The Summer Place

A Novel

Jennifer Weiner

• Publisher: Atria Books
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781668033661
• eBook ISBN: 9781501133596
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of That Summer comes another “must-have” (USA TODAY) beach read about family, secrets, and the ties that bind.

When her twenty-two-year-old stepdaughter announces her engagement to her pandemic boyfriend, Sarah Danhauser is shocked. But headstrong Ruby has already set a date (just three months away!) and spoken to her beloved safta, Sarah’s mother Veronica, about having the wedding at the family’s beach house in Cape Cod. Sarah might be worried, but Veronica is thrilled to be bringing the family together one last time before putting the big house on the market.

But the road to a wedding day usually comes with a few bumps. Ruby has always known exactly what she wants, but as the wedding date approaches, she finds herself grappling with the wounds left by the mother who walked out when she was a baby. Veronica ends up facing unexpected news and must revisit the choices she made long ago. Sarah’s twin brother, Sam, is recovering from a terrible loss, and confronting big questions about who he is—questions he hopes to resolve during his stay on the Cape. Sarah’s husband, Eli, who’s been inexplicably distant during the pandemic, confronts the consequences of a long ago lapse from his typical good-guy behavior. And Sarah, frustrated by her husband, concerned about her stepdaughter, and worn out by the challenges of the quarantine, faces the alluring reappearance of someone from her past and a life that could have been.

When the wedding day arrives, lovers are revealed as their true selves, misunderstandings take on a life of their own, and secrets come to light. There are confrontations and revelations that will touch each member of the extended family, ensuring that nothing will ever be the same in “this first-rate page-turner” (Publishers Weekly) that will whisk you to the charming beaches of Cape Cod.

Part One

Ruby Getting Married

Sarah

On a Friday night just after sunset, Sarah Weinberg Danhauser lit a match, bent her head, and said the blessing over the Shabbat candles in the dining room of her brownstone in Park Slope. Dinner was on the table: roast chicken, glazed with honey; homemade stuffing with mushrooms and walnuts, fresh-baked challah, and a salad with fennel and blood oranges, sprinkled with pomegranate seeds so expensive that Sarah had guiltily shoved the container, with its damning price tag, deep down into the recycling bin, lest her husband see.

Eli, said husband, sat at the head of the table, his eyes on his plate. Their sons, Dexter, who was eight, and Miles, almost seven, were on the left side of the table with Eli’s brother Ari between them. Ari, twice-divorced and currently single, his jeans and ratty T-shirt contrasting with the khakis and collared shirts Sarah insisted her sons wear on Shabbat, had become a Friday-night regular at the Danhausers’ table. Ari was not Sarah’s favorite person, with his glinting good looks and sly smile and the way he’d “borrow” significant sums of money from his brother once or twice a year, but Eli had asked, and Sarah’s mother-in-law had gotten involved (“I know he’s a grown man and he should be able to feed himself, but he acts like Flamin’ Hot Cheetos are a food group, and I’m worried he’s going to get rickets”), and so, reluctantly, Sarah had extended the invitation.

On the other side of the table sat Ruby, Sarah’s stepdaughter, and Ruby’s pandemic boyfriend, Gabe. Sarah supposed she should just call Gabe a boyfriend, minus the qualifier, but the way his romance with Ruby had been fast-forwarded thanks to COVID meant that, in her mind, Gabe would always have an asterisk next to his name. Gabe and Ruby had been together for just six weeks in March of 2020 when NYU shut down and sent everyone home. Ruby had come back to her bedroom in Brooklyn and, after lengthy discussions, Sarah and Eli had agreed to allow Gabe, who was from California, to cohabitate with her. The two had been inseparable that pandemic year, all the way through their virtual graduation, snuggling on the couch bingeing Netflix or taking long, rambling walks through the city, holding hands and wearing matching face masks, or starting a container victory garden on the brownstone’s roof deck that eventually yielded a bumper crop of lettuce and kale, a handful of wan carrots, and a single seedy watermelon (“Next year will be better,” Ruby promised, after posting a series of photos of the melon on her Instagram).

Ruby and Gabe had stayed together through the summer, into the winter, and, after the New Year, when the pandemic had finally loosened its grip, they’d gotten vaccinated, gotten jobs—Ruby as assistant stage manager in an independent theater company in Jackson Heights; Gabe as a proofreader—taken several of their favorite plants, and moved out of Brooklyn and into a tiny studio in Queens, where they’d been living for just over a month.

