Page 3 of The Summer You Were Mine

“No one knows, and no, Dad didn’t move out,” she said, sounding insulted. “He’s right here.” Ellie could hear her mother pull her mouth away from the phone. She could practically see her dad leaning on the counter in the kitchen in his faded USC T-shirt. “Do you want to talk to him?”

“Does he want to talk to me?”

The cab stopped at an intersection three blocks from her apartment, but Ellie was too antsy to keep sitting. She tapped on the glass to tell the driver she’d get out and pulled out her credit card to swipe.

“Well of course he does, sweetie, why wouldn’t he? Hon—George? Here, talk to Ellie.” She heard muffled sounds as her mom passed the phone to her dad. Ellie exited the cab, and even though the air was thick with exhaust fumes, she finally felt like she could breathe.

“Coccinella.”

The tightness in her chest pulled again.

“ Ciao, Papino. What the hell are you guys doing over there?” She stood on the sidewalk staring at her reflection in a shop window that had been papered over from the inside for construction and pulled her tote bag off her shoulder because the scarf she’d used to protect her suit was now getting ruined by that very suit.

She held the bag away from her body like it contained a bomb, nearly whacking a tiny woman in a turquoise turban and a matching paisley caftan.

The woman yanked her twin Yorkies in pearl necklaces out of the way, setting off a chorus of yips in protest of such a violent change in direction.

“Well, it’s what your mother said—we think that being apart is the right thing to do.”

“Now? You’ve been married for almost four decades.” Ellie squinted against the sharp barks as the Yorkie wrangler hurried off. “Aren’t people supposed to iron things out after the first two decades at least?”

“People change, Ellie.”

“Weren’t you supposed to be doing your changing, when…

I don’t know, the Bee Gees were popular?

Holy crap. The wedding! Are you going to tell them?

” She started marching up the street, determined to not look up at whoever else might be giving her second glances.

If New York had a hierarchy of weird street happenings, her current outfit had edged her up a few levels for sure.

However, all of her focus shifted to the trip ahead.

In two days, she and her parents—both of them—were going back to Italy like they used to almost every summer of her youth.

This time, it was for the wedding of her eighty-two-year-old grandmother, Graziella, who had decided it was time for her to finally marry Simone, the man she had been with for the last ten years.

They had recently moved in together, mostly on the demands of their friends who were tired of hauling their communal box of playing cards and the green felt tablecloth they played on between houses.

The card game, Burraco, was serious business for the eighty-plus crew in Chiavari and reason enough to consolidate resources.

“No, no, we don’t tell them now. We will tell them after.

Here, talk to your mother—Peg? Peggy!” His voice got farther away.

“Here. Take the phone.” Ellie could picture him stretching his long arm out to Peggy while she likely made a face at him.

Her mom could be a real pill under all of that mid-Pennsylvania charm.

“Ma?”

“Honey, listen, it’s okay. We are not going to ruin the wedding. Everything is going to be fine. No one will know. I mean, you and Benny will know, but you can’t tell anyone. Which means—I’m not sure if you ever talk to him. Anymore, I mean. But you can’t tell, you know, Cris.”

Ellie quickened her pace and felt a raw spot start to bark from her right heel where the leather strap of her shoe was rubbing a protest. She pictured her cool little apartment with its blue-gray walls and cozy furnishings just waiting for her to open the door and dissolve.

When was the next time she would be required to leave the nest?

Whenever she needed something from the neighborhood bodega, she guessed. Perfect.

“Why are you talking about Cris right now, Mom? Isn’t he in Greece or Paris or wherever the World Athletic Games are this summer?

” she asked as she keyed into her building, then headed through the foyer and down a hall to the right.

She’d been lucky enough to buy the ground-level apartment in Murray Hill near the United Nations right when she’d signed the contract to take Games Over live and national.

The apartment was so small that she had to open the bathroom door to blow-dry her hair if she didn’t want to bruise her elbows, but it did have a postage-stamp-sized courtyard off the sleeping area and a closet containing the tiniest washer-dryer combination ever produced.

Since she’d broken up with her former fiancé and his architecture textbook collection, it had become her sanctuary.

