dad would’ve been involved. He wouldn’t have just vanished. It’s different nowadays. And your situation is… not theirs.”

“You’re right. But it’s the entire idea of him, and me, and you guys. ‘Family’ is such a powerful word. Whenever I’d be on the verge of filing papers, I’d picture all of us congregating in that big old house on Baxter Road, and it was too damned sad to imagine arriving in fragments.” Cissy frowns. “I was so heartbroken after your grandmother died. And I was already heartbroken enough in my crummy marriage. Then this man came to the funeral. A navy fellow. He and my father wereveryclose. For decades.”

Cissy makes a face as if she might be ill.

“Anyway, I went to Chappy,” she said. “And then we… Well. You know. Afterward I felt horrible. I told him no way, never again, it was a onetime mistake. I spent the next five years denying my feelings, until Chappy finally called me on it.”

Bess thinks about how miserable she was at Choate after Ruby passed, how she begged her mom to let her come home.

“I’m not even living in Boston full-time anymore,” Cissy had said.

It was the first Bess had heard of it but she didn’t have time to contemplate the new arrangement due to her vast despair.

“I don’t care!” Bess had shrieked, ever the teenager. “I’ll live in Sconset then!”

“You’re not graduating from some rinky-dink, two-bit island school!” Cissy insisted. “So buck up! High school problems are not real!”

It was a smack in the face when Bess was so down, when she felt so far on the outside she might as well have been sitting in the street. She didn’t belong at that school. Palmer tried to bring her into the fold but standing beside her cousin highlighted every ugly and unkempt part of Bess. She was a ferret to Palmer’s unicorn. In trying to help, Palmer made it worse.

Despite Bess’s desperation to leave, Cissy refused, and so Bess took matters into her own hands. Now she considers the possibility that her mother’s veto had less to do with academic merit and more to do with Chappy Mayhew. Perhaps if Bess had stayed at Choate, Cissy wouldn’t have put him on hold for all those years.

“Oh, Bess,” Cissy says. “Don’t give me that look.”

“It’s not what…”

“I did confess to your father, in a bumbling sort of way, but he said he didn’t want to know. And he had plenty of his own… Listen, sweetheart, Dudley is an amazing father.”

“Amazing? I wouldn’t gothatfar.”

“A great father. But he’s a god-awful husband. I won’t go into details. But you and I, we have more in common than you’d guess.”

Bess nods. She thinks of everything behind the veil of cheery Christmas cards and whimsical summer homes. Long-term affairs, in one example. Hookers, in another. A lifetime spent in the closet, if what’s been said about her grandfather is true.

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