Summer Harbor Read Free Page A

Kiley found her slippers and pulled on her housecoat. “Let’s have breakfast.”
    Will shook his head. “Not for me. I’m going back to bed.”
    “We aren’t done talking about this, you know.”
    Will stood in the doorway and shrugged a silent “Whatever” of youthful sangfroid . Instantly, Kiley knew that she’d made the right decision. He thought that his tears and apologies were enough. In that still childlike, solipsistic world Will inhabited, he believed that he had smoothed things over. That she was his mother, therefore, she must forgive him. Kiley remembered how that felt. If only tears and remorse could smooth away the mistakes of youth. This indiscretion would not affect the rest of his life in quite the way hers had, but neither would it go away.
    “Tell me something.” Will remained in the doorway, his hands pressed against the doorjamb.
    Kiley pulled the belt of her housecoat around her waist. “What?”
    “What is it about Hawke’s Cove that scares you so much?”
    “Stuff.”
    “Like my father?” A last arrow fired.
    Kiley knotted the belt, not looking up at Will. “Your father was the love of my life.”
    That was all she would ever say. Will’s father was someone who was kind, and handsome, and clever, whom she loved, and was now gone.
    The truth was, she didn’t know who his father was. Long ago she had loved two boys equally, only to find that that wasn’t possible. In love, there can never be three. The uncanny part was that every now and then Will betrayed some characteristic of one, and then of the other, as if the two had joined together to create this child; as if her love had somehow caused the impossible to happen, and Will was part of all three of them.
     
    The old summerhouse was so like she remembered it that for an instant, upon opening the double front door, Kiley half expected Mortie the cocker spaniel to greet her. Mortie had been her dog as a child, his fur a golden tan color that faded as he aged. He’d peacefully died in his sleep right there in the corner beside the hearth in the summer of her seventeenth year. Kiley glanced at the corner, half surprised that there was no dog bed still there. Stifling the temptation to tour the house as a memory museum, Kiley called to Will to start unloading the suitcases from the car.
    Kiley’s parents hadn’t been back to the place since her mother’s first fall. A shattered hip and the diagnosis of advanced osteoporosis had ended their summer pilgrimages to Hawke’s Cove, despite the encouragement of Lydia’s physical therapist to keep doing what she had always done. Any thought of going was further compromised as Merriwell’s lungs began to lose their battle against his lifetime of smoking. So, the Harris house had stood empty last summer, for the first time in nearly seventy summers. No Harris had lounged on the front porch, morning coffee in hand, surveying the magnificent seascape that, no matter how often it was viewed, never failed to amaze. A three-generation continuum had been broken, in part by Kiley’s refusal to come back.
    Now there was Will, the fourth generation at Hawke’s Cove, standing on the broad verandah…staring across the short front yard and narrow road to the intense blue of the summer ocean below the bluff. His ball cap was twisted around backward, his baggy jeans exposed his boxers, and his face was glowing with that first view of the cove that lent its name to the town. Will hitched up his jeans and turned to face her. “No one ever said it was this beautiful.”
    “It’s even more beautiful during storms. The sea becomes this gray green color, and the whitecaps are like cream. You can’t see across to Great Harbor because the sky and the sea become the same color. When I was a girl, we’d sit out here to watch the storms come and go, like our own private show.” She let Will imagine she meant herself and her parents. But it was Mack and Grainger with whom she’d sit, enraptured by the