“You have to admit that it’s strange,” he’d grumbled.
“Life is strange,” said Gabe. In December, Rosa had flown out to Brooklyn with Gabe, to help him move into the apartment he’d rented, and to introduce him to Benji, who had long since put away his bass and now went by Benjamin Scott. He sold commercial real estate, and was married with two children. He’d been, unsurprisingly, angry to learn about Rosa’s duplicity, and their first meeting, at a diner in New Jersey, had started off feeling excruciatingly awkward, but Ben had warmed to Gabe. He’d even helped him find a job, calling a friend of a friend who owned a skateboard shop in Jackson Heights and who’d hired Gabe to organize its special events and run its social media accounts.
Connor was delighted to be in school with his cousins, and thrilled with Sam’s new companion, who’d assumed a role in his life somewhere between cool uncle and big brother. Sam was happy—especially when he imagined Julie looking down at him with understanding.
Sarah didn’t feel it when a microscopic fleck of her mother’s ashes fell from the hem of her dress into a crack between the floorboards in the kitchen… but the house did. She opened herself and welcomed her former mistress.
It’s all right now, said the house. See? Everything worked out the way it was supposed to work out.
Oh, look! said what used to be Veronica. She could see Sarah, deep in conversation with Eli, who was listening attentively, and Sam holding hands with Gabe. She could see her grandchildren and her step-grandchildren, Dexter and Miles and Connor, begging to be allowed to go to the pool, Ruby gesticulating with both hands as she told Paul Norman all about her newest project, which was outdoors and interactive, Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream staged in a shuttered suburban mall as a choose-your-own adventure for middle-school-age kids. She could even see her sister and her sister’s husband, stuffing their faces at the kitchen table. No, we’re not selling, she heard Sarah say, and she was glad.
Veronica heard, and felt, the vibrations of her grandsons’ feet on the deck. She smelled, and felt, the scents of linguine with clam sauce, her son-in-law’s specialty, which he’d made for dinner the night before. She could feel the presence of all the people she’d loved; all the people who’d loved her.
And you’ll be able to see everything, the house assured her. This is your place. Your home. And you’re a part of it now, forever. All you have to do is sit back and watch.
Acknowledgments
The Summer Place was written during the latter part of our shared COVID year. I started it in the fall, wrote through the dark, cold winter, and was completing a first draft in the spring of 2021, when the vaccine rollout began. It felt—briefly—as if a return to something like normal was on the horizon, and all of us were waking from some strange, enchanted interlude, during which our lives had been reordered. Stuck at home, together, we saw the people with whom we were closest—our children, our spouses, our parents—out of context and in a new light.
I wanted to write about that time, about a family whose members had come through the pandemic year, as opposed to a book set during the heart of it. A fun, lighthearted book. A wedding weekend! I thought. Family drama! A man making sense of his sexuality, a husband, confronted by an old mistake, and a wife, tempted by an old love! I wanted the story to have a feeling somewhere between a No?l Coward farce and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where the pairings are driven by otherworldly interference. I also knew I wanted to write about the ways that quarantine exposed the fault lines in relationships and the buried foundations of money and privilege and sacrifice that hold up our lives, whether or not we acknowledge that they’re there.
Then, in March 2021, my mom, Fran, was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Nine weeks later, she was dead. My mom was the first person who brought me to Cape Cod, on family vacations, when I was a girl. When I became a mother myself, I brought my daughters to the Cape, where they spent big chunks of the last eighteen summers with their Granny Franny. So I knew that I also wanted to write about loss, and mothers and daughters and how the torch gets passed from one mother to the next. My mother’s spirit infuses every page, and I hope that when you read it, you can feel her humor and intelligence and her big, embracing heart.
I will always be grateful to Joanna Pulcini for being one of the first people who believed I had stories to tell.
I’m grateful to my agent, Celeste Fine, and to John Maas at Park/Fine, who edited this book with kindness and incisive skill and made every page, person, and plot point better. I am also grateful for the hard work of Emily Sweet, Andrea Mai, Susana Alvarez, Anna Petkovich, and Theresa Park.