Summer of '69(52)

Darren throws away the empty popcorn box and reclaims Kirby’s hand. Her heart not only sings; it hits a soprano’s high note. “My mother is protective,” he says. “Trust me, it’s not you.”

Trust me, it is me, Kirby thinks. “Have you ever had a serious girlfriend?” she asks.

“One,” Darren says. “My freshman year. Her name was Amanda.”

Amanda. She sounds white, but Kirby is afraid to ask. She finds she’s jealous of Amanda, which is ridiculous. “Did your mother like Amanda?” Kirby asks.

“Hated her,” Darren says, and he laughs. “How about you? Have you had a serious boyfriend?”

Officer Scottie Turbo, she thinks. But there’s no way she’s going to tell that story. However, she finds she can’t discount it either. “One,” she says. “He was…older. A policeman.”

“A policeman?” Darren says. He whistles. “Damn, that’s tough to compete with. I’m jealous.”

Kirby squeezes her hand. “You shouldn’t be,” she says. “It’s over. And I mean over.”

When it’s finally their turn to ride the carousel, they pick horses next to each other, Darren on the inside and Kirby on the outside.

The carousel starts to spin and Kirby raises her hands over her head. She has never felt this happy.

Neither of them gets the brass ring—it goes to a little girl with custard-colored curls who looks like Buffy from Family Affair—but even so, Kirby gets off the carousel feeling like she’s lucky in every part of her life.



Darren walks Kirby back to the house on Narragansett Avenue and says, “I’ll be by tomorrow with those two-by-fours. And hey, why don’t you come to my house for dinner on Sunday night? Sundays we always do steamers.”

“Are you sure?” Kirby says. She loves steamer clams. On Nantucket, she and Tiger harvested their own clams using rakes that had belonged to their grandfather. No matter how thoroughly they rinsed them, they always ended up with sand in the bowl, and that was what made them authentic.

“Sure I’m sure,” Darren says. “Come at five; that’ll give us plenty of time to hang out before you have to go to work. You can get to know my mom a little better, and my dad is way easier than my mom.”

His mom is the real judge, Kirby thinks. “Okay,” she says. “I’ll see you Sunday.”

Darren leans over and kisses Kirby gently on the lips. Before she can register how good it feels, he’s walking away with a wave.

Kirby floats into the house. Darren Frazier kissed her! He invited her for dinner! And the truly transcendent thing is, she doesn’t even think of him as black anymore. She only thinks of him as Darren.

On a whim, Kirby knocks on Patty’s door, and Patty calls out, “Enter at your own risk!”

Kirby finds Patty standing at her bureau wearing only a slip and staring into the mirror.

“Hey,” Kirby says. She drops her voice to a whisper. “I have air-conditioning now. Want to come upstairs and luxuriate?”

“I have to go to work,” Patty says. “Double feature, The Italian Job and True Grit.” She tries for a light tone but Kirby senses something wrong. And then she sees the purple bruise on Patty’s upper arm.

“Hey,” Kirby says, gently taking Patty’s elbow so she can get a better look. “What’s this?”

Patty yanks her arm away. “I told you,” she says. “Role-playing.”

“Patty,” Kirby says. She locks eyes with Patty in the mirror, which seems easier than talking to her face to face. “Is he hurting you?”

“It’s a game,” Patty says. “Now, please leave.”





Help!



It feels like Blair is being held hostage in her own body. She’s thirty-four weeks pregnant. There are still six weeks to go until her due date. She has heard that twins often come early, but she has also heard that first children are often late.

Early, she thinks, come early. Today, tomorrow, right now.

Of course, the babies will have no father.

Blair can’t believe Angus asked her to leave. But then she tries to imagine how she would feel if she had walked in on Angus necking with her sister Kirby. It would be unspeakably horrible—much, much worse than finding out about the faceless Trixie.

She half expected there to be a bouquet of flowers waiting for her at All’s Fair with a note of apology. When that didn’t happen, she figured maybe Angus would show up in person. Blair would pretend to be indignant when she opened the front door. She would make him suffer for a few minutes before she relented and let him inside.

And then they would just pick up where they left off last summer. Angus could work at her grandfather’s desk; they could walk into town for ice cream cones, go out for romantic dinners, share a cigarette on the bench at the top of Main Street. Anyone could see that Angus needed a vacation, and Angus and Blair needed a vacation together.

But Angus didn’t even call to see if Blair had made it to the island safely, and Blair just hoped that he was bedridden with one of his episodes. It would serve him right.

On Blair’s first full day on Nantucket, Exalta takes Jessie to her tennis lesson, and Kate has errands to run in town, so Blair is left alone in the house. She loves All’s Fair, but she loves Little Fair even more. Little Fair was the backdrop of all of Blair’s adolescent summers. She smoked her first cigarette there and poured her first gin and tonic into one of the jelly jars kept in the cabinet. She let Larry Winter kiss her on the deck overlooking Plumb Lane the summer she was fourteen, and for the rest of that summer, he would show up below that deck in the wee hours of the morning and call up to Blair as though they were Romeo and Juliet. In Little Fair, she had played countless games of Monopoly and gin rummy with her brother and sister; she had made popcorn in a two-quart pot, burning it half the time; she had read the first novel she had ever truly fallen in love with, Gone with the Wind; she had taught Tiger and Jessie and the Dunscombe twins how to make sailors’ valentines out of seashells and cardboard boxes.