With coronavirus in the way of summer plans for many, escape from the couch to Cape Cod with “Big Summer” by author Jennifer Weiner.
Weiner, who’s known for her favorite summer reads like “Mrs. Everything” and “In Her Shoes,” is back with “Big Summer,” which tells a story about friendship and the resilience of the human heart.
Get lost in “Big Summer” and read an excerpt below.
Prologue
1994
By the second week of September, the outer Cape was practically deserted. The tourists had packed up and gone home. The roads were empty; the glorious beaches were abandoned. It was a shame: by September, the ocean was finally warm enough for swimming, especially if it had been a hot August, and the paths that wound through the dunes and cranberry bogs and secret blueberry bushes, the ones that were pickup spots for men in summer’s high season, were deserted, and the bushes were full of ripe berries. She and Aidan could fill their pockets and pick beach plums out of their bushes between the cottage and the beach. They would each bring a metal pail, and they’d recite Plink! Plank! Plunk!, like the heroine of Blueberries for Sal, as each plum rattled to the bottom.
You’ll go crazy out there, her father had told her when Christina asked if she could take the summer cottage that perched on the edge of the dune in Truro. It’s too empty. Too lonely. No one to see, nothing to do. But he hadn’t told her no. As the first weeks and months had passed, Christina had come to cherish the solitude and the silence, the slant of late-afternoon sun that warmed the floorboards where her ginger cat slept.
With the summer people gone, she could have her pick of parking spots on Commercial Street when she and Aidan went to Provincetown. If he’d behaved himself at the grocery store, she’d buy him an ice-cream cone at Lewis Brothers or a malasada at the Portuguese Bakery. She’d learned every quirk of the cottage, the way the doors swelled up when it rained, the creak of the roof as the beams settled at night. When there were thunderstorms, she could go out to the deck and watch lightning crack over the water of Cape Cod Bay, letting rain wash her face as she imagined that she was standing at the prow of a ship, she and her little boy, alone on the storm-tossed seas.
Sometimes, that was how she’d felt. Her mother was dead; her sisters and brother, the closest in age a decade her senior, were strangers she saw on holidays; and her father had been puzzled when Christina had asked for the cottage, then furious when he learned the reason why. “Daddy, I’m pregnant,” she told him. His face had turned pale, then an unhealthy, mottled red; his mouth had worked silently as he glared. “And I’m keeping the baby. I’ll raise it on my own.”
When he’d raged, demanding to know whose baby it was, Christina had simply said, “Mine.” He’d yelled at her, spittle flying from his lips, insisting that she tell him the name of the man she’d spread her legs for, demanding to know whose whore she’d been. He called her all the names she’d expected to be called and a few that had surprised her; he’d said “You have broken my heart,” but she’d kept quiet, silent and still as he shouted and threatened. Eventually, he’d relented, the way she knew he would.
Fine. Go. Wish you all the joy of it, he’d muttered, and handed her the keys and a list of phone numbers, for the caretaker and the plumber, the trash hauler and the guy who kept the furnace running. She’d stayed in Boston long enough to give birth, and then, as soon as her stitches had healed, she’d taken herself and her baby to Truro, following Route 6 as it snaked and narrowed, over the bridge at Sandwich, up to Hyannis, past Dennis and Brewster, Harwich and Orleans, Eastham and Wellfleet, then into Truro, onto a rutted dirt path that ended at the bluff, where the cabin stood. She’d worried that Aidan would fuss or cry on the ride up, but he’d sat, awake, in his car seat, like a wise old owl, his eyes open as they bounced along the lane and parked on the patch of matted grass in front of the cottage. “We’re home,” she’d said, lifting him into her arms. He was just three weeks old, but she thought he understood.
