28 Summers Read online

  There is one set menu at the Cauldron each night. Tonight, it’s a Bartlett’s Farm baby greens salad topped with a lemon-thyme poached lobster tail followed by a wood-grilled sirloin followed by an apricot tarte tatin with buttermilk ice cream. Scott picks a white wine to go with the first course and a red wine to go with their steaks. Mallory admires how confident and at ease he is and how down-to-earth when talking to their server. She imagines this is how Jake would act if he were across the table from her right now. She doesn’t want to bring Jake with her on this date either, but because Jake was on Nantucket a scant two weeks earlier, he’s still fresh in Mallory’s mind—everything he said and did, every time he touched her, every time he kissed her, every time he looked at her with smoldering desire. What would he say if he could see her now with Scott? Would he be jealous? Yes, of course. Mallory knows there’s no reason for her to feel guilty—after all, at that moment, Jake is probably attending some fancy political fund-raiser with Ursula. He will climb into bed with Ursula that night; he might even make love to her. (Mallory tries never to think about this.)

  Across the table, Scott is shaking his head. She’s been caught loving Jake in her mind.

  “I can’t believe you’re single,” he says.

  “I can’t believe you’re single,” she says. She leans in. They’re seated at the best table, by the front window—or at least, it’s the best unless one of Mallory’s students strolls by. “You are single, right? I know you said you’re divorced, but are you officially divorced?”

  “Officially divorced for six years,” he says. “Lisa stayed in Philly, married one of my Wharton classmates, and they have a baby now.”

  Wharton; Kitty would be thrilled to hear this. But no, sorry, Kitty isn’t welcome at the table tonight. “But you don’t have any children? Now is the time to tell me.”

  “No children,” Scott says. He reaches for her hand. They are holding hands. Does it feel okay? Yes, it feels nice. “But I’d like to have children someday.”

  “Did you just say that on a first date?” Mallory asks.

  “Was that a goof?”

  “Um…” Mallory says. She isn’t sure how she feels about having more children; she’s never had a reason to consider it. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Our first course hasn’t even arrived.”

  What does Mallory learn about Scott Fulton on this date?

  He’s thirty-four years old, turning thirty-five in May. He grew up in Orlando, Florida; his father was an animator for Disney and died of a heart attack when Scott was a sophomore at Florida State. His mother got married again, to a man who works for the State Department and lives in Dubai, so that is where she now lives. No siblings. He met his future ex-wife at FSU; she was in hotel management and brought Scott to Nantucket when she got a job at the White Elephant. He fell in love with Nantucket. He worked at the Lobster Trap six nights a week, which was how he met Oliver (yes, Oliver used to hang out at the Trap; Mallory remembers this), and he drove the Blazer to Nobadeer during the day.

  The health scare was a mild heart attack, caused by stress and coffee and cigarettes—and cocaine, he admits. He quit the stress, the cigarettes, and the cocaine. “But not the coffee,” he says.

  “But you did quit the cocaine?” Mallory asks. She knows she sounds like a federal prosecutor, but that’s because suddenly Krystel is at the table.

  “Yes,” he says.

  He likes to surf-cast and walk in the moors with Roxanne, his Lab, who’s six years old; he bought her right after the divorce. He plays golf and recently joined the club at Miacomet. He’s going to stay in his rental on Winter Street through next spring, though he’s looking to buy a house in town.

  Houses in town start at a million dollars, Mallory thinks. She banishes Kitty from the table once again.

  “This has been incredibly one-sided,” he says. “When are we going to talk about you?”

  “Next date,” Mallory says.

  Scott drives Mallory home to the cottage. There’s no question about inviting him in because Mallory asked Ava Quinn to babysit for Link. It was almost too convenient—Scott brought Ava over when he picked Mallory up, since Ava lives right across the street from him, and he’ll take Ava home.

  Mallory lets Scott kiss her good night. The kiss is lovely—warm, sweet. There’s chemistry. Mallory tries not to think about kissing Jake goodbye in nearly the exact same spot two weeks earlier before he climbed into his rental Jeep and drove to the airport.

