The summer following Bailey’s death

The summer following Bailey’s death is a stretch of school-free weeks in which Lennie moves unevenly between retreat and renewed involvement with other people. Grief remains a constant presence, but the season also brings music, friendship, family revelations, and movement toward the future. Its arc does not make Bailey’s loss disappear: it shows Lennie beginning to live with the loss without treating that life as a betrayal of her sister.

The season begins in isolation

On the last day of school, Sarah swerves into a parking spot and laments having to entertain herself another way. The two girls go into Cecilia’s Bakery, where Cecilia gives them an extravagant amount of pastries for free, her sorrowful expression reflecting how persistently the community’s sympathy follows Lennie. Even an ordinary outing is marked by the bereavement surrounding her.

The first day of summer vacation brings an invitation Lennie refuses. Sarah calls after learning that three members of the Fontaine family are expected at Flying Man’s, where they will play music; the two older Fontaines are in a band in Los Angeles, where they attend college. Sarah urges Lennie to come, but Lennie says she will stay home. Sarah’s suspicion that Lennie might be with Toby exposes a tension Lennie is trying to contain: she has promised Bailey that the intimacy between her and Bailey’s boyfriend will not happen again, yet she remains preoccupied with it.

Grief reshapes the household

Two weeks after school ends, Gram, Big, and Lennie are each moving through the park in different directions, a comic image of a family unable to settle together. Gram follows Lennie upstairs with a full teapot and two mugs, trying to revive their former habit of drinking tea and talking at the kitchen table. Lennie does not want to talk and pretends to read instead. The old ritual remains available, but grief has changed what its invitation means. Gram also spends a long time in the shower, where Lennie understands that she is trying to cry without being heard; the family hears her anyway.

Lennie’s distress is not only withdrawal. She is unsettled by intense romantic and sexual thoughts, especially because Toby is the person she feels she should not imagine. The suddenness of these feelings contrasts with her earlier sense of herself as protected and inexperienced. Her confusion is sharpened by guilt: she cannot easily separate grief, longing for comfort, and the wish to feel less afraid.

Reconnection, music, and movement

The summer does not keep Lennie apart from everyone. In a later call, Sarah greets her with exuberant affection and immediately adds that she is furious and will not speak to her. Beneath the teasing, Lennie can hear real anger about their estrangement, but she listens to the gossip Sarah has missed and they arrange to meet at Flying Man’s. Before that reunion, Lennie has spent two hours practicing Cavallini’s Adagio and Tarantella. The playing feels vivid enough to make her consider attending summer band practice after all. Music offers an activity she can return to even while she has not yet resolved what she wants to tell Sarah about Toby.

Toby’s presence also draws Lennie out of isolation. One night she sees him beneath the plum tree and goes with him through the woods toward the river, without either of them explaining the plan. Earlier, she had imagined that a happier, less exposed version of herself would have remained safely inside a shell. Now she recognizes herself as more emotionally open and unsettled, and wonders whether this intensity is part of why Joe noticed her. She cannot regard that change as a benefit without guilt, because it has come in the wake of Bailey’s death. Remembering that Bailey urged her to be less guarded, however, lets Lennie understand the change as something Bailey’s life taught her, not something she owes to Bailey’s death.

The past of Paige Walker comes into view

The summer also changes Lennie’s understanding of her family history. Gram had explained Paige Walker’s absence through the family’s so-called restless gene: a tendency, especially among the women, to keep moving from place to place and relationship to relationship, and eventually to return. Gram had named relatives who traveled before coming home, presenting departure and return as part of a family pattern. But the explanation cannot erase the particular pain of a mother not seeing her daughters for so many years.

In the attic, Lennie discovers a polished mahogany box engraved with galloping horses. Inside are years of sealed letters on Gram’s stationery, each addressed to Paige. Other discoveries make Paige less like the distant figure of family legend and more like a person with ordinary habits and enthusiasms. Lennie’s longing shifts: the imagined traveler had never made her feel like a daughter, while the details of a mother who loved lilacs and made pesto make that relationship newly imaginable—and make Paige’s absence hurt in a different way.

Gram eventually remembers the night Paige came for a weekend visit carrying a one-way plane ticket. She recalls the cold, the lilacs filling the kitchen, and Paige’s long green dress as she moved restlessly through the room. Paige told her mother she did not feel able to be a mother. Hearing this history, Lennie recognizes how Gram had protected Paige from blame while keeping her own guilt. Lennie tells Gram that Paige’s leaving and failure to return were Paige’s choices, not Gram’s fault. Gram responds with relief, as though a burden held for sixteen years has finally been released.

Grief and the future

Later, Lennie runs from the music room into the woods, intending to go home and write a poem to Joe. The step toward the future is inseparable from the fact that Bailey has no future. Lennie understands that Bailey will die again in her memory throughout Lennie’s life: grief will remain because love remains. The realization does not promise an end to mourning; it gives Lennie a way to understand continued living as compatible with it.

After spending hours making pies, cakes, and berry pudding with Gram, Lennie sets out for the cemetery. She runs through alternating patches of sunlight and shade, feeling the fabric of death that has clung to her for months begin to loosen. At Bailey’s grave, she remembers why the family chose a site where Bailey could be near the river. She sits beside the stone, touches Bailey’s name and the words she wrote for the funeral, and holds the marker as if embracing it. The visit joins the season’s movement toward life to an act of remembrance: Lennie can feel a moment of happiness and still bring Bailey with her.