The Summer Cottage Read Online Free Page A

which had spread from her breasts into her lungs and then into her bones, made breathing and moving, simply existing, an effort. Her legs, once strong enough to kick her body through the water to the raft in just over a minute, ignored her pleas for support, hanging from her fragile hip bones, as ineffectual as wind chimes on a still day. Helen and Claire both gazed out at the horizon.
    “Top ten, I think,” said Helen.
    “I think so too.”
    “And it’s only the end of June.”
    Claire smiled at her daughter. “Good old reliable Helen.”
    “What do you mean by that?”
    “You know damn well what I mean,” said Claire. “Let’s sit on this top step a moment, so I can concentrate on breathing in this salty air. It’s good for what ails me.”
    “So you keep telling me, Mom,” said Helen, helping her mother sit and then encircling her shrunken waist with her arm.
    They sat for several minutes, neither woman speaking, until Claire said, “It’s times like this that I miss him the most.”
    “Me too.”
    “He was a good man, your father, a strong man.”
    “Yes.”
    “I keep wondering if I should have kept him home that night.”
    It was an evening they talked about more often than Helen cared to—a recurring, never-ending conversation, like those about Claire’s swimming days and her cancer. When the phone rang at two in the morning the night their “city” home neighbor Joellen’s daughter, Bethany, went into labor, it had been raining hard for several hours. You can’t go out in this, Claire said at the time, mindful that her husband had been battling a bad cold for a week. But they had discussed the imminent birth, John and Claire, and agreed that he would go to the hospital, even though he had recently retired, instead of leaving Bethany in the capable hands of his young, taciturn partner. Normally, neither John nor his partner needed to be present in the hospital’s birthing room, but Bethany was expecting triplets, the product of fertility drugs she had been taking for two years that had finally resulted in pregnancy. He won’t talk to her the way you would, Joellen had said to John about his partner the day she knocked on the back door with a loaf of warm banana bread and the request that he preside over the birth of her grandchildren. So, John put on his galoshes that night, his heavy raincoat and hat, and drove to the hospital and helped with the delivery of the three small but healthy children, two girls and a boy. And he was just about home when a traveling salesman, drinking the last of six beers that had been sitting on the seat next to him, drove his rental car through a red light and into the driver’s side of John’s Jeep, killing him instantly.
    “He wanted to deliver Bethany’s babies,” said Helen. “There’s nothing you could have done.” The tears that rimmed her eyes each time she had this conversation with her mother reappeared. She dabbed at them with the sleeve of her T-shirt.
    Claire took hold of the railing at the side of the steps and slowly stood. “I think about it every time I see those children—although they are darling,” she said. “After that night, I never again cared for banana bread.”
     
    Back at the house, Helen again settled her mother into the wicker chair on the porch. “How about that tea now?”
    “Yes. I’d love some.”
    Helen busied herself in the kitchen while the water in the kettle boiled. She washed the lettuce for the dinner salad, set the dining room table for two, and peeled the summer squash, her mother’s favorite vegetable. When the kettle whistled, Helen poured the hot water into two mugs that held Constant Comment tea bags and dunked the bags several times. She put the mugs on a tray, along with a salad plate of chocolate chip cookies she had made the night before, and walked back out to the porch. Wanting to change topics, to lighten her mother’s dark mood, Helen kissed Claire on the forehead. “Well, what’s that