28 Summers Read Free Page A

aren’t too happy.”
    “Right,” Mallory says. “How’d you two meet again?”
    “Krystel was my waitress,” Cooper says. “At the Old Ebbitt Grill.”
    “Nothing wrong with being a waitress,” Mallory says. Mallory is waitressing herself at the Summer House pool out in Sconset three days a week. “Did she go to college? Like, at all?”
    “She went to UMBC for a while,” Cooper says.
    That’s vague, Mallory thinks. A while meaning a few semesters or a few weeks? It doesn’t matter. Mallory won’t judge; they have their mother for that. Kitty Blessing is downright obsessed with education, breeding, social standing.
    “You’re getting married at Christmas,” Mallory says. This is a phenomenon she has never understood—Christmas is already so busy, frantic, and filled with angst; why make it worse?—but again, she won’t judge. “Where will it be?”
    “In Baltimore,” Cooper says. “Krystel’s mother has no money and her father isn’t in the picture.”
    Mallory tries to imagine her mother’s reaction to this news. Kitty has lost the war but won a crucial battle. Krystel’s family is a disappointment, so there will be no dynasty-building. However, that means Kitty will have no competition in planning the wedding. She’ll insist on tasteful Christmas (white lights, burgundy velvet bows, Handel’s Messiah ) rather than tacky Christmas (elves, candy canes, “Jingle Bells”).
    “I’m happy for you, Coop,” Mallory says. For what might be the first time in her life, she’s telling the truth about this. For all of her twenty-four years, Mallory has suffered from a chronic case of sibling envy. Cooper is the golden child to Mallory’s silver. He’s the chocolate chip cookie to her oatmeal-raisin, which people like, just never quite as much.
    “So now’s the part where I ask you a favor,” Cooper says.
    “Oh,” Mallory says. He wants a favor from her? This is new. Cooper is a policy wonk for the Brookings Institution, a think tank in DC. His job is important, prestigious even (though Mallory’s not going to pretend she understands what he actually does). What could he possibly need from her? “Anything for you, you know that.”
    “I’d like to have a bachelor…well, not a party per se, but a weekend. Nothing crazy, just me, Fray, obviously, and Jake McCloud.”
    Fray, obviously, Mallory thinks, and she rolls her eyes. And Jake McCloud, the mysterious Jake McCloud, Cooper’s big brother in his fraternity, Phi Gamma Delta—Fiji—whom Mallory has never actually met. She’s had some intriguing phone conversations with him, however.
    “Oh yeah?” she says.
    “And I was thinking maybe I could do it there on Nantucket over Labor Day weekend?” He pauses. “If you don’t mind three guys crashing on the sofa…or the floor…wherever.”
    “I have two spare bedrooms,” Mallory says.
    “You do? ” Cooper says. “So it’s, like, a real house? I always got the impression it was more like, I don’t know, a shack?”
    “It’s not a house -house but it’s better than a shack,” Mallory says. “You’ll see when you get here.”
    “So it’s okay, then?” Cooper says. “Labor Day weekend?”
    “Sure,” she says. Labor Day weekend, she thinks, is when Leland said she might come, but those plans are tentative at best. “Mi casa es su casa.”
    “Thanks, Mal!” Cooper says. He sounds excited and grateful, and after she hangs up, Mallory runs her hands over the worn-smooth boards of the deck and thinks about how good it feels to finally have something worth sharing.

    On the day this conversation takes place, our girl is so tan that her skin looks like polished wood, and her mousy-brown hair is getting lighter. From certain angles, it looks nearly blond. She has lost eight pounds—that’s a guesstimate; the cottage doesn’t have a bathroom scale—but she is definitely more fit thanks to the fact that her only form of transportation is a ten-speed bike that she found