Elin Hilderbrand - 28 Summers

“ Will you handle it?”

“That’s not letting me handle it.”

“What are we doing, Jake?”

“I don’t know what you’re doing,” Jake says. “But I’m putting in the time. I’m trying to grow up. I’m trying to build a relationship that’s going to last for the long haul. And we’re just not there yet, Ursula. I’m sorry, but we’re not.”

When she stands up, her wine spills.

“You’re holding back to be cruel,” she says. “Or to show me how powerful you are.” She looms over him, blocking out the moon, and he feels all the Parisian magic drain away as though someone has pulled a plug. Of course this is how their week away will end.

“Don’t ruin this,” Jake says. “Let’s go to dinner.”

“You’re the one who’s ruining it,” she says, and she storms off.

When Jake gets back to Washington, he has a pile of work on his desk, and mixed up in his in-box are not one, not two, not three, but four phone messages from Cooper Blessing.

He calls Cooper at Brookings and is told that Cooper is out on personal leave.

What?

He calls Cooper at home. Cooper answers in a broken, hoarse voice and says, “Krystel left me.”

Jake has to work late that night in order to catch up, but the moment he’s finished, he goes to Georgetown to meet Cooper at the Tombs.

Krystel, it turns out, is a drug addict and has been all along. Cooper knew she occasionally did cocaine with the other servers at work but he chalked it up to the restaurant business, the late nights, the double shifts. Then he found out that Krystel had been venturing over to Fourteenth and U to buy crack.

“She was smoking crack! ” Cooper says. “Like a…like a…”

“Oh, man,” Jake says.

“I tried to get her in rehab,” Cooper says. “But she won’t go. She doesn’t want to quit. She moved back to her mother’s house in Rising Sun, she says —but honestly, I think she’s living in a flophouse somewhere.”

“Is she crazy?” Jake says. “You’re the best thing that ever happened to her.”

“She loves the drugs more,” Cooper says.

Jake nearly says he understands. Substitute the word work for the word crack and that’s Ursula. But it’s not the same, Jake knows it’s not the same. Krystel is addicted to crack; Krystel has walked out on a marriage after less than nine months. It’s a problem so big that Jake is at a loss.

“What can I do, man?” Jake asks. “How can I help?”

Cooper says he needs to get away. He has to get out of DC, if only for a long weekend.

“Mallory wants us to come back up to Nantucket,” Cooper says. “She says we need a do-over.”

“Oh,” Jake says. “Really?”

Mallory picks them up at the airport. She’s tan and fit; her hair is sun-bleached to the color of golden wheat. She’s wearing her jean shorts and a T-shirt from someplace called the Rope Walk as well as her Wayfarers, her suede flip-flops, and half an arm’s length of rainbow-colored friendship bracelets. There’s a thin tattoo of a vine around her ankle.

Jake is smitten. He loves everything that’s familiar and everything that’s different.

Mallory hugs her brother first, long and hard, eyeing Jake over Cooper’s shoulder. Her expression is partially obscured and therefore hard to read. Here it is, one year later, and they’re together—though not under the circumstances they might have hoped for.

When Mallory and Cooper separate, she turns to Jake. “Hey, stranger,” she says. “Welcome back.” She stands on her tiptoes to hug him, grabs a hank of hair at the back of his head, and tugs.

His heart crests like a wave.

Jake is so deliriously happy when he climbs into the back seat of the Blazer that he feels like he could levitate—and he didn’t even have to lie to Ursula. He’s on Nantucket to console his brokenhearted friend. But brokenhearted Cooper is in good spirits. He flirted with the flight attendant and walked off the plane with her phone number. She, too, will be on Nantucket all weekend and they’ve made plans to meet up at the Chicken Box.

When Mallory drives them down the no-name road, dirt, dust, and sand fly up in a cloud. When the air clears, the cottage is before them, perched on the lip of the beach. The ocean is a blue satin sheet beyond. They’re here. They’re back.

The cottage looks the same; it smells the same. This year, Jake and Cooper get their own bedrooms. Jake quickly claims the one next to Mallory’s.

“Swim?” Cooper says.

“Hell yes,” Jake says, though he’s eager to talk to Mallory. He wants to know how her year has been, he wants to look at the new books on her shelf, he wants to paw through her CDs and play some music. This cottage, this stretch of beach, this island, has imprinted itself on his consciousness, like a watermark on fine paper.

“You guys swim,” Mallory says. “I’ll get the hors d’oeuvres ready, and in a little while we can light the charcoal. I made burger patties.”

“That’s funny,” Cooper says. “It’s just like last year.”

Rewind, repeat; it’s just like last year.

There is something different this year, however: an outdoor shower. Mallory shows it off, calling it “the mansion.” It is roomy and beautifully crafted, made of pressure-treated lumber that has only just started to weather to gray. It has a changing area with a bench and towel hooks that look like anchors. Jake is just tall enough that he can peer over the top—ocean to one side, pond to the other. The water is hot and plentiful. It’s the greatest shower in the world.

Then he notices a pair of men’s board shorts hanging from one of the anchor hooks.

He scrambles for a second. He was the first person in the shower; Cooper is in the kitchen, talking to Mallory. So these belong to…

Someone else.

Cooper grills the burgers while Mallory tends to the corn and tomatoes. Jake plays music—Dave Matthews, Hootie and the Blowfish, and then “Hard Headed Woman.” This gets Mallory’s attention; he can see her looking at him through the billow of steam from the pot of corn. Whatever they had is still there. Ursula doesn’t matter, and whoever the other guy is doesn’t matter.

Cooper comes in, holding the platter of burgers and grilled buns. “What is it with you and this song?” he says.

Over dinner, Mallory is direct. “Do you want to talk about Krystel or not talk about Krystel?”

“Not talk about Krystel,” Cooper says. He piles pickles on top of his burger, and Jake notices Mallory doing the same. Without warning, Jake thinks about Jessica—the diving contests they used to have at Potawatomi pool, the way she would flip her wet hair over so that she looked like Dolley Madison. He misses having a sister.

Mallory raises her wineglass. “Here’s to not talking about Krystel.”

They touch glasses and drink.

“I don’t understand love,” Cooper says. “How many times have I eaten out in my adult life? Hundreds. Which means I’ve had hundreds of servers, and half of them were female. Why did I fall in love with Krystel Bethune at the Old Ebbitt Grill? It doesn’t make any sense.”

“She’s beautiful,” Mallory says. “Was that it? Did you succumb to surfaces?”

“She wasn’t the most beautiful girlfriend I’ve ever had,” Cooper says. “Tiffany Coffey in high school was prettier. And Stacey Patterson from Goucher…”

“Yeah,” Jake says. “Stacey was hot.”

Mallory kicks Jake under the table and suddenly the night comes alive. She’s jealous!

“It was timing,” Jake says. “You were ready to meet someone and she was there.”

“I was wearing my Hopkins Lacrosse T-shirt,” Cooper says. “She mentioned that she knew a bunch of players from the ’87 championship team. I was impressed, I guess. But that’s the kind of thing that keeps me up at night. What if Krystel hadn’t mentioned Petro and Wilkie? Or what if I’d worn a different shirt? We wouldn’t have started talking, I wouldn’t have asked for her number, and I would not be sitting here on Nantucket a broken man.”