Girls of Summer Read online

  Girls of Summer is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2020 by Nancy Thayer

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  BALLANTINE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Hardback ISBN 9781524798758

  Ebook ISBN 9781524798765

  randomhousebooks.com

  Title-page image: © iStockphoto.com

  Book design by Dana Leigh Blanchette, adapted for ebook

  Cover design: Belina Huey

  Cover image: Saowakhon Brown/Getty Images

  ep_prh_5.5.0_c0_r0

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  By Nancy Thayer

  About the Author

  one

  Remember, Lisa’s mother had often said, it’s good to know where you want to be, but sometimes you have to go in the opposite direction to get there. Lisa knew her mother was right because her mother was, as was her father, a high school teacher full of knowledge and experience. She also knew that when they had married, her mother had wanted to have five children and her father had wanted to be a novelist. Instead, they taught in the Nantucket high school and had only one child, the fortunate Lisa, but they said they were extremely happy throughout their lives. So maybe they didn’t get where they intended to go, but they ended up where they were meant to be.

  Lisa thought about her mother’s words a lot. Her teachers always told her that she could make something of herself. She could be an astronaut or a doctor or the governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts!

  Lisa politely thanked them but secretly wondered why she should do anything other than what she loved doing most: swimming at Surfside Beach in the summer, biking around the island in the fall and spring, and creating entire wardrobes of clothes for her many dolls during the winter.

  Actually, she knew why she should do something else: to please her parents. Even if it wasn’t her fault—how could it possibly be her fault?—that they had no other children, that her father never wrote a novel, even so, she felt a powerful obligation to her parents, these people who had given her life, and that life had given her so much good fortune. They never pushed her, but she knew they expected and hoped for a lot from her. They gave her violin and piano lessons. Ice skating and swimming lessons. She mastered them, but she didn’t excel at any of them. She never brought home a gold medal for her parents to put on their mantel.

  Still, Lisa made mostly A’s in her high school courses, and she volunteered for various island causes. She helped her mother clean house. She helped her father mow the lawn and rake the leaves and shovel the snow. She had lots of good friends, and two best friends, and she was never bored. Like her mother, she carried a book with her everywhere, in case she got stuck in a waiting room for the dentist or had to take the ferry to the mainland.

  In high school, she had friends who were boys, but she never had a real boyfriend, which secretly worried her. Was she such a loser? It was true that she worked hard on her grades and spent a lot of time reading and sewing. After she graduated from high school, she learned that guys didn’t ask her out because her parents, those brilliant high school teachers, terrified them.

  When it came time to apply to college, Lisa wanted to attend the Fashion Institute of Technology, but her parents refused to send her there. So Lisa went to Middlebury College in Vermont to major in business administration and to learn how to ski, because who knew? Maybe she’d be a star at skiing.

  In the summer, she returned to the island to work, because she needed the money but also because she loved working in retail, especially in the clothing shops. She helped hang, fold, smooth, and carry glamorous dresses for the posh summer women. She never wanted to be one of those posh women. She wanted to be the owner of the shop.

  In college, she finally dated, although not very seriously. During her freshman year, the guys seemed all about partying. They got drunk, did stupid pranks, and laughed like donkeys. Over the next few years, it got a little better. The guys she went with tended to be on the jocky side, muscular, often incredibly handsome, always nice. But something was missing. They weren’t, somehow, enough.

  In late October of her senior year, Lisa went to a gathering with her girlfriends. The northern Vermont air was crisp, the mountains were blazing with crimson and gold, and she felt she was perched at the very edge of a new and exhilarating life. The party was held in an old Victorian house. The doors and windows were open, there was a bar in every room, and after downing a couple of beers with her friends, Lisa realized she hadn’t eaten since breakfast and she was getting slightly dizzy.

  She wandered into the long hall, squeezed between groups of people, and found herself in an extremely large, ancient kitchen with so many roosters on the tiles, plates, dishtowels, and implements that she wondered if she’d had more to drink than she’d thought.

  “Hi,” a man said.

  “Oh,” Lisa replied, and thought: Wow.

  A British aristocrat stood before her, like a young Hugh Grant clone, complete with floppy hair, except this man’s was dark. He was wearing a collared shirt and a blue blazer, and she squinted at this.

  “I had to go to dinner with my parents,” the man said, reading her mind.

  “Oh, dinner,” Lisa moaned.

  “Hungry? Come this way.”

  He put an arm around her shoulders and gently guided her to a table piled high with cheeses, crackers, a gigantic sliced ham, and other mouthwatering goodies.