  Just go away, she tells Jake in her mind. Let me see if this works.

  Mallory and Scott go on a second date—to Le Languedoc for their famous cheeseburger with garlic fries—and then to the Club Car to sing at the piano bar. Mallory requests “Tiny Dancer,” and Scott throws twenty bucks in the glass jar. It’s a fun night. Scott knows people; the bartender greets him by name and they bump into two of his site foremen at the bar and Scott is gracious, introducing Mallory and buying them a round of drinks.

  On their third date, they take both Link and Roxanne out to Sconset. They do the bluff walk with its uninterrupted views of the Atlantic Ocean to the right and magnificent homes to the left. For some reason, Link wants to hold Scott’s hand, so the two of them go up ahead and Mallory takes Roxanne’s leash and follows. This switcheroo is immediately unsettling to Mallory. Link and Scott could too easily be mistaken for father and son, and Mallory is talking to Roxanne like she’s her dog.

  They wander around Sconset, peeking into pocket gardens, some of which are still lush with flowers and a second bloom of climbing roses. They peer at the tiny cottages, built in the 1700s, when people were smaller. Scott leads them down New Street toward the Chanticleer with the famous carousel horse out front and then farther down to the quaint, shingled Sconset Chapel.

  “Could you ever see getting married here?” Scott asks Mallory.

  “Did you just ask that on our third date?” she says. “What’s wrong with you?”

  He puts his arm around her shoulders and squeezes. She still has Roxanne’s leash wrapped around her wrist, and Scott has Link’s hand, and they’re like a little family unit—except they’re not. “I like you, Mallory.”

  You don’t know me, she wants to say. She’s told him basically her whole life story—Kitty and Senior, Coop and his two failed marriages, Aunt Greta and Ruthie, Leland and Fifi, Apple and Hugo, Dr. Major; she even told him the story about Jeremiah Freehold. They talked at length about Fray and why Mallory decided on single motherhood. Although Scott has learned all this—he’s a very good listener—he still doesn’t know her.

  What does it take to know a person?

  Time. It takes time.

  Will Scott still think she’s so wonderful when she has the stomach flu or he hears her on the phone with the parent of a student who’s underperforming? Will he think she’s a good mother when she snaps at Link for splashing in the bathtub or when she skips reading stories because she’s too tired? Will he find her fun when she informs him that she can never see him on Fridays during the school year because Fridays are for Apple? She doesn’t like lima beans or beans of any kind; she has no sense of direction; she doesn’t care for the theater and last year went home during the intermission of the high-school musical. She has so many flaws, so many areas that need improvement, and yet Mallory lacks the time and energy to work on them. She doesn’t make a charitable donation to Link’s day care because she pays so much in tuition already, even though she could, technically, afford an extra hundred bucks. She never watches the news and doesn’t know who the prime minister of the UK is. Well, yes, she knows it’s Tony Blair, but don’t ask her anything else about Great Britain. The president of France? She would say Mitterrand, though she suspects that’s wrong; Mitterrand might even be dead. She reads the Inquirer and Mirror but only to make sure there’s no one she knows in the police blotter; she has never once attended town meeting. He couldn’t find a less informed person. Well, except she does know about celebrities because she did, this year, get a
subscription to People magazine, which was thirty bucks she could have donated to the day care.

  Will any of this bother him once he figures it out?

  After their fourth date—they go to see Love, Actually at the Dreamland and then to the Pearl for tuna martinis and passionfruit cosmos—Mallory agrees to go back to Scott’s house on Winter Street, and they sleep together. The sex is good—better than good! Scott is the right balance of gentle and firm. He knows what he’s doing.

  Later, as Mallory lies in his bed—which is high and wide and, because it’s now October, made up with flannel sheets in a navy plaid——he brings her a glass of ice water and a couple of coconut macaroons on a plate, and after she devours them he says, “Let’s get you home. And no arguing—I’m paying the babysitter.”

  Full steam ahead; they become a couple.

