Much to her surprise, Boop loved remembering the girl she had been at eighteen. What chutzpah she’d had. What moxie. She’d known exactly what she’d wanted—and hadn’t yet known she wouldn’t get it, so she’d been light and free of constraints. It was a time when her feelings—love and lust and excitement and hope and anger—rushed through her like a snowball pushed down from the top of a hill, gaining speed and weight along the way.
Her footsteps to the bedroom were heavy but quiet, the same as her secrets.
She walked to the windows that had been manufactured to look like original double-hung paned glass to maintain the historic integrity of the house Zaide had built for his bride in 1919. The window trim had been repainted white, and after six years it still popped from the sand-colored walls, as her decorator had promised. When Boop had decided to move from Skokie and live in South Haven full-time, she’d sold her grandparents’ walnut bedroom suite and donated the money to an organization that supported teenage mothers. She’d sprung for light oak beachy and contemporary furniture with clean lines.
She potchkied around her room, ruffling curtains, smoothing the bedspread, rearranging throw pillows, jotting down a grocery list even though the cupboards were jam-packed. Boop sighed. Contentment swirled and settled in with her deep breath.
This is why I’m here.
This was not an existential statement of being, but a practical declaration of resolve. She’d been asking herself, What am I doing in South Haven, with its frigid winters and transient neighbors? Why am I living alone in an old house with a wooden staircase and enough bedrooms for a family?
Hannah needed her to be there. Not forever, but for now. Hannah needed to know some of what happened that summer as much as Boop needed to acknowledge it, even relive it. After her granddaughter was settled and assured, and the girls had gone back to their own homes and lives, Boop would move to San Diego. Until then, she had memories to cherish, circumstances to unravel, and loved ones to nurture.
This time, when Boop left South Haven, she would be traveling light.
Boop pried off a blue lid from a plastic storage box and gently lifted out the itchy wool sweaters knitted by Nannie’s mother, who’d died before Boop was born. Red beads the size of grains of rice were sewn across the front of the navy sweater, and iridescent sequins had been stitched across the beige one. Nannie wore the sweaters on High Holidays, and Boop had tucked them away when she died. She lifted the navy one to her face and inhaled. It smelled like an old sweater. There was a time she’d have detected a hint of talcum powder.
Under the next sweater—a white cardigan Nannie had knitted herself—Boop found just what she was looking for: her childhood tackle box. When she was eighteen it had been the perfect hiding place. As a child, Boop had loved fishing on the Black River with her grandfather. Then she grew more interested in looking for boys than for worms. But Zaide understood and didn’t nag.
Boop walked to the taupe floral chaise—a reupholstered remainder of her grandparents’ bedroom—tucked diagonally into the corner by the window, climbed onto it, and stretched her legs in front of her, not a varicose vein in sight, though her skin was more delicate and sheer than it had once been. She set the tackle box on her lap, the weight of the past pressing on her legs.
Rust embellished the box’s edges—not because it’d been battered to look old, but because it was old. She’d seen things just like it at Eagle Street Market, where someone could buy something like it to transform into a planter or a jewelry case or set it on a windowsill as an element in a vintage lake vignette. They’d make up a story to go along with the box, no doubt, though they wouldn’t have needed to.
Thunder boomed in the distance, so Boop set aside the box, closed the windows, and watched a few cars drive down Lakeshore, away from the beach, when really it was the best time to stay. The lake became unpredictable, rampant with swells, its waves crashing onto the sand as it transformed into something different for the duration of the storm—perhaps living out its dream to be the ocean. Even in the dark, she saw rain roll in from the north. She knew the sheets of water cut through the surface of the lake like a straight-edge razor. The storm would darken the beach from beige to brown and in the morning the sand would be packed tight like brown sugar.
She cradled the tackle box in her arms like a baby, and a long-lost love danced across her heart. His name caught in her throat, as if she’d taken too big a bite of the past.
There would never be an accidental encounter, an explanation, or a second chance. He would never show up in South Haven. He would be eighty-seven or eighty-eight now. The memories were all she had, and this summer she would honor what she had ignored for so long.
The next morning, sunshine slipped through the opening in the bedroom curtains. Boop rose slowly, carefully. She shuffled to the window, pushed one panel left, the other right. She unlocked and pushed on the window sash. The breeze nudged her eyes closed again, and Boop held the sill so she wouldn’t wobble. When she opened her eyes, she saw one boat gliding way out on the lake, set amid blue water with sky to match.
Two kites dotted the sky to the south, way beyond the lighthouse. Boop smiled, pleased she could still see so far down the beach, and as far as the horizon.
Hannah jogged up the street and disappeared from view when she ascended the porch. A few moments later the front door slammed. What she was thinking as she ran, jostling the baby, Boop didn’t know.
Dressed in red twill