Sarah finished the blessing over the wine and the bread. The platters of food had made their first trip around the table (Ari, Sarah noticed, helped himself to the largest chunk of white meat). She’d just finished reminding Dexter to put his napkin on his lap when Ruby, beaming blissfully, took her boyfriend by the hand. “Gabe and I have some news,” she said.

Sarah felt a freezing sensation spread from her heart to her belly. She shot a quick, desperate look down the table, in Eli’s direction, hoping for a nod, a shared glance, any kind of gesture or expression that would say I understand how you feel and I agree or—even better—I will shut down this foolishness, don’t you worry. But Eli was looking at his plate, completely oblivious as he chewed. Big surprise.

Sarah made herself smile. “What’s that, honey?” she asked, even though the icy feeling in her chest told her that she already knew.

“Gabe and I are getting married!” Ruby said. Her expression was exultant; her pale cheeks were flushed. Beside her, Gabe wore his usual good-natured, affable look. His dark hair was a little unruly; his deep-set eyes seemed sleepy; and his posture was relaxed, almost lazy, as Ruby put her arm around his shoulder, drawing him close. Sarah liked Gabe, but she’d always felt like he was a boy and not a young man, a mature adult, ready to take a wife and, presumably, start a family. Not that Gabe wasn’t a good guy. He was. He was well-mannered and considerate, supremely easygoing. He never got angry. He almost always looked pleased. Or maybe he just looked stoned. Sarah had never been able to tell, and these days, with pot being legal, she couldn’t complain about the smell that had sometimes seeped down the stairs from the attic when Ruby and Gabe had been in residence. It’s no different from having a beer, Eli had told her, and Sarah agreed intellectually, but somehow it still felt different, illicit and wrong.

“Way to go!” said Ari, extending his hand across the table so Gabe could high-five him. “Up top!” he said to Ruby, who grinned and slapped his palm.

“Can we be in the wedding?” asked Dexter. Dexter looked like his father, tall and lanky, with curly dark-blond hair, pale, freckly skin that flushed easily, and elbows that always seemed to find the nearest pitcher or water glass.

“We can be best men!” said Miles. Miles was more compactly built than his brother, with Sarah’s heart-shaped face and fine brown hair. If Dexter was an exuberant golden retriever, Miles was a small, neat cat, his movements careful and precise as he maneuvered his silverware and dabbed at his lips with his napkin.

“We’ve got an even better job for you guys,” said Ruby. “We’re going to get married in July, on the Cape. I already asked Safta, and she says it’s fine. She knows it’s my favorite time of year there.”

“So soon!” Sarah blurted, then gulped at her wine. Ruby had always been a determined girl. She hated to be thwarted; despised hearing No, or Let’s think it over, or worst of all, Slow down. Even a whiff of a hint that her stepmother opposed this match, or thought that Ruby, at twenty-two, was too young to marry anyone, would have Gabe and Ruby at City Hall by the end of the week with a marriage license in hand. And what was worse, Sarah thought, was that Ruby had told Sarah’s mother before she’d told Sarah herself. She felt a clenching toward the back of her throat, a feeling that had become all too familiar during the pandemic, as she choked back what she wanted to say.

Sarah had met Ruby fourteen years ago, when Ruby was just eight years old, a skinny, pigtailed girl walking down the hall of the Manhattan Music School, where Sarah was the executive director. She’d noticed Ruby right away. Or, rather, she’d noticed Ruby’s father, tall, bespectacled, and a little awkward, one of a handful of men in the sea of women; towering over most of the moms and nannies who sat, waiting on the benches outside the kids’ classrooms as their children shook maracas or thumped at drums. “Miss Sarah, do you have a boyfriend or a girlfriend or a husband or a wife?” Ruby had asked one day after class, staring up at Sarah very seriously.

Sarah had been charmed. “Not at the moment,” she’d said, and Eli had put his hand on Ruby’s shoulder, gently steering her toward the other kids, saying, “I’ve got it from here.”

