watch them wobble into the distance. When did we all become so scared?
She thinks of Michael, at seven, falling off the monkey bars and splitting his head open on the concrete ground. She didn’t panic, it was just one of the things that happened to everyone. She bundled him in the front of the car and drove him to Dr. Grover’s house where he was stitched up in the Grovers’ kitchen as Mrs. Grover served them lemonade and ginger snaps.
She never knew where Michael was when he was growing up. Someone had a boat on the marshes, and Michael and his friends once got stranded for the day. Nan only knew when they ran in the kitchen door, shrieking with excitement at what swiftly became their near-death adventure. Whatever adults were around smiled affectionately, one ear on the conversation, the other somewhere else, because life, in those days, revolved around the adults. Not around the children.
The first time Everett brought her to their summer house, Nan had no idea what she was letting herself in for. She had barely heard of Nantucket. Had vacationed only on the Jersey Shore, knowing little of what she later came to think of as “old America”—the true Yankee families, the old-money families, whose ancestors had sailed over on the Mayflower, and who could trace their families back hundreds of years.
Her own parents had been English, had sailed to New York hoping for a better life than the one they left behind in Birming-ham, and had moved to Ossining because of a distant cousin who lived there.
She had been this naive little girl, still known to all as Suzanne, who hadn’t known what to expect when Everett brought her home. There was no Googling to find out about the Powells, no one who could have told her the family was famous in Massachusetts for funding the majority of the renovation that has made Cape Cod what it is today, no one who could have explained the money she was marrying into, the privilege and history that came with the Powells.
She married Everett because she loved him, and as a wedding present his parents bought them an apartment in New York City. Nothing fancy, she would say years later, but it was utterly fancy, and for the first two years of their marriage Nan would wake every morning and think she had died and woken up in a Grace Kelly movie.
Nowhere did she feel this more than at Windermere. Built in the 1920s, just off Baxter Road in the village of Sconset, it stood high on a bluff, overlooking the Atlantic Ocean, its shingles gray and weary from being buffeted by the wind, but its lines graceful and elegant, the porches, in the old days, always abuzz with people.
Not a huge house, Windermere now sat on nine perfect acres. Originally a modest saltbox, over the years various careful additions had turned it into a stylish estate. The developers had started to circle, like vultures looking for their kill. The house would be torn down, Nan knew, if she ever let them get their hands on it, and it was a place that held too many important memories for her to let it go that easily.
It was the Powells’ summer house—their idyllic retreat from Memorial Day to Labor Day each year—a home filled with naked children, clambakes on the beach, and so much joy.
It was one of those naked children who caused her name change, that very first trip. “It’s Suzanne,” Everett kept saying to the little three-year-old—someone’s daughter, or cousin, or something—who kept trying to drag her off to build another sandcastle. “I want Nan to come,” the little girl kept saying, and Everett had laughed, so handsome then, his blue eyes crinkling in his tanned face. “Nan,” he said, turning to Suzanne. “Nan in Nantucket. I like it.” And since that time she had only ever been called Nan, had mostly forgotten her given name; she often found herself crossing out Nan when filling in forms that requested her full name, only realizing at the end that she hadn’t written Suzanne.
When Nan thinks back to those early days at Windermere, she can almost hear the tinkling of drinks being poured and the musicians playing, she can almost see the fairy lights strung up around the house, the lanterns hanging from the trees, people laughing and drinking and dancing.
There were dinner parties that went on all night, Everett’s parents—Lydia and Lionel—the first to lead their guests