  They bundle up to watch the Nantucket–Martha’s Vineyard football game; they pick out pumpkins at Bartlett’s Farm and carve jack-o’-lanterns with Link. Mallory starts calling Scott at his office when she gets home from school to tell him about her day. He learns all the kids’ names—Max and Matthew, Katie and Tiffany and Bridget and the two Michaels—and their backstories. He memorizes her schedule.

  The first week in November is unusually mild and Scott plays eighteen holes of golf. Mallory and Link go to meet him at the club when he’s finished and Mallory admires how lean and strong he looks in his golf clothes. Even his spikes look good on him. He finds a child-size putter and takes Link over to the practice green. He bends over and wraps his arms around Link to show him how to hold the club. They tap the ball into the cup again and again; Link loves pulling the ball out and starting over.

  The towel bar in Mallory’s bathroom falls off and Scott asks if it’s okay if he comes over while Mallory is at school to fix it. She hesitates. She never let JD fix anything in the cottage and she certainly would never have let JD prowl around when she wasn’t home. However, she surprises herself by saying, Sure, that would be great. The towel bar has been lying on the floor for over a week; she’s been too busy to pull out her drill.

  The towel bar is fixed the same day he offers and he leaves her a cute little cartoon of the two of them kissing. The cartoon is good—he’s a real artist, like his father must have been; Mallory tapes the cartoon to the fridge.

  Mallory starts taking Roxanne running with her. She lets Roxanne sleep on the green tweed sofa.

  As Mallory is teaching her senior creative-writing class at the end of the day—it’s the first year for this; Mallory lobbied to make it an elective—there’s a knock on the classroom door. Mallory opens it to find Apple holding the most beautiful bouquet of flowers Mallory has ever seen.

  “These arrived for you,” Apple says. “Guess who sent them.”

  The card says: Just because. Love, Scott.

  Mallory decides to do something nice and unexpected for Scott. The next day, she leaves school during her lunch period, picks up a Turkey Terrific sandwich from Provisions, and takes it to the office at the storage center.

  Scott has an administrative assistant named Lori Spaulding; Mallory knows her slightly. She’s a single mom like Mallory and has a daughter a year older than Link. The two of them used to cross paths at Small Friends, dropping the kids off and picking them up. “Hey, Lori,” Mallory says. “I brought lunch for the boss. Is he in?”

  Lori takes a beat. “He is. Let me get him.”

  “Or if he’s busy, I can just drop it?” Mallory says.

  “I’m sure he’ll want to see you,” Lori says. There’s an edge to her gravelly voice. “I hear you two are having quite the whirlwind romance.”

  That night on the phone, Mallory says, “Were you and Lori ever involved romantically?”

  Scott laughs. “Not at all. Why?”

  Mallory isn’t sure what to say. She got a vibe. Lori likes Scott; she’s jealous of Mallory. Why Mallory and not me? she probably thinks. Why indeed? Lori is pretty; she has blond hair that’s always in an impeccable French braid. Mallory admired this long before Scott was in the picture and wondered how a single working mother could have such good hair. Did she get up an hour early to do it? Did she use two mirrors? And was it just a natural talent? Mallory would never in a million years acquire the skill because French braiding is one of the many mysteries of being a woman that has eluded her. She puts her hair up in an elastic, and even then, her ponytails are off-center.

  “She’s attractive. She has that sexy voice. She’s single.”

  “She does nothing for me,” Scott says.

  The holidays approach. Mallory goes home to Baltimore for Thanksgiving; Scott stays on Nantucket. He cooks for all the guys who are working for him, many of whom are single and don’t have anywhere else to go but the bar.

  Mallory misses him while she’s away. She calls him from behind the closed door of her childhood bedroom because she doesn’t want her mother or Coop to overhear her. She loves the sound of his voice. She loves how he’s deep-frying a turkey in the backyard for the guys and making cornbread dressing and brussels sprouts that he saw Tyler Florence make on the Food Network. He tells her he’s going into town the next night to see the tree lighting—at five o’clock, all the Christmas trees on Main and Centre will light up at once—and Mallory gets jealous, wondering who he’s going with, wondering if maybe he’s going with Lori and her daughter, wondering if they’ll go get a drink at the Brotherhood afterward.

