Summer of '69(22)

He sits up. “Oh, hi. You’re Jessie, I bet.”

The boy is tan already and his hair has a glint of gold that Jessie knows can only be achieved by swimming in salt water and letting your hair dry in the sun. At least, that’s Kirby’s claim. Jessie’s hair is dark brown, and dark brown it remains all summer long. The boy’s rope bracelet is fairly new, Jessie notes; it’s still bone-white and loose on his wrist. Jessie has forgotten about rope bracelets. At the start of each summer, she and Kirby and Tiger would walk to the Seven Seas gift shop and each of them would pick out a brand-new clean white rope bracelet that would then shrink and weather with every swim. By the end of summer, the bracelet would be dingy gray and snug around Jessie’s wrist, but somehow Kate would wiggle the blade of the scissors between rope and skin to cut the bracelet off before they returned to Brookline.

“Who are you?” Jessie asks.

“Pickford Crimmins,” the boy says. “Call me Pick.”

“Pick,” Jessie says. “Are you related to Mr. Crimmins, then?”

“I’m his grandson.”

Grandson? Jessie didn’t know Mr. Crimmins even had a child, much less a grandchild.

“I’m Jessie,” she says. “Jessie Levin.”

“I know,” Pick says. “Bill told me about you.”

“You call your grandfather Bill?” Jessie calls her grandmother Exalta in her mind only; if she ever called Nonny Exalta to her face, she would be stuffed into the buttery for all eternity.

“That’s what he asked me to call him,” Pick says. “I met him for the first time at the beginning of May.”

“You just met your grandfather?” Jessie says.

Pick tosses aside his paddle game, gets up off the couch, and stands at the top of the stairs, where Jessie can get a better look at him. Pick is tall and lean…and cute, Jessie decides. Very cute, cuter than any boy at school, but that only serves to make her self-conscious. She loses her wits for a second, then regains them. What is he doing here?

“What are you doing here?” she asks.

“Making lunch,” he says. “Bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwiches on toasted Portuguese bread that Bill got from this place called Aime’s Bakery. You ever heard of it?”

Portuguese bread from Aime’s, another summer tradition that Jessie has forgotten about. Portuguese bread is a dense white that makes the world’s best toast. Some people buy twenty loaves at the end of the summer, take them home, stick them in the freezer, and enjoy the bread all year, but Exalta and Kate think this is cheating. Portuguese bread, like tomatoes and corn from the farm stand on Hummock Pond Road, is meant to be enjoyed only in the summer.

“Of course I’ve heard of it,” Jessie says. “They make chicken pies on Thursdays and brick-oven beans on Saturdays.”

“Good to know!” Pick says. “So, can I fix you a sandwich?”

“Yes, please,” Jessie says. She’s confused and a little uneasy about what Pick is doing in Little Fair, but her hunger wins out. She sees at least a pound of bacon, crispy and brown, draining on a paper bag. There are two tomatoes and a head of iceberg lettuce on a cutting board, the one that Tiger scorched with a pot long ago.

“Want mayo?” Pick asks.

“Yes, please,” Jessie says. She sits down at one of the seats at the table for three and wonders what her siblings would think if they could see this stranger in the kitchen at Little Fair. Technically, he’s not a stranger, Jessie supposes. He’s Mr. Crimmins’s grandson and they have known Mr. Crimmins all their lives. But do Blair, Kirby, and Tiger know that Mr. Crimmins has a grandchild? Pick said he only just met Mr. Crimmins in May. What does that mean?

Jessie has questions, but she’s temporarily mesmerized by the sight of Pick creating the sandwiches. He toasts the precious bread until it’s golden brown, spreads it with mayonnaise, layers on the bacon and sliced tomato, then tops it with lettuce that he shreds expertly with the dull chef’s knife that has probably been at Little Fair longer than Jessie has been alive. He puts the sandwiches on plates and gets down two glasses from the cabinet. He knows where everything is in this kitchen. How is that possible? He brings a frosty pitcher of lemonade out of the icebox, delivers both sandwiches and drinks to the table, and then reaches into the narrow closet that serves as a pantry and produces a cylindrical tin of Jays potato chips. Jessie’s mouth drops open. Potato chips are expressly forbidden in both houses. The only time Kate allows Jessie to have potato chips is with her chicken salad sandwich at the club, and even then, if Exalta happens to be present, Jessie has to ask for carrot sticks instead.

An entire tin of potato chips here, at Little Fair!

Pick raises his glass of lemonade to Jessie. “Nice to meet you,” he says.

Jessie stares at him. He has arresting ice-blue eyes, the color of the rarest pieces of sea glass.

“Okay,” she says. They touch glasses and Jessie feels embarrassed. She has never touched glasses with a boy before. She has never eaten a meal alone with any boy except for Tiger.

When she finishes half her sandwich and a large handful of chips—it’s taking all her willpower not to devour the entire canister in a frenzy—she says, “Are you living here?”

“I am,” he says. “And my grandfather is living in the room downstairs.”