Endless Summer Read online

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Copyright © 2022 by Elin Hilderbrand

  Cover design by Lauren Harms

  Cover photograph by courtneyk / Getty Images

  Cover © 2022 Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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  First ebook edition: October 2022

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  “The Surfing Lesson,” “The Tailgate,” “The Sixth Wedding,” and “Summer of ’79” were previously published by Little, Brown, in slightly different form, as ebook originals. “Barbie’s Wedding” and “The Country Club” previously appeared, in slightly different form, as bonus content in special editions of The Rumor and The Identicals, respectively.

  ISBN 978-0-316-46113-9

  LCCN 2022933911

  E3-20220922-JV-PC-COR

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction

  The Surfing Lesson

  The Tailgate

  Barbie’s Wedding

  The Country Club

  Frank Sinatra Drive

  The Sixth Wedding

  The Workshop

  Summer of ’79

  Summer of ’89

  Acknowledgments

  Discover More

  Also By Elin Hilderbrand

  With love and gratitude to my “work husband,” Tim Ehrenberg, @timtalksbooks.

  He makes signing books in a scary basement fun.

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  Introduction

  I’ll think of summer days again… and dream of you.

  —Chad and Jeremy, “A Summer Song”

  I started my writing career as a short-story writer. In 1990, my senior year at Johns Hopkins, I submitted a story called “Misdirection” to Seventeen magazine. It was accepted for publication and I was paid eight hundred dollars—and my belief in myself as a published writer was born. I continued to attend creative writing workshops—at the Ninety-Second Street Y in New York City, at Bread Loaf in Middlebury, Vermont, and finally at the University of Iowa graduate creative writing program—and I would persistently mail my stories to literary magazines across the country. I found success at places like the Mid-American Review and the Massachusetts Review—and I garnered at least half a dozen encouraging rejection letters from the mothership of important contemporary fiction, The New Yorker.

  While I was at the University of Iowa, I was abjectly miserable. I felt like a literal fish out of water—the program was competitive, nearly cutthroat; I missed being near the ocean; I longed for my family and friends back east. The university offered free therapy and I would go every week and cry for the entire fifty minutes. At one point, my therapist said, “I think it’s clear what you should do.” I thought she was going to tell me to give up and go home. I have to admit, I was surprised; I didn’t think therapists were supposed to suggest quitting (but if she was about to give me permission, I would take it and run!).

  “What?” I said.

  “You should start writing about Nantucket.”

  The next day, I started my first novel, The Beach Club.

  What follows in these pages fuses my love of Nantucket with my longtime affection for short fiction. Included here are novellas, short stories, and extra chapters that are related to but not part of my summer novels. Three works here have never been published and the rest have been published only in exclusive editions by certain retailers or only in electronic form. It’s a great joy to give you all of the pieces in one volume. I do ask that you read the introduction to each story first—the pieces will feel much more textured and nuanced (and make far more sense!) if you’ve read the original novels.

  And for those of you literary detectives out there looking for my first published work, “Misdirection,” you can check out the January 1993 edition of Seventeen magazine!

  Thank you for reading. I love and appreciate you all.

  —XO, Elin

  The Surfing Lesson

  (Read with Beautiful Day)

  Here is my first-ever e-short, a short story that is of a novel but not part of it. “The Surfing Lesson” is a prequel—it occurs a few years before the action in Beautiful Day, and in it, we get to experience some of the history between my main character, Margot, and her husband, Drum. The opening scene takes place at the Juice Bar, a Nantucket institution. Margot and Drum bump into one of Drum’s ex-girlfriends and instead of feeling jealous, Margot realizes she needs to ask Drum for a divorce. The second part of the story is set at Cisco Beach, which is the best beach on Nantucket for surfing. I loved being able to describe the history of Margot and Drum’s relationship here, because there was no room to do so in the novel. This story also reminds me of the happy years when my two sons were in middle and high school and they used to spend all day long surfing at Cisco.

  If anything was going to change Margot’s mind about divorcing her husband, Drum, it was the presence of Hadley Axelram ahead of them in line at the Juice Bar on the third night of their Nantucket vacation. The day had been hot and sunny, with a high of 89 degrees, the second-hottest August 18 on record. There were forty-five or fifty people packed into the front of the shop and in a line snaking down Broad Street, creating a traffic hazard for the Jeeps and SUVs streaming off the late ferry. Margot’s attention was consumed with making sure her three children didn’t get hit by an overly excited driver, so it was surprising that she even noticed Hadley Axelram, although for the past ten years, Margot had experienced a personal barometric drop whenever the woman was nearby.

  Storm approaching.

