Summer of '69(89)

There’s only one other structure on this road: the six-bedroom home David found listed for sale in the newspaper. Kate spies it up ahead. She pulls into the spacious drive. The house has gray shingles and white trim that are weathered and peeling, respectively, in a way that suggests gravitas and character rather than neglect. The house is tall and wide; both All’s Fair and Little Fair would fit inside. From the front porch, there are uninterrupted views of the ocean. Kate is enraptured; here, there’s no mistaking you’re on an island.

Kate tries the front door. It’s unlocked, so she walks right in. The house is immediately welcoming. There’s a living room on the left, a dining room with a grand round pedestal table surrounded by ten ladder-back chairs on the right, and a flight of stairs up the middle. The back of the house features an eat-in kitchen with big windows that look back on what used to be farmland. There is, in fact, plenty of room for both a tennis court and a swimming pool, and although Kate scorned David for suggesting it (she cringes remembering her own sharp tongue. Why does he remain married to her?), she now thinks how wonderful it would be to create a proper summer estate out here. She had previously thought it garish and gauche, but neither is true if there are no neighbors to witness it.

Upstairs, Kate finds a medley of bedrooms and bathrooms and closets. The entire upstairs is painted white and every time Kate turns a corner, there’s another bedroom, another bath. Some of the bedrooms have twin beds, some a double bed; two connect through a Jack-and-Jill bathroom with a double vanity. There’s a spacious linen closet and a nursery that still contains a crib. There is one room where the walls are lined with books, the swollen paperbacks of summer, and Kate imagines a future time when her mind will be quiet enough that she can read again.

Expecting another closet, she opens a door to find a set of stairs, which she climbs up to an attic. It’s a finished space—though brutally hot; it needs a powerful standing fan—that’s furnished with six built-in bunk beds. The quality of the bunk beds is high; the wood is solid and true, and the mattresses look new. Kate imagines that the man of the house built these for his grandchildren, maybe at their behest, maybe as a surprise, and the brothers and sisters and cousins treasured their time up here away from the adults, telling secrets, making up ghost stories.

Kate wonders if she will ever have enough grandchildren to fill this room.

She returns to the second floor to find the room that will be Tiger’s. One of the front rooms, she decides, with a big bed and a half bath. When Tiger comes home, he can marry Magee and the two of them can sleep in this room and wake up to the sun’s first rays hitting the water.

The other front bedroom will be for her and David; it’s the master, and it has an en suite bath with a claw-foot tub. There are rooms for Blair, Kirby, and Jessie, and one guest room that will be home to boyfriends or college roommates or in-laws.

Kate stands at the top of the stairs looking down. She hadn’t expected to like the house this much; she had not expected to like it at all. She came to see it with dual purposes, neither of them noble—to escape Exalta and to appease David. But what she has found is a place that the entire family can call home. It’s not fancy—there’s no crown molding, no priceless murals, nowhere to hang proper drapes. There are no brick floors, and there’s no kitchen fireplace or quaint buttery. It has no pedigree, really—if Kate had to guess, she would say the house was built with stock-market money in the prosperous twenties as a summer resort by people who loved nature and their privacy.

The house feels like home. It feels like the place where she and David might happily spend the 1970s, the 1980s, and, if they’re lucky, the 1990s. Maybe they’ll even watch the sun rise on the new millennium here.

The year 2000; it’s only thirty-one years away, and yet it feels like science fiction.

The thought sustains her. She will usher in the next thousand years here, on Red Barn Road.



Kate can’t risk calling Laundry Real Estate from the house, nor can she go to the office in person, as someone she knows might see her and report back to Exalta. She decides to call from the bank of pay phones at the Nantucket Electric Company building. It’s midday and another scorcher. The town is deserted, which is a good thing. There’s always a chance someone might notice her using the pay phone and wonder if Kate is having an affair. Bitsy Dunscombe would most definitely suspect that.

Kate needs to be quick.

There’s only one other person at the bank of phones, a blond teenager with his back to Kate. He’s yelling into the receiver, “Where is she? Have you heard from her? No? Not anything?” When he slams down the phone, Kate gasps.

“Pick?” Kate says. It’s the first time she has used his name. Bill Crimmins tactfully skipped a proper introduction, though naturally Kate and Pick have seen each other in passing. He’s always on his bike, either heading to the beach or to work or returning from the beach or from work. If he looks over and sees her, he waves and she waves back.

Pick seems upset by the call and embarrassed to be recognized. He draws his forearm across his eyes. Was the boy crying? Kate replays his words and suddenly she understands: he must have been looking for his mother.

“Hey, Mrs. Levin,” he says. He gestures toward the phone with a theatrical flourish. “All yours.” He turns to go; she sees his bike resting against the telephone pole. She would normally be grateful for an easy exit—she has sensitive business to discuss that she doesn’t want him to overhear, plus she feels very uncomfortable around him. She can’t bring herself to look at him too closely. But he’s in such obvious distress, she can’t let it go unremarked.