Read Summer Beach Reads 5-Book Bundle: Beachcombers, Heat Wave, Moon Shell Beach, Summer House, Summer Breeze for Free Online Page B

summer on Nantucket!” she told her father. “Nothing could be better!”
    She moved around the kitchen. Everything was familiar, everything was right where it had always been: the knives in the wooden block, with the bread knife space still empty—they never had figured out where that knife went. New heat-proof rubber spatulas hung out with old wooden spoons and slotted spoons in the blue speckled container, while the less popular utensils mingled messily in the top drawer to the left of the sink, along with so many crumbs Abbie suspected the drawer hadn’t been cleaned since she was last here.
    The red enamel colander and the salad spinner were on top of the refrigerator, and just inside the pantry door hung their mother’s apron. It said Kiss the Cook and their mother had given it to herself for Christmas, laughing as she showed it off. That had been the Christmas Abbie was fifteen. Whenever Abbie came in from a school event or the beach at dinnertime, her mother would be wearing that apron as she prepared dinner. She’d tap her apron and arch her eyebrow.
    “Oh, Mom, you are such a dork,” Abbie would say, and she’d huff over, rolling her eyes, to peck a kiss on her mother’s cheek before stomping out of the room.
    Now Abbie touched the apron, allowing the memory to flood back. She wished she had been nicer about kissing her mother.
    And there by the far wall, on the low shelf with the cookbooks, was a large white oyster shell she’d found at the beach at Pocomo,the last time the sisters had gone beachcombing. Abbie picked it up and held it in her hand. She’d wanted, after their mother’s death, to keep up the tradition of the Beachcombers Club, but the first time she’d forced her younger sisters to go to the beach to search for prizes, they had all ended up sobbing in helpless wrenching grief. She marshaled them out to beachcomb the next year, but their hearts weren’t in it; the beach held no magic—it just wasn’t the same with their mother gone. They never tried it again.
    Anyway, as the girls grew older, they lost the time and interest for beachcombing. Months passed, and then years, and the gripping sorrow eased into an ache, and then into something more like the memory of an ache. Their father had changed after his wife died. He’d retreated deep inside himself, and he seldom talked about their mother or shared his own grief with his daughters. But on Danielle’s birthday, he always took the girls out to dinner, and he always proposed a toast. Abbie could remember lifting her juice glass, saying, “Here’s to Mom. Happy Birthday, wherever you are.” It was her father who coined the phrase. The girls knew it was exactly what their mother would have liked them to say. It was what she had believed.
    Perhaps once a year, every year, Abbie pestered her busy sisters into giving up an hour from their social lives to go down to the beach together, and two years ago, just before she left for her au pair job, she marshaled them into a trip. They were all in their twenties then; Emma was just home for a week, Lily had finished her junior year of college. They were in their adult lives, but Abbie could be forceful when she got really bossy, so they all went. No one found anything terribly unusual. Abbie won the prize with the oyster shell, a big one with a creamy interior around a spot of deep abalone blue. When she was a girl, she’d used these shells as carriages for her small troll dolls. That summer she’d put it on the trophy shelf and forgot it almost immediately.
    And here it was, a little dustier than before. So much time had passed, so many things had changed, yet here, Abbie thought, was this ordinary shell, sitting on the shelf like an ivory platter full of memories.
    She touched the shell with her fingertip, then went to the sink to wash the lettuce.

7

Marina
    As she put the bluefish in the refrigerator, Marina discovered she was smiling. Jim Fox was really attractive, and the