Eli had taken Sarah to dinner that Saturday night, and to a Philip Glass concert at the Brooklyn Academy of Music the following week. Eli was more than ten years her senior, divorced, with full custody of a child, employed as a periodontist. Back when Sarah had made lists of what she wanted in a husband, any one of those facts would have been an automatic disqualifier. She’d thought she had wanted a man her age, unencumbered by either children or ex-wives; a painter or a writer or a musician, not a man who did root canals and gum grafts for a living; definitely not a man who’d failed at marriage and already had the responsibility of a child.

But Eli won her over. He wasn’t a musician himself (“Six months of recorder,” he’d said cheerfully, when she’d asked), but when they started dating he began reading reviews and following classical music blogs. He took her to hear chamber music concerts and piano recitals, where he listened attentively and was unstinting in his admiration for the musicians. “Someone has to be the audience, right?” he’d said. “We can’t all be soloists.” She’d smiled, a little sadly, because once, being a soloist had been her plan. There was a version of her life where the closest a man like Eli could have come to her would be as a member of the audience, where he’d paid for a ticket to hear her play. But Sarah had abandoned that dream long ago.

Sarah loved the way Eli had pursued her with a single-minded intensity; the way he noticed what she liked, the way he always thought about her comfort. If they went out and the weather turned cold, he’d wrap her up in his jacket and insist that she wear it home. If he noticed her enjoying a certain wine at dinner, he’d have a bottle sent to her house the next night. He bought her clothes without asking for, or guessing at, her sizes (later she learned that he’d discreetly asked her best friend); he gave her a pair of beautiful gold and amethyst earrings to mark their first month of what he unironically called “going steady.” The first time he took her to bed, she’d been delighted, and a little surprised, at how much she liked it. In the real world, Eli was respectful, almost deferential, a feminist who had no problem working with women or treating them as equal. With his clothes off, he was different—self-assured, a little bossy, in a way that Sarah was surprised to find thrilled her.

Best of all was his devotion to Ruby. A man who loved his daughter, Sarah had thought, a man who was a good father, would be a good husband, too. She’d been right, for the most part. Eli had been a wonderful husband, even if Ruby had been a handful early on. Ruby had liked Sarah just fine when she was Miss Sarah at music school, had resented Sarah terribly when things went from being theoretical to actual, and when Sarah went from being a fun companion who showed up on the weekends and took Ruby to get mani-pedis or tea to a full-time, live-in partner to Ruby’s father, who made sure that Ruby did her homework, cleared her dishes, and finished her chores.

It hadn’t been easy, but Sarah had persevered, ignoring the resentment and nastiness, enduring the tantrums and the tears. She’d made allowances after Eli told her that Ruby’s mother, Annette, had walked out before Ruby’s first birthday, and she had done her best to not take it personally when Ruby made rude remarks or hid her house keys or left unflattering drawings of Sarah (her chin extra-pointy, her mouth gaping open, presumably mid-yell) lying around where Sarah was sure to find them. She learned not to flinch when Ruby made a point of correcting anyone who got it wrong: Sarah’s not my real mother. It had taken Sarah years of patience, years of ignoring slights large and small, years of extending her hand and having it slapped away, to finally arrive at the moment, right around her thirteenth birthday, when Ruby had started to soften and began to let her in.

It hadn’t hurt, Sarah thought, that Annette had no discernible interest in parenting. Annette was an artist with no actual career and no permanent address. She had always focused on herself and her current passions, whatever they were at the moment: learning to throw pottery or to apply henna designs, performing slam poetry in Seattle, or building costumes for an avant-garde theater company in Brazil. (Annette loved to tell the less theater-literate that the proper terminology was not sewing or creating costumes but building them.) Annette’s creative pursuits came first; her romantic partners came second. Her only child might not have even made the list.

And now Ruby was getting married! Maybe if Sarah had been Ruby’s birth mother, she’d have been comfortable telling Ruby no, she was too young to be promising her entire life to someone; that her brain was not done baking; that she still had the whole world to see and explore. Her father and her biological mother could have said those things, and Ruby might even have listened; but Sarah, as a stepmother, had to keep quiet, knowing that if she spoke up she’d only send Ruby running faster in the wrong direction.

“We don’t want a big wedding,” Ruby was saying, with Gabe’s hand still clasped in hers. “Just family and our closest friends. There’s not a lot of planning that we need to do. So there’s really no reason to wait.” Daintily, Ruby speared a drumstick from the platter and set it on her plate.