“He’s retired,” her dad said. Clearly she was on speaker. “He’s coming to the wedding.”

Ellie dropped her keys in the entryway to the apartment, missing the bowl set on the console table next to the door by at least six inches.

Another surge of fire ripped through her veins.

If the day kept going like this, she was going to end up nothing but a pile of ash in a pair of Chanel slingbacks.

Ellie tossed her bag on a chair and walked around the half wall that separated the living area from the sleeping area and began pulling off her suit.

She put her nose to her arm to see if her skin smelled like coffee.

Nope. Only shower gel and shame. She sighed.

“There is no danger of me speaking to Cris Conte,” Ellie replied.

“Why did I think you wanted to have him on the show?” Peggy’s voice got quieter as Ellie pictured her turning her face away from the phone. “George, she said that, didn’t she?”

“I don’t remember,” said her father through what was likely a mouthful of Peggy’s famous carrot loaf, which usually sat atop a doily under a glass dome in the corner of the kitchen counter.

“Maybe you imagined it. I would never. Besides, I know him personally, which makes it completely unethical.” Ellie rolled up the suit and tossed it on top of a pile for the dry cleaner’s. She pulled on a pair of cutoff sweatpants and a soft cotton T-shirt and padded into the tiny kitchen space.

“But isn’t that rule only for therapists? Would it still apply to you?”

Ellie felt a kick in her head. No time like the present to remind her that although she had her PhD in counseling psychology, she wasn’t currently a practicing clinician because she never got her license. Gotta love that maternal timing.

Her mom went on. “Well, it’s too bad anyway. You kids were two peas in a pod forever. It would be fun to hear you two talking again!”

“The show isn’t really about chitchat and reminiscing.

It would be dead air and awkward.” Ellie reached up to the cabinet where she kept the licorice tea that usually worked to keep her stomach calm, then grabbed her favorite oversized mug from the drainboard with a diagram of the chemical structure of dopamine on it.

“Well, which is it?”

“Which is what?” Ellie asked, filling the teakettle with water.

“Well, you either know him or you don’t, honey. It can’t be both.”

But it was both—first one, then the other. There was a time when Ellie couldn’t imagine not knowing Cris, but now that time felt so far away—like remembering something she’d read in a once-favorite book. It was all familiar, but foggy, and would likely never be as good as she’d thought.

Thirty minutes later, Ellie was lying in bed with her head and shoulders propped up on pillows and the air conditioning humming.

The sheer shades were pulled low, letting in a cool afternoon glow, and the huge TV across from her was tuned to a gardening show.

There was something soothing about watching the host roll through the various methods of plant propagation when she knew she’d never need to hold on to the information.

She could let it filter in and flow out—more like breathing and less like thinking.

Meditation was sometimes difficult to get through, but she could do this.

She was just starting to un-bulge the veins in her neck but had unfortunately forgotten to silence the ringer on her phone.

It pinged through the calm gardening woman’s voice beginning to dive into rhizome division.

Ellie reached over to her nightstand to check to see who it was. Omar. She had to pick up.

“Hey,” she said.

“I didn’t actually expect you to answer. Are you okay?”

“I don’t know yet. I am trying to meditate. Sort of.”

“Is it helping?”

“No,” she said, taking a sip of tea.

“Ellie, I am so sorry. I don’t know what happened. I always cut the microphones and double-check. Honestly, I can’t understand how I could be so careless.”

“It’s okay. It really was my mistake, O. I am not angry with you. I could have looked up at the stupid light myself, you know.”

“Thanks for saying that, but I’m determined to contain the damage.

First of all, I pulled the episode, so no one is going to be downloading or viewing it on any platform at this point.

I’ve also been on the phone all afternoon with guests and, well…

There’s some good news and some bad news.

I would ask which one you want first, but I know you hate that, so here goes.

It’s good that you’re going on vacation and we didn’t book too many guests for next month, because the ones we did book canceled.

I spoke to two agents personally, but the rest sent emails. ”

“I’m guessing they didn’t express deep regret for their sudden change of plans.”

“Not really. They all said some version of ‘We don’t want to talk to someone who hates us.’”

“I thought there was good news in this somewhere.”

“I said it. That was the vacation part.”