Page 130 of The Book of Summer

“That’s swell news about your Pops,” the Celery Stalk said.

Ruby nodded and hoisted a basket of greens onto her right hip. Suddenly a stomach stitch overwhelmed her. She took in several deep breaths to chase it away. It was only her tummy pulling and stretching. Nothing to worry about, just a new baby freshly on its way. Sam had been home but two weeks and this turn of events said far more about him as a man than any medical records or stints in a mental ward. He’d done a man’s job. As far as Ruby was concerned, on that ugly matter there was simply nothing left to say.

54

Sunday Morning

“So I’m here,” Evan says, standing in the doorway.

“You’re here.”

Exactly as promised,Bess thinks.I would’ve loved to have been the person you settled for.

She wiggles away the thought of it, having already decided what can she really do? There’s no getting around what happened, or didn’t happen, and though she’d love to, Bess can’t exactly go back and unmarry Brandon. Neither can she jettison her job, sell her possessions, and take up residence in Sconset. They’d never work in the real world. Not for a single second, a fact long since proven. Just ask Evan: They’ve already made that mistake.

“Put me to work,” he says. “What can I do?”

He sets two cups of coffee on the round oak table between them, no spare this time. There is his cup, and there is hers, as denoted by “DECAF” scribbled in Sharpie on its side. Bess reaches for it, though she could very much stand the full caf. She is so tired her head is floating with lack of sleep. There is a gentle buzz that only she can hear.

“I brought my truck,” Evan says.

“Perfect. Some of this stuff, I don’t even know.”

Bess points listlessly to the corner. An umbrella stand. A planter. A vase Clay cracked with an oar in a bout of teenage hijinks before he understood how to operate his gangliness.

“What do you do with an umbrella stand?” Bess says. “Or ninety percent of this junk?”

“Do you have to move it all?”

“I can’t leave it here. It’d be like littering. Anyway, maybe you can start with the artwork?”

Bess gestures to a yawning seascape behind her, one of the many in the home. The painting is all large dunes and small waves, except for the shadow of a woman veering off toward the right side of the frame.

“Sure, I can move pictures,” Evan says. “Even if it is a huge waste of my notable brawn.”

“Ha! Don’t worry about that. You’ve seen the glass-encased Revolutionary War flag in the foyer. It’s bigger than my mom’s Defender so we should probably wait until your coworkers arrive. In other words, we need some muscle.”

“Ouch,” Evan says, walking to her side of the table. “I’ll try not to take offense. Okay, Lizzy C., whatever you need, I’m at your disposal.”

Though he’s going for his usual swagger and sway, Evan moves awkwardly, shuffling like a robot. What he wrote in the Book of Summer, it is the very most he’s ever given Bess. Or anyone else for that matter, though Bess doesn’t know this. What she does know, however, is that her heart is suddenly snagging all over the place, like panty hose after a day of med school interviews.

Bess jiggles her shoulders in order to wake up. High school loves are invariably bigger in your brain. It’s sentimentality, a certain kind of homesickness, really no different from what’s going on with Cissy and the house. Maybe Bess can find an engineer willing to move Evan closer to the road.

“All right,” she says. Bess slaps the table to bring herself fully into the right decade. “Go to it. Rip that sucker off the wall.”

“But isn’t there, you know, protocol, for moving artwork?”

“I’m sure there is, but who has time for protocol? Cissy is now more concerned with being a pain in my ass than the integrity of her personal effects so I’ll do whatever it takes. I need to follow Flick’s advice. ‘Get the shit out and be done with it.’”

“Your cousin is a smart lady,” Evan says.

He goes to inspect the back of the seascape, as if it might tell him something.

“I should inform you,” he says, “that Cissy’s outside. On a lounge chair in some sort of gingham, whaddya call it,tankini.”

“A tankini?” Bess gawps.

“I asked what she’s doing and she said, relaxing and sunning herself. You might have noticed it’s raining.”