In Lisa Wingate's novel, A Month of Summer, Rebecca Macklin lives in LA, has a legal practice with her husband, and runs her 9-year-old gymnast daughter to practices and meets.
Then Rebecca receives a devastating phone call. She has not seen her father in over thirty years. She was supposed to spend a month of every summer with him and his new family as part of the custody arrangement of her parents' divorce when she was twelve. But she refused to go. Her father honored her wishes.
Her stepmother has written over the last couple of years that Rebecca's father developed dementia and urged her to make peace before it was too late. But Rebecca ignored her. Why bother making contact with him now?
But a phone call from Dallas puts Rebecca in a tough spot. Her step-mother has had a stroke. Her developmentally disabled step-brother was roaming town alone, having gotten on a bus without being able to figure out how to find his way home. Her father was totally confused. The police found Rebecca's name on a contact list. If she didn't come to take care of her father and step-brother, Social Services was going to get involved.
Reluctantly, Rebecca makes plans to go. But on the day she leaves, she sees her husband at an outdoor cafe holding hands with one of his clients. Is this why he has been working late? Without time to confront him, she boards her flight, with all the problems of her life weighing her down.
But when she arrives in Dallas, things are worse than she imagined. A housekeeper who was supposed to keep things in order has disappeared. Dirty dishes and molded food are everywhere as is dirty laundry. Wet laundry has mildewed in the washer. And money is missing from her father's accounts.
The point of view shifts back and forth from Rebecca and her step-mother, Hanna Beth. Hanna Beth is cognizant, but can't express herself or control her movements. When she learns that Rebecca has come, now of all times, she wonders what will happen. Will Rebecca ship her father and step-brother off to institutions before Hanna Beth can recover enough to go back home?
As each woman painfully peels back layers of the last several years, they learn things aren't always as they appear.
I saw one reviewer call this a light and easy read. I didn't think so, myself. It was a good read, but felt very heavy sometimes, except for the knowledge (or at least the hope) that things would work out somehow in the end.
There's a delightful cast of side characters in the book: a sweet older woman Rebecca meets on the flight who she runs into again later, a talkative older man in Hanna Beth's nursing center, a stern German physical therapist, a sweet aide with two boys, a nurse from Ghana. I loved one teasing line from the nurse who was trying to get the older man back to his room: "Old rooster, he loud on the fence, quiet in the stew."
This book is the first in Lisa's Blue Sky Hill series about a neighborhood in Dallas. I had read the second book in the series, The Summer Kitchen, as well as the fourth, Dandelion Summer. But there were so many years between each read, I could not remember if any of these characters showed up in the later books. I probably would have caught more of the connections if I had read them in order and closer together, but each book does hold up well as a stand-alone.
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