Chapter 1 Lindy
Lindy
David had said he didn’t want a big party for his fiftieth, but Lindy had blazed ahead planning one, anyway. The inspiration
Lindy’s parents’ fiftieth anniversary happened to fall the week before, and David’s birthday was the week before that. “The
summer of a lifetime,” she’d told David as he’d crawled into bed. “Three parties, three weekends in a row. We’ll get all the
kids to spend two full weeks in Maine.” He’d slipped off his glasses and sighed, kissed her good night, and switched off the
lamp. She’d taken that as a yes.
Now it was go-time, D-Day, David’s Day, as she’d been referring to it in her mind. The weather, thank God, was glorious—eighty-two
and sunny, not a cloud in the sky. It was the perfect late-July-in-Maine day that people dreamed about all winter long.
“Where do you want the cake?” said Kate, David’s younger sister, banging in the front door of the yellow cottage with a giant
box from Hannaford, sunglasses nestled in her curly salt-and-pepper hair.
“On the table,” Lindy said, finishing folding away an afghan from potential red wine spills.
David’s family had changed nothing about the yellow cottage’s interior since the ’70s.
It was all knotty pine, threadbare mustard couches, and old rocking chairs, plus doilies and afghans crocheted by David’s grandma, who’d been dead thirty years.
Lindy didn’t know how you could seriously go four decades without updating a room, but the soul-lifting view of the cove out the old single-pane picture window overshadowed both the outdated décor and the musty smell that lingered.
“I could’ve made a cake,” Kate said, as she set the box down and pushed up the sleeves of the light L.L.Bean flannel she wore
open over a grubby T-shirt and shorts.
If Kate had made the cake, it would’ve ended up sugar-free, gluten-free, entirely devoid of any semblance of birthday-cake-ness.
Lindy and Kate had been best friends as kids, from the ages of ten to fourteen, but, since then, they’d never quite seen eye
to eye.
“Oh, no, you’re doing so much already!” Lindy said. “Thank you for going to town to pick it up. And, again, I really appreciate
being able to hold the party here.”
David’s parents had bought the yellow cottage in 1973, when David was thirteen. Now that they were gone, David technically
shared ownership with Kate and their younger brother, Josh, but since together the three siblings had twelve kids, it had
always just made sense for David and Lindy and their four to stay at Lindy’s family’s nearby cottage, Innisfree, with Lindy’s
parents. They’d done so as much as they could every summer while the kids were growing up.
Lindy had been summering at Innisfree since before she was born, just as her mother had done before her.
But Innisfree would be the site of the anniversary party next week, and base of operations for Hailey’s wedding the week after
that. Lindy’s mom, Greta, who was eighty-one now, had said that was “more than enough for one summer.”
She had a point. Sometimes Lindy didn’t know what she’d been thinking, to attempt to pull all this off at once. “It’s really great of you guys,” she emphasized to Kate, then laughed. “I think my mother might’ve had a breakdown, otherwise.”
Kate shrugged and gave a little smile as she opened the cellophane-topped box. “The lettering sucks,” she said. Happy 50th, David! was written in blue icing, drastically off-center, in lettering that appeared to have been crafted by an eight-year-old drunk
on Kool-Aid. The attempt at a trio of balloons, off-center to the opposite side, more closely resembled a triumvirate of swimming
sperm.
“Oh, God,” Lindy said.
Kate laughed. “They said there was nothing they could do, given that the party’s in a couple hours. Don’t worry, he’ll probably
think it’s funny.”
Would he? Lindy still didn’t know, she realized, after all these years.
The first time Lindy met David, she was ten years old.
Well, “met.” More like “spotted” from the seat of her pink Schwinn Fair Lady as she rode past the yellow cottage.
Their enclave of summer cottages was known as “The Cove,” but it was, more accurately, Summerland Cove Point, a small, rocky
point lined on one side by a tidal cove and on the other by the Atlantic Ocean. The point was accessible only by turning off
the main highway onto Summerland Cove Point Road, which, though not wide enough for two cars to pass, was officially “two-way”
for its first half mile, before becoming a counterclockwise one-way loop, tracing the tip of the point, then connecting back
up with itself again.
At ten, Lindy was allowed to ride from Innisfree all the way out to the highway, almost three-quarters of a mile.
When she reached the post office on the corner there, she had to turn around and pedal back.
