28 Summers

by Elin Hilderbrand

This island chooses people,

Every night before Mallory falls asleep, she silently thanks her aunt Greta. What a gift. What an opportunity. Everybody hurts; she knows this. But not Mallory this summer.

How do you ever recover from something like that? Well, the answer was that you didn’t recover. Losing Jessica was the central fact of Jake’s life, and yet he almost never talked about it.

But what did it matter? She didn’t enjoy the things money could buy; she never relaxed, never took a vacation, didn’t have girlfriends to meet for drinks. “Just be aware that what you achieve doesn’t matter as much as what kind of person you are,”

Maybe we’ll be next, Ursula had said. Ha! Jake thought. If he were to lose his job, go bankrupt, get hit by a bus, or be diagnosed with terminal cancer while he was married to Ursula, he’d be on his own. He would never, ever marry Ursula.

Fifi’s writerly instincts tell her that with Mallory, still waters run deep. Something is going on with her, maybe. Or maybe not.

They weren’t going to agree on everything; that was a given. Politics covers such a vast spectrum of issues that it’s unlikely any two Americans hold the exact same views; each person’s political DNA is unique, like biological DNA.

Or maybe she’s wrong. Maybe a mother is always her son’s best girl. She can hope.