Summer Harbor Read Free Page B

dramatic sky, jumping and grasping hands at each bolt of lightning spearing from the black clouds into the roiling sea, like Neptune’s tridents.
    “Do you think we’ll get any thunderstorms while we’re here?”
    “This is New England seacoast, so anything’s possible.”
    Kiley grasped the handle of her suitcase and climbed up the steep, narrow stairs to the second floor. She breathed in the slightly musty, salt-and-wood smell of a long-closed summerhouse. The scent acted like a door to the memories of other summer arrivals, made tangible by the same awkward weight of the overpacked suitcases, and the familiar sound of her sandals on wood floors. She half tasted the homemade chowder always left for them by the woman who used to open the house when she was a girl.
    The wash of homesickness weakened her legs with its potency, and sharp tears came to her eyes.
    “Mom, are you all right?” Will’s voice betrayed his surprise at his mother’s quiet weeping.
    “I never realized how much I missed it.” Kiley laughed at herself and brushed away the tears. “Oh, I feel so foolish.” But was it the foolishness of sentimentality, or the foolishness of having stayed away for so long?

Two
    Will came upon the photographs when he pulled open the top drawer of the pine bureau in the tiny upstairs room that once had been his mother’s. The pictures were loose, the pinpricks where thumbtacks had held them on the wall were tinged with rust. Will ran his fingers over the white beadboard wall above the bureau, and picked out the tiny holes. As he held up the photographs, Will could see that they matched the pinholes perfectly. Someone had come in and pulled these pictures down and stuffed them into this drawer in a random and thoughtless way. Some of the five snapshots were torn at the corners, where the culprit had yanked against the tacks.
    Hearing his mother coming down the hall, Will instinctively slammed shut the drawer.
    “Finding everything?” His mother stood in the doorway, her out-of-character crying jag no longer in evidence, her eyes dry, if bright, her smile fixed, if not genuine.
    “Yeah. Fine. Just putting my stuff away.”
    Kiley seemed satisfied and went back downstairs to start dinner.
    Will gently slid the drawer open again and removed the snapshots. Sitting on the soft mattress of the single bed, he studied the faces captured there. Two boys, and a girl who could only be his mother. He was taken by surprise at how much she looked like him when he was a kid; the shape of her face, the color of her hair, and the expression in her eyes reminded him of an old snapshot of himself that she kept on her desk at work.
    Will flipped the first picture over, the one where they all looked about grade school age. “Grainger, Mack, and me, summer of 1976.” The three were on the beach, a huge sand castle behind them. The colors had faded, but Will could still make out the red, white, and blue of his mother’s one-piece bathing suit and the pale green of the warm summer sea. In the second photo, the same three sat on the flat wide porch rail of this house, legs dangling over the side, arms entwined. Kiley sat between the two boys, the three faces smiling into the camera. “Summer 1980.” The handwriting and the color of the pen, a girlish lilac, made Will think that his mother had pinned these pictures up, not one at a time, but at the same time, as if she’d chosen these five as a sampling of her summers with these two boys. Could they be cousins? He rejected the theory that these two boys were relations; looking at how physically they touched in this picture, he understood that these three were friends, best friends. Teen girls were especially touchy-feely with each other; boys, more apt to loop an arm around a neck in a mock choke hold to demonstrate their affection. This gangly trio were tangled together with arms across each other’s shoulders in every conceivable combination. Only best friends did that.
    The