The Summer Garden by Paullina Simons EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Author: Paullina Simons
- ISBN: 978-0061988226
- Language: English
- Genre: Romance, Historical Fiction, Family Saga Fiction
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Page: 752
- Price: Free
Deer Isle, 1946
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The Carapace
Carapace n. a thick hard case or shell made of bone or
chitin that covers part of the body of an animal such as a
lobster.
Once upon a time, in Stonington, Maine, before sunset, at
the end of a hot war and the beginning of a cold one, a young
woman dressed in white, outwardly calm but with trembling
hands, sat on a bench by the harbor, eating ice cream.
By her side was a small boy, also eating ice cream, his a
chocolate. They were casually chatting; the ice cream was
melting faster than the mother could eat it. The boy was
listening as she sang “Shine Shine My Star” to him, a Russian
song, trying to teach him the words, and he, teasing her,
mangled the verses. They were watching for the lobster boats
coming back. She usually heard the seagulls squabbling before
she saw the boats themselves.
There was the smallest breeze, and her summer hair
moved slightly about her face. Wisps of it had gotten out of
her long thick braid, swept over her shoulder. She was blonde
and fair, translucent-skinned, translucent-eyed, freckled. The
tanned boy had black hair and dark eyes, and chubby toddler
legs.
They seemed to sit without purpose, but it was a false
ease. The woman was watching the boats in the blue horizon
single-mindedly. She would glance at the boy, at the ice cream,
but she gawped at the bay as if she were sick with it.
Tatiana wants a drink of herself in the present tense,
because she wants to believe there is no yesterday, that there is
only the moment here on Deer Isle—one of the long sloping
overhanging islands off the coast of central Maine, connected
to the continent by a ferry or a thousand-foot suspension
bridge, over which they came in their RV camper, their used
Schult Nomad Deluxe.
They drove across Penobscot Bay, over
the Atlantic and south, to the very edge of the world, into
Stonington, a small white town nested in the cove of the oak
hills at the foot of Deer Isle. Tatiana—trying desperately to
live only in the present—thinks there is nothing more beautiful
or peaceful than these white wood houses built into the slopes
on narrow dirt roads overlooking the expanse of the rippling
bay water that she watches day in and day out.
That is peace.
That is the present. Almost as if there is nothing else.
But every once in a heartbeat while, as the seagulls sweep
and weep, something intrudes, even on Deer Isle.
That afternoon, after Tatiana and Anthony had left the
house where they were staying to come to the bay, they heard
loud voices next door.
Two women lived there, a mother and a daughter. One
was forty, the other twenty.
“They’re fighting again,” said Anthony. “You and Dad
don’t fight.”
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