Page 12 of These Summer Storms

No Griffin, ever again.Alice swallowed back the truth and lied. “He couldn’t get away from work.”

“Work,” Elisabeth repeated, in a tone that underscored the whole family’s feelings about Alice’s (now secretly ex) fiancé. “Busking keeps him busy?”

“He’s an actor, Mom,” Alice said, loathing the knee-jerk defense of a man she was no longer emotionally required to defend and somehow couldn’t stop defending.

“Is he.” Elisabeth stepped onto the gleaming hardwood floor of the foyer. “I thought he worked in a café.” There was no thinking about it. Griffin was a largely out-of-work actor in New York City who, when he needed cash (which was all the time), picked up shifts at the coffee shop his best friend managed. Elisabeth knew it. Everyone knew it. Had known it. But Alice hadn’t cared, because he’d beenhers.“No matter. As you say, you’re here now and it’s nice to see you after so long away.”

Alice leaned in to her mother’s brief embrace, releasing her clenched teeth as Elisabeth delivered a kiss somewhere in the vicinity of her left ear. She wondered how many offhand (pointed) references to the last five years she’d have to endure before she’d done the proper penance.

She did not wonder when her mother would assume someresponsibility for what had happened five years ago. For what had happened since (or not happened, as it was).Responsibilitywas not one of Elisabeth’s words.

Leaning back, Alice caught one of her mother’s hands and studied the older woman’s face, impossibly smooth skin interrupted by a barely visible handful of fine lines the envy of women thirty years younger—the combined product of excellent genes, a militant commitment to sun protection, a facialist who made house calls, and a dermatologist with a client list whose net worth was equivalent to the GDP of a small European country.

Not even widowhood could keep Elisabeth from her skincare regimen. To the untrained eye, she looked smooth and dewy and unpuffy and fabulous, but daughters are trained from birth to read their mother’s emotions, and Alice noticed the tiny cracks: the tightness at the corners of SPFed lips; the red wash peeking above the tidy neck of the white long sleeve cotton tee that was a staple of her summer wardrobe—one of a dozen or so identical tops that cost more than most people’s weekly salary; the barely there swell beneath the stunning blue eyes Alice had not inherited as the only Storm child who favored their father. Eyes that, just then, were a touch bloodshot.

Not that Elisabeth Winslow Storm would ever admit to having lost sleep or shed tears for her husband of more than forty years. Emotions were not a commodity in which Alice’s mother invested. “You know we’re having an event on Monday. Greta is helping with arrangements, but I’m sure we can find something for you to do.”

Not a funeral. Not a service. Anevent.

Alice swallowed around the knot that ached in her throat. “You told me on the phone.” It was one of the few things Elisabeth had said to Alice when they’d spoken the day before.

Your father died.

He was in one of his idiotic toys.

We’re having people to the island on Monday.People to the island. Like it was a garden party.I suppose it’s a good thing it’s a long weekend.

When Elisabeth remained silent, Alice took a deep breath and asked, “How are you doing, Mom?”

“Me?” Tidy blond brows rose and Elisabeth extracted her hand from Alice’s grip. “I’m fine.”

So much for the possibility of her homecoming looking like it did in the movies. There was nothing close to the grief of central casting here, not even twenty-four hours after Franklin’s death. No shared tears. No long embrace. Not a hint of her mother’s emotions.

Elisabeth must be feelingsomething,no?

The fact that she was disinclined to inspect it notwithstanding, Alice was feeling something.

Alice tilted her head. “Really?”

“We all die eventually, Alice. Have you had coffee?”

Years of speaking fluent Elisabeth Storm ensured Alice knew better than to say anything more. She lowered her satchel to the floor. “No.” She followed Elisabeth to the rear of the house, where the narrow, dark hallway opened into a massive, bright farmhouse kitchen complete with an entire wall of greenhouse windows, and tried for light conversation. “Who else is here?”

Elisabeth waved a hand in the air, toward the ceiling and two additional floors of studios and offices and bedrooms and nooks and crannies. “Everyone.Theyall came as soon as they heard.”

Alice gritted her teeth at the impossible-to-miss comparison to her siblings, her mother docking points for the seven hours Alice should have been sleeping under the same roof. She pulled a large French press down from an open shelf and set it on the counter. “I came as soon as I heard, too, Mom.”

“Of course you did. By train.”

Apparently, the train was going to be the thing, not the bit where the woman’s husband had died, and without warning.

“Right.” Alice crossed to the pantry, flicking on the exterior light switch before entering to get coffee, sadness welling as she reached for the enormous orange bag. Franklin Storm might have died a billionaire, but he’d been born a kid in Quincy, Massachusetts, and spent a lifetime loyal to Dunkin’ Donuts.

Her fingertips stroked over the logo as she lingered on the rest of the pantry, the first of her father’s ghosts. If she were going to paint hisessence, she’d start here. A still life with old-fashioned hard pretzels, black licorice candy, kettle-cooked potato chips, tinned sardines. Three jars of spicy pickles. Heirloom tomato sauce he insisted on buying from a farm on the other side of the Bay, in Tiverton.

It’s not worth eating tomato sauce if it’s not from these tomatoes,he would say, his voice booming with excitement, matched only by the delight from the lady who ran the market, who fell a little more in love with the eccentric billionaire every time he wandered into her farmstand.

That was the problem, wasn’t it? Her father was incredibly easy to fall in love with, and absolutely impossible to love.