Killer Summer, Lynda Curnyn [books suggested by bill gates .txt] 📗

world of country clubs and private schooling was what Amanda aspired to. Which was why I found it strange that when Amanda did finally marry, she chose a man from the very world she and I had long tried to leave behind.

Donnie Havens had grown up two towns away from us on Long Island, though we didn’t know him then. In fact, Amanda didn’t meet Donnie until a couple years after I had married Tom.

She was still living in Manhattan, sharing that same two-bedroom with new roommate after new roommate. She still frequented the bars we used to go to, despite the fact that her mother warned her she would never meet anyone nice in a bar. And she met Donnie in a bar. A little dive up by Penn Station that she went to with some co-workers for happy hour one night. Donnie was in town for some sort of trade show at Madison Square Garden for a line of electronic components he was selling back then. With his thinning hair and blue-collar bravado, Donnie was the kind of man Amanda and I usually avoided. We knew his kind. He looked like the fathers who lurked in the backyards of our childhood, running lawnmowers and shooting the breeze over the hedges about what new car or boat they would buy, if not for the burden of mortgage payments and insurance premiums. The sons who bellied up to the bar, slamming down shots and trading barbs, believing they would never fall prey to the lassitude they saw in their fathers’ lives.

But Amanda didn’t avoid Donnie that night. In fact, she sat at that bar with him until closing. He made her laugh, she told me over the phone the next day, confiding with something that bordered on embarrassment that she had brought Donnie home with her the night before. And when I met Donnie two months later, after Amanda finally gave in to the fact that he was her boyfriend, I understood right away what she saw in him. It wasn’t just that he was familiar to us, with his accent and his ready smile. Donnie was a good talker. And attentive to boot. I think he won Amanda over by virtue of the sheer persistence with which he pursued her.

I had to admit that, after two years of living with Tom, turning down the corners on a bed that had already gone cool and sharing silences that I wouldn’t quite call companionable, I was jealous.

Not that I let Amanda know it. In fact, I wasn’t even sure I knew it. Instead I invited them out to the house at Kismet time and time again, even more so after Donnie came to work for Tom at Luxe, believing all the while I was doing Amanda a favor by sharing my oceanfront home with her when really I was the one who was aching for the company. As well as for the attention, the compliments, that Donnie heaped on me unabashedly. I enjoyed the way he leaned in close to talk to me, as if I were the only person in the room. How he shared his grand schemes with me about all his future plans. Like me, Donnie was a dreamer. The difference was, Donnie still believed that his dreams might come true, despite the fact that he had failed at them over and over. Still, I started to feel a kinship with him that I had never felt with Tom, and for a while, I even believed it went beyond the similar backgrounds we shared.

But it wasn’t until the year my father died that the urge to return to what was familiar took root in me. To find comfort in the arms of a man I could understand on a more basic level than I had ever understood Tom.

It was too bad that man happened to be my best friend’s husband.

Chapter Thirty-four

Sage

Enough with the appetizers. I’m ready for the main course.

There was something about the sun setting over the Great South Bay that always moved me. But watching the sky spread into a spectrum of brilliant pinks and purples and reds while sharing a bottle of wine with the most beautiful man I had ever laid eyes on thus far was something else altogether.

I think Vince felt that same sense of wonder, too.

“It’s amazing that something so spectacular happens every night and most people don’t even take the time to notice,” he said, once the sun had sunk into the horizon completely and the waiter came by to light the candle at our table.

It was true, I realized, thinking of Zoe and how much time she spent fretting over the state of the world that she barely took time to appreciate it. Or Nick, so hell-bent on proving himself that he rarely saw beyond his own nose.

A memory of my mother, playing in the yard with me and Hope when we were kids, filled my mind. I smiled, the words she recited that day bubbling up inside of me.‘“We’ll talk of sunshine and of song, and summer days when we were young. Sweet childish days that were as long as twenty days are now.’”

When I saw Vince’s speculative gaze, heat pooled in my stomach. “Wordsworth,” I explained. “My mother was forever reciting poems to me and my sister when we were kids,” I continued, suddenly feeling silly for spouting poetry when Vince had done nothing, outside of pausing before this sunset, to suggest that romance was on his mind. But I couldn’t help myself. He seemed to bring it out in me.“It’s funny the things you remember,” I said, feeling shy. And I never felt shy with men.

He smiled slightly. “That’s a beautiful thing to remember,” he said, looking at me as if for the first time. “I don’t think I’ll forget it myself.”

I’m embarrassed to admit how jubilant I felt hearing that I had somehow managed to strike a