The cottage wasn’t grand. It was a summer place with no central heat, ripped screens on the windows, no dishwasher in the kitchen, and just a handheld nozzle in the tub to serve as a shower; a place with threadbare sheets and mismatched napkins and kitchen cabinets filled with chipped hand-me-down mugs and garage-sale glasses, nothing like the grand, sprawling summer palaces that the rich folks who’d discovered Truro had started building, high on the dunes. Christina never cared. She loved every imperfect piece of it. The pared-down quality and the quiet were exactly what she needed after New York. In spite of her father’s warning, she’d made some friends, and they had helped her insulate the walls and showed her how to use steel wool to fill the holes that admitted families of mice every winter. She bought space heaters, layered braided cotton rugs over the creaky wood floors, bought heavy wool blankets for the beds. She found ways to acquire the things she needed, trading heirloom tomatoes for jars of honey and firewood; writing wedding vows in exchange for a cashmere blanket, revising a personal ad in exchange for a pale-blue bud vase. She’d made the summer cottage a home, and she’d crafted a life full of routines and rituals for herself and her son. Oatmeal for breakfast, with honey from the honey dripper; a cherry Popsicle from Jams after a day at the beach; three stories before bedtime, two from books and one made up.
That night, after Aidan fell asleep, Christina wrapped herself in a soft-fringed cashmere shawl, poured a glass of wine, and stepped through the door and onto the deck, barefoot, to listen to the wind. In the darkness, the breeze was strong off the sea, with an icy edge. It had been almost seventy degrees that afternoon, warm enough for swimming, but she could feel winter in the wind.
She walked back inside, through the cluttered kitchen, past the rows of Mason jars that she’d spent the morning filling while Aidan was in preschool, putting up the tomatoes and green beans and pickles she’d grown herself; through the living room, its crooked bookshelves filled with fading, water-swollen paper-backs, and wicker baskets that held Aidan’s Legos and Lincoln Logs. Her writing desk, one of the handful of good antiques that came with the house, stood in the corner, with her laptop closed in its center, abandoned beneath a framed vintage poster of Paris.
In the bedroom, she made sure Aidan was sleeping, then bent close to trace her thumb along the curve of his cheek. He’d just turned four, but already, he had started to lose the sweet babyish plumpness that made squeezing him feel like embracing a warm loaf of bread. Still the skin on his cheek was as soft as it had been the day she’d first held him. My treasure, she thought, as her eyes prickled with tears. When Aidan was first born, and she was half-crazed with loneliness and hormones, when her stitches ached and her breasts dripped when he cried, everything made her weep, including her predicament. Especially her predicament. You chose this, Aidan’s father would remind her when he’d found time to come around. You had a choice. It was true. She’d gone into the situation completely aware, telling herself that the glass was half-full, not half-empty, and that a piece of someone else’s husband was better than no man at all. When she’d found out she was pregnant, it had felt like an unexpected gift, like a miracle. Who was she to say no to the possibility of this life, or the way it would remake her own?
Once, when she was still with Aidan’s father, he’d told her he would leave his wife for her. She had let herself picture every part of the life they would have together, a grand, bold-faced life in New York City, but by Aidan’s fourth year she was long past that fantasy. She’d never believed him; not really. Deep down, in the place where she could be honest with herself, she always knew the score. He’d wanted escape, fun, a fling: nothing permanent. He would never leave his wife, and her money.
But she had Aidan. Her prince, her pearl, her heart’s delight. Even if the two of them had been starving on the streets, she would have been happy. Aidan brought her daisies and Queen Anne’s lace clutched in his grubby fist, and pails with glittering lady slipper shells, still gritty with sand rattling at the bottom. Aidan smacked soft, honey-smeared kisses on her cheeks after breakfast and called her his beautiful mama.
Someday, she’d go back to the city, and gather up the threads of the life she’d left behind. She’d hunt down her old editors and pitch them stories; she’d reconnect with her old friends, and send Aidan to school there. Maybe she’d fall in love again, maybe not. But if, in the end, she never lived the glittering, rich-lady life of her youthful imaginings, she’d have a life that made her happy.
Christina bent down and started to sing. “Blackbird, singing in the dead of night; take these broken wings and learn to fly; all your life, you were only waiting for this moment to arise.” Her story was almost at its end, but, that night, she had no idea. That night, as she sat in her son’s darkened bedroom, with her shawl wrapped around her shoulders, listening to the wind whine at the corners of the cottage, she thought, I never knew that I could be so happy. She thought, This is the way it was always meant to be.
This excerpt is reprinted with permission from BIG SUMMER by Jennifer Weiner, published by Atria Books © 2020. All rights reserved.
