Firefly Summer Read online

  Also by Nan Rossiter

  Nantucket

  Under a Summer Sky

  More Than You Know

  Words Get in the Way

  The Gin & Chowder Club

  Published by Kensington Publishing Corporation

  Firefly Summer

  NAN ROSSITER

  KENSINGTON BOOKS

  www.kensingtonbooks.com

  All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

  Table of Contents

  Also by

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  PART I

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  PAQRT II

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40

  CHAPTER 41

  CHAPTER 42

  CHAPTER 43

  CHAPTER 44

  CHAPTER 45

  CHAPTER 46

  CHAPTER 47

  CHAPTER 48

  CHAPTER 49

  CHAPTER 50

  CHAPTER 51

  CHAPTER 52

  CHAPTER 53

  PART III

  CHAPTER 54

  CHAPTER 55

  CHAPTER 56

  CHAPTER 57

  CHAPTER 58

  CHAPTER 59

  CHAPTER 60

  CHAPTER 61

  CHAPTER 62

  CHAPTER 63

  CHAPTER 64

  WITH HEARTFELT THANKS . . .

  A READING GROUP GUIDE

  Discussion Questions

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  KENSINGTON BOOKS are published by

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  119 West 40th Street

  New York, NY 10018

  Copyright © 2016 by Nan Rossiter

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.

  Kensington and the K logo Reg. U.S. Pat. & TM Off.

  eISBN-13: 978-1-4967-0504-4

  eISBN-10: 1-4967-0504-1

  First Kensington Electronic Edition: August 2016

  ISBN: 978-1-4967-0503-7

  July 3, 1964

  “Mom-mom-mom!” Easton shouted, tumbling into the kitchen, his face lit with happy exuberance. “Mom-mom-mom!” he repeated, grinning the grin that stole everyone’s heart. He was wearing his favorite Red Sox cap—a permanent fixture on his blond head—and his sky blue eyes were sparkling with life. Even at the tender age of seven—just an evening shy of eight—Easton had an irrepressible way of filling a room with his unbridled enthusiasm, but on this particular evening, Martha Quinn was a little short on patience.

  “What is it, Easton?”

  “Look!” he exclaimed, turning off the kitchen light and proudly holding up a mason jar blinking with tiny golden-green lights.

  Martha looked up from pouring cake batter into two round pans. “I see. Now turn the light back on or I’ll have batter all over the table.”

  The screen door swung open again, and because the spring was broken, banged against the house, allowing two more jostling children trailed by a big yellow Lab to tumble in.

  “If Willow’s feet are muddy, please keep her outside,” Martha commanded.

  “Mo-om,” howled six-year-old Piper. “Sailor took my jar!”

  “That’s because mine broke and you weren’t catching anything anyway,” eleven-year-old Sailor said defensively.

  “I was so,” Piper protested. “Mom, do you have another?”

  “I do . . . somewhere. Sailor, how’d you break your jar?”

  “It fell.”

  “You mean you dropped it,” Martha corrected and then glanced down at their bare feet. “Did you clean it up?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you use a dustpan?”

  “There weren’t any small pieces.”

  Martha eyed her skeptically.

  “Pipe, you should’ve put your name on your jar, like I did,” Easton said, holding his jar so she could see his name scrawled across the lid. He opened the refrigerator. “Here’s another jar,” he said, taking out a half-eaten jar of bread and butter pickles. “Mom, can I dump these into something else?”

  Martha eyed her middle child again. “Sailor, please ask Birdie and Remy to come in.”

  “Birdie! Remy! Mom wants you!” Sailor hollered through the screen.

  “I could’ve done that,” Martha said.

  A moment later, the screen door swung open, banging against the house again, and the two oldest Quinn girls clambered in, giggling and elbowing each other, but as soon as they sensed the tension in the kitchen, they stopped, stood straighter, and waited for instructions.

  “I need you two to keep everyone outside. I have a million things to do tonight.”

  “We’ve been trying, Mom,” thirteen-year-old Remy and fifteen-year-old Birdie—whose real name was Martha—protested, “but they—”

  “No buts!”

  A car door slammed, and Martha sighed. “Thank goodness!”

  “Dad!” the girls shouted, clambering around their father as he came through the door. “What kind of ice cream did you get?” they asked.

  “Did you get strawberry?”

  “Coffee?”

  “Vanilla?”

  “I hope you were able to get chocolate!”

  “Hold on!” Whitney Quinn said, laughing good-naturedly and holding the bag above their heads. “Whose birthday is it?” he asked, eyeing his four daughters.

  “Easton’s!” they chorused.

  “That doesn’t matter,” Sailor protested. “On my birthday, we . . .” but Whitney held up his hand and her voice trailed off in defeat.

  “It’s Easton’s birthday, so the flavor of the day will be . . .”

  “Did you find black raspberry?” Easton asked hopefully.

