Page 28 of Summer Romance

“I think you two should consider keeping the family home until Cliffy is twenty-two. It’s disturbing to come home from your freshman year in college to a new place. From what I can tell an eighteen-year-old is still a kid.”

I have removed and replaced the cap on my pen about a thousand times. I am watching Pete watch Ethan. I am also reading his mind. Pete does not like being made to look like a jerk. I sometimes think the only reason he coaches the girls’ soccer team is so that he gets credit for participating and to distract onlookers from the fact that those are literally the only hours he spends with them now. I also know that Pete’s parents divorced and sold their house as soon as he left for college and that he was totally traumatized by it. He knows that I know this.

“Twenty,” he says. And we agree.

After an hourof reviewing bank statements and filling out forms, Ethan and I shake hands with Lacey, nod to Pete, and make our way downstairs and onto Delaney Street. It’s July–in–New York hot and humid, and I stand for a second and let the sun warm the air-conditioning off my skin.

“Feel good?” he asks. He takes my hand, gives it a too-quick squeeze, and lets go.

“Yes.”

“That was oddly satisfying.” He smiles at me. “I don’t know why, but it’s super important to me that Pete thinks I’m completely insane.”

“Well, you’re off to a good start, and thank you for saving me half the gold coins. I think I knew they were mine, but I’m not sure I would have said anything.”

“Why not?”

It’s a bigger question than I feel like exploring at noon in the middle of town. “I don’t know. Maybe I’ve gone quiet.”

“I’m really sorry about your mom. I remember her. And how you guys were together.”

“You do?” I look up at him and have the feeling she’s here with us, like he’s summoned her. I wait for her to say something in my head, but she doesn’t. What I really want, I realize, is to hear someone say her name.

“I remember you guys at the diner, and seeing you around town. Always talking about something, and I’d think, wow, who talks to their parents that much?”

I smile. Me, that’s who. We were so close. “It’s been really hard.” People are walking past us on the sidewalk andI’ve backed up to the hardware store to get out of the way. Ethan leans against the wall next to me. “We lived right there,” I say.

“Right where?”

I motion to the small yellow door across the street, next to the dry cleaner’s.

“I didn’t know that,” he says.

“Yeah, my parents moved into that apartment intending to buy a house and fill it with a million kids. It ended up just being me, and they divorced when I was little, so my mom and I stayed there.” I don’t say “seven miscarriages” because that always makes people uncomfortable.

“Then we were practically neighbors, both living in town.”

I give him a look that saysnot exactly. “Yeah, we liked it. That’s why we were always at the diner. I worked at the dry cleaners sometimes. I helped the tailor.” I don’t say how much I love ironing, because that always makes people think I’m crazy.

“And then you moved back and bought a house and filled it with a million kids.”

“Yes,” I say. “I did.” I look up to the picture window above the yellow door. Beyond it was our little black kitchen table with two chairs. She worked at that table, sketching her designs on four-by-four pieces of card stock. At the end of the day she’d secure her stack with a binder clip, and I’d either never see the designs again or one of them would be the featured jewelry item at Macy’s that season. She never seemed to care much about which designs sold, she just loved the process and formed her own opinion about whatwas good. “Alice!” she’d call from that little table. “I made a frog! Doesn’t he just sparkle?” My mother believed that when something came together in exactly the right way, it sparkled. She thought this of some of her designs, most of her big ideas, and all of my kids.

When I don’t say more, he lets it go. “What do you want to do now, besides clean out my entire house? I own you now.” He takes my hand, just barely, and runs his fingertips over mine.

This makes me smile because I’m actually dying to go through that house and make her open-house ready. It’s my favorite kind of quiet, satisfying work where you see your progress as you go and you know when you’re done. My boss used to tell me that I was the only person he ever knew who saw beauty in accounting, but I loved it for both the process and the moment that everything balanced. The thing about motherhood is that day to day there’s no measurable outcome. The mark of a successful day is just getting everyone back in bed.

Before I can stop myself, I reach out and brush my fingertips over his again. I love the way that whisper of a touch moves up my arm.

“Let’s start with lunch,” he says.

We sit atthe bar at the diner and wait with serious faces for Frannie to come out and see us. “Oh hey, sis,” Ethan says when she comes out of the kitchen.

“Good God, Scooter,” she says, placing a stack of pancakes in front of the man at the other end of the bar andwalking toward us. “Tell me you didn’t wear that getup to the meeting. Please.”

“He did,” I say. “And he’s a damn good lawyer too. Saved me thirty thousand dollars’ worth of gold coins. And got me two more years in my house.”

Ethan seems very pleased with himself. “Who knows, maybe I’ll wear the whole Carmen Miranda costume to our next meeting.”

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