Page 3 of Our Last Vineyard Summer

God, she sounded desperate. Is this what her mother meant years ago when she’d called Betsy her neediest child?

He shook his head at her. “Roberta and I are going to give it another shot,” he said.

“You said she was selfish and unreachable.” He’d also said the divorce would be finalized any day now; a lie, clearly.

“People change.” Andy lowered his brows, then pulled Betsy up to stand so they were facing one another. His unshaven face, clean-lined and freckled, was inches from hers, and he kissed her forehead with tenderness. “I’m sorry, Betsy. You’re a great kid, and I really enjoyed this.” He pushed a lock of hair out of her eyes, and it took all her might not to latch her arms around his neck and hold on. “Professor Warner said to stop by after this and keep in touch with him this summer. We want you to succeed here.”

She felt her knees buckle. They were in love. He’d said as much three weeks ago, before he got the offer at Dartmouth. He’d held her hand at the jazz club bar and said, “I can’t imagine life without you.” At the time, she’d thought that meant they’d be together forever. It was the logical next step after months of serious dating. Now it was clear that he was already imagining their lives apart.

I will not cry, she told herself, snatching her paper off his desk and tucking it under her arm. “I gave legitimate sources, and I used the proper research channels. Maybe it’syour beliefsthat are limitingyour understandingof my topic. Maybe it’s the subject matter that madeyouuncomfortable.”

It was her mother’s stock approach, call a man out for being sexist and he’d stammer and fumble, and while he decided to shut down orfight back, you figured out your next move. It would be impossible to make it to the elevator without tears.

“Good luck with Roberta. And your career.”

“Thank you, Ms. Whiting, and you as well.”

She slammed the office door in his face.

CHAPTER TWOBetsy

Edgartown, Massachusetts

Betsy lugged her enormous suitcase and knapsack of textbooks out of the taxicab and onto crowded Main Street in Edgartown, thinking that the air was positively chilly for June. Summer was always a slow start on this tiny island off the coast of Cape Cod, but by July, the temperatures would soar, the frigid waters growing tepid. Then there would be beauty all around, showing itself in different colors of hydrangeas, a shoreline that drew a jagged line to blue, soft sand lining the endless ocean.

“Two dollars, miss.” The cabbie’s front teeth overlapped at the center. “Are you going to see your family?”

“My mother.” Betsy felt inside her macrame tote for cash; the bag was jammed with two romance novels she’d purchased on a whim in the Amtrak station, even if she knew she should save her money. Already this trip was costing her a fortune. Tourists stepped around Betsy’s luggage, a row of pretty shops lining the sidewalks, some selling pastel-colored sundresses and others stockingJawsT-shirts, since the movie had catapulted Martha’s Vineyard to celebrity status since its release three summers before. “But I’d rather be spending the summer alone.”

“Don’t be smart now. Everyone needs their people—it’s like a good dose of medicine.” He reached for her five-dollar bill, handing her back her change.

“You obviously haven’t met my mother.” Betsy smirked. “Or my sisters.”

There was the sickly-sweet smell of fudge, tourists in thin cashmere sweaters browsing the shops, their doors open to the fresh air. Betsy traipsed along the sidewalk with the rest of the ponytailed summer crowd, walking down the one-way street to her parents’ summer house.Here comes Betsy, she heard a voice in her head,crawling back home with her tail between her legs.

She’d given her landlady notice earlier that day, sliding a typed letter under the old woman’s door after Betsy had stuffed every belonging worth keeping into her suitcase. She’d brought the textbooks so she could rework her final paper, even though she’d convinced herself during the journey to New England that there was no point in returning to grad school come fall. The only thing that had kept her going these last few months was Andy. Maybe she wasn’t cut out for psychology after all. She was tired of her male classmates accusing her of being too emotional when they discussed a clinical case, tired of them leaving her out of study groups and talking in those obnoxious scholarly voices when they attempted to one-up each other in class.

A few minutes’ walk from Main Street, Betsy could see her family’s familiar white clapboard cottage on South Water Street, its historic green shutters standing proud with a flag flapping off the small front porch. Her father wouldn’t be in the house, only his things would be, and she didn’t want to be here without him. Last May, after he died, no one bothered to travel to the Vineyard, the summer months overtaken with the funeral and memorials and checking in on their grief-stricken mother in her Georgetown apartment. She paused in front of the house’s white picket gate, a memory of her and her sisters holding a lemonade stand on the sidewalk. She could see Louisa blowingbubbles, her and Aggie chasing after them while running their fingertips along the fence slats. How Betsy would always call after Aggie and Louisa to wait up, how she’d always felt like she couldn’t keep pace. It hadn’t occurred to Betsy how much she missed the island until now.

Betsy let herself in, stepping into the sunny living room, the house smelling of her mother’s jasmine perfume. She was relieved to see that the cottage and its rooms were identical to how they’d left them. The room was a time capsule. How many books had Betsy read on the well-worn navy couch with throw pillows emblazoned with goldfinches? The large model sailboat she and her father had built a decade before remained on display on the mantel, the opposite wall covered in framed photographs of her and her sisters with their arms pretzeled around each other at various stages of their childhood. They were on the beach, on the porch, onSenatorial, in a backyard dressed up with ribbons in their hair. There was Betsy at four, Aggie at eight, and Louisa at nine, and so on, until Louisa turned fifteen and the pictures stopped. Almost like the family had ceased to exist after 1965.

“Mom?” Betsy’s voice drifted through the empty living room, past the faded wallpapered dining room where her mother had insisted on squeezing in a mahogany table for eight many years ago.

“In here.”

Betsy stopped short in the doorway to the kitchen. There was no sign of her mother, only her eldest sister, Louisa, standing at the faux-brick counter with her shoulder-length light hair in a headband, her signature braided belt cinching the waist of a white shirtdress. She was barefoot, and still, she carried herself like a woman shopping for fine jewels at Tiffany’s. Discerning, doubting. “Hi,” she said.

“Oh, hi.” Betsy darted her eyes to the white metal cabinets and the old fridge her mother refused to part with. She’d been preparing for the strangeness of seeing Louisa, poised to act as though nothing ever happened between them, in order to keep the peace for her mother, but a bitterness rose up in Betsy’s throat. “I didn’t know law firms gave vacations.”

“Only to those that work the hardest.” Louisa didn’t miss a beat, even as she sliced the lemons. She stopped, her knife splaying to one side, and she briefly met Betsy’s eye. “I have a week or so. How have you been?”

Betsy looked away, trying to decide what to say to someone you hadn’t spoken to in a year. Louisa had written her a letter in April, but Betsy hadn’t bothered to read it. “Fine. You?”

“Fine.”

The black-and-white wall clock ticked, its cat shape and bulging eyes comical. She and Louisa had always squabbled, even with five years between them, while kindhearted and generous Aggie, a year younger than Louisa, played the role of mediator. Their father always said she and Louisa had clashing temperaments: Louisa’s fiery nature was easily irritated by Betsy’s easygoing one. Her mother saw it differently, though, once telling Betsy that she’d never be happy unless she found a way to stop competing with her eldest sister. After a year of psychology classes, Betsy had a different theory: Louisa was annoying.

Louisa squeezed the lemons into a pitcher. “I can’t believe you actually came.”

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