Page 85 of 28 Summers
He tilts in the seat and the kayak wobbles. It’s Stacey Patterson from Goucher, Coop’s old flame.
“Hey?” she says. “Jake? Jake McCloud?”
“Go, go, go,” Jake whispers, but Mallory doesn’t need any prompting, she’s paddling with swift, strong strokes while still managing to appear unconcerned.
Jake hears the boy say, “Who’s that, Mommy?”
“No one, I guess,” Stacey says. “Let’s catch a fish.”
Close call. They get back to the cottage and Jake tells Mallory that the fisherwoman was Stacey from Goucher.Remember she met us that night at PJ’s?Yes, Mallory remembers, of course. Then they sit in silence for a second, thinking the same two things.
It would have been bad had they not escaped.
It’s a miracle something like this hasn’t happened before.
Because of the Stacey Patterson near disaster, they decide it’s best if Mallory goes to the fish store to pick up the lobsters by herself. Jake misses her the entire time she’s gone, though it gives him a chance to poke around the cottage unobserved. He could also do this while she’s out running in the morning but usually he just sleeps with his face buried in her pillow, inhaling her scent. The reason he comes to Nantucket every year is to see Mallory, pure and simple, but there are so many other things he loves about this weekend, one of which is three days of unstructured time. There are no meetings, no calls, no agendas, no parties, no lunches, no daughter to drop off or pick up. He and Mallory have the things that they do, but they’ve adjusted these with age and circumstances. Maybe she feels as bereft about going to the fish store alone as he feels about having to stay behind, but she understands. She doesn’t want to be found out any more than he does. He’s safe with her.
His “poking around” includes studying the books on her bedside table—The Paris Wife, State of Wonder—then opening her closet and looking at her clothes. He pulls out a blouse, then a dress. He imagines her wearing them to school. All of her students, male and female, must be in love with her; he can’t imagine they wouldn’t be. The night before, he asked her if she was dating anyone, though he didn’t admit to seeing her wearing the navy sweatshirt on Facebook and wondering whose it was. Mallory said there was no one special. Jake couldn’t help himself; he asked if there was anyone “not special,” and Mallory confessed that she and Brian from Brookings had had a bit of a text flirtation that ended when Brian sent her a picture of his penis. She said she burst out laughing, then deleted the entire text thread. He’d sent ten follow-up texts asking if he’d crossed a line or offended her or if maybe it wasn’t “big enough,” and Mallory finally answered that she was forty-three years old, too old to be sexting, and when he responded that there was “no such thing as too old for sexting,” she said she thought they’d better stay friends.
Texting is dangerous, they’ve both agreed. It’s tempting, oh, so tempting, to shoot Mallory a message every time he’s thinking of her, but they both know people who have been discovered this way—entire affairs, secret relationships, double lives, et cetera, revealed on a cell phone bill. Jake sends Mallory only two texts a year—one at the end of August to let her know when he’s arriving and one when he’s in the rental Jeep on his way. She doesn’t text him at all.
They eat the lobsters on the beach and wash them down with a bottle of very good champagne—this year, vintage Veuve Clicquot that one of her students gave her as an end-of-year gift. The champagne loosens him; it sends glitter through his veins. They finish their lobsters and fall back on “their” blanket—it’s the very same blanket they’ve used since the first year—holding hands, balancing plastic cups of champagne on their chests.
Are they both still spooked by the proximity of Stacey Patterson? Yes! When Jake opened his laptop before dinner, he heard an unfamiliarping!that turned out to be a Facebook message from Stacey:I could have sworn I saw you kayaking on Nantucket today. Are you here, or am I starting to lose it in my old age?Jake thought about responding withStacey, you’re starting to lose it,but then he decided it was best not to respond at all.
“What if we went away next year?” Mallory asks. “What if, instead of here, we went to Saskatchewan or Altoona? Someplace nobody knows us, someplace we can walk around in public?”
“There’s always a risk,” he says. “Besides, I like it here. This is the home of our relationship. And Ursula has accepted my trip to Nantucket as a matter of course. She doesn’t question it.”
“She might someday.”