  Hadley Axelram had dated Drum off and on for the three years before Margot met him. Hadley Axelram had a certain kind of look—to Margot, she looked like a twelve-year-old boy—that Drum and various other men found themselves powerless to resist. Hadley was five foot two and weighed ninety pounds. She had no chest and no ass; back in the days when Margot used to see her in a bikini, she had been startled by the sharp protruding bones of Hadley’s hips and rib cage. Hadley wore her dark hair in a pixie cut, which made her brown eyes look enormous and sad, like the eyes of an extraterrestrial stranded billions of miles from home. Hadley always wore a choker. Years ago, it had been a black suede cord wrapped around a jade-green stone that nestled in the hollow of Hadley’s throat. But now, the choker was caramel-colored leather embellished with recognizable gold hardware—Hermès. When Hadley reached up to idly finger her choker, Margot noticed that he
r nails—longer than anyone would expect on a person so obviously striving for androgyny—were painted the purplish blue of Concord grapes.

  Drum had spent much of those three on-again, off-again years competing with his best friend, Colin O’Mara, for Hadley’s affections. Colin had been the second-finest surfer on Nantucket, after Drum. Drum was as graceful and elegant as a person could be on a board. “Like watching fucking Baryshnikov,” Margot had once heard a spectator on the beach say. Colin’s surfing, on the other hand, was all about brute strength and the relentless desire to outdo Drum.

  The same dynamic had been true in their pursuit of Hadley Axelram.

  “Look,” Margot said now, nudging Drum and pointing ahead in the line with her chin. “There’s Hadley.”

  Drum nodded once but said nothing, which meant he had already seen her.

  Over the past ten years, Margot had pieced together the following facts: Hadley, who was Indonesian—her grandparents were some kind of royalty in Jakarta—had spent the summer of 1999 drinking nightly at the Lobster Trap, where Drum worked as a bartender, until Drum finally asked her out. They fell in love—Hadley first, but Drum harder. That September, Hadley left Nantucket for graduate art-history studies in Florence. Her departure had stunned Drum and everyone else who’d assumed that Hadley was little more than a Lobster Trap brat and a surfing groupie. Drum felt like he had been shot in the chest (his words), but he put up an unaffected front. “Ciao,” he’d said to Hadley when he dropped her at the airport with her steamer trunk. “Arrivederci.” When Hadley returned to Nantucket the following summer and appeared at Drum’s cottage unannounced, Drum administered what he called a “hate fuck” and then showed her the door. And this was when Colin O’Mara stepped in. Supposedly with Drum’s “blessing,” Colin dated Hadley all summer, going so far as to let Hadley drive his beloved CJ5 all over the island and letting her live with him rent-free in his parents’ enormous summer home on Shawkemo Hills Lane.

  The line for the Juice Bar moved forward a bit. Margot and Drum and the kids crossed the threshold into the actual ice cream shop, which smelled powerfully of vanilla and just-pressed waffle cones. The kids knew the rules: Once they were in, they were allowed to talk about what flavors, what sauces, what toppings, what kind of cone. Drum Jr. and Carson became absorbed by this, as did Drum Sr., who read the names of the flavors out loud to Ellie. Margot was free to scrutinize Hadley Axelram, who was four people over and two people ahead, one spot away from ordering.

  Hadley had her two children with her. One was a boy Drum Jr.’s age, ten, who had inherited Colin O’Mara’s Irish coloring—the strawberry hair, the freckles. The other child was twoish, younger than Ellie, young enough to be carried, and this child, also a boy, had dark hair and olive skin like Hadley. Margot wondered how Hadley could stand having the child straddling her hip in the close, crowded heat of the shop. She was a good mother, Margot supposed.

  The first son was Colin’s, born only five months after Drum Jr., as though getting accidentally pregnant outside of wedlock had been a fad that year. Unlike Drum and Margot, Hadley and Colin had never married; they stayed together for a couple of years and then split. Colin lived in Kauai now; he sent Drum and Margot cards at Christmas, pictures of himself on far-flung beaches or on the lips of volcanoes. In the last picture, there had been a Polynesian woman in a grass skirt at his side; it looked like he had snagged her from the luau at the Hilton.

  These cards made Margot sad.

  The second son, Margot knew, had been sired by an up-and-coming painter named Jan Jaap. In a victory of biology over history, his pale Dutch coloring had been overpowered by Hadley’s Indonesian genes. Margot and Drum had unwittingly walked into one of Jan Jaap’s art openings in SoHo, and, finding Hadley there, they were treated to the love story. At that time, Hadley had been pregnant. She looked as though she had tucked a cantaloupe into her camisole.

  That night had ended in a vile fight between Margot and Drum, as so often happened on nights that involved Hadley. Drum had climbed into a cab and screeched back to the apartment alone, and Margot stumbled into a Burmese restaurant and cried over her momos.

  That painter, Jan Jaap, had never quite lived up to his potential, Margot thought. She wondered about the Hermès choker.

  Drum Jr. declared that he wanted vanilla ice cream in a cake cone; he was overly cautious with his taste buds, afraid to try anything new no matter how alluring his father made other choices sound.

  “How about chocolate fudge caramel ripple, buddy?”

  No. Drum Jr. would not be budged. Margot sighed. A twenty-two-minute wait for vanilla in a cake cone?

