28 Summers: The gripping, emotional page turner of summer 2020 by 'the Queen of the Summer Novel' (People) (36 page)

A groggy Cooper answers the phone. “Hello?”

She’s woken him. Of course she’s woken him; it’s just after nine in the morning. She tries not to picture Cooper naked and hungover beneath the inn’s featherlight comforter, lying next to whatever poor woman has just become the fourth—fifth?—Mrs. Cooper Blessing.

“Cooper?” Ursula says. She sounds unhinged. She
is
unhinged. “It’s Ursula de Gournsey, good morning.”

She hears a rustling noise that she can only imagine is Cooper sitting up in bed, wondering what the hell is going on. “Good morning?” Cooper says. “Ursula…is everything okay? It’s not Jake, is it?” His voice breaks a little. He must think Jake is dead or injured or terminally ill, and now Ursula feels even worse. The last time she saw Cooper was at his parents’ funeral.

“Jake is fine,” she says quickly. “He and Bess are out to breakfast. They’re both just fine.” She inhales the breeze blowing in off the lake. The lake is so big, it creates its own horizon; she’s pretty sure that people who grew up on the coasts have no idea just how vast the Great Lakes are. “I’m calling to ask about your weekends with Jake on Nantucket.”

A beat passes. Cooper clears his throat. “Ursula,” he says.

“You and Jake go to Nantucket every year over Labor Day,” Ursula says. “Right?”

Another beat passes. Ursula hears a voice, female, the new wife, justifiably wanting to know who is calling their hotel room at nine in the morning during their honeymoon and making Cooper squirm. Ursula may end up being the reason for Cooper’s next divorce.

“Ursula de Gournsey,” Cooper whispers. “I’ll just be a minute.” And then he clears his throat and says, “Sorry about that, Ursula.”

“I’m the one who’s sorry,” Ursula says. “Sorry for inserting myself into your life at what I’m sure is the least convenient moment. But something came to my attention just now. I was reading this…
blog
…and it dawned on me that maybe you and Jake
haven’t
been going to Nantucket together all these years. Maybe he’s…been going alone? Or with someone else? I don’t need any proof from you; you don’t need to send me pictures or share any stories. I’ll take you at your word.” Ursula feels her coffee about to repeat on her. If Cooper says he
hasn’t
been going to Nantucket, then an awful, stinking possibility will be exposed and they’ll both have to acknowledge it. “Has it been you that Jake spends Labor Day weekend with up on Nantucket?”

Half a beat, maybe not even. “Yes,” Cooper says. “Yes, of course, Ursula.”

Of course
. Ursula closes her eyes. Would Coop lie to her? The answer, she can only assume, is yes. Cooper has a questionable track record with women; that much is irrefutable. Maybe he lies to his wives. Maybe he’s pathological. The other person he might be covering for is…his sister, Mallory. Mallory Blessing is pretty, yes. She’s a simple, clean kind of pretty. Girl-next-door pretty. She isn’t glamorous, isn’t powerful, isn’t a siren. She isn’t anything like Ursula. There is no way Mallory Blessing has enough allure to reel Jake all the way back to Nantucket year after year after year. Ursula is paranoid; deranged, even—and she has just shown her hand to Cooper.

“Great, Coop, thank you so much!” Ursula says. She makes her voice as bright and cheerful as she can so there’s no doubt in Cooper’s mind that she’s a complete sociopath.

“Ursula?”

“Yes?”

“Thanks for checking in,” Cooper says. “See you on the Hill.”

Ursula hangs up. She walks back to her Adirondack chair. Her iPad is lying in the grass,
Leland’s Letter
still glowing on the screen. Everything about the morning has lost its appeal. She did not assess the situation slowly or methodically. She acted on impulse and now she feels like a fool.

The sand dollars and fortune cookies, though. It bothers her.

Mallory drops Link off at Nobadeer Beach to meet his friends. Nobadeer is on the same coastline as the beach they live on and Mallory can’t quite understand why Link doesn’t just invite his friends to the house like he did when he was younger. Mallory even offered to make everyone fajitas with her homemade guacamole. But Link said that Nobadeer was “more fun.”

Plus,
he said,
nobody wants to go to the beach when there are parents watching.

Watching what?
Mallory asked, but she received no answer.

“There had better not be any beer in that backpack,” she says. “If the police call me, I’m not answering. You’ll molder in jail.”

“No beer,” Link says.

“Prove it,” Mallory says.

Link hesitates, then unzips the backpack: two bottles of water and a Gatorade.