“She might,” Jake says. He pours them each more champagne. It’s better to acknowledge the possibility of Ursula finding out than dismiss it. At this point, Jake is far more concerned about Bess discovering his secret. She’s at the age when she’s just becoming aware of boys, and Jake would like her to believe they are trustworthy. A better man might decide to give up the relationship with Mallory out of respect for his daughter. But Jake finds himself unwilling—he would like to say “unable,” but he knows better—to do that, and so should Bess ever find out, he will admit to his failure. He conducts himself like a prince the other 362 days of the year in hopes that this will balance out his weekend “away” in some karmic sense.
They finish the champagne, then head to bed, hand in hand. They are living inside a magic bubble, the kind that doesn’t pop.
Sunday, it drizzles, and so Jake feels okay about driving up to Great Point, though he wears a baseball cap. Once they pass the Wauwinet gatehouse, they don’t see another soul. The sky is moody, striated “fifty shades of gray,” Mallory quips, and the water is a steel-blue plate. The eelgrass sways; the gulls dip and swoop unpredictably in the wind.
On the way home, they stop to get the Chinese food. Mallory goes in alone. Jake sinks in his seat, pulls down his cap, waits for her to pop out of the restaurant holding the hood of her raincoat closed so it doesn’t blow down in the wind. She has been inside for only three or four minutes, but she grins at him with so much enthusiasm when she reappears that he starts laughing. If he ever has to explain himself to Bess, he will describe how good it feels to know there is one person on earth who is always happy to see him.
Summer #21: 2013
What are we talking about in 2013? The Boston Marathon bombing; Lean In;the fiscal cliff, North Korea; Roger Ebert; “I’ve never seen a diamond in the flesh”; Chris Kyle; Snapchat; the Met Ball; One World Trade Center; Danica Patrick; Frank and Claire Underwood; Sandra Bullock; John Kerry; Aaron Hernandez;The Goldfinch;James Gandolfini.
Every day when Ursula wakes up, she checks her work phone (a BlackBerry), then her personal phone (the iPhone 5s), and then she gets on the exercise bike with her iPad and reads four newspapers—theWashington Post,theNew York Times,theWall Street Journal,and theSouth Bend Tribune.She would like to say she reads all four cover to cover, but she doesn’t have time. While Congress is in session and she’s in Washington, Ursula rises at a quarter after five and her mind is still half asleep, so who can blame her for skimming the headlines first? She normally ignores the Metro section of thePostand theTimesbecause the murders and house fires of DC and Flushing, Queens, are low on her list of priorities. But on the morning of October 23, 2013, Ursula intentionally checks the Metro section of thePostbecause she has heard the most outrageous rumor. She heard from Hank Silver, her former boss at Andrews, Hewitt, and Douglas, that A. J. Renninger is considering a run for mayor of DC.
Ursula feels this must be bad information. AJ—Amelia James Renninger, the six-foot blonde who transferred to the New York office and managed to escape the fate of nearly everyone else in the firm on September 11 by virtue of her eyebrow appointment—is now back in the District, working as a “freelance consultant,” which could mean any number of things. Ursula has heard bits and pieces about AJ over the years, none of it terribly positive. She suffered from PTSD after 9/11 and took a leave of absence from the firm even though they’d moved to midtown, and who could blame her? But then, apparently, she got addicted to something, probably Ativan, and there was a period when she dropped off the grid. She resurfaced back in DC a year or two ago and now she’s entering the political fray.
Mayor of DC? Ursula can’t think of a more thankless job. She remembers that AJ grew up a military brat, her father a lieutenant colonel in the navy, so she doesn’t have a hometown, per se, and Washington is good at absorbing people.
Ursula doesn’t see any mention of the mayoral race in general or of AJ specifically, though her attention does snag on a headline that reads “Baltimore Couple Killed on Beltway.”
…pulled over to change a flat…wife stood beside her husband, presumably to alert oncoming traffic to his presence…both husband and wife hit by tractor-trailer…neighbor confirmed the couple was on their way home from a performance at the Kennedy Center.
It was probably Yo-Yo Ma,Ursula thinks. She had wanted to take Bess but her schedule had been too busy.
And then Ursula sees the names:Cooper Blessing and Katherine (Kitty) Duvall Blessing.
Ursula stops pedaling. Cooper Blessing is dead? And who is Kitty? The newest wife? Ursula rereads the article and only then sees the ages—Cooper Blessing, 73, and Kitty Blessing, 72—and she realizes it’s not Cooper himself but Cooper’s parents. Ursula has met the elder Blessings three times; these were people she knew, or sort of (she’s not sure she could have picked them out of a crowd). They’re dead. Killed on the Beltway.
