That Summer by Jennifer Weiner (read more books .txt) 📕

“So you’re doing taxidermy?”

“Yep.”

“No more needle-felting?”

“No, I’m doing that, too. I’ve actually got two commissions to do this week. A goldendoodle and a Great Dane.”

“Well, I left you and Dad the Indian chicken you both like. You just need to—”

“Put it in a saucepan, heat it on a low flame for twenty minutes.”

“Okay, well, have a good day at school.”

“Bye,” Beatrice said, without looking up from her knitting.

As the train picked up speed, Daisy turned her head toward the window. She saw her own reflection—brown hair, full cheeks, heart-shaped face, lines, faint but discernible, around her eyes—and watched the backyards of New Jersey flashing past. She was thinking about her father, who’d been on her mind.

Jack Rosen had been a businessman—or, as he put it, an entrepreneur, forever in search of the next big thing. For the first ten years of her parents’ marriage, money had been scarce. Her father had invested in opportunities that hadn’t panned out—a jewelry store franchise that had been doing fine until a Kay Jewelers opened up in a nearby mini-mall; a fur-storage facility that had gotten picketed every week by animal rights protestors; a fondue restaurant that had given Jack and his wife two good years, until people stopped eating fondue.

Then, in the 1970s, her dad had gotten lucky with Jazzercise studio franchises, and when the 1980s arrived, her father had presciently invested in movie-rental shops. The next twelve years had been good ones. They’d moved out of their duplex and into a rambling Victorian mansion in Montclair, New Jersey. He’d sent his sons, Daisy’s brothers, to the Emlen Academy, the storied boarding school that had only admitted a handful of Jews until the 1960s.

Jack Rosen had loved his sons, a love that was tinged with something close to awe as they’d grown into the kind of young men he’d never been, sporty, preppy fellows who’d traveled the world, tagging along with wealthier friends to Nantucket and St. Barths and Banff. His sons skied and sailed; they played tennis and eventually knew how to order wine. David had played baseball at Emlen, and Danny, who was short and slightly built, like their dad, had coxswained the men’s eight for the crew team. Daisy could sense that the sports and the slang, the way her brothers seemed to speak a coded language full of nicknames and casual references to people Jack had never met and places he’d never been, made her slight, asthmatic father proud, and also left him slightly bewildered. She’d been very young when her brothers had been at Emlen, but she could still remember, vividly, her father wearing an Emlen hoodie around the house during the winter months and an Emlen T-shirt in the summer. At graduation, he would dress in a tweed sports jacket, no matter how hot it was on that day, and a tie in Emlen’s colors, and take pictures of everything—the ivy-covered dorms, the dining halls, benches on the quad, with their brass plaques, the crew shells, even the other families, whose dads wore dress shirts with the cuffs rolled up and madras shorts and boat shoes on warm afternoons. There’d be sweat pouring down her father’s bald head and cheeks, and her mother, tottering beside him in high heels, would hiss, Jack, that’s enough as he’d surreptitiously fire off his camera. Daisy always liked visiting Emlen—they set up a tent where other families could drop off their children, so there were other kids to play with, and good things to eat. It wasn’t until she was older that she understood how complicated it must have been for her parents, the way they must have felt both proud and out of place.

Daisy adored her father. She’d been a late-in-life baby, arriving when her mom was thirty-eight and exhausted and, Daisy suspected, pretty much ready to retire as a mom, but her father had loved her unreservedly. Me and my shadow, her dad used to say. She’d tag along with him whenever she could, when they’d visit his businesses, or his mother, Daisy’s grandmother, who lived in an apartment in Riverdale in the Bronx. Her father did much of the family’s cooking, and all of the baking, and it was from him that Daisy learned to prepare hamantaschen and rugelach and sufganiyot. Princess Diana, he’d called her, and he’d say, “Nothing is too good for my little girl.” Every Saturday they spent together would end with the two of them browsing at a bookstore—sometimes the Waldenbooks in the nearby mall, sometimes the Strand in New York City. Her father would let her buy a stack of books as high as her knee. Daisy had her own bedroom and her own bathroom, a closet full of Girbaud jeans and Benetton sweaters. Every summer she went to Camp Ramah in the Catskills, and for her bat mitzvah she’d had a casino-themed party, which had featured a roulette wheel, blackjack tables, a popcorn stand, a photo booth, and a crew of “party motivators” to coax the awkward preteens out onto the dance floor. For favors, there were customized pairs of socks, pink for the girls, blue for the boys, that had I DANCED MY SOCKS OFF AT DIANA’S BAT MITZVAH embroidered on the soles. Daisy had worn a pink dress with a tulle skirt and silver paillettes stitched into the bodice, and had gotten her hair permed. She’d never felt more pretty, or more grown up.

Eighteen months later, things had taken a turn. First, her dad had gotten his money out of the movie-rental franchises, convinced that the public’s appetite for at-home movies was waning, and put everything into a local chain of rotisserie restaurants called Cluck It. Then people stopped wanting roast chicken. Or maybe they wanted it from Boston Market. Or maybe Cluck It wasn’t as much of a draw as investors had hoped. Whatever the reason, three of the four restaurants had closed within a