Page 72 of The Book of Summer

“Yeah, well, whenever I’ve known ‘exactly what I want’ it turns out I’m dead wrong.”

“Just do it,” Evan says with a smile. “Have that baby.”

“Oh, sure. It’s so simple.” Bess snaps. “New person! Appear!”

“I didn’t say it’s simple. But, hell, you have a life, a career. You’re solid as hell.”

“I’m not the least bit solid,” she says. “I can’t even control Cissy!”

“Pretty sure you’re not expected to mother your own mom. What are you afraid of, Bess? Why can’t you raise a child on your own?”

“Oh, I certainly could,” Bess says with a sigh. “In theory. There are far more scandalous circumstances than a thirty-four-year-old professional, well-educated single mom. Like being a forty-year-old professional, well-educatednon-mom.”

“So what’s the problem?”

“I don’t…” Bess sighs again. “I don’t know if I have it in me.”

“Of course you have it in you!”

Evan’s voice has always been so persuasive. Deep, powerful, as if coming from his lungs, or his heart. And those earnest brown eyes, like precious heirlooms she left behind. Bless it, Bess is falling for his old shtick. God, she hates when he does this. It’s so much easier to remember Evan Mayhew as the smug jerk from high school.

“I appreciate your faith in me,” Bess says, a little primly. “But this isn’t some novel where a major debacle turns out for the best and they all live happily ever after.”

“Why not?”

“Don’t get me wrong. It’s great to fantasize about,” she says. “If this was a novel, and you know peoplelovebooks set in Nantucket, but if my life were a novel, I’d chuck my ED job in San Francisco, move on-island, and become a general practitioner dealing with jellyfish stings and wacky boating mishaps.”

“Cobblestone burn,” Evan adds.

“Fishhook removal.”

“You’d have a hard time competing with Tim, though. I can’t see you doing house calls for destitute drug addicts who pay in stolen guns. Or for John Kerry.”

“Dr. Lepore can have his house calls. Last time my mom went in for a tick check he was complaining that he’s perennially short-staffed because no one can stand this island for long. It takes a certain kind of weirdo to be cut off from civilization year-round.”

“Yes it does,” Evan says, brows peaked. “The kind only found in books.”

“Exactly. Anyhow, I could do the easy, in-office problems, and save the zany, contrarian cases for Lepore. Together we’d solve Nantucketers’ health woes and I’d raise my baby with Cissy at Cliff House. She’d watch him, or her, while I worked. My child would write her first words in Sarah Young’s Book of Summer.”

“Don’t forget… you’d also fall in love with your high school beau.”

“Oh, God!” Bess says, and laughs. Her eyes at once well up. “What an idea. However, I don’t think my French teacher from Choate lives around here.”

“That’s harsh, Codfish.”

“That’sharsh? Um, what was that personal philosophy of yours? Never make the same mistake twice?”

“Touché,” he says, and shakes his head. “It’s my only rule.”

“Swell.” Bess finds herself frowning. “Yet another reason this proposed novel could never materialize. Not to mention, Cliff House is now more cliff than house. So there’s a big old hole in the middle of my plot. Literally.”

Evan nods as tears glint on his lashes. Is hecrying? Or about to? Bess pushes the thought away.

“So,” Evan says, and hops up onto his feet. He brushes off the back of his jeans. “I should take you home. Any more beer for me and you’d have to drive.”

“Wouldn’t be the first time.” Bess smiles. “But I have a bike, remember?”

She points toward the one she found in Cissy’s shed, blue and rusted near the handlebars.

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