A Hundred Summers by Beatriz Williams

leaves. Nick glances up at the obscured rows of windows looming above.
    My blood turns to air. I’ve been kissed before, but never a real kiss, never one that meant something.
    Nick bends downward, and the brim of his woolen cap bumps against my forehead. He laughs, removes the cap, and bends down again.
    His lips are soft. He presses them against mine for a second or two, just long enough so I can taste his maple-syrup breath, and pulls back, mindful of the windows above us.
    “Drive carefully,” I say, or rather whisper, because my throat refuses to move.
    He replaces the cap. “I will. I’ll write tonight.”
    “And get some sleep.”
    “Like a baby.” He picks up my hand, kisses it swiftly, and props himself back on his crutches. “Until Saturday, then.”
    “Until Saturday.”
    We stand, staring at each other.
    “You go first,” says Nick.
    I turn and walk up the steps into the warmth of the common room. Outside, Nick is hobbling back down the sidewalk, back to his dashing Packard, back to New Hampshire. His large hands will wrap around the steering wheel, his plaster-cast leg will work the clutch awkwardly, his warm caramel-hazel eyes will follow the road ahead. I hope three cups of coffee are enough to keep them open.
    Nick Greenwald. Nicholson Greenwald.
    Nick.
    I cross the lounge and climb the worn wooden steps to my small single room on the second floor. The door is ajar. I push it open, and behold Budgie Byrne, still in her nightgown, with her cashmere robe belted about her tiny waist. She’s draped across my narrow bed, next to the window.
    “Well, well,” she says, smiling, swinging her slippered foot. “Who’s been a naughty girl?”

6.
SEAVIEW, RHODE ISLAND
May 1938
    N obody knew for certain when the first house was built on Seaview Neck, but I had witnessed cordial arguments on the club veranda gallop on long past midnight trying to settle the dispute. New Englanders are like that: everyone wants to descend in direct line from a founding father.
    Whoever did settle Seaview first had an excellent eye for location. The land curved around the rim of Rhode Island in a long and tapering finger, guarded at the end by a rocky outcropping and an abandoned stone battery that had fired its last shot during the Civil War. On one side of the Neck lay the Atlantic Ocean, flat and immense, and on the other lay Seaview Bay, on which most of the households had built docks that poked like a line of toothpicks into the sheltered water. Generation after generation, we children had learned to swim and row and sail in Seaview Bay, and to ride waves and build sand castles along the broad yellow beach girding the ocean.
    With all due modesty (and New Englanders are like that, too), the Danes had as much claim as any to the founders’ crown. Our house lay at the end of the Neck, the last of the forty-three shingled cottages, right up against the old battery and with its own little cove hollowed out from the rocks. According to the deed in Daddy’s library, Jonathan Dane laid claim to the land in 1697, which predated the formation of the Seaview Association and the building of the Seaview Beach Club by about a good hundred and seventy years.
    I had always thought our location the best on Seaview Neck. If I wanted company, I walked out the front door and turned left, down the long line of houses, and I was sure to see a familiar face before I had gone a hundred yards. If I wanted privacy, I turned right and made for the cove. This I did almost every morning. My window faced east, and the old wooden shutters did little to keep out the early summer sunrise, so I would wrap myself in my robe, snatch my towel from the rack, and plunge my naked body into the water before anyone could see me.
    The pleasure varied by the season. By September, the Atlantic had been sunning itself all summer long, drawing up lazily from the tropical south, and my morning swim amounted to a tingling soak in a warm salt bath. In May, a month