That Summer by Jennifer Weiner (free e reader txt) 📗

her generation. She didn’t want you to struggle, as she had. I know it doesn’t seem like it now, but I know your mother, and all she’s ever wanted for any of her children was that you be safe, and comfortable, and happy.”

Daisy looked over his shoulder at her mother, a small, slump-shouldered figure, weeping softly.

“And she’s right,” Arnold continued, his voice gentle. “You have a daughter. You need to think about her.”

Daisy’s chest felt tight, and the air felt thin. “I need to make a phone call,” she said.

Arnold led her to his office, where a framed wedding portrait of Daisy and Hal stood on the desk, the same one that Diana must have seen in Vernon’s Cape house. Daisy looked at it: her twenty-year-old self, in a frothy confection of white lace and tulle, a fairy-tale princess dressed for her happily-ever-after.

She flipped the picture facedown on the desk and sat in Arnold’s creaking leather chair. Steeling herself, she found her phone in her purse and called Diana.

The phone rang once. Again. Again. Then she heard Diana’s voice.

“Daisy.”

Daisy didn’t say a word.

“Are you there?”

“I’m here,” Daisy said.

“I owe you an apology.” Diana’s voice was quiet. “I lied to you, and I’m sorry. What I told you… it must be a hard thing to hear about someone you love.”

“You shouldn’t have lied to me,” said Daisy.

“You’re right. But what would have happened if I’d been honest? Or if I’d tried to confront Hal?”

“You didn’t have to…” Daisy’s throat was thick, and it was hard to speak. “You didn’t have to involve me,” she finally whispered.

On the other end of the line, she heard Diana sigh. “You are involved, though,” she said. “You, and Beatrice, too. I wish it was different, but it’s not.”

Daisy felt an icy hand take hold of her heart, and she didn’t speak, couldn’t speak.

“Where are you?” asked Diana.

“At my mom’s.” Daisy knew what she wanted to say, but she wasn’t ready to say it out loud, how maybe a part of her had always suspected the truth about her husband; that, with her family’s complicity and her own willingness, she’d kept her eyes shut for a long, long time.

She cleared her throat. “Where are you?”

“I’m home,” Diana said. “In Truro. I live in a cottage at the very end of Knowles Heights Road.”

“Send me your address.” Even as she spoke, a plan was forming in Daisy’s mind. “I’m driving up tonight, and I want to see you, in person. Tomorrow, first thing in the morning.”

“Okay,” said Diana. “And, Daisy? I’m sorry. I can’t tell you how sorry I am that you and Beatrice are involved in all of this. I’m sorry for everything.”

Daisy didn’t answer. She ended the call, set the phone down, walked to the powder room, used the toilet, and washed her hands without meeting her own eyes in the mirror. Back in Arnold’s office, she picked up her phone again. She had one more call to make before she started driving.

The phone barely rang before Hal’s voice was in her ear. “Daisy? Where are you? Where’s Beatrice? What’s going on?”

Daisy sat up very straight. She licked her lips. “Hello, Hal. We need to talk,” she said.

33 Hal

They were eighteen years old, and the world was theirs, laid out before them like a banquet before kings.

All summer long, they’d kept tallies in Magic Marker on the cottage walls. Who’d kicked a keg. Who’d booted and rallied. Who’d gotten into the Squealing Pig or the A House or the Dory Bar, who’d gotten a blow job, who’d gotten laid. Writing on the wall probably meant that Crosby’s parents would lose their security deposit, but none of them cared. It was their last summer together, one last, epic summer for the Class of 1987, and Hal Shoemaker, class president, had appointed himself Vice Admiral. “Leave no man behind” was the motto they’d adopted, and, as the last beach bonfire approached, Hal was worried about Daniel Rosen. Diesel Dan, Dan the Man, whose nickname had been lengthened to Manfred, then shortened to Freddie. (Hal had gotten his own nickname after a mixer at Miss Porter’s, when there had been an unfortunate encounter with a girl who’d just started her period. Bryan Tavistock had made a joke about the Masque of the Red Death, and, thus, Hal became Poe.)

Twenty-three boys out of the fifty-eight members of their graduating class had come to the Cape for August. They spent their days drinking on the bayside beach in front of the cottage named Begonia, where four guys were staying. Hal was at his folks’ place a few miles away, hosting three more classmates there. Other members of the class were roughing it on the KOA campgrounds near the Head of the Meadow Beach.

Hal considered Dan, lying on his belly on a towel, motionless except for the slow expansion and collapse of his rib cage. He poked at the other boy’s shoulder with the handle of a plastic shovel. Dan sat up, squinting into the sun.

“Hey,” said Hal. “Any luck last night?”

Instead of answering, Dan just muttered, “I gotta take a leak,” and hauled himself unsteadily upright. Hal sighed. Dan was short and skinny, the perfect build for a coxswain but less than ideal, Hal guessed, for attracting the ladies. There was also something dainty, something almost girlish in the cast of Dan’s features, the round, long-lashed eyes that turned up at the corners, and his ears, which came to points at their tips. Of course, his looks wouldn’t have held him back, if he’d had any confidence. Bryan Tavistock, for example, whose nickname was Whale and who always smelled faintly of salami, scored almost as much as Hal himself, because Bryan was confident and funny and, perhaps most of all, extremely persistent. He told every girl he met that she was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen, and he never took no for an answer. No, Bryan liked to say, is