“Lucky you,” Mallory says.

“Where’s the trust?” Link says. His tone is good-natured but when he gets out, he slams the door of the Jeep a little harder than he needs to.

“Hey,” she calls through the open window. “I love you.”

He raises a hand.

“I love you, Lincoln,” she says a bit louder.

He turns around scowling, but he can’t hold on to it. He grins. “Love you, Mama.”

Mallory’s phone rings. It’s Cooper. Cooper? He just got married six days earlier on the eastern shore of Maryland. Mallory flew down for the wedding. It had been a simple affair—just her, Amy and Coop, and Amy’s sister and mother. While Mallory was away she’s pretty sure Link had people over, even though he was supposed to be staying at his friend Bodie’s house. When she got home, the floor in the kitchen was sticky, she was out of Windex, paper towels, hot dogs, and ketchup, and she’d found an empty Coke can on the windowsill in the bathroom. She was relieved it was Coke, but Link is fourteen and she has taught high school way too long to be naive; beer is probably not far behind.

Mallory pulls over to the side of the sandy road. She has a million-dollar view of the dunes and the ocean beyond. The waves are good today; there are dozens of people out surfing.

“Coop?” she says. She wonders if the marriage has broken up already. On the honeymoon; that would be a new record (though not by much). “Everything okay?”

“Guess who called me this morning?” Coop says. “Well, you’re not going to guess so I’ll tell you. Ursula de Gournsey, that’s who.”

Mallory puts up the Jeep’s windows, turns on the air conditioning and aims the vents at her heart. She’s sweating. “Really?”

“Really.”

“What did she want?” Mallory asks.

“She wanted my assurance that I’m the one Jake goes to Nantucket with every summer,” Coop says. “She told me she didn’t need
proof;
she said she would take me at my word.”

Mallory feels like she’s the one riding a wave, but in a nauseated way, not a fun, beachy way. She pinches the skin of her bare thigh. She always thought that if and when she and Jake were discovered, she would have time to come up with a defense. But now she’s just…blindsided, a solid, stinging smack to the cheek. “What did you tell her?”

“I said yes. I said it was me that Jake goes to Nantucket with every summer. I lied, Mal. To a United States senator.”

“Thank you,” Mallory says. “Thank…Coop. Thank you.”

“I feel sick,” Cooper says. “I’m on my goddamned honeymoon, Mallory, trying to start a life with Amy. Trying to start
fresh
. And yet there I am, lying to protect my sister who has been conducting an affair with my best friend for…how long? How many summers?”

“A lot,” Mallory says. “A lot of summers.”

“A lot of summers,” Cooper says.

“Did she say
why
she was asking? Was it just out of the blue, or did something happen?”

“She said she read some blog post that put an idea in her head.”

“Blog post?” Mallory has a hard time picturing Ursula de Gournsey reading a blog post.

“That’s what she said. I didn’t ask for details. I said as little as possible. But what I did say was a complete lie.” Coop stops talking and Mallory hears irregular breathing. Is Coop
crying?
“I stopped speaking to Jake after I figured out what was going on…back when I married Tish. When was that, 2007? I haven’t had a meaningful conversation with him in eight years. My best friend. My big brother, the brother I never had, that was Jake. And if I ever have to lie again…I’m not saying I’m going to abandon you, I’m saying,
Don’t make me lie again!
” He screams this last bit—and can she blame him?

“I won’t,” she whispers.

“But you won’t stop seeing him. I know you won’t.”

Mallory doesn’t answer.

Cooper says, “Do you know why I lied, Mal? Other than because you’re the only family I have left?”

“Why?”

“Because I think you and Jake are probably really good together. You’re both…easygoing. And smart as hell. And you’re both kind. You’re good people. I can see why you like him, I can see why he likes you. But the two of you are doing something that, at base, just isn’t right. Which proves something I’ve suspected all along.”

“What’s that?” Mallory whispers.

“Everyone is human,” Coop says. “Every single one of us.”

That does it; tears drip down Mallory’s face. She moves her sunglasses to the top of her head and squints at the sparkling surface of the Atlantic until it blurs.

Blog post. Blog post?

When Mallory gets home from the beach, she Googles
Most popular blogs, women.

Number one is
Leland’s Letter
.

