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

and thin lips and pointy ears, one with seven piercings, including one through the tragus. By the end of the year, to her mom’s amusement and her father’s dismay, Beatrice had stopped wearing jeans and sneakers and began finding an aesthetic of her own, one that involved vintage Laura Ashley and Gunne Sax dresses, delicate gold rings, pearl necklaces and embroidered carpetbags and bouquets of tea roses and baby’s breath.

Beatrice could write about art and fashion. But then she decided there was a different story she could tell.

“Last year a woman was murdered in the house next door to mine,” she typed.

There. She was off to a banging beginning. Now for some details. “Every summer I go to Cape Cod with my parents. My father’s father owns a house on the Outer Cape, right on the water. My dad’s brother and his wife and their kids get it for three weeks, then my mom and dad and I get it for three weeks, and for the last part of the summer we’re all together.” When she was younger, that had been her favorite part of the summer. Uncle Jeremy was like an older, grayer, more profane version of her dad. He had a bit of a beer gut (maybe because, unlike her dad, he drank beer), and a skinny, anxious, slightly bucktoothed wife. Every year when they arrived, Beatrice’s mom would hand Aunt Janie a large gin and tonic and lead her to a seat out on the deck, and Uncle Jeremy would coax her father out of his office. “C’mon, Hal. Live a little!” he’d say. Whenever her dad would try to claim that he couldn’t go fishing or to the beach or out to lunch because he had work, Uncle Jeremy would say, “Don’t be such an old woman!” in a funny, quavering voice… and it would work. Her dad would trade his button-down shirts for ancient T-shirts advertising old bands like R.E.M., and sometimes he’d even skip his daily five-mile run and go to the beach, or for bike rides with Beatrice and her cousins Oliver and Tallulah (both were nice enough, with their mother’s unfortunate overbite). Once every summer, at the end of her dad’s designated vacation week, they would charter a fishing boat for the day, and even Aunt Janie would come, after dosing herself with Dramamine and ginger candy. They’d take turns pulling in stripers and bluefish, and her mom would pack a picnic, which they’d eat while the boat was at anchor, rocking gently on the waves. There would be bonfires on the beach, and her grandfather would come for the big barbecue, where they’d invite all their friends and other visiting families, people her dad and his brother had grown up with. The party would go late into the night, with parents stashing the kids in her bedroom, with its two sets of bunk beds. Beatrice could remember being very young, waking up to find her room full of sleeping children, in the beds or curled up under blankets on the floor, hearing laughter, and music, and the splash of one of the dads cannonballing into the swimming pool.

“Cape Cod is my favorite place in the world,” she typed, and thought about one of her favorite Emily Dickinson poems, the one about how she’s never seen a moor, and never seen the sea, “yet now I know how the heather looks, and how a wave must be.” It was a poem about faith, and not beach vacations, but the line how a wave must be had always called the Cape to mind. For years, her parents had sent her to nature camp and art camp and, finally, the sailing camp in Provincetown that her dad had attended. Beatrice had been prepared to hate it, but it turned out that she loved to sail. Once she passed her skipper’s test, she begged her father to buy her a used Sunfish—“It can be a whole year’s worth of birthday and Christmas and Chanukah presents,” she’d said. He’d agreed. Beatrice had gotten her boat the next year. That summer, she’d spent long days on the water, all alone, tacking back and forth around the bay.

“Last summer, my dad’s family rented the house out for a week,” Beatrice typed. When Uncle Jeremy had called, her dad had put him on speaker, so Beatrice overheard her uncle’s voice, tense and eager, as he’d said, “They’ll pay us whatever we want. They need a place to put their guests, and they’re trying to rent every house on the street.”

“Not interested,” her dad had said. “We’ve never let anyone stay there who wasn’t family, and we’re not going to start now.”

“You have all your Emlen buddies stay there,” Uncle Jeremy argued, and her dad had said, “That’s different. I’m there with them.” Uncle Jeremy’s voice had gotten almost shrill, as he’d said, “It’s twenty thousand dollars, Hal. Maybe that doesn’t make any difference to you. But it makes a difference to me.”

That was when her dad had spotted her. He’d frowned, walked across his office, and shut the door, but Beatrice guessed that Uncle Jeremy had talked him into it. Instead of going to the Cape for the last week of June, they’d gone to the Bahamas. Her parents had forced her to ride a bike all over the island. They’d eaten conch fritter and her mom had pointed out the pink sand at least four times a day, saying, “Isn’t it beautiful!” with a longing sigh like she missed the beaches already, even though they were right in front of her. On the last day of their vacation, they’d been packing, getting ready to go to the airport, when Beatrice’s phone had started blowing up, with her friends texting her things like: OMG and DID YOU SEE and THAT’S YOUR HOUSE ON CNN! She’d checked the news, then hurried through the suite’s living room and into her parents’ bedroom, to find her mom sitting about six inches from