  Whitney smiled. “You only turn eight once . . .”

  “You did! All right!” he exclaimed.

  PART I

  I have loved you with an everlasting love;

  I have drawn you with unfailing kindness.

  —Jeremiah 31:3

  CHAPTER 1

  Piper Quinn looked up from pulling on a dandelion—whose roots, she decided, reached all the way to China—pushed a shock of her short dark hair out of her eyes, and waved. Nat McCabe looked in the rearview mirror of his pickup and waved back. She smiled. Nat had stopped home for a late lunch, but before he left, he’d pulled her into his arms, murmured how good she smelled, and teasingly told her he’d been craving rice pudding all morning, and Piper, who’d been satisfying Nat’s
cravings for nearly forty years, laughed. She’d been planning on working in the garden that afternoon—they’d had a wet spring and the weeds were thriving—but as she watched Nat pull away, she thought about the rice pudding her mom used to make, and an image of her mom’s old Good Housekeeping cookbook—faded red and missing its dust jacket—filled her mind. Her mom had used that cookbook as faithfully as she’d used her Bible.

  Piper glanced at the weeds poking their seedy heads up above the fence and briefly entertained the idea of looking for a recipe online. There were several sites she liked, all with wonderful recipes and reviews, but she quickly dismissed the idea. There was only one rice pudding recipe she wanted to make, and it was in her mom’s favorite old cookbook.

  Piper gave the mulish weed one last tug and it defiantly snapped off at the ground. She sighed, tossed it in her basket, and eyed the offending root. “I’ll be back,” she warned, “and I’ll have my weeder!” She rinsed her hands under the outdoor faucet, dried them on her shorts, and looked at the big golden retriever sprawled across the sunny grass. “Are you staying out here, ol’ pie?” The sweet old dog, hearing one of the many names she associated with herself—ol’ pie, ol’ girl, sweets, pup-ster, and of course, her official name, Chloe—opened one eye, yawned, and closed it again. Piper shook her head and smiled. “I’ll take that as a yes.” She climbed the two wooden steps to the wraparound porch and straightened the wooden sign that was hanging next to the door. The carved and painted green-and-white sign had been welcoming friends to the Quinn summer home in Eastham for as long as she could remember. Whit’s End was the whimsical name her father had given the rambling Nantucket-style house when he learned that their fifth child would also be their fourth daughter! He’d carved the sign that same summer, and although it had been repainted several times, it was due for another fresh coat.

  Piper went inside, kicked off her tattered running shoes, and walked over to scan the cookbook shelf. On it was everything from Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child to the infallible Irma Rombauer and her daughter Marion’s Joy of Cooking, and tucked next to that was a dog-eared copy of The Joy of Sex—what in the world is that doing down here? Piper pulled it from the shelf and continued looking for the cookbook, but when she didn’t see it, she picked up the groundbreaking sex manual from the early seventies and leafed through it, remembering, with a smile, how she and her sisters had spent hours poring over the iconic illustrations, trying to decide whether some of the positions were even anatomically possible. She started to feel aroused, closed the book, and tucked it under her arm. Nat would get a kick out of it . . . and maybe even a new craving!

  Piper climbed the stairs to the second floor and gazed resignedly up the worn, narrow stairs to the third. She hadn’t been in the attic in years. She’d even tried to forget its existence, but she knew forgetting wouldn’t change anything—the attic would still be full of stuff . . . and stuff was the gentle word she and Birdie and Remy used when referring to the attic’s contents. Sailor used a more colorful noun. For years, she and her sisters had talked about going through everything, but somehow, they’d never gotten around to it. Life always got in the way.

  Piper pushed open the door and pulled the string dangling from the rafters. Nothing happened. She peered around the dimly lit room and made her way toward the window—the only other source of light—but as she walked between all the boxes, her heart sank—she was never going to find the cookbook in this mess.

  She bumped into an old seamstress mannequin, and when she reached out to steady it, she inadvertently touched the unfinished neckline of her mom’s last project—a sundress for Remy’s daughter Payton. Her mom had been working on the dress that fateful rainy, spring day when she’d stopped to make a cup of tea and get the mail. Piper had been away at college at the time, but Birdie had called to tell her what happened. “Thank goodness she put the kettle on before going out to get the mail, because it was the whistling kettle that alerted Mr. Moody—who found her lying in the driveway.”

  Martha Quinn had suffered a stroke, and although Dr. Sanders had assured her four daughters it was a mild one, the stroke had turned out to be the first of many that, over time, irreversibly damaged the tiny blood vessels in Martha’s brain and stripped her of all her motor and cognitive skills—from sewing and cooking, to writing and walking, to remembering and recognizing, and finally, to swallowing—but it was that first stroke that made it difficult for Martha to hold and thread a needle; and later on, when Remy asked Payton whether she’d like to have the dress finished by someone else, Payton had said no—the dress would just remind her of the day Gran stopped sewing.