As the damp, cool breeze ruffled her ponytail, to her right was the deep blue cove, rimmed in seaweed-covered rocks.
On her left, she passed a half dozen cottages set back on large lots, then the Summerland Cove Point Association or “SCPA” clubhouse, a small one-story shingled building with a single clay tennis court out front.
(As on all sunny mornings, Mr. and Mrs. Hastings were there, swatting a ball around and laughing.) Gulls swooped over the cove, crying.
A heron stalked for fish in the shallows.
In the distance across the water, the cars going past on the main highway were tiny, soundless, irrelevant, as if part of another world.
Lindy’s tires crackled over gravel. At the inward bend of the road, barely visible below a rim of dark rocks, was the community
beach, a tiny stretch of gritty sand just wide enough at high tide to lay out a towel, and across from that was the yellow
cottage, which ten-year-old Lindy knew had recently sold. “To a family from Chicago,” was the word around Summerland Cove.
“Three kids—boy, girl, boy.” (David, Kate, and Josh, in that order, Lindy would soon learn.)
She’d seen a station wagon with Illinois plates parked in front before, and now she spotted a skinny boy carrying a heavy
box up the front steps. He was ignoring the younger girl who trailed him with a smaller box. Normally, Lindy might’ve stopped
to try to make friends with the girl, but her eyes had fastened onto the boy. He had curly, dark brown hair and long legs,
and he was wearing running shorts, a white T-shirt, Adidas sneakers.
It wasn’t as if she had a feeling right then that she would marry him. It was just that he looked interesting, that was all.
After the yellow cottage, she’d usually have taken the cut-through part of the loop that led directly to Innisfree. Today,
feeling wrought up or thoughtful or both, she rode the whole loop in the direction that cars traveled, skirting another half
dozen old cottages—these were far more closely spaced—then curving around to pass the tall pine that stood watch over the
rock formations and crashing waves at the point’s end. Relishing the dampness of spray on her face, she curved again and stood
on her pedals to power her way up the hill past five more cottages and into the woods. Innisfree was at the end of the loop,
on the high ground, looking out at the ocean and Monhegan Island.
She leaned her bike against the porch rail and banged in the screen door. In the farthest room, her mother was practicing
Chopin on the piano—as usual.
Lindy mulled it over till dinnertime, then suggested to her parents that they should probably invite the new people from Chicago over for drinks. (Her father had grown up in Chicago, and that was where Lindy’s parents had met. Certainly, Lindy told her parents, they would have a lot to talk about.)
Greta put out deviled eggs. David’s parents brought Kate along, so that Kate and Lindy—their mothers must’ve discussed it—could
become friends, which they did, bonding over Boggle on a rainy afternoon. (“You two are the exact same age!” Mrs. Kauffman
had told them excitedly, but Lindy was two months younger, a fact Kate never let her forget.)
Not until the summer David turned seventeen did he notice Lindy as more than his little sister’s friend. Lindy, who was fourteen
by then, knocked on the door of the yellow cottage to get Kate to come to the beach, but David answered and said Kate was
sick in bed with a sore throat.
“Oh,” Lindy said, wondering instantly if Kate had made good on her threats to kiss Andrew Thompson and ended up with mono
as a result. Lindy’s mother was always warning her about mono, calling it “the kissing disease,” though Lindy had never kissed
anyone yet. “Okay.”
David looked Lindy up and down and swallowed. She liked the depth of his dark eyes, the handsome shape of his nose, the unruly
curls of his mop of dark hair. “I’ll come with you,” he said.
Her heart made an involuntary little leap.
Truth be told, she’d always had a tiny crush on him, which she kept deeply buried on account of Kate.
If Kate ever talked about him (Lindy took care never to ask), Kate would say dismissive things like, “Oh, he’s always off in his own world.
” Or, “He thinks he’s so much smarter than the rest of us!
” But, hanging around the Kauffman family’s yellow cottage, Lindy had observed that David was kind to his mother, had excellent table manners, and told quiet jokes under his breath, though never at anybody else’s expense.
He took time to play tennis and go to the beach with his little brother, Josh.
He took Josh and Kate out in the rowboat three times a week.
And, over these past few summers, Lindy had witnessed him with his nose buried in The Red Badge of Courage, Walden, The Catcher in the Rye. Were these assigned summer reading for school? No matter. He was clearly smart. Ambitious. One rainy day, when Lindy and