A Summer Affair Read Free Page B

commission for her best client, Chick Klaussen: a sculpture for the entry of his offices on West Fifty-fourth Street in Manhattan. She planned to be finished with the commission right before the baby was due. Jason was happy because he was, deep in his soul, a procreator. He would have had ten kids if Claire was willing, a stable of kids, a posse, a football team, a tribe: the Crispin clan.
    When Claire was thirty-two weeks along, she was in the hot shop working on the Klaussen commission. She had a week or two of work left at the most. At the most! she promised Jason, even though her doctor wanted her to stop. Too hot in there, he said. Not safe for you or the baby. Claire was working very hot, it was finish work, shine and polish, she was not drinking enough water, and she fainted. She hit the floor, cut her arm, broke two ribs, and went immediately into preterm labor. On the MedFlight jet, they told her she would most likely lose the baby. But Zack had lived; they took him by emergency C-section, and he spent five weeks on a respirator in the NICU. He lived, Claire healed.
    Jason was shaken to his core. He had been standing there as they sliced Claire open—Claire, whose body had sucked in two bags of IV fluid in less than thirty minutes, so advanced was her dehydration—and he had fully expected them to pull out a stillborn. But then, the cry. It was a revelation for Jason; it was his born-again moment, the moment when an adult man who thought he knew everything learned something about the human condition. He sat next to Claire’s bed as Zack spent the first of thirty-five days in the NICU, and he made Claire promise she would stop working.
    For a little while, he said. Have a studio finish the Klaussen commission.
    This was as close as he came to blaming her. But no matter—Claire blamed herself, as she had blamed herself for Daphne’s accident. Her blood type was the rare AB positive: the universal acceptor. And that was all too fitting. Give her the blame, the shame, all of it: she had no boundaries, she would take it on. She agreed to stop working; she gave the Klaussen commission to a glass studio in Brooklyn to finish.
    Zack captured Jason’s heart—and Claire’s heart, too—because they came so close to losing him. Even now, seven months later, Claire woke up in the middle of the night, worrying about the lasting effects of her fall. She watched Zack, willing him to respond to her in an age-appropriate way, wishing that his eyes would show that glimmer, that promise that her other kids had shown: intelligence, motivation, determination. Since Zack’s birth, she had lived with the whisper, There’s something wrong with him . She constantly badgered Jason: Do you think something happened when he was born? Do you think there’s something Dr. Patel isn’t telling me, or something she didn’t see? To which Jason always responded, “For Chrissakes, Claire, he’s fine!” But that sounded to Claire like denial. It sounded like Jason was blinded by love.
    How was she going to tell Jason about the gala? Claire waited through dinner—fried chicken, Jason’s favorite. She waited through bath and stories for the girls and a shower and homework for J.D. She waited until Zack had his bottle, until Jason was relaxed on the sofa, remote control in hand. The TV was on, but Jason had not committed to anything yet. Now was the time to tell him! This was their life now, but Claire could remember Jason naked and grinning with a clam rake in his hand, his sun-bleached hair shining like gold.
    “I had lunch with Lock Dixon today,” she said. “At the yacht club.”
    He heard her, but he wasn’t listening. “Did you?”
    “Doesn’t that surprise you?”
    Jason changed the channel. Claire resented the TV, all fifty-two bright, chirping inches of it. “A little, I guess.”
    “He asked me to cochair the summer gala.”
    “What’s that?”
    “You know, the Nantucket’s Children thing. The event. The concert. The