Page 3 of The Book of Summer

Her dad was getting frustrated, as Dudley Codman was prone to do when things weren’t going his way. The man was loud and intimidating, like a dictator or the head of a drug cartel. But it all unraveled when somebody crossed him.

“Elisabeth,” he said with a beleaguered sigh. “Have another doctor cover for you. No one plans to see you specifically. Don’t random people just show up with a stab wound or whatnot looking for anyone with a pulse?”

“Also a medical degree. And we have precious few stab wounds. But I get what you’re saying.”

On some level, her father was right. It is simple to trade shifts, and unlike her colleagues, Bess isn’t opposed to working holidays. In fact, she prefers it. She likes doing people favors, plus emergencies tend to be better during times of celebration. There aren’t so many drug seekers and paranoid moms.

“I’m already taking off Memorial Day weekend,” Bess told him, counting backward in her head.

If she did as asked, she would arrive ten days earlier than planned. That was no kind of option.

“And finagling time off for Flick’s wedding was a major coup,” she said. “They sort of expect me to work holidays.”

“Why? Because you’re a divorcée?”

“Almost-divorcée. And it’s not quite that blatant. But, yes.”

“Listen, I don’t have time to argue,” he said. “You’ll go to Nantucket, help your mother pack, and drag her out of that crapshack she calls a home. Now, if you’ll excuse me, one of my companies is about to release earnings and I’m positive they’re going to post a miss.”

“Dad, I’ll talk to her when I’m there. I’ll call her tonight! Surely nothing will happen between now and—”

“Listen, Bess,” he snapped. “If you don’t go, your mother will end up in a pile of rubble on the beach.”

“Jesus, Dad.”

Dudley’s intrinsic mobster was leaking out.

“We’ll spend months trying to sort out which pieces are bones,” he went on. “And which are rocks.”

And then the line went dead.

So, “dire”? Yes, he made it seem quite dire, right down to the shards of bone.

“I don’t know, Cissy,” Bess says now, once she catches up to her mom, a sixty-five-year-old lady who can outrun her three kids and probably half of the Nantucket High track team. “Dad made it sound pretty treacherous.”

“If it were that bad, don’t you think he’d be here?”

“He says the house is going to fall over the bluff.”

“As if I’d let that happen.”

Cissy jams her fingers into her mouth and emits a sharp whistle. Two terrified seagulls flap away from their telephone-pole nest. She whistles again, and then juts her thumb out toward the road.

“We’re hitchhiking?!” Bess yelps.

“Don’t be such a pansy.”

Bess stands openmouthed, a bead of sweat crawling down her back.There goes Cissy Codman,folks driving by must think.Up to her usual antics.

Bess’s mother is famous on that island. No, infamous. When Bess returned to the island to finish high school, Nantucketers almost seemed surprised that Cissy was something more than a municipal agitator.

“My mom will be here in thirty minutes,” Bess might say.

“Your mom?” was the reply. “You mean Cissy?”

“My mom wanted me to drop this off.”

“Who’s your… Oh, ha ha ha. Why didn’t you just say Cissy?”