  But now that she was near food, she couldn’t eat. She was more self-conscious than she’d ever been in her life, and that was really not the way she’d ever been. This man was daunting.

  “Who are you?” she asked.

  He grinned. “Erich Hawley. Senior, majoring in economics. And skiing.”

  “I’m Lisa, a senior majoring
in business administration.” She smiled, tilting her head so that her glossy brown hair fell over her shoulder and down over her breast. Oh, wow, she thought. It had happened. She was flirting! “And I’m learning to ski, but I’m not a natural at it. I’m better at swimming. I live on Nantucket.”

  Much later Lisa would learn that those simple four last words would cause a giant misunderstanding. Erich assumed that living on Nantucket meant Lisa was wealthy. And wealth was what Erich was all about.

  “Nice,” Erich said.

  “Very nice,” Lisa responded. She felt bewitched, unable to think in words, overwhelmed with physical sensations. This man!

  If Erich had enchanted Lisa, she had enchanted him right back. She knew she had a pretty face and a good figure, not to mention that glossy dark hair falling over her shoulder, but that couldn’t explain why in that moment, in that crowded room in a rambling Victorian house at the northern reaches of the country, suave, cosmopolitan Erich Hawley chose her. Maybe it was her air of openness and naiveté, and she was naïve. Maybe it was sheer chemistry. Or maybe, and this was what she thought much later, it was fate, destiny, life’s secret plan to get Juliet and Theo onto the earth.

  Erich leaned close to her, his lips brushing her ear. “I can hardly hear you in this mob scene. Let me take you out to dinner.”

  “Thank you, but no. You just had dinner with your parents,” Lisa reminded him, and she saw the quick flash in his eyes that she would later learn was a sign that she’d said something that interested him. That she hadn’t jumped at the first opportunity to be with him. That she might possibly be a challenge.

  “I didn’t have dessert,” Erich said, smiling wolfishly.

  She went to dinner with him.

  As she got to know him, she was even more charmed. Erich’s parents were elegant multilingual Europeans with homes in Switzerland and Argentina. (Many of Erich’s clothes were bespoke, tailored in London, although Lisa knew that shouldn’t matter. But she did love his clothes.) Mr. Hawley worked for an important international Swiss bank with many initials. Erich was going to work there, too. This particular bank was an institution that helped fund improvement projects in less wealthy countries. In Lisa’s mind, Erich became a kind of modern-day combination of King Arthur and Robin Hood. Very quickly she not only admired him, she adored him.

  Erich had his own apartment, and for the rest of the year, Lisa more or less lived with him. She felt privileged to fix his dinner, clean his kitchen, do his laundry. Somehow she managed to keep her grades up, too, although she scarcely cared. For the first time in her life, she was happy to be Cinderella, and not until much later did she realize that Erich not only liked her in that role, but he had slowly, brilliantly, surreptitiously imposed that role upon her.

  In April, Erich took her to New York to meet his parents, who had come up from their Washington, D.C., home on business. Lisa found them so terribly smooth and cultured that she became tongue-tied, probably because all three of the Hawleys would lapse into German or French when speaking with one another, and Lisa could hardly remember English in the glow of their brilliance.

  But Erich’s parents liked Lisa, and in May, just before graduation, Lisa brought Erich home to meet her parents. Erich thought that Lisa’s family was the very model of old money, with their book-filled historic Greek Revival house and ancient Range Rover.

  That weekend on the island made Lisa’s adoration waver slightly. Erich was moving to D.C. when he graduated, and every so often, he’d casually suggested that Lisa might like to live there with him. In Vermont, Lisa knew she wanted to go with Erich. On Nantucket, she wasn’t so certain. It was as if she were one person on the island, and another person with Erich. She wasn’t sure where she wanted to end up with her life, and she didn’t know if Erich was the spot or a path in the opposite direction.

  She intended to talk this over with her mother and with a couple of her best island friends. She wasn’t clear about how she really felt. Did she love Erich or simply love the fact that he, cosmopolitan, elegant Erich, loved her? But Erich, who was a genius at marketing and presentation, surprised her the night before they left the island. He took her and her parents to Le Languedoc, one of the toniest restaurants on the island. They enjoyed a feast of oysters, lobster, and fresh baby greens. They were happily studying the dessert menu when the waiter arrived at their table carrying a standing ice bucket.

  Lisa and her parents stared at the bottle of Dom Perignon in surprise.

