Boop filled her lungs with enough night air to expel a hidden truth.
“I was pregnant.”
Hannah walked around the porch. Boop stopped counting after twenty laps.
“You’re making me dizzy,” Georgia said. “Sit down.”
“You both knew?” Hannah looked at Doris and then Georgia.
They nodded.
“My family, the doctor, the girls,” Boop said. “That’s all. Others probably suspected, but it wasn’t something you talked about.”
“It was something you lied about,” Doris said.
“Did your grandparents force Pop to marry you?”
“Not exactly.”
“Then what exactly?”
“Oh, Hannah, it’s a long story. All you really need to know is that your pop was a mensch.” Boop had always known this, and she’d been grateful. But had she been grateful enough?
Hannah gulped. “You did it for the baby. For my dad. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but maybe that’s enough.”
“Just because it worked out for us doesn’t mean you don’t deserve more than that uncertainty now,” Boop said.
“If you didn’t love him, why did you stay?” Hannah’s voice cracked.
“I did fall in love with him. It just took time.” But there was more to it. While there had been many things Boop had wanted to become, a leaver was not among them. Unlike her parents, every time Boop had escaped back to South Haven to recharge, whether for a weekend or for months in the summers, she’d returned home on the day she’d promised to do so, sometimes ahead of schedule.
She’d never forgotten that she was a lucky girl.
“I will always come back,” she’d said to Marvin when she was nineteen and had been Mrs. Peck for less than a year. “I’m going to help my grandparents with the blueberry festival. I’ll be back on Tuesday before dinner.” She hadn’t ever asked permission. She’d simply share her intention, which Marvin would accept because she always returned as promised.
True, he hadn’t been a child then, but a psyche could easily be bruised at any age. Boop had made sure her husband never had to sneak downstairs and unlock the door, rationalizing that she might have forgotten her key. He’d never tapped strangers on the shoulder because they had Boop’s hair, walk, or mannerisms. Marvin never had to make up a story about where his wife was or why she was gone. She’d kept the promises she’d made to Marvin before God and their families as well as the one she’d made to herself.
But these promises were also her penance for needing to get married.
Hannah shouldn’t have worries or what-ifs when it came to marriage. Enough of those would come along with motherhood.
“If you’re not in love with Clark anymore, or if you never were, you’ll fall in love with someone else one day, and you’ll see. And that’s what you deserve. That’s even what your baby deserves. Heck, it’s what Clark deserves, don’t you think? Even if that means waiting.”
“You didn’t wait,” Hannah said.
“She’s right,” Doris said.
“I didn’t have any other acceptable options,” Boop said. “They called it ‘getting in trouble’ and that’s exactly what it was. Trouble.”
“And marrying Pop got you out of trouble?”
“You bet it did.” In more ways than one. “And Pop got something in addition to a pregnant bride. Your great-grandpa Stan wasn’t going to give Pop the business until he had a nice Jewish wife—one that he approved of—a healthy Jewish baby, and a brick bungalow in Skokie.”
Hannah flinched. “That’s awful!”
“Your grandmother has had a wonderful life,” Georgia said.
“I did, but yours can be better. Learn from my experience. Pop and I both got what we needed—but was it what we wanted?” Boop shrugged. “Eventually, yes, but I don’t want you to wait for eventually.”
Boop wanted Hannah to have what she’d lost.
Smothered memories gasped for air through unguarded cracks in Boop’s consciousness. She’d once had drive and ambition. Dreams and naivete. And a figure to die for.
Far-off big-band music, Zaide’s laughter, and the roar of roadsters resounded inside her. The clean scent of hair cream tickled her nose. The bite of peppermint toothpaste coated her tongue. Was it all in her imagination? Or could the girls and Hannah hear it and smell it and taste it too?
Hannah studied her. “You have a lot of thoughts about love for someone who says she wasn’t in it.”
Boop diverted her gaze and gathered her thoughts, then looked back at Hannah. “I’ve had a lifetime to consider it.”
Hannah nodded, her curiosity momentarily muted. “What would you have done if you hadn’t gotten pregnant? What were your dreams? Did you have plans?”
The questions chipped away at Boop’s resolve to keep that summer veiled within the personal story she’d created—how she’d been a young woman who wanted nothing more than to be Mrs. Marvin Peck, housewife and mother. She looked at her friends.
Doris shrugged.
“It’s up to you,” Georgia said.
After all this time, Boop remained unsure of how to explain the unexplainable. “It was another lifetime, Hannah. It doesn’t matter anymore.”
“It matters to me.” Hannah placed her hand on her stomach. “It matters to us.”
Boop had so wanted it all to matter.
Time tumbled forward and back. People and actions overlapped and crisscrossed through the years. Would it be possible for Boop’s experiences at eighteen to benefit her granddaughter now? Could Boop’s pain be Hannah’s gain?
She was not a frivolous old woman, yet Boop recalled a frivolous girl—one who’d been charging toward a limitless future until she’d crashed.
“You must remember something,” Hannah said.
Against her heart’s better judgment, Boop remembered everything. After all, it had been the best and worst summer of her life.
Chapter 3
BETTY
Summer 1951
Betty needed to pick up her pace or she’d miss what she’d been waiting for since forever. It was almost noon and the summer staff would arrive in South Haven in about three hours. And now that she was eighteen, she would no longer be “Bitty Betty Stern”; she’d be part of the gang.
She was old enough to join in on the secret bonfires that weren’t so secret; enjoy a day off, playing cards in the staff cabins; or drive to