“What about your dress?” Sarah managed. “And flowers? You’ll need a caterer… and invitations can take weeks. Months!” Maybe she could convince Ruby that there were actual, practical reasons why this plan would never work. When Sarah herself had gotten married, she and her mother had spent six months planning the big day. There’d been a rehearsal dinner at her parents’ house in Truro, then the ceremony on a bluff overlooking the ocean, and, finally, the reception at a vineyard, underneath a tent, on a gorgeous night in early September, when the air was still soft and full of the smell of summer rose hips, the bay still warm enough for skinny-dipping. Late at night, after their rehearsal dinner, she and Eli had gone down to the beach, taken off their clothes, and run into the water. I thought it was bad luck to see the bride the night before the wedding, he’d said. So close your eyes, she’d whispered back, wrapping her legs around his waist and her arms around his shoulders.

“We’re going to do email invitations,” said Ruby, waving one hand in an airy dismissal of Sarah’s concerns.

“What?” Sarah squawked, wrenched out of her memory of skinny-dipping and rudely returned to the tragedy currently in progress.

“Better for the environment,” said Gabe, making his first contribution to the conversation.

“Siobhan said she’d make me a dress as a wedding gift.” Siobhan, Sarah knew, was an NYU classmate who’d majored in costume design. “And Safta said she’d help me with the rest of it.”

Again, Sarah mentally cursed her mother. Again, she wondered why Ruby hadn’t told her first, or at least at the same time. She looked down the table, at her husband, wordlessly begging him for help. Eli’s face was expressionless. He still had his eyes on his plate and his fork in his hand. As Sarah watched, he shoved another wad of stuffing into his mouth and started chewing.

“Can we be ring bearers?” asked Miles.

“Are dogs invited?” asked Dexter. “I bet we could tie the ring around Lord Farquaad’s neck!”

At the sound of his name, Lord Farquaad, the family’s corgi, who’d been sleeping on his bed in the corner of the dining room, lifted his head and peered around. Once he’d determined that no food was on offer, he gave a chuffing sigh, settled his snout back on his paws, and closed his eyes, looking vaguely disgusted at having been woken up for nothing.

“You guys can be ushers. How about that?” Ruby offered. The boys had cheered and Sarah relaxed the tiniest bit. When Sarah had gotten pregnant, she’d worried that the new arrival would further alienate Ruby, but Dexter’s arrival had been the event that finally turned them all into a family. Prickly, angry Ruby had loved the baby unreservedly. The first day in the hospital, she’d begged to hold him. As her dad watched, murmuring instructions, Ruby had seated herself carefully in the armchair and tucked the blanket-wrapped bundle against her chest. “Hello, Dexter,” she’d said. “I’m your big sister. And when you’re old enough, you can come stay with me, and I’ll let you do anything… you… want.” Eli had looked a little alarmed at that assertion, but Sarah’s eyes had filled with tears. Maybe this will be all right, she’d thought. She’d greeted Miles with just as much enthusiasm, and all through college no matter what else she had going on, she’d spent a week or two each summer with her half-brothers at Sarah’s mom’s place on the Cape, shepherding them through meals and nap times, driving them to swim lessons and Audubon camp, hunting for clams or hermit crabs on the beach, or going for a bike ride and an ice-cream cone.

“What’s an usher do?” asked Miles.

“You get to be in charge of where everyone sits. You help people find their seats, and you ask if they’re with the bride or the groom. It’s a very important job,” Gabe said, with one of his easy smiles. Ruby beamed at him, and Gabe reached over to give her ponytail an affectionate tweak. Ruby’s cheeks were pink; her usually sharp expression was almost dreamy. Her eyes sparkled behind her glasses as she leaned her head on Gabe’s shoulder.

“Have you told your mother?” Sarah asked quietly.

Ruby’s expression darkened. “We’ve talked,” she said.

Which meant what, exactly? Sarah shot her husband a frantic look, which Eli, still chewing, either didn’t see or chose to ignore. What had Annette said when Ruby called her with the news? Why hadn’t Sarah’s own mom called to warn her? And what was she supposed to do now? Congratulate those two children? Propose a toast?

Before she could decide, Dexter asked Gabe, “Did you give her a ring?”

Ruby fli...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Prologue
• Part One: Ruby Getting Married
• Part Two: The Course of True Love
• Part Three: Met by Moonlight
• Epilogue: If We Shadows
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Copyright