  Erich turned to the waiter. “Would you please bring the young lady’s dessert now.”

  There was a moment of silence. The waiter reappeared, setting before Lisa a delicate white porcelain plate holding a small black velvet box.

  “Erich?” Lisa asked.

  “Open it,” Erich told her, smiling.

  Of course she guessed what it was. And she knew very well that she could make only one answer to the question the box held. She just didn’t know if that was the right answer for her. She was in love with Erich—any woman would be. But she wasn’t certain she could fit into his world, and she knew he would never consider living on Nantucket.

  She opened the black velvet box. Inside was an emerald-cut diamond, at least two carats in size, set in a platinum band. She looked up at Erich.

  “Lisa, will you marry me?” he asked.

  Her breath caught in her throat and in that flash of silence she was aware that everyone in the dining room was watching them.

  Trembling, she answered, “Yes, Erich. Yes, I will marry you.”

  Erich lifted the box off the plate, removed the ring from the velvet slot, took Lisa’s hand, and gently slid the ring onto her finger. Leaning forward, he kissed her softly, chastely.

  The dining room burst into applause. The waiter popped the champagne. As Lisa and Erich toasted each other, she decided she truly and wholeheartedly loved him. He was good, smart, handsome, and ambitious, and he had chosen her. She could sense how much this evening meant to him, how pleased he was that everything was so perfect, and she was thrilled to be a partner in the creation of the moment.

  The next day, though, as she spent one last hour walking on the beach with her best friend Rachel, she admitted that she had doubts.

  “You’ve met him, Rachel,” Lisa said. “He’s like a prince. Why would he choose me?”

  Rachel laughed. “Um, maybe because you’re beautiful and smart and kind?”

  “But our worlds are so different. Can you see me in Washington, D.C., discussing foreign economies with people who know what they’re talking about?”

  “Sure I can,” Rachel said. “I can see you doing anything. The question is, do you want to?”

  “I do. I really do. I mean, I do want to marry him.”

  “But…?”

  “But…” Lisa paused. “He doesn’t laugh a lot. He never belly laughs.”

  “Maybe that’s because he’s not leaning on a bar drinking his thirteenth beer,” Rachel suggested. “Come on, Lisa. Look at the man. He’s important. His work is important.”

  “I know.”

  “Are you afraid?”

  “Not afraid, no…”

  “Do you believe he loves you?”

  “I do.”

  “Do you love him?”

  Lisa hesitated. “Yes, I guess I do.”

  “Then all the rest will work out,” Rachel assured her.

  * * *

  —

  Erich wanted the wedding to be held in Washington, where all his parents’ friends could attend, where the ceremony could take place in the Washington National Cathedral and the reception at the Chevy Chase Club.

  Lisa wanted to be married at home, on Nantucket, and friends of her parents had offered the yacht club for the reception, so that should be fancy enough for Erich’s parents and his friends.

  They argued. In less than a mont
h, they would graduate from Middlebury, and that didn’t leave them much time for a wedding before Erich began his duties with the Swiss bank. Most weddings on Nantucket were planned a year ahead, so most churches and wedding officials would be booked. She was her parents’ only child. This was important for them.

  “Maybe we should wait,” Lisa suggested.

  “Maybe we should elope,” Erich countered. “We don’t need all the fuss of a wedding, anyway. We’ve got more significant work to get on with.”

  The tiniest, almost unnoticeable chip of ice fell into Lisa’s heart. Of course saving desperate communities was important, but couldn’t a ceremony of their marriage be kind of important, too? Where was the romantic Erich who had so dramatically proposed to her in Le Languedoc?

  They compromised. They were married in Lisa’s living room by the local county clerk, with her parents and her best friend Rachel in attendance. Erich’s parents were in Africa that month, and couldn’t come. They sent flowers, champagne, and a silver ice bucket engraved with the couple’s names and the date. After the brief ceremony, the small wedding party toasted with champagne, split the flowers among Lisa’s mother, Rachel, and the county clerk, and the newlyweds headed back to Middlebury to pack up and prepare for graduation.

  * * *

  —

  After graduation, the married couple moved to D.C. where Erich joined his father in the bank. Lisa and Erich rented a small apartment in Washington near the Mall, and Erich dove headfirst into his work. Lisa cooked healthy meals and did laundry and spent the swampy hot summer visiting all the marvelous museums in the area. She missed Nantucket so very much—it was summer, after all. But she understood that this first year of marriage was crucial. She wanted to prove herself loyal, helpful. She couldn’t leave Erich for two weeks or even one.