28 Summers

by Elin Hilderbrand

“You paddle,” she said. “I’m going to lie here like Cleopatra.” Yes, fine, he would paddle her for as long as she wanted. In twenty-four hours, she had become his queen.

But there was something about Mallory that made him feel safe. He could turn himself inside out and show her his wounds, and it would be okay.

She loaded a pancake with moo shu pork until it was dripping and messy and took a lusty bite. Jake was so stunned by the vision of a woman enjoying her food rather than battling it that he wondered if he might be falling in love with her.

Jake gave Mallory a long, deep kiss goodbye. “I’m happy the dog chased the cat that chased the rat.” “Excuse me?” “I’m happy it ended up being just you and me this weekend. And I’m coming back next year. Same time next year.” “No matter what?” Mallory said. “No matter what,” Jake said, and it did make leaving a little bit easier.

When she saw him, she grinned and waved like a little kid. The sheer earnestness of her excitement made Jake want to pull her up to the altar and marry her right there and then.

She wants to call Jake but she can’t. When they parted the last time, they agreed they would call for only four reasons: engagement, marriage, pregnancy, or death.

He sees her green vine tattoo standing out against the golden skin of her ankle. It feels like he has vines wrapped around his heart. He’s in love with her, he thinks.

If they count the Fridays and the Mondays, then today is the start of their fourteenth day together, the end of their second week. Is that how long it takes to fall in love?

Everything at this moment is so sublime that Jake thinks, Freeze! I want to stay right here forever. But of course, life doesn’t work that way. The waves fold over themselves again and again and again, and nothing can stop them.

What if he called Ursula and told her he wasn’t coming home? What if he quit his soul-sucking job with PharmX? What if he opts out of the lease for their new apartment on Twenty-Second and L? What if he stays here and finds a job, even if that job is playing guitar at the Brotherhood of Thieves? “Are you okay?” Mallory asks. “It looks like you’re a thousand miles away.” “Actually,” he says, “I’m right here.”

Link was delivered by cesarean section at Nantucket Cottage Hospital, and the nurse whisked him off to get cleaned up while the surgeon stitched Mallory up. The operating-room nurse said, “They’ll bring your boy back in a few minutes.” “He’s mine,” Mallory said. “He’s mine for the rest of my life.”

Mallory loves Jake. Her heart is not transferrable. It has belonged to Jake since the first time he answered the phone in Coop’s room, since the afternoon he stepped off the ferry and onto the dock, since the moment he slid an omelet onto her plate.

She says to the ocean: I’m crying because he’s growing up. He and Nicole—a girl I like very much, a girl I love, I couldn’t have picked a sweeter, smarter girl—are sleeping together, which means his childhood is over. I am not his best girl anymore and I never will be again. Or maybe she’s wrong. Maybe a mother is always her son’s best girl. She can hope.

“I want to thank you for getting me this far, Mama. I’m going to study and exercise good judgment and check my Ubers and be kind to everyone I meet, just like you taught me.” He hugs her tight. It very much feels at that moment like he is the adult and she the child. “I love you. You did a good job.”

“Are you going to leave too?” Mallory asks. “No,” Jake says, and he pulls the chair right up next to her. “If it’s okay with you, I think I’ll stay.”

I can’t BREATHE I’m sobbing so hard