  Missing him and feeling jealous are good signs, she thinks. They’re on the right track.

  Around Christmas, Link goes up to Vermont to spend the holiday with Fray and Anna, and Mallory and Scott become inseparable. They alternate between spending the night in town at his house, which Mallory likes because the Winter Street Inn across the street is all decked out for the holidays, and at Mallory’s cottage, which she likes because Scott “planted” a small Christmas tree on the beach and rigged it with white lights and it gives Mallory such joy to look out her kitchen window and see it. They attend the annual Christmas pageant at the Congregational church; they shop in town and get hot chocolate with homemade marshmallows at the Even Keel Café. Two days before Christmas, it snows, and they put on boots and walk Roxanne into town early in the morning to take pictures of Main Street, silent and shrouded in pure white. Then they let Roxanne off her leash and she skids down the street like a kid on skates.

  On Christmas Eve, they go to the annual party at the Winter Street Inn and hang out with Kelley and Mitzi and the police chief, Ed Kapenash, and Dabney Kimball Beech from the Chamber of Commerce and Dr. Major and Apple and Hugo. Ava Quinn sits down at the piano and plays carols and Mallory nearly chokes up as they sing “O Come, All Ye Faithful” because she has now lived on this island for ten years and look at the community she has built. It was an act of faith, moving here. Aunt Greta had told Mallory long ago that Nantucket chose people and that it had chosen Mallory, but she feels this with absolute certainty only right in this instant.

  Scott must notice her moment of introspection because he squeezes her hand.

  They drink Mitzi’s mulled cider (it’s strong; Mallory can handle only a few sips before she switches to wine) and they eat the pine-cone cheese ball and stuffed dates, and by the time Mallory and Scott stumble across the street, it’s after midnight and already Christmas.

  On the afternoon of New Year’s Eve, they take a long beach walk with Roxanne. The sun is low in the white sky; it’s cold. The waves pummel the shore like they’re trying to make a point. This is winter on Nantucket, and it’s only just beginning.

  As they are about to go back up to the cottage to prepare for their New Year’s Eve festivities—Apple and Hugo are coming over for fondue and a bottle of Krug that Scott insisted on splurging on—Scott says, “Hey, I want to tell you something.”

  The tone of his voice sets off an alarm. A confession is coming: He is married after all; he does have a child, or children, who are living overseas in Dubai. The project on Old South Road isn’t afford
able housing but a front for the Mob. Scott has a gambling problem. He’s a cocaine addict. He’s sleeping with Lori.

  “What is it?” she says.

  “I love you,” he says.

  Mallory closes her eyes. She is seized by panic. She isn’t sure what to do. Why is she not prepared for this? Any idiot could have seen this was where things were headed.

  “I love you too,” she says, then immediately hates herself. She is suggestible and easily swayed, just like Leland told Fifi so many years earlier.

  She’s lying to Scott. She doesn’t love him. She really, really likes him. She thinks he’s a wonderful person. He’s smart and kind and sexy and funny and absolutely wonderful with Link. She’s happy every time he walks in the door; she feels a ping of pleasure every time he calls. He has filled a void for her and for Link that she didn’t even realize was there. Her relationship with Scott has been a joyride. It has been heady infatuation. She loves having a partner in crime. And it has been luxurious, all the ways big and small that he’s made life on this island easier for her with his companionship, his ardor for her. She has spent the past three and a half months being adored. Flowers delivered to her classroom! A house in town and one at the beach! The little cartoons he leaves for her all the time now that he knows how much she enjoys them. This is the stuff other women dream of. Mallory and Scott can get married at the Sconset Chapel; Roxanne will wear a wreath of white roses around her neck, and Link a tiny tux. There is still plenty of time for Mallory to have another baby.

  But…Mallory doesn’t love him.