Page 14

“Home sweet home,” Summer said, pulling onto the winding gravel drive.
Head out the window, cheeks puffed out like a blowfish, Buttercup was too busy gobbling up the wind to respond. But when Summer pulled up to the house and stopped the car, the pooch barked with excitement.
“You already dreaming about morning beach runs and naps in the sun?”
She opened the door and had to help Buttercup down—again, Q-tip legs—and took in the warm-grey shake siding house, with its white trim and round captain’s window that Summer and Autumn used to pretend was a porthole when they played pirates. The expansive deck Summer would lay on so she could read with the sun on her back and the warm planks on her belly.
She could be blindfolded and still recall every detail of the beach house, which sat on a bluff overlooking the inlet where the Mystic River and the Atlantic Ocean married. Her family had been coming to Mystic, Connecticut, since the summer she’d turned eight and they had suffered a devastating hardship, with her father losing his business and in turn the family home. Summer and Autumn had been uprooted from their friends and her dad had been devastated. Fifteen years of struggle and sacrifice and working toward his dream of owning his own business had been stolen in one fell swoop.
This house, the house on the bluff overlooking the sapphire waters of the ocean, had become their haven. It was a place where her family could come together over clambakes and grill-offs. Pancake breakfasts made while singing The Supremes into whisks; movie nights with the projector lighting up the backyard, watching Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn fall in love on the big screen inRoman Holiday. Lazy days by the beach, thumbing through one of the many second-hand books left by previous holiday-goers. But Summer had never felt like a guest. She’d felt like she belonged here more than anywhere in the world.
And after the month she’d had, she needed to feel like she belonged. It had taken every ounce of pride she possessed not to collapse in a weepy mess whenever a customer asked how she felt about BookLand being in her backyard. “Oh, you know, there’s room for everyone.” If she knew when BookLand was going to open. “Last I heard, in a few months.” Or how nice it was going to be to have a big-box bookstore in town that sold cookbooks or children’s books or...fill in the blank with any and every genre of book on the planet. “I do love me a good fantasy read.”
Her fear was that “romance books” would eventually fill that blank. That it would be easier for her customers to fulfill all their literary needs in one convenient, if sterile, spot—especially when she couldn’t compete with the big-box discounts.
She’d worked hard to stay upbeat and appear unaffected by how much Wes Kingston and his behemoth bookstore had affected her. It affected her mood, her bottom line, even her belief that she could survive this.
All she had to do was catch a glimpse of Weston Kingston—who gave their kid rhyming names, anyway?—and anxiety would set in. Her heart would race, her palms would sweat, and she’d get this intense pressure behind her breastbone. Then there was the fact that she hadn’t had a decent night’s sleep since he’d nearly had her baby towed. Now two crews were working around the clock, hammering and drilling and driving her slowly out of her mind.
She’d tried to leave her problems back in Ridgefield, but as she walked up the cedar steps of the beach house she could still feel the weight of uncertainty. She took in a deep, grounding breath. It smelled like sea salt, beachgrass, and long-ago memories. Another deep breath and she felt her pulse begin to slow. By the third, the world didn’t seem so precarious.
The house was quiet, save for the coffee percolating in the corner of the kitchen. The soft glow of a lamp flickered in the family room, making her smile. Her dad had awoken to greet her.
God, she needed some advice, not to mention a hug. Francesco Russo gave the kind of hugs that made the world feel safe. And, right then, Summer needed to feel safe.
Setting her suitcase by the door, she tiptoed across the hardwood floors that had been battered by generations of kids, Buttercup hot on her trail, her nails echoing in the empty kitchen. Suddenly out of steam, her pup flopped down in the kitchen and fell instantly to sleep, so Summer filled up two mugs of coffee and carried them into the front room.
Resting his knitting needles in his lap, her dad looked up, a wide smile spreading across his face. “Hey, Sunny Bunny.”
At sixty-seven years old, Frank Russo still had the boyish grin he’d had Summer’s entire life. It reached from ear to ear, and curled up at the corners like he had a secret to hide. But there weren’t any secrets between Summer and Frank. Maybe it was because he’d had kids later in life, or maybe it was because Summer idolized her dad, but the two of them had always had this special bond that left no room for secrets.
“Hey, Dad,” she said, and felt the heaviness of the loneliness that had been following her around for the past month soften.
Autumn’s week-long work trip had turned into a month of traipsing across Europe, fangirling and living the life of a Swiftie. “Twenty-two countries in thirty-one days,” Autumn had marveled last night before she’d boarded a plane headed for Connecticut. Which was why this reunion meant so much to Summer. Being away from her family was hard. Being away from her twin was like missing a limb. And lately, that limb had been giving phantom pangs.
She was looking forward to a week of uninterrupted Russo time.
“Whatcha working on?’ she asked, tilting her chin toward his work-in-progress.
“Neighbor’s daughter is having twins. Girls. So I thought I’d knit them a couple of baby dolls like you girls had. Nearly done with the parts. All I need to do is knit them together and fill them with some stuffing.”
Summer plopped down on the sofa and smiled. While her dad used to rent out tractors and bulldozers to construction crews for a living, he was also a master knitter. He also quilted, did needlepoint, and wielded a glue gun like he was Susie Soccer Mom. Her mom was the golfer and handyman of the family, and her dad was the homebody hobbyist.
“You used to carry that thing everywhere.”
“Lu Lu,” Summer said fondly. “I still have her. She looks like she’s got a few too many miles on her but she’s rocking her retirement.”
Frank reached over and patted Summer’s knee, giving it a gentle squeeze, then cleared the emotion from his throat. “Now, where’s my grand-doggie?”
“In the kitchen, sleeping off her nap.” Summer looked down at the half-eaten plate of cookies. “Does Mom know that you’re eating a stick of butter for breakfast?”
“That’s why I have a plate of celery next to it.”
She broke into a leisurely smile. “After forty-five years, she knows that trick.”
“After forty-five years she knows all my tricks.”
And after forty-five years her dad’s eyes still lit up with love whenever he spoke about his wife. If that wasn’t relationship goals then Summer didn’t know what was.