  Piper moved the mannequin to one side and saw her mom’s hope chest pushed up against the wall. She lifted the heavy lid, and the sweet, woodsy scent of cedar drifted into the room, transporting her back to her parents’ bedroom in the big old colonial in New Hampshire—their year-round home.

  Nestled in the top of the old chest was a wooden tray filled with jewelry and beads. Piper picked up a string of pearls and slipped it over her head. Her sisters had loved putting their mom’s beads around their necks, donning her fancy hats, clunking around in her high heels, and admiring themselves in the full-length mirror behind the door. Piper, however, had only liked to watch; whenever her sisters had tried to put the beads around her neck or the bright red lipstick on her lips, she’d always shaken her head and turned away—there was no way they were putting that stuff on her! She’d much rather play the games her brother played—games that involved hitting or bouncing balls and running.

  Piper laid the beads back in the tray and noticed a stack of envelopes with her father’s long, elegant handwriting scrawled across them. They were addressed to Martha Lane—his seventeen-year-old sweetheart. Piper slipped off the faded ribbon and began to read the letters her father had written to her mother when he was a navy pilot flying Hellcats off an aircraft carrier in the Pacific during WWII. She smiled at his sweet words and the way he professed his love and told her of the future he hoped they’d share one day. Piper smiled sadly—back then, her parents had been blissfully unaware of the tragedies that lay ahead in their lives.

  An hour later, Piper slipped the last letter back into its fragile sheath, retied the ribbon, and looked out the window. She saw Chloe, far below, moving to her favorite spot under the towering oak trees her father had planted when each of his children was born, and then realized the trees’ long shadows were stretching across the grass—the afternoon was slipping by. Five more minutes, she thought, turning back to the chest. She lifted out a pile of sweaters and found an old leather photo album. She pulled her father’s dusty old mission-style rocking chair up to the window, sat down, and opened the book. The album was full of black-and-white photos that had been carefully mounted on black construction paper. She slowly turned the pages and smiled—her dad looked so handsome in his navy uniform, and her mom looked absolutely stunning in a long fur coat, back when fur was not only acceptable, but fashionable. Women weren’t caught dead wearing fur anymore.

  Piper slowly turned the pages, reading the captions her mom had neatly printed in white ink: Grand Central, 1945, Hanover, N.H., 1947, Fenway Park, 1948 ... and then there was one with just the year: 1949. The picture was of her parents, and her mom was holding a baby. They looked so happy. Piper studied the photo; they were standing on the porch of Whit’s End, and in 1949, the baby had to be Birdie. She shifted the book in her lap and a pile of loose photos fell on the floor. She picked them up and as she slowly looked through them, she realized they’d all been taken in front of Nauset Lighthouse. The first one was of Birdie when she was about two; then Remy stood beside her. Soon, the pictures included Sailor ... and then Easton ... and finally, there was one with her.

  She turned the page and another photo fell out. She picked it up, and the late afternoon sunlight cast its golden rays across it. It was of all of them—older now—a formidable crew! They had their arms around each other’s should
ers and they were laughing. Sailor was making bunny ears behind Remy’s head. They looked so happy. Piper’s eyes glistened—she’d only been five at the time, but she’d been old enough to know that her world—and the people she loved most in it—would never be the same.

  CHAPTER 2

  “It’s just a sprain,” Dr. Sanders said, slipping the X-ray back into its folder. “You need to be more careful, though, Birdie. You’re not a spring chicken anymore.”

  “You’re not a spring chicken, either, my dear,” Birdie Snow snorted. John Sanders had been Birdie’s doctor most of her life. He’d been fresh out of residency and new to her parents’ doctor’s practice when she’d switched over from the family’s pediatrician. At the time, Birdie had felt a quiet pride in being the handsome young doctor’s first patient, and through the years, she’d wondered if the teasing relationship they’d always shared might’ve blossomed into something more if David hadn’t come into her life.

  “Indeed, I’m not,” John said with a chuckle. “I’ll be seventy this year . . . and I’m going to retire.”

  “You are?!” Birdie sounded horrified.

  “Yes, I might even see if I can find a girl to marry. I think it would be nice to have a little companionship in my old age. I’ve always wanted to travel, and it would be more fun with a companion.”

  Birdie didn’t even hear his last sentence. She was too busy feeling as if the rug were being pulled out from under her . . . again! She’d always appreciated that her doctor was growing old alongside her, and she fully expected him to be there till the bitter end. It never occurred to her that he might retire. And as far as finding a girl to marry—that was an entirely different subject . . . and a frivolous one at that. “You can’t retire! Who’s going to take care of me? My ailments are only going to get worse, and I definitely won’t be able to trust some young, new whippersnapper who doesn’t know my history.”