“Ruby loves this place as much as I do.” As much as you and Sam didn’t, Sarah heard her mother say. “When she called and said she wanted to be married here, I was just so happy we’d have a chance to all be together.”
“It shouldn’t have bothered me,” Sarah said. “And, for the record, I always loved it here, too. It’s just, with the boys, and everything they’ve got going on, it’s complicated.” As she spoke, she discovered that she was angry at her mother, angry in a way she’d never let herself acknowledge. Ronnie had pulled it off perfectly. She’d had a life as an artist, and had then been able to comfortably, happily set that life aside. Ronnie had never strayed during her happy marriage, because Sarah’s father had never given her a reason to look elsewhere for love and affection. She’d given her children idyllic summers in this unspoiled, perfect place. Even in her anger, Sarah wished that, in spite of the complications, she’d let the boys spend more time here during the summers; that she’d allowed them to take a few months off from their music lessons and language classes and spend lazy, unstructured hours reading or swimming or exploring or daydreaming, as she and Sam had done.
But the truth—one that she’d barely acknowledged, even in the privacy of her own brain—was that she hadn’t loved it here. Not after what had happened with Owen. For years, every place she saw, every food she tasted, the sight of the Wellfleet Drive-In’s marquee or a whiff of fried onion rings as she drove past Arnold’s brought back a memory of something they’d done together and made her ache. Everything felt tainted; everything had hurt. She’d been glad when she’d fallen in love with Eli; glad of the path that life with him offered. Glad, too, that the path had led her away from Cape Cod, from Ronnie’s scrutiny, and maybe even her disappointment, that Sarah hadn’t stuck with her music. Eli’s parents had a place at the Jersey Shore, a two-and-a-half-hour drive instead of a six-hour one. It gave her an easy excuse not to make the trip to Massachusetts.
“You don’t need to apologize. I understand,” her mother said, but Sarah felt like she had to keep trying to explain. Maybe to Ronnie, maybe to herself.
“I’ve got friends who rent places in the Hamptons, or who stay with their parents out there, and that’s doable. But getting up here…”
“I know it’s a haul,” said her mother. She smiled a little. “Did I ever tell you I was in the Hamptons once? For a film festival, when The Summer Sisters came out.”
Sarah, who’d only ever heard a handful of her mother’s stories about her writing life, shook her head.
“I don’t know what it’s like there these days, but when I went there, I’d never seen such awful traffic leaving the city in my life,” Ronnie said. “And then, at the screening, I remember feeling like I was twice the size of every other woman there.” She laughed a little. “Twice as big and maybe one-sixteenth as fashionable. And I’d never been skinnier or better dressed.” She shook her head, her expression regretful. “I wasn’t in a hurry to go back. The Outer Cape is much more my speed.”
“Is it hard being here?” Sarah asked. “Without Dad?”
Ronnie hesitated. Her shoulders slumped, and Sarah felt guilty for bringing up something that was clearly still painful. “I miss him. Sometimes I still feel like he’s just away, you know? Not dead, just at the hardware store buying lightbulbs, or at the library, getting a new book.” She sighed and added, “But this was always much more of my place than his.”
“Really?” Sarah knew, of course, that her mom had spent every day here in the summertime, while her father had only come for two weeks’ vacation, and then on weekends. But she had memories of her dad in Truro: showing her and Sam how to build bonfires, wading with them out to the sandbar to kick a soccer ball around during low tide; clamming in the summer and oystering in the fall, teaching Sam and Sarah how to drive when they were thirteen in the Corn Hill Beach parking lot at twilight after making them swear not to tell Mom.
“Oh, Lord,” Ronnie said, laughing a little. “You don’t remember? Your dad got sunburned if he even thought about the sun. He wasn’t much of a swimmer. He didn’t like seafood. He got seasick on any kind of boats, including kayaks and canoes.”
Sarah was bewildered. “He went fishing with us!” She could picture her dad, in his Red Sox ball cap and aviator sunglasses, with a stripe of zinc on his nose. They’d catch striped bass, and eat fillets for weeks, cooked in the oven, with mustard and bread crumbs, or grilled.