Page 10 of The Summer We Started Over

“Sure. Sometime.”

Eddie thought he was going to kiss her, but he hurried down the steps, into his truck, and tore out of the driveway, leaving her standing there alone.

She took a moment to regroup. Her emotions were all over the place.

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Three years ago, their father suddenly bought the small farm on Nantucket and moved them there. The clear, clean air of the small Berkshire Mountains town where they’d lived for years had seemed to Eddie to be clogged with the gray of ashes. When her father told her they were moving, she understood why.

Eddie knew that their father hoped this would be a way to distance them from the residence of a tragedy, to live where no one had known her brother, where they could start their lives anew.

Eddie had quit her city job to stay and do what she could to help. Barrett had been about to graduate from college. She needed support, stability. Eddie had gone through the packing of what they wanted and the trucking off to a charity shop of what they didn’t want. Eddie had been the strong one for the family, what was left of the family. She’d bought a used four-wheel drive Jeep. She put delicious food on the table for them at normal hours and did the laundry and threw out the flowers that had been sent and later wilted and died.

And this house, this farmhouse, such an odd place on a resort island, like a Laura Ingalls Wilder book set in Saint-Tropez, had been clean and bright and welcoming. The floors were wide-board pine, freshly stained to a butterscotch shine, and the windows were large, letting the sun brighten the air and everything in it. The rooms were spacious, some wallpapered in pleasant old-fashioned flower designs, all of them with freshly painted marshmallow white trim. The kitchen had a large porcelain sink and a Garland six-burner gas stove from the fifties. They put a large, oval-shaped rag rug in the middle of the room with a new oak kitchen table with six matching chairs.

The property had been excitingly strange, not at all like the stony Berkshire Mountains, and not like Nantucket’s golden beaches, but rich with thick grass laced with wildflowers, and next to it, at the end of the driveway, a small, handsome barn. It had a loft full of hay so sweet-smelling Eddie wanted to chew on it, and a floor of large unpainted wide boards that made a satisfying clopping sound when you walked over it.

She’d stayed for almost a year. She bought a used Jeep for herself and gave her newer Jeep to Barrett. She painted rooms, washed windows, bought groceries, and cooked dinner. She worked at the bookshop six days a week. Sometimes, she missed New York and her life there. Still, she went to the beach with Barrett, and to the movies, library lectures, concerts, any event where her sister might make friends. She tried her best to coax their father into joining them, but he remained in a kind of walking coma, dealing with the loss of his son and his wife by arranging books on the shelves in an order that only he comprehended. Eddie knew they had to give him time.

She’d met Jeff.

And now, here she was, after two years away. She took a deep breath and walked toward the house.

three

Eddie tried the front doorknob, and of course, it turned and opened because no one ever locked it. She pulled her suitcases behind her and went into the front hall. The house was quiet. A new bookshelf had been added. It was filled with books, and it ran the length of the hall, and all the books, she could tell, were her father’s. Leaving her suitcases—she’d take them up to her bedroom later—she walked toward her father’s study. For a moment, she stood in the open door and took it all in.

The large room was filled with light from the two long windows in the back wall. Her father’s desk and his sagging old leather reading chair stood where they always had been, and an old table was next to them, piled with books. All the walls were stacked with books, so that the windows were framed by shelves and gave a sense of being recessed. In the past two years, her father had obviously acquired morebooks, and she could tell he’d arranged them in a sensible order—biographies here, literary criticism there, novels leaning dangerously in the corner.

Her father stood in the midst of it all, holding a book in one hand and muttering to himself. He wore baggy khakis, an old college sweatshirt, and sneakers. He hadn’t shaved for a few days and his blond-brown hair was still a shaggy, handsome mop.

“Hi, Dad,” Eddie said.

Her father pushed his reading glasses up to his forehead and smiled. “Darling, have you seen my biography of Charles Lamb?”

Alarm lanced Eddie’s heart. Was her father senile at fifty-five?

“Dad?”

“Oh, wait,” William said. “Eddie! That’s you! You’re home! I didn’t know you were coming home!” He set down his book, crossed the room, and hugged her. “Let’s go to the kitchen, have some tea, and catch up. Now where’s your sister? She’ll be thrilled to see you.”

Relief washed through her. Her father wasn’t senile. He seemed almost like his old self, kind, loving, enthusiastic about life. She followed him into the kitchen, where the counters, the stove, the round oak table were shining clean—Barrett’s work. In the middle of the table was the antique ironstone bowl, filled with bananas, apples, and pears. Barrett’s touch there, too. In the midst of a house full of books and confusion, the kitchen was serene and welcoming.

William filled the Keurig with water and popped a pod in. “These are recyclable,” he told Eddie quickly, before she could ask. “Ha!” he laughed. “Look out the window.”

Eddie leaned over the porcelain sink and saw the red barn and the long spill of land beside it, rolling slightly all the way to the woods that separated it from the winding road through the new housing development. The horse was trotting, shaking her mane, chasing after Duke.

Before Eddie could speak, William said, “It’s a game they play. Duke nips at the horse’s heels and runs while Duchess chases him.Don’t look so worried. They like each other. Think of it as occupational therapy.”

“That’s great,” Eddie said. “I’m glad the horse has finally made a friend.”

“You want a drop of milk in your coffee, right?” William opened the refrigerator door and took out a carton of milk.

“Yes, thanks.” Eddie sat at the table, pleased that her father remembered how she liked her coffee and wishing she could ask him to remove his reading glasses from his forehead. The lenses caught the light and reflected it haphazardly across the room. It was unsettling. But she didn’t want to say one negative thing during this precious time with her father.

William put her cup in front of her and sat at the table with his own cup in his hands.

“Now, tell me everything,” he said. “First of all, why are you here? Are you still working for that writer? What’s she like? Her books seem…lighterthan what I would choose to read.”

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