The Summer of 1962
as told by Rose, on a Tuesday afternoon in March
We didn't have money for the shore that year. Nobody said it out loud — you didn't, back then — but June came and went and nobody packed a suitcase, and that was how you knew. So your grandfather borrowed Mr. Kowalski's pickup, the green one with the gate that only closed if you kicked it, and he drove all six of us out to the lake with a watermelon and a transistor radio.
Your mother was three that summer. She fed her ice cream to the dog — just held it right out to him, like it was his all along — and then cried so hard about it that I gave her mine. That was your mother from the very beginning, if you want to know the truth of her. She'd give anything away, and she grieved everything, and both of those all the way through.
That was also the summer I learned your grandfather couldn't swim. Forty years old and he'd just never mentioned it. He walked into that lake up to his waist, stood there like a man consulting with the water, and walked back out. "Somebody's got to watch the sandwiches," he said. I didn't let on I knew. Forty years married to that man and he was still full of surprises — I found out at his funeral he'd been sending his sister in Krakow money every month for thirty years. Never said a word. That generation, they didn't tell you they loved you. They just did it, quietly, until the day they were gone and you added it all up.
Anyway. That was the best summer, and it cost four dollars of gas and a watermelon. You can put that in the book.