Elin Hilderbrand - 28 Summers

Jake runs his hands over the walls of Link’s room. “My old friend the paneling,” he says. Link’s room is the only place that retains the old-fashioned, cottagey smell—salt water and mildew.

“He wouldn’t let me change a thing,” Mallory says. “Except I turned his closet into the world’s smallest bathroom. He says he likes the cottage better the way it was before. Can you imagine?”

“Well…”

“Not you too,” Mallory says. “Do you hate it? Do you think I bleached out the character?”

Jake steps back into the great room. “You kept the desk!” he says. He hadn’t noticed before, but Mallory’s kidney-shaped desk is still in the same place in the far corner of the pond side of the room, nearly hidden by the master bedroom’s new six-panel door. The desk appears out of place in this new version of the cottage, like a dowdy maiden aunt at a party of supermodels, and yet Jake would choose the maiden aunt to talk to every time.

“I couldn’t bring myself to get rid of it,” Mallory says. “I remember Aunt Greta writing letters at this desk. I wonder now if she was writing to Ruthie.”

The song changes to “At Last.” The music comes from Sonos, a playlist imported from Mallory’s phone. The five-CD changer is long gone.

“I’m sorry you don’t like it,” Mallory says, and she throws back what’s left of her wine. Even the wine is fancier—gone is the twelve-dollar bottle of Cypress chardonnay, replaced by a Sancerre from the Chavignol region. “But I’m the one who has to live here. Link will be leaving for college in a couple of years and you’ll leave on Monday.”

“Hey, hey,” he says, gathering her up in his arms. “It’s gorgeous, Mal. It’s like a magazine spread. It just feels different, and I have to get used to it.”

“I didn’t want to live in a charming, rustic box anymore,” she says. “Fray has a goddamned castle out in Seattle and he and Anna just bought a place in Deer Valley, a chalet, Link calls it—”

“You didn’t do all this to keep up with Fray, did you?” Jake asks.

“I wanted it to be nice,” Mallory says. “Nicer.”

“How could anything be nicer than having the Atlantic Ocean as your front yard?”

“I know, but…” Mallory pulls away a few inches and Jake gets his first good look at her. The cottage has had a complete makeover, but Mallory Blessing is exactly the same. There’s some gray in the part of her hair, which he’s glad she hasn’t “bleached out.” Her face is suntanned and when she raises her eyebrows, her forehead becomes an accordion of wrinkles, and Jake loves it. He loves seeing her get a little older, a little more seasoned. She still has the girlish freckles across her nose and tonight, her eyes are bluish, more blue than he’s ever seen them.

“Are you okay?” he asks. “Mal?”

She rests her head on his chest and he closes his eyes. Three hundred and sixty-two days he has waited to hold her in his arms.

“I’ve been tired lately,” she says. “Link and I had a tough year. I want him to study and play baseball and be a good kid and he wants to make out with his girlfriend and go to bonfires and get high with his buddies.”

“I feel your pain,” Jake says.

“Is Bess giving you a hard time?”

“Not me.”

“Ursula?”

Jake nods. Bess doesn’t have a boyfriend, go to bonfires, or smoke dope. She stays home with her friend Pageant, and the two of them make incendiary posters for the rallies and marches and protests they attend on the weekends to fight for climate change, reproductive rights, transgender rights, immigration rights, gun control, Amnesty International. It’s hard to keep up, and whereas Jake tries to be supportive—he loves that Bess is using her voice—Ursula’s attitude is one of amusement, which comes across as patronizing.

Off to defend the lesbian cheetahs? Ursula asked recently. Or is today Ugandan dwarves?

You’re offensive, Bess said. If anyone knew what you were really like, no one would vote for you.

Bess! Jake said, but she had already slammed out of the condo.

Ursula tossed it off with a laugh. Let her go, she said. I hated my mother at that age too. It’s natural.

“What if we went out tonight after dinner?” Jake says. “What if we went to the Chicken Box for old times’ sake?”

“I’d love to,” Mallory says. “But we can’t. We dodged a bullet, Jake. I thought for sure Ursula would put you on lockdown and I’d be alone this weekend.”

“She seemed unconcerned,” Jake says. Mallory told him about the whole situation with Leland’s Letter and Ursula calling Cooper. Mallory found it strange that Ursula hadn’t simply confronted Jake, but that’s because Mallory doesn’t understand the architecture of his marriage. Ursula doesn’t deal with the issue head-on partly because she can’t summon the emotional energy and partly because she’s afraid if she pulls the wrong block, the whole Jenga tower will fall. A failing marriage is a death knell in politics; Ursula will maintain at any cost.

Jake isn’t thrilled that Cooper knows what’s going on, although Cooper covering for them has bought them some freedom. Why not enjoy it? “We’re so old now,” he says. “We won’t know anyone at the Box.”

“We might, though.”

“Let’s do something different, then,” he says. “How about if after dinner we take a bottle of wine down to the docks and drink it onboard the Greta ? It’ll be nice to be out on the water. We can sit on the bow. No one will see us.”

Mallory purses her lips. “Mmm, I don’t know about changing up our routine. We do things the way we do them because they work.”

“No one is going to see us on the bow of your boat, Mal.”

She huffs. “Fine. But when we’re walking, stay six paces behind me with your hands in your pockets and wear a hat.”

Jake laughs. “Deal.”

They park Mallory’s Jeep downtown and walk—Mallory first, Jake following—past the Gazebo, Straight Wharf, and Cru and onto the docks. It’s fun to be out at night among people enjoying the last weekend of summer. Jake is nervous, which only heightens his pleasure; he’s drunk too much wine, probably, and Mallory has a second bottle in her bag. They may have to sleep on the boat and sneak off at the crack of dawn.

They come to the gatekeeper. Beyond a certain point, it’s boat owners and guests only. There’s a teenager with strawberry-blond hair curling out from beneath his University of Miami hat like lettuce peeking out of a hamburger bun. Jake nearly turns back. Mallory knows every teenager on this island. She’s the English teacher—the best, the most popular. Any one of her students could whip his phone out of his pocket to snap a pic of the dude Miss Blessing is hanging out with and then post it on Snapchat. Someone else would then do face-recognition. First the high school and then the entire island would know that Miss Blessing was seen at the docks at nine o’clock at night with Jake McCloud, husband of Ursula de Gournsey.

Is he being paranoid? Probably.

“I’m on the Greta, ” Mallory says to the kid. “Slip one oh six.”

“’Kay,” the teenager says.

They walk on. Jake feels so relieved that he reaches for Mallory’s hand, and she swats it away, as she should. He grabs her by the shoulders and she elbows him in the ribs. They’re at slip 100. The Greta is three boats ahead on the right. They’re almost in the clear.

A man and a woman step off one of the huge yachts on the left. The man is big and burly. Mallory and Jake have to move aside so the couple can pass.

“Evening,” Jake says.