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

reasonable. He pointed at the picture. “I’ve never met this guy. Never even seen him. My guess is that it’s his son. Mr. Shoemaker has two sons, and they both spend part of the summer here, I think. I really don’t know a lot, though. Mr. Shoemaker is the only one I’ve met. He’s the one I deal with. This guy I don’t know.”

Diana stared at her husband for a long, silent moment, her chest heaving, her hands clenched into fists. Then she shoved her way past him and went stalking down the hall, looking for more pictures, more evidence, a name. After all these years, finally, a name.

In the living room she found two more pictures, one of the man on a sailboat, beside someone who had to be his brother, a slightly older, slightly fatter version of him. The second was a wedding picture, where the man she’d known as Poe seemed to be in his mid-thirties, and his wife, a young woman with wide eyes and dark hair, half-swallowed by an enormous pouf of a white dress. She stared at the two faces, first the man, then the woman, running her fingers over the words monogrammed at the bottom of the picture frame: Henry and Daisy Shoemaker, June 9, 2001.

“Diana?” Michael had come up behind her, moving carefully, the way you’d approach a skittish, feral cat.

“I’ve seen her,” she said. Her voice was faint. “Jesus, Michael, I’ve seen this woman, in the post office, and Jams, and in the Wellfleet Market…” A memory was surfacing. She’d been at the market, picking up hot dog buns, and this woman, Daisy, had been right beside her. Diana remembered that her brown hair had been drawn into a loose ponytail, and she’d said something, Hi, or Perfect beach weather, isn’t it, or… “Lucky,” said Diana. Her voice was hollow. “She said how lucky we were, to be in a place like this.” Diana’s heart was thumping, her brain spinning. She felt like her windpipe had narrowed, like she couldn’t take in enough oxygen. When she shook her head, there was a ringing in her ears. “This guy, the guy who raped me, he comes here every summer, him and his wife and his d-daughter…” She swallowed the scream that wanted to escape, and when Michael tried to take her hand, she said, “I can’t be in here anymore,” and walked, then trotted, down the hall. Right by the front door was a half-moon-shaped table, with more framed pictures, and a glass jar of seashells. Diana picked it up, hoisted it over her head, and sent it smashing down to shatter on the tiled floor before running out the door.

She tried to forget. She tried to put the knowledge of Henry Shoemaker’s face, of his presence in Truro, into the farthest reaches of her mind, walling off the new knowledge the way she’d walled off Corn Hill Beach, long ago. I’m not going to think about it, she would tell herself, but that promise just turned out to be a guarantee that she was going to think about it, all day long, at work, at home, painting in the shared studio space at the Castle Hill Center for the Arts, where her brushes sat with paint drying on the bristles, and her half-finished canvases were stacked facing the walls. On and on, her brain churned, like a washing machine stuck on “agitate,” with one simple phrase, two words, pounding like a drum: he’s here, he’s here, he’s here. She resisted, until one day she couldn’t stand it anymore, and she did the thing she’d been keeping herself from doing since that Saturday morning with her husband. She went to the Truro library, sat down at one of the public terminals, and typed “Henry Shoemaker” into Google, because she couldn’t stand even the idea of typing his name into her own laptop at home.

Two hours later, her eyes were burning, and her neck ached. She’d learned the name of Henry “Hal” Shoemaker’s law firm, and where he’d gone to law school and college, and the year he’d made partner. She knew the name of his daughter, and his home address. She’d learned that his wife’s real name was not Daisy. It was Diana, and, somehow, that unsettled her almost as badly as finding the picture had. It made her think that she was the rough-draft Diana, the one who got crumpled up and tossed in the trash, while his wife was the final version, the one who was beloved, cherished, marriage material.

Daisy and Hal had one child, a daughter, who was thirteen (if Beatrice Shoemaker was on social media, Diana didn’t want to know. Even while gripped by this insanity, she had limits). The Shoemaker clan lived in Gladwyne, Pennsylvania, in a house that she could view on Curbside, and that she knew, thanks to public real-estate records, that Hal had purchased from Vernon Shoemaker in 1998 for one dollar, and that it was now assessed at just over two million dollars. Vernon Shoemaker owned the house in Truro, but his Facebook page informed her that his sons and grandchildren were regular summer guests.

“Can I ask you a question?” Michael had brought home steamed lobsters for dinner, in an attempt to cheer her up. He was cracking a tail enthusiastically. Diana was nibbling, without appetite, at a swimmeret. “You know everything there possibly is to know about this guy except his blood type. What’s the endgame? What are you planning to do?”

She didn’t answer. She didn’t have an answer. What she did was change the subject, then clear the table, and wash the dishes, and climb up to the sleeping loft, willing herself to fall asleep.

She woke in the middle of the night and lay awake, waiting until five o’clock in the morning. She thought about the girl she’d been, and all the girls and women, violated by their bosses and their colleagues, by men whom they’d trusted and admired.