Page 21 of Summer Light on Nantucket

“Iglowed?” Blythe was amazed.

“You’re still glowing,” Celeste said. “Good night, sweethearts.” She walked over to her friend and was quickly chatting and laughing.

Blythe wrapped her arm around her youngest child’s shoulders. “It’s just you and me, babe.”

For a moment, mother and daughter waited and watched as several families with young children passed by. A small girl squealed with pleasure as her father swung her up onto his shoulders. A boy of seven or eight gabbled excitedly to his mother about the sailboat they’d just come from. A little girl in a blue gingham dress and braids skipped along, each parent holding a hand.

Blythe sighed, remembering the days when her children considered her their hero, their best friend. The days when Miranda was small and adored them both. And as the two oldest children grew more independent and less adoring, along came Teddy and then Holly.

One day when Teddy was three, he told Blythe that he was hercuddlemum.

“Where did you learn that word?” Blythe had asked her little boy.

“I didn’t learn it! Imadeit! I made my own word!” Teddy had been wide-eyed with astonishment at his achievement.

Blythe remembered all the nights when she and Bob lay in bed sharing anecdotes about their children, their magical children. After a bath, when their hair was damp and fragrant with baby shampoo and they were wrapped in towels, when they giggled as Blythe played a game on their toes as she dried between them—such small things! Such small moments! Now she knew they had been some of the happiest moments in her life. And back then, when she was tucking her children into bed, she was probably thinking about whether or not she would still fit into her blue dress for the party she and Bob were going to that weekend. Her mind would be in two places at once, and often it still was, and sometimes she yearned to be back in that world, but then she’d remember how exhausted she’d been, trying to decidewhether Daphne’s rash required a visit to the doctor, or whether she should talk to Bob about buying a new dishwasher.

Beside her, Holly was chattering about the land turtles her grandmother had spoken about at dinner. “Land turtles are a brilliant idea, because they could be kind of like taxis for the sea gerbils, when they come out onto the beach to explore.”

Blythe wanted to show her daughter that she was as interested in sea gerbils as Celeste.

“Maybe they could meet a seagull and he could fly the sea gerbils around the island,” she suggested.

Holly broke into a fit of giggles. “Mom! That’s crazy. Gulls would eat sea gerbils!”

“Right.” Blythe pretended to laugh, but really, in a way, her feelings were hurt. If Celeste had made that suggestion, she thought, Holly would have loved it! But Blythe realized how silly it was for her to have her feelings hurt over a discussion of sea gerbils.

Then Blythe looked up and saw, backlit by the outdoor lamps, the first man she had ever loved.

—

Aaden Sullivan. Her high school crush. Even after she’d married Bob twenty years ago and loved him as well as she could, she’d disciplined herself to ignore any thought of Aaden from her mind. She hadn’t looked him up on any social media or googled him. She hadn’t asked anyone about him. She hadn’t attended any of her high school reunions, but that was because she’d always been pregnant or rearing children. (And she’d always wondered why people said “rearingchildren” because that word brought to her mind an image of a horse on its hind legs, its forelegs waving threateningly in the air, about to come down on you and slash you or wheel around and gallop around the field in a fit of wildness. Which, she realized, could be a description of what some days with children felt like.)

“Mommy?”

Blythe looked down at Holly, who was no longer babbling on about sea gerbils.

“Why aren’t we walking, Mommy?”

Blythe tried to laugh charmingly, in case Aaden heard her. “Oh, sweetie, I think there’s a man out there who I knew so long ago in high school.”

“Is he a nice man?” Holly asked. “Because you look weird.”

“Well, thank you so much for pointing that out,” Blythe said, making a face at Holly.

Holly giggled and made a face back. Usually, because she was eleven, she considered herself too old to act silly, but clearly Holly was as elated as the rest of them to be on the island at the beginning of summer, plus, she was alone with her mother, which didn’t happen very often.

Blythe’s mind was rushing with those thoughts when she heard a man say, “Blythe? Is that you?”

She knew that voice so well. The huskiness, the bass tone, the slight accent, woke up parts of her anatomy she’d forgotten she had.

“Aaden! My goodness! What a surprise!”My goodness?she thought. She sounded like someone’s Great-Aunt Myrtle.

Aaden wore tennis whites. Blythe couldn’tnotnotice his spectacular muscles and his perfect tan. She felt shivery all over, like a debutante being approached by a prince.

He walked up to her and kissed her quickly on her cheek. He smelled of warm cotton and sunshine.

“And who is this lovely person?” Aaden asked, smiling at Holly.

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