  Carson went the opposite route. He asked for a waffle cup with a scoop of raspberry sherbet and a scoop of maple walnut doused with hot fudge and topped with gummy worms. Margot admired his creativity even as she knew this would end in a stomachache and possibly a cavity.

  Ellie wanted a cup of mint chip with chocolate sauce and a squiggle of whipped cream. She would eat three bites, and Margot would be left with the rest, which meant Margot shouldn’t order.

  Drum Sr. turned to Margot. “I’m going to have the pistachio.”

  He was as predictable as their eldest child. Margot said, “Note the look of surprise on my face.”

  That decided, there was nothing to do but wait. Margot eyed Hadley Axelram. The woman had inspired jealousy more insidious than Margot could have imagined. How many times had Margot told Drum that she knew he was still in love with Hadley? How many times had Margot ransacked Drum’s underwear drawer, where he kept photos from the summers of 1999 and 2000? These photos were mostly of Drum and Colin and Dred Richardson and the other guys who had surfed Cisco back then, but some of the group photos featured Hadley. Margot would stare at Hadley’s waifish, sexless figure and wonder what it was that had been so attractive. Then Margot admitted that there were certain women who possessed magic powers, who bewitched and captivated, who got into a man’s bloodstream like a virus that never died—and Hadley Axelram was one of them. Every time they had happened across Hadley in the past ten years, Drum got a look on his face like a kid who wanted a puppy.

  But now that Margot’s reservoir of romantic feelings for Drum had run dry—and when she said dry, she meant dry—she found herself excited, happy even, to have an unexpected encounter with Hadley Axelram. This might be just what Margot needed. Hadley Axelram’s presence at the Juice Bar might be seen as a miracle, a last lifeline. Jealousy as defibrillator.

  From her spot a chess move away, Margot listened to Hadley Axelram order. Double scoop of butter pecan in a waffle cup with caramel sauce and crushed Heath bars for the older son, a kiddie cup of cookie dough ice cream for the younger son, and… pistachio in a waffle cone for Hadley.

  Margot almost couldn’t believe it. But then she recalled that during the periods when Hadley and Drum were dating—not only the summer of 1999 on Nantucket, but also part of the summer of 2001 on Nantucket and briefly in the winter of 2002 in Aspen—Hadley exerted enormous influence over Drum. She was the reason he’d gotten the tattoo of the god Ganesh on his hip, she was the reason he listened to Better Than Ezra, and apparently she was the reason he always ordered pistachio ice cream. For all Margot knew, Drum and Hadley had come to the Juice Bar too many times to count and ordered pistachio ice cream together.

  Margot wanted to care. She yearned to care.

  Once Hadley had received her cone and cups, Margot beamed in her direction, her smile as bright as a searchlight.

  Hadley turned, saw Margot and Drum, and her expression appeared to be one of genuine delight. Not at seeing Margot, of course, but at seeing Drum.

  “Hey!” Hadley said. She had her hands full with her ice cream and the child’s ice cream and the child, and she had to twist and maneuver through the crowd to Margot and Drum, which was not a path anyone waiting in line wanted to clear for her.

  Margot heard Drum mutter, “Oh, Jesus.”

  Normally, it was Margot who would have said
this. Years before they had bumped into Hadley at the art gallery, they had seen her at the Matterhorn, in Stowe, Vermont. Wearing a white cashmere sweater and jeans and long feather earrings, she had been drinking a beer at the bar, surrounded by men ten years her junior. Margot had spotted her first and said, “Oh, shit.” She and Drum had had both boys in tow; Carson was pitching a fit after having spent all day in the Kinderhut, and all Margot had wanted was a glass of wine. She was the one who had insisted they stop at the Matterhorn, but once Drum saw Hadley, Margot’s dream of a fun, relaxing après-ski was ruined. Hadley had shrieked with joy upon seeing Drum, causing her other suitors to scatter. Margot was left to deal with her recalcitrant and exhausted children while Hadley and Drum “caught up,” Drum with that insipid look on his face. Margot had been bitterly jealous then, her stomach roiling with concealed rage.

  She wanted rage now. She wanted to feel something.

  “Hey, Hadley!” Margot said. She bent in and kissed the woman’s tanned cheek. Soft as suede.

  “Hey, guys!” Hadley said. “Hey, Drum!”

  “Hey,” Drum said. He gave her half a wave.

  Suddenly, it was their turn to order. No time for a reunion. Margot said to Hadley, “Why don’t you wait for us outside? We’d love to catch up!”

  Hadley said, “Yes, of course!”

  She scooted past Margot and Drum and the kids, and Margot caught the scent of Hadley’s intoxicating perfume, a scent that had nearly caused her to vomit at the Matterhorn and again at the art gallery. Did Drum smell it? She looked at him. His mouth was a grim line.

  “What’s wrong?” Margot said.

  Drum didn’t answer her. He was placing their order with the adorable fifteen-year-old server who wore her hair in two Alpine braids like Heidi. When he was done, he said, “I don’t feel like dealing with Hadley Axelram tonight.”