Leland’s Letter
is a blog? Mallory had thought it was…well, she wasn’t sure. It was Leland’s project, her
platform
. Mallory always felt bad that she hadn’t paid closer attention. She had looked at it right when it came out and read articles on self-defense on the subway and the true-life story of a woman in Utah held against her wishes by a polygamist, back when that was a thing everyone was talking about. The website had seemed angry and strident and edgy and urban, just like Leland herself, and Mallory simply wasn’t interested.

Mallory clicks on
Leland’s Letter
.

The lead article, right there on the front page under the masthead, is titled “Same Time Next Year: Can It Save Modern Marriage?”

“Gah!” Mallory shouts. “She didn’t!”

…
late-night conversation with an intimate friend revealed a shocking secret…this friend, let’s call her “Violet,” has been conducting a clandestine relationship over the course of two decades that she calls her “Same Time Next Year.”

Mallory keeps reading. Leland did it. Right down to the sand dollars and the fortunes.

Mallory stands up, looks around her cottage as though there’s a crowd assembled, an indignant studio audience waiting to see just how Mallory is going to handle this.

She goes to the kitchen for iced tea, cuts a wedge of lemon, takes a sip. It’s cold, refreshing, minty because Mallory steeps her tea with fresh mint from the pot of herbs on her porch. She knows she lives a blessed life; she has never denied that. She was given this property when she had nothing else and it’s extraordinary by anyone’s standards. She has a healthy, strong, intelligent son. Fray’s son. Maybe Leland’s…
betrayal
—there’s no other word for it—has been long planned as revenge because Mallory slept with Frazier Dooley and bore his child. But Leland handled the news of Link’s sire with great equanimity. Was that all an
act?
Has Leland been patiently waiting all these years to stick a pin through the heart of Mallory’s voodoo doll?

Maybe Leland is angry that Fifi came to visit Mallory alone so many years earlier. Maybe Fifi told Leland that Mallory knew about their breakup before Leland did. That would have hurt. Leland cares about Fifi more than she ever cared about Fray.

Right?

Mallory realizes she has no idea who Leland loves—or has loved—other than herself. And hasn’t that always been the case? Mallory thinks back to childhood, adolescence, high school—although, to be fair, everyone was self-absorbed in high school. In young adulthood, there were those loathsome months they lived together in the city. Leland had snatched up the job that Mallory wanted, and even if Leland was better suited for that job, she had treated Mallory like her inferior. She hadn’t shared the duck or the lamb shank from the French restaurant on the ground floor of their building; she had eaten those meals ostentatiously, dipping pieces of golden baguette into the pan sauces, holding a forkful of potato purée in front of her mouth before she luridly licked it off and then groaned at how
sublime
it was. All this while Mallory ate her bologna sandwiches, her ramen, her dry scrambled eggs.

There was Leland’s disastrous first visit to Nantucket when she vanished with her New York friends, abandoning Mallory, abandoning Fray. And then the catastrophic second visit with Fifi. Leland had said such cruel things:
Mallory is particularly suggestible…She’s a follower.
Mallory understood that Leland had been angry at Fifi and jealous of Mallory, but she had meant those words; if she hadn’t, she would have chosen other derogatory things to say.

It was a wonder Mallory and Leland had remained friends. They had done so only because Mallory had chosen to overlook Leland’s faults. Their friendship had history—not only the moments Mallory readily recalls but also the times she knows she’s forgotten. Driving in Steve Gladstone’s Saab to the Owings Mills Mall, pooling their money to buy Chick-Fil-A, stopping to put two dollars’ worth of gas in the car so they didn’t return it to Steve bone-dry, listening to
Songs in the Attic
by Billy Joel. “Captain Jack” was their favorite song; Mallory knew the lyrics a little better than Leland did, and she had been proud of that. Going back even further, there were countless summer days at the country club, handstands in the pool, backflips off the diving board, hitting a tennis ball against the concrete practice wall, both of them wearing only their one-piece bathing suits and their Tretorns, before the age of body-consciousness. They rode their bikes all over Roland Park, one time venturing a block farther than they should have when a carful of older boys stopped to ask their names. Leland, thinking fast on her feet, had given the name Laura Templeton, and Mallory, following suit, had said, Jackie Templeton. These were characters from
General Hospital
. One of the older boys had said, “Are you two sisters? You don’t look alike. Who’s older?” Leland had opened her mouth to answer—she was most certainly going to say that
she
was older—but at the last minute she had pushed off the sidewalk and started pedaling furiously down the block, and Mallory had followed. They didn’t stop until they safely coasted into Leland’s driveway, and only then did they let themselves acknowledge that they might have been in real danger, like girls in an after-school special.