Page 4 of The Book of Summer

And so Bess started just saying Cissy. It was a joke, but then it stuck. Her mother didn’t seem to mind, or even notice.

“Cis, let’s rent a car,” Bess says. “Obviously no one’s keen on picking up a couple of grifters and this isn’t exactly a thoroughfare.”

“Have a little patience, why dontcha? Honestly, Bess.”

Bess sighs, though a smile slips out. God, she adores that crazy woman. Bess fixes her eyes on the horizon. A few cars motor by, then nothing. She grows hot and impatient. How much longer will they wait? Alas, fortunately or unfortunately—Bess cannot decide—a white, wood-paneled truck appears in the distance. It approaches and then rolls to a stop.

“Is that…” Bess says.

“Just friggin’ fabulous.”

Cissy drops the bike and then the suitcase.

“Go to hell, Chappy!” she screams, and raises both middle fingers.

“Mother!”

“Polished as ever,” the man says, and leans across the passenger seat to leer at them through the open window. “What a mess, eh? Well, Bess. Welcome home.”

“Thanks,” she mumbles.

“Here, hop in.”

“This is fucking perfect,” Cissy grouses, but she throws the luggage and bike into the back nonetheless. “I guess you’re the only option, on account of my daughter’s baggage situation.”

Baggage situation, Bess thinks with a smirk. How painfully appropriate.

“Are you even allowed to drive?” her mother asks the man, their neighbor Chappy Mayhew, as they rumble away from the airport. “Don’t you still have that DUI conviction on your record?”

Chappy laughs and shakes his head. Bess can’t help but smile. Yep, she’s in Nantucket all right. Or, as Cissy would say, it’s “just fucking perfect.” Welcome home indeed.

3

Saturday Afternoon

“So how ya been, Doc?” Chappy asks as they splutter toward Baxter Road, Bess wedged between him and her mother.

Cissy has her eyes closed and her head pressed against the frame of the car. She keeps emitting small burps, as if she might be sick.

“Fine,” Bess answers curtly. “I’m just dandy.”

“So what brings you to our lovely island all the way from California? Far as I can remember, you haven’t been round since your wedding. And that was, what? Two years ago?”

“Four,” she says.

Chappy whistles.

“Wow. That’s a long time away from your mom.”

“Give it a rest, Mayhew,” Cissy says. “She visits us in Boston and I go to San Francisco at least once a month.”

“You do?” Bess says, and cranes her neck to look at her.

“Anyway, mind your own damned business.”

“Wouldn’t that be a treat?” he says with a snort.

It would be tough for Chappy to mind his own damned business, given that he lives in the gray saltbox directly across from Cliff House. Within shooting distance, as Cissy would say, with some degree of cheer. Chappy’s been their neighbor since before Bess was born, and even if they didn’t live so close, Cissy Codman is impossible to ignore, with that incessant biking, her town-meeting intrusions, and the general propensity to raise hell.

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