Free Summer House by Nancy Thayer Page A

and Worth were late arrivals on Friday, they ended up with a choice of one of the cramped attic bedrooms or a second-floor room with a lumpy double bed. It was a pretty room. All the rooms were nicely wallpapered and softened with thick silky rugs, and the bed linens were old but clean and crisply ironed.
    “This will have to do,” Worth said, and dumping his bag on the bed he began to unpack, setting his striped pajamas in the bottom drawer of the dresser, allowing Helen, as was his habit, the top two drawers.
    All at once panic rinsed down Helen’s back. She could not share this pretty little room, that narrow double bed, with Worth, lying, philandering, cheating, deceitful Worth. It would be sickening to feel his large hairy male body shoved up against hers, knowing he had been lying on top of, inside of, another woman, and it would be heartbreaking if he should curl up against her—and how could he not in such a small bed—without becoming aroused and initiating sex.
    “You know,” she said, and her voice seemed higher than usual, “I am too familiar with the lumps in that bed to want to attempt a night’s sleep there, and you don’t want to deal with my insomnia. I think I’ll try the sleeping porch.”
    Worth kept unpacking. Socks in the drawer with the pajamas, and ironed boxer shorts, and a couple of short-sleeved polo shirts in thedeep blues that brought out the blue of his eyes. “No one sleeps on the sleeping porch,” he said.
    “Then why is it called a sleeping porch?” She sounded light-hearted, flippant, as she left the room and walked down the hall.
    The sleeping porch, at the end of the house, had three walls of screened-in windows, a wooden floor with an old rag rug in an oval puddle of blues and browns, and a disreputable daybed shoved up against the inner wall, covered with a white chenille bedspread that probably dated from the 1930s. The spread was stained with dubious spots that looked like blood, but Helen knew it was from pizza or chocolate ice cream, because not so very long ago, when they were teenage boys, Oliver and Teddy had turned this room into their private and unassailable lair. Mismatched furniture that Nona couldn’t quite give up but didn’t know what else to do with had migrated from other rooms to the sleeping porch: a white wicker rocking chair with unraveling wicker and chipped paint, a handsome ladies’ desk with a wobbly leg, a standing brass lamp with sockets for three bulbs, only one socket of which worked, and a very ugly card table that someone—Grace, no doubt—had covered with Con-Tact shelf paper in a white-and-pink rose print. The paper was coming unstuck at several places along the edges of the tabletop.
    Helen dropped her bag on the floor and collapsed on the daybed. This gave her a view of the ceiling, which was a yellowed white with a water stain in one corner. It would be cool out here at night, perhaps even cold. Nantucket Junes were notoriously unpredictable. But there were plenty of wool blankets in the linen cupboard. Besides, Helen liked a cool bedroom. The room had no closets, but someone had once hung a couple of black wrought-iron plant holders near the windows. The plants were gone, but the little metal arms would serve very well to hold a few hangers. And she didn’t need a chest of drawers. Well, she would when she returned for the summer. If she intended to sleep here for the entire summer….
    From the hall came Grace’s voice. “Mandy? I’m taking Christian down to the beach with me, all right?”
    “Thanks, Mom!” Mandy called. “I’ve got to nurse the baby.”
    Oh, fortunate Grace, to have that darling bright-eyed little grandson!Helen could hear the child’s high sweet voice as they went down the stairs. “Will the seals be on the beach this time, Grandma? Maybe the bottle with our message will be there in the sand! Can I take my shoes off now?”
    Helen had been surprised at the satisfaction she’d felt when Grace’s