Elin Hilderbrand - 28 Summers

Still, Leland worries that she has cashed in on her longest friendship for this success. A week later, Leland looks down at her phone and sees she’s received two successive texts from Mallory. She thinks, Here it comes. Mallory will say Leland is opportunistic (she is), selfish (ditto), and ruthless (well, yes).

Leland starts reading the texts with trepidation. The first says, Happy birthday, Lee! I love you!

The second text says, Oops, sorry, I thought today was the 29th not the 27th. I’ll text you on Wednesday!

Okay, Leland thinks. So Mallory isn’t upset about the Dirty Dozen? This is great news because now that Leland has some momentum, she can take Leland’s Letter to the next level. She can lay claim to some cultural influence. She just needs to keep her foot on the gas and not get slowed down by sticky issues like best friends with hurt feelings.

It’s only as Leland is falling asleep that night that she realizes Mallory might not have seen the article. It went viral, but that doesn’t mean it reached every person in America. Mallory is a single working mother on an island thirty miles off the coast. She’s immersed in her school day, her students, Link, the painful and painstaking work of dismantling her parents’ financial and business affairs. She might not spend hours online Googling Ursula de Gournsey the way that Leland Googles Fiella Roget and tracks her every move.

Leland opens her laptop (she sleeps with it; she is that pathetic).

Mallory Blessing isn’t a subscriber to Leland’s Letter . Leland’s first instinct is to be offended. Her own best friend!

She snaps her laptop shut. Actually, it’s a major relief.

Summer #22: 2014

What are we talking about in 2014? Polar vortex; Jimmy Fallon; Flint, Michigan; The Twelfth Man; Vladimir Putin; Malaysia Airlines Flight 17; Ebola; Janet Yellen; mindfulness; Robin Williams; Ferguson, Missouri; CVS; the Oregon Ducks; Cuba; Tim Lincecum; One World Trade Center; Clooney and Amal; ISIS; Minecraft; Hannah, Jessa, Marnie, and Shosh; conscious uncoupling; Tinder; Greg Popovich; “I’m all about that bass (no treble).”

The summer after Mallory’s parents are killed…

Okay, wait. She needs a minute just to process this phrase. Her parents killed. Senior and Kitty dead. All through the first half of 2014, Mallory struggles. She wakes up feeling just fine…until she remembers. Then it’s like falling into a black, bottomless hole, wind rushing in her ears, vertigo, nausea, a weightlessness, a loss, not only of Senior and Kitty but of herself. There’s an assault of emotions, all of them unpleasant, some of them ugly, and the most hideous is guilt. Was Mallory a good daughter? Or even a decent daughter? She fears not.

She resented all the rules . Step one, napkin on lap. No yelling to someone in another room; no stomping up the stairs. Bread and rolls were to be broken in half first, then into pieces that were buttered individually. Salt and pepper were always to be passed together . Nail polish could be applied only in the bathroom. Thank-you notes were to be written and mailed within three days. There was a list of forbidden TV shows, among them Prisoner: Cell Block H, Falcon Crest, Hill Street Blues. No Rocky Horror. Good morning. Please may I be excused. Hello, Blessing residence. And above all: Never refer to a person using a pronoun while the person was present. Kitty was a stickler for that one.

Mallory loathed their expectations of her: good grades, good posture, sparkling conversation, spotless driving record, irreproachable work ethic. She had rebelled mentally even as she complied, and she was certain Senior and Kitty could tell. There was nothing her parents had taught her or asked of her that had not served her well. She should have been grateful instead of surly. She should have taken her mother up on her offers of makeup lessons and ballroom dancing. She should have gone shopping with her at the Mazza Gallery; she shouldn’t have called the David Yurman earrings Kitty gave her for her fortieth birthday “matronly.” Mallory had rejected all of her mother’s efforts to refine her. She had joyfully spent her four years at Gettysburg wearing sweatpants, her hair in a scrunchie. She had gotten a tattoo her first winter on Nantucket, a vine that wrapped around her ankle. If anyone had asked her why, she would have said it was just for decoration, for fun, but the real answer was that she reveled in becoming the anti-Kitty.

Mallory avoided the emotional work of dealing with the loss of her parents by focusing on the practical work. What had to happen? Well, immediately, there was the service, burial, and reception to plan. Somehow, Mallory did this on autopilot; Cooper was less than no help. Then there was the house to put on the market, the furnishings to give away or auction off, and Senior’s business to sell. Again, Cooper took a pass, so Mallory worked with the family attorney, Jeffrey Todd, and her own attorney, Eileen Beers. During February break from school, Mallory and Link drove down to Baltimore to sort through each room of the Blessing house. Over April break, Link flew to Seattle to see Fray and Anna, who was pregnant with a baby girl, and Mallory and Cooper met in Baltimore to finalize the sale of the house and the business. Even split between them, the money was considerable. To Mallory, it was a fortune. But money, once her largest concern, now meant nothing.

What does Mallory say to herself to fend off the demons?

They were together.

There was no suffering.

They had lived full, happy lives.

She had given them a grandson, whom they both adored.

It wasn’t her fault.

The accident had nothing to do with Mallory. She had spoken to both of her parents on Christmas and thanked them for her gifts: a new Wüsthof chef’s knife, Malouf linens for her bed, a hardback copy of The Goldfinch . They had thanked her for the black-and-white picture of Link and the gift certificate to Woodberry Kitchen. She had told them she loved them. Link had told them he loved them.

Mallory hadn’t known about the Yo-Yo Ma tickets, and frankly, she was surprised Kitty had been successful in convincing Senior to go, though he did love Washington in general and the Kennedy Center in particular. Cooper hadn’t known about their plans either, but he hadn’t been offended. They were two healthy, happy adults, completely self-sufficient. The car they drove was an Audi A4, which Senior had bought the previous spring. There was no reason for the tire to blow other than raw bad luck.

Cooper is of the opinion that when your number comes up, it comes up. Nothing to be done about it.

Mallory tries to adopt this perspective as well, though she has a difficult time. She keeps thinking something went wrong, that there was a mistake; it wasn’t supposed to be this way. She wants to fix it. She wakes up in the middle of the night crying. She wants them back. Please—for just a day or an hour or even a minute so that she can tell them she loves them. So she can thank them.

The summer after Mallory’s parents are killed, an unlikely savior arrives, and that savior is baseball. Lincoln Dooley is chosen as the starting catcher for the Nantucket U14 travel team. Mallory spends the month of July in the bleachers and behind the backstop at the Delta fields on Nobadeer Farm Road as well as at a dozen fields across Cape Cod and the south shore. As time-consuming and expensive as it is to attend every single game, it’s just the preoccupation Mallory needs. The Nantucket U14s are the best team Nantucket has fielded in the history of their baseball program; they have a winning record, which is impressive given that the island has such a small pool of kids. One reason for their success is that ten of the twelve teammates have played together since T-ball. The other reason is the coach, Charlie Suwyn.