Summer Harbor Read Online Free PDF Page B

whole time she and Will prepared to come back. She’d forbidden it heart-space on the long drive. But now, sitting on the front porch, the latent surge of excitement and expectation built up, part nostalgia, part hope.
    Abruptly, Kiley stood up. This place could not be allowed to open that place in her heart where she had buried the past.
    Any thought of seeing Grainger Egan was out of the question. She could not bear to see the man the boy had become.

Four
    Grainger Egan stood in line at the post office window, a month’s worth of bills in his hand. He was standing behind a lanky boy digging in his capacious pockets for the right change for half a dozen postcard stamps. Dozens of youths cluttered the streets of Hawke’s Cove in the summer, mostly indistinguishable one from another, camouflaged into anonymity by their baggy pants and backward baseball caps. Maybe it was the boy’s intense study of one of the postcards in his hand, or the bend of his neck, but Grainger was certain that he knew this kid. As the boy turned away from the window, Grainger nodded to him, with a nominal I’m-sure-I-know-your-parents smile. Then Grainger’s smile froze, but the boy turned away before the look on Grainger’s face exposed how startled he was at the sight of those wide-spaced blue eyes. Grainger knew who he was, who he had to be. Without question.
    He was the image of his mother. Masculine, to be sure, but the same honey blond hair, the same ocean blue eyes, so achingly familiar. The spontaneous dimpled smile as he responded to Grainger’s half-smile. The telltale arch of his eyebrows proved his heredity, perfect ram’s horns, just like Kiley’s. It might be believed that here was a creature of parthenogenesis, so deeply did he resemble his mother at this age.
    Unable to avoid the thought before it was in his mind, Grainger wondered whether she still looked like that, like a gamine, a breath of fresh air, the blithe spirit he and Mack nicknamed Kiley, after being made to read Shelley’s “To a Skylark” in ninth grade. “Hail to thee, Blithe Spirit,” they mocked the writer. Kiley laughed it off, retorting, “Bird thou never wert.” Wert became their code word that summer. “Hey Blithe, Grainger and I wert going to the movies tonight, you want to go?”
    “You wert, wert you?” Oh, they thought themselves very funny. Or Mack very funny, because he was the one to use the word to the greatest amusement. He could always do that, defuse any situation with a joke or a funny gesture, or a non sequitur.
    Until Kiley came into their lives, Mack and Grainger had been content as a duo. They had played the same games for so long they didn’t have to discuss the details of the various missions planned as mock soldiers, or the complicated plots of their imaginary detective stories, or which superheroes they were, wearing towel capes and running along the beach. Mack was always clever Spider-Man; Grainger, the conflicted Superman. When Kiley came, they expanded their games to include her or happily played games of her devising, as long as Barbies weren’t involved. On the rare occasions he let himself think back, Grainger remembered every childhood summer day as sunny and warm. Every day a beach day. He still saw the three of them as eight-year-olds, or ten-year-olds. When they were fifteen and life was golden. Beyond that, Grainger could not allow himself to reminisce. Dual abandonments, the bookends of his youth, inevitably subverted even the most innocent recollection.
    Some cynics might say that adolescence changes everything; what could he expect? But Grainger knew that they had come very close to defying the odds in preserving a platonic friendship, devoid of jealousy, devoid of competition. Until one summer when it all came tumbling down and their lives were changed. Even then, they might have carried into adulthood only the sweet memories, if only…
    Grainger slapped the fistful of bills against his leg. He had spent a