That Summer: A Novel Read Free

apartment, acquired after Julia had gone off to college, a new start for a new life, a new wife, new children.
    Helen cast Julia a quick apologetic smile. “I’ll be right back. There are croissants if you want one. Just help yourself. I know I don’t have to tell you that.”
    Helen slipped out of the kitchen, in pursuit of Jamie’s iPod or gym shoes or the stray wing of a model plane.
    Julia looked over to find her father looking at her.
    “Caroline would probably buy the house off you if that’s what you want,” said her father quietly. “You wouldn’t have to go back.”
    Julia leaned against the counter, the taste of cold coffee sour on her tongue. Her anger evaporated, leaving her feeling nothing but tired, tired and confused. “I’m damned if I do and damned if I don’t, aren’t I?” she said. “There’s no good way to deal with it.”
    She didn’t understand why this unknown great-aunt would pass up the cousins on the spot for a great-niece who didn’t even remember her name. Memory stirred—fresh-cut grass and the heavy scent of flowers and the cool of water against her fingertips—and was gone again.
    “Dad?” Her father looked up from the paper. Julia levered herself away from the counter, the hems of her jeans, always too long, brushing against the tiled floor. “Why would this aunt … Regina leave the house to me?”
    She half-expected him to shrug, to punt the question. Instead, he folded the paper meticulously, setting it down on the side of the table, exactly aligned with the grain of the wood. “Your mother grew up in that house,” he said. He cleared his throat. “Your aunt always used to say it would be your mother’s someday.”
    His eyes met Julia’s. They were gray, like hers. They had the some coloring, or had once. Her father’s hair had long since gone gray, while hers was artificially enhanced with lighter highlights. Underneath, though, it was the same pedestrian mid-brown.
    Her mother’s hair had been black, her eyes a vivid blue. She was everything that was alive and lively. Until she wasn’t.
    When Julia tried to remember her mother, all she could scrounge up was an image from an old picture, the colors faded with time, her mother, in a garden, a kerchief tied over her black hair, laughing up at the camera. All around her, the trees were in bloom. There was a lake or a pond somewhere in the background, just the vaguest impression of a shimmer of water.
    The picture had stood on her father’s nightstand. It had gone into a drawer not long after their move to New York. Julia had never quite had the nerve to ask her father what he had done with it. Their mutual grief was a palpable silence between them.
    “And I was the next best thing?” Julia hadn’t meant it to come out sounding quite so sour.
    “Either that,” said her father drily, “or Regina was looking to put Caroline’s nose out of joint. There was no love lost there.”
    Julia tucked her hands into the pockets of her jeans, fighting against the urge to curl into a ball like a porcupine, all defensive prickles. She missed the familiar armor of her job, that relentless whirl of work that meant she never had to think about anything she didn’t care to, pushing it aside with the excuse of being too busy.
    But she wasn’t busy now, was she? And she needed the money. It had been nine months already since Sterling Bates had let her go, with crocodile tears and false condolences. They had fired her, as was their charming practice, the day before bonuses were announced, reducing her take for the year to a third of what it would otherwise have been. Her severance would run out soon, but the bills were still coming in: mortgage, health care, groceries. She had no idea what property sold for in Herne Hill, whether it had been hit anywhere as hard as the market in the United States, but either way one looked at it, it was an unexpected windfall. She’d be an idiot to turn her back on it, all because of