Summer of '69(105)
It was Lorraine. Lorraine Crimmins, who cooked and baked for Exalta and who, that summer, was also minding the children.
Their summer had ended abruptly right there. Kate packed up herself and the children that very night and they had left on the early ferry, before her parents were even awake.
“You can explain to them why I left,” Kate told Wilder. “Stay here with her if that’s what you want.”
Kate had stood on the upper deck of the ferry with her car keys clenched like a weapon between her fingers as she watched Nantucket retreat into the distance. Lorraine Crimmins; it was such a betrayal. Lorraine had started working at the Nichols household when she was sixteen years old and Kate twenty, a sophomore at Smith College. That was during the war. Kate had invited Lorraine to listen to the radio with her in the evenings; together they had knit socks for the men overseas. Kate had been kind to Lorraine because she pitied her. Lorraine was a sad case—ruined by her mother’s death when she was a baby, doomed to disappoint and underachieve every step of the way after that. Lorraine was very pretty, but her style tended toward tawdry. She wore too much makeup when she went out at night, and her clothes were tight and cheap. At Bosun’s Locker she met men—scallopers, house painters, traveling salesmen—one after the other, no one special, no one serious.
Wilder and Lorraine, crammed into the buttery. Given away by Kate glimpsing that one pale foot. It wasn’t a vision Kate could ever hope to forget.
Kate had told Wilder to stay with Lorraine but as the ferry crossed the sound, she feared that was exactly what he would do. Kate loved Wilder and she hated herself for that. It seemed the cruelest circumstance life had to offer—that someone she loved so profoundly could hurt her so badly and still that love did not die. If anything, it intensified. Kate wanted Wilder to love her, to desire her, not Lorraine Crimmins.
Why her? Why Lorraine, of all people?
Exalta had called the next day to check on Tiger’s fever.
“Tiger’s fever?” Kate said.
Yes, Exalta said, Wilder had explained that Tiger was running a high fever, which was why Kate had taken the children to Boston in such a great hurry.
The big war hero was a coward, Kate thought.
Just as Kate was summoning the courage to tell Exalta the truth—as humiliating as it was, Kate would also gain great satisfaction in stripping Exalta of her illusions about the man—Wilder had walked through the door. He dropped to his knees in front of Kate, and she felt the mightiest relief she had ever known.
A few minutes after Bill goes into Little Fair, Kate and Jessie watch all three of the Crimminses emerge from the house—Mr. Crimmins first, holding a duffel bag, then Lorraine, then Pick. Pick turns and sees Kate and Jessie and offers a halfhearted wave. Jessie gets up and takes a step forward but Kate says, “Let them go.” The last thing she wants is a grandiose, overblown goodbye, and she can’t get close to Lorraine again or she will do something she is sure to regret.
“But…” Jessie says. She gazes at her mother with her liquid brown eyes. “I’m in love with him.”
Kate processes this information. “Come with me,” she says. “I want to talk to you.”
Midnight Confessions
Jessie follows her mother up the stairs of Little Fair. It’s almost unbearable to be here now that Pick is gone, really gone. Jessie would even prefer him being here with Sabrina. She thinks back to the day she arrived, when she found Pick playing that dumb ball-and-paddle game. She feels like she walked into a trap. Pick was so cute with his sun-bleached hair and his rope bracelet and his easy charm, asking Jessie questions, taking an interest in her, making her a simple, delicious lunch when she was so hungry. It was impossible not to fall immediately in love with him.
Kate indicates that Jessie should sit at the table and Jessie does so, though her heart breaks because he didn’t leave a note for her or anything, no sign that they’d been friends or that he’d miss her. Probably, he’d been worried about Sabrina—or maybe not. Maybe he was just happy that his mother came to reclaim him. Jessie hadn’t been able to tell from the look on his face.
“You know what the happiest summer of my life was?” Kate asks.
“When you turned thirteen?” Jessie guesses.
“I was thirteen during the Great Depression,” Kate says. “So, no.”
Jessie doesn’t venture another guess. Frankly, she doesn’t care.
“It was the summer you were born,” Kate says. “Your dad and I brought you here when you were only four weeks old, just a little peanut. And we lived up here in Little Fair all by ourselves, and the other three kids stayed in the big house with Nonny and Gramps.”
“Oh,” Jessie says. She’s only old enough to remember when her siblings lived in Little Fair by themselves.
“I was happy…well, probably because I had a little bit of space from Nonny. It was just you, me, and Daddy. It felt like a fresh start…and I desperately needed a fresh start.”
Jessie runs her Tree of Life pendant along its chain as her mind wanders back to the exchange she overheard between her mother and Lorraine Crimmins. Kate had called Lorraine Crimmins a whore, and Lorraine, instead of getting angry like Jessie assumed she would, said, Lucky for your husband. Jessie had gotten a funny feeling then, like a door was opening, a secret door, and she was finally getting a glimpse of what lurked behind it. She knows a whore is a prostitute, a woman who gets paid to have sex with men, and she knows that when Lorraine said, Lucky for your husband, she meant Wilder Foley, not David Levin.