Page 161 of The Book of Summer

As if he can read her thoughts, and hell maybe he can, Evan turns the mike over to the real vocalist and jumps off the stage. He saunters up while Bess stands dumbed and speechless.

“So,” he says. “Better than Coolio?”

“Uh. Yeah.”

“I do love you, Bess,” he tells her. “It’s not just the night or the moment or the really good booze.”

“I love you, too,” she answers. Then pauses. “Although I am on Vicodin. So who knows?”

Evan throws back his head and laughs.

“Oh, Lizzy C. A piece of my heart indeed.”

You know you got it if it makes you feel good.

64

The Book of Summer

Ruby Young Packard

June 1, 1948

Cliff House, Sconset, Nantucket Island

The house is open, the flags are raised, and the ferries from New Bedford and Woods Hole are running regularly once more. All that and I have three new bathing costumes, my favorite featuring blue-and-white stripes and close-fitting shorts. It’s just as Mother said, the summer will always come.

They’re expecting 40,000 visitors on Nantucket this season, a record by far. Folks are ready for vacation and now we’re only a ninety-minute flight from New York. There’s now no place on earth unreachable if you have but ten days to spare. Sconset doesn’t seem so isolated anymore.

Not that the trains are suffering, not by a mile. Grand Central reported last weekend was its busiest in history. I’m sure more than a few bodies were bound our way, judging from all the gruff city voices I heard on Main Street. Admittedly I am often vexed by the tourists, even though I’m technically an off-islander myself. Not that I feel like one. Baxter Road is more my home than Commonwealth Avenue, no matter how many days I spend in each.

The roads in town are jammed with cars, from new and sporty to old-fashioned and high-slung. That the gasoline stockpiles are being released is quite evident and already biking has fallen out of fashion. Cycling is back to being a “roughing it” kind of pastime. Or as the New York Times proclaimed, “a holiday sport suited only to those hard of muscle and with dogged determination.”

In addition to prepping the house for the season, we’ve spent the past few days golfing and sunning and sailing, too. I never understood my little brother’s obsession with the sport until I tried my hand for real. And wouldn’t you know? There is a certain splendor to sailing, to gliding upon God’s great sea using nothing but rags and a chunk of wood. The simple beauty of the sport is not unlike Sconset itself, with its gray shingled homes huddled together in quiet, restrained dignity, sturdy against the winter winds.

But it’s winter no more. Outside glassware clinks and the waiters scurry about. We’re holding a fête tonight, the first of the summer. Our guest list tops one hundred and every single person RSVP’d “yes.” Old friends and new. Nantucket and Boston and New York, even Washington town. Three cheers for summer. May it be made only of long days.

With love and hope,

Yours truly,

Ruby

65

RUBY

Summer 1948

They stood by the swimming pool, or the three-quarters pool that it was.

“It won’t be done by the party,” Ruby noted.

She was in her bathing costume, with a mallard-green scarf wrapped around her shoulders. Her feet were sandy. They’d just come up from the beach.

“This is not good at all,” she said.

They were supposed to have 150 guests and their yard was torn to bits. Not the brightest notion to start a large construction project during the busiest season in a decade. Had Mother been alive she could’ve told Ruby that.

---