Fifteenth Summer - By Michelle Dalton Page 0,53

loved the olive tapenade and the artichoke torte and lots of the other fancy stuff she and my dad had made.

And Abbie cracked us up with a story about Estelle, the crazy art gallery owner, who’d had another one of her famous tantrums recently.

People we knew from town started claiming spots around us and saying sweet, funny things about our hoity-toity picnic.

Dad passed around a small bowl of the first blueberries of the season. They were tiny and on the sour side, just the way we all liked them. We nibbled them as we watched the sun go down. It was so fun and the sunset was so mesmerizing that I almost forgot to be nervous about my date.

So of course that was just when Josh showed up.

I didn’t realize he was there until I saw him standing at the edge of the picnic blanket, holding a cute little bouquet of daisies and gaping at our fancy china and champagne goblets and candlelight.

“Josh!” I said, quickly swallowing the blueberry in my mouth and hoping desperately that I didn’t have any food in my teeth. “You’re here!”

I jumped to my feet, smoothing down my yellow halter dress with one hand and tucking the frizz away from my hairline with the other.

As I gave him an awkward we’re-in-front-of-my-family hug hello, he whispered, “I didn’t think you meant it about the bow tie!”

“I didn’t!” I said with a laugh.

He was wearing a white T-shirt with a cool, faded American flag on it, rolled up khakis, and had bare feet. He gave our fancy dishes and silverware a glance, then looked back at me with raised eyebrows.

“Oh, this is just something we do,” I scoffed, waving my hand at the Gatsby picnic. “For a laugh. We’re not really fancy.”

“Speak for yourself,” Abbie said. She was leaning on one elbow, popping blueberries into her mouth.

“That’s my sister Abbie,” I told Josh. “And this is Hannah, and, um, my parents.”

“I’m Adam,” my dad said, standing up to say hello.

“And I’m Rachel,” my mother said as she pulled some dessert plates out of our picnic hamper. “We were just about to have dessert if you want to join us.”

“Oh, that’s okay,” Josh said. Then he seemed to remember his daisies and thrust them toward my mom.

“For you,” he said bluntly.

My mom and I raised our eyebrows at each other as Josh whispered to me, “I didn’t know what the heck a hyacinth was.”

“Those are perfect,” I said.

Which was true. They were simple and sweet. They were just the kind of not-fancy flowers my mom loved. She smiled as she gave the little bouquet a sniff, then plunked it into her water glass.

It made for an easy, guilt-free exit.

“I’ll be home by ten thirty, I promise,” I told her, crouching down to say good-bye. “Thanks for the Gatsby night. It was . . .”

I couldn’t say it was perfect. Because perfect would have included Granly.

“Well, I really loved it,” I said.

And that was the truth.

I guess since I’d forgotten to feel nervous before Josh arrived, all my nerves hit during our walk down the beach. I couldn’t think of anything to say as we picked our way around shrieking packs of little kids and college students laughing as they popped the caps off bottles.

I wanted to hold Josh’s hand, but the wind was picking up and I needed my hands to hold my skirt down.

Josh was quiet too. He asked a couple polite questions about my parents and my sisters.

Then I asked him how dinner had been with his parents.

“Oh, fine,” he said. “Some of those poets who like to come into Dog Ear set up right next to us, and they started improvising.”

“Ooh,” I groaned. “Improv poetry? That sounds painful.”

“Oh, my dad ate it up,” Josh said. “He likes that kind of thing. He went to Woodstock, but don’t ask him about it unless you want to listen to him go on about it for three hours.”

“Woodstock!” I said. “But how— How old—”

“Sixty-six,” Josh said, answering the question I couldn’t quite bring myself to ask. “He was fifty-one when I was born, and my mom was forty.”

“Wow,” I said. “I mean, I knew they were, you know, on the older side . . .”

“Yeah.” Josh shrugged. “That’s why they only had me. But I think that’s what they wanted anyway. I mean, my parents have never been the romp-around-with-a-bunch-of-little-kids types.”

“Oh,” I said.

I hadn’t really thought before about how different our lives really were. I’d grown up in