Sunny Hostin - Summer on the Bluffs

Dedication

To my Summer Vineyard Sisters, Kathy and Regina

and my writers room,

Kathy, Regina, Floyd, Farah, Jill, Pierre, Linsey, Therese, and, of course, Manny.

See you on the Bluffs.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Prologue: An Invitation

Chapter 1: The Witch of Wall Street

Chapter 2: West Tisbury

Chapter 3: Jumping the Broom

Chapter 4: The House

Chapter 5: The Beekeeper

Chapter 6: Summer Sisters

Chapter 7: Swim

Chapter 8: Red Beans and Rice

Chapter 9: First Comes Love, Then Comes Marriage . . .

Chapter 10: 8 Spruce Street

Chapter 11: Baby, Baby, Baby

Chapter 12: Love Dont Live Here Anymore

Chapter 13: The Incredibly True Adventures of Two Girls in Love

Chapter 14: An Old Flame

Chapter 15: A Not-So-Secret Reunion

Chapter 16: Welcome to My World

Chapter 17: Its Just Lunch

Chapter 18: Opening the House

Chapter 19: What Ama Knows

Chapter 20: Friends on the Other Side

Chapter 21: There Is No Planet B

Chapter 22: Second Chances?

Chapter 23: About Those Schuyler Sisters

Chapter 24: God Said, Made You Look

Chapter 25: Memories and Meaning

Chapter 26: The Ferry

Chapter 27: Independent Women

Chapter 28: The Fifth of July

Chapter 29: Bring Hope When You Come Around

Chapter 30: How Do You Sleep?

Chapter 31: Omars Story

Chapter 32: The Secret About Perry

Chapter 33: Libbys Story

Chapter 34: All I Do

Chapter 35: I Need You

Chapter 36: A Lost Bee

Chapter 37: What God Throws My Way

Chapter 38: Olivia

Chapter 39: Carousel

Chapter 40: Sailing

Chapter 41: Not a Holiday, but a Special Day

Epilogue: A Wedding on the Bluffs

About the Author

Also by Sunny Hostin

Copyright

About the Publisher

Prologue: An Invitation

March 21, 2019

Amelia Vaux Tanner, rich, glamorous, beautiful, was one of the first Black women to have a seat on the New York Stock Exchange. She had been married, until his death, to Omar Tanner, a quiet man who looked good in suits and who was content to let his wife shine.

Amelia never had children. She always thought she would, then she looked up one day and she was forty. Her career was in full swing, and she and Omar had everything they needed and wanted. She thought about having a baby, as her doctor kindly pointed out to her, before its too late. But truth be told, she didnt feel like it.

It wasnt that Amelia didnt like children, she did. She was godmother to three girls. She loved taking them to Europe on their birthdays and swooping them up for summers on Marthas Vineyard. It was like a dream. But she also realized that the beauty of loving other peoples children is that you get the best of them and then you get to give them back.

Now all three girls were grown up, but they remained close to Amelia. She was more than a fairy godmother, she was their Ama, their second mom. With her support and generous financial gifts through the years, they had all excelled. Perry Soto, almost twenty-eight, was on the partner track at one of New Yorks top law firms. Olivia Jones, twenty-six, followed her Ama onto Wall Street and was shaping up to be a gifted analyst. Billie Hayden, twenty-five, was a marine biologist, currently serving as an assistant director of the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole in Massachusetts.

Each summer, the girls, now women, came to Oak Bluffs to spend time with Ama at the house she and her late husband had built nearly thirty years before. It was customary in the Vineyard to humbly refer to a luxurious summer home as a cottage. But Ama was having none of that. She boldly christened the house, her most prized possession, Chateau Laveau, named after the New Orleans voodoo priestess herself, Marie Laveau.

Amas picturesque home sat high on the Bluffs. It had five bedrooms, a chefs kitchen, a pool, three French-country-style beehives, a pool house with three additional guest bedrooms, and steps that led down to a private beach. Her grandmother died shortly after she married Omar and she rarely visited New Orleans except when it was convenient to stop on trips to the coast. Oak Bluffs had become home. Over the years, the house had played host to American presidents and African royalty, movie stars and Wall Street titans, Nobel Prize winners and MacArthur Fellows. It was a stunning piece of property, but most importantly, it was the backdrop for a rich slice of cultural history.

On the eve of her sixty-sixth birthday, Ama was sitting at her desk, her monogrammed Mrs. John L. Strong notecards laid out in front of her. She had decided to send each of her three goddaughters an invitation. Within each invitation, she enclosed a small gold bee pendant. Come spend the entire summer with me, the way you did as schoolgirls. It was time for the bees to come back to the hive. At the end of the summer, she planned to give one of them the keys to Chateau Laveau.

Although Ama promised that none of her goddaughters would leave the summer empty-handed, for each of them their beloved Chateau Laveau was the only prize. Each young woman wanted the house desperately.

But as the old folks used to say, Every shut eye aint sleep and every goodbye aint gone. By the end of the summer, new bonds were created and others torn apart. It turned out there was very little Ama didnt know and no limit to how far she would go to protect her girls. And in the end, the three found sisters discovered that they werent the only ones with something to hide. Ama had a few secrets of her own. What she had to gift them was far more than property. There was a reason she entered each of their lives all those years ago. This was her season to tell them everything they never knew they needed to know.

Chapter 1

The Witch of Wall Street

Amelia Vaux Tanner arrived in New York City on June 22, 1972. She had a diploma from Southern University, a junior college in Shreveport, Louisiana, and a patent leather purse with forty-five dollars in cash and a bank check from her grandmother for three hundred more. Amelia traveled by one train from New Orleans to Chicago and then another from Chicago to New York. The journey was long but worth the trouble. On a warm summer morning, her train finally breezed into Grand Central Station with her set of matching luggage. She can still remember the thrill of it, how she stood in the main concourse, staring up at the starry silhouette of Orion in the bright blue celestial ceiling. Just getting to New York was everything she had ever dreamed of, all that came after was just gravy. It was two p.m. in the afternoon, hours away from rush hour, and still the hall was packed. Men in suits and trench coats, ladies in smart dresses and perfectly coiffed hair. They zoomed by her so fast, she had to check that they werent wearing roller skates. Would she ever move so fast? She doubted it.

She stepped out of the station, oriented herself, and headed south. On West Thirty-Fourth Street, she entered the Webster Apartments. It was an integrated boardinghouse for single women over the age of eighteen, regardless of race, nationality, or religious belief. To qualify, a woman must show proof of employment, at least thirty hours a week. Amelia had, through her college career office, landed a position as an executive secretary at Mayflower Advisors, a financial services firm on Wall Street.

Dorothy Hadley, the boardinghouse director, was a prim woman with skin so pale that Amelia could see the veins in her hands. Mrs. Hadley went over the strict house rules. No ironing in the bedrooms. Irons were only allowed in the laundry. No male guests on the upper floors. Men were allowed only in the dining room, the drawing room, and the garden. Beds were to be made once a day. A housekeeper did a thorough cleaning once a week on Fridays. Two meals per day were provided, breakfast and dinner. Beverages and small snacks, such as yogurt or cottage cheese, could be kept in the pantry refrigerator. No alcoholic beverages were allowed on the upper floors. Once a week, on Saturdays, there was a coed cocktail social. Each resident would be given two tickets a week, which entitled them to a glass of wine for themselves and a guest. The cost of the room was $150 a month, payable on the first.