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  PRAISE FOR THE LAST BATHING BEAUTY

  “The Last Bathing Beauty is a pitch-perfect summer read, starring Betty ‘Boop’ Stern, a plucky heroine with a tackle box full of secrets and enough regret for a lifetime. Using dual timelines, Nathan expertly unravels the events that derailed Betty’s sparkling future in 1951 and continue to haunt her even as an eighty-four-year-old woman. Full of characters that shine and told with compassion and humor, this is women’s fiction at its best.”

  —Sonja Yoerg, Washington Post bestselling author of True Places

  “Amy Sue Nathan is a true storyteller, and The Last Bathing Beauty is her best book. It’s an epic tale of family, secrets, loss, marriage, betrayal, friendships, laughter, and regrets.”

  —Cathy Lamb, author of Julia’s Chocolates and All About Evie

  “The Last Bathing Beauty is a gorgeous story about how life doesn’t always work out the way we want it to, but if we’re willing, we can still make it a great life. This book ripped at my heart in the best possible way, and I won’t forget it. Told across three generations of smart, determined, compassionate women, The Last Bathing Beauty is the loveliest of stories about the sacrifices and triumphs that come from being a daughter, wife, mother, and friend.”

  —Juliet McDaniel, author of Mr. & Mrs. American Pie

  “For those who believe in happily ever after, Amy Sue Nathan’s The Last Bathing Beauty is a real winner. She has spun a heartfelt tale about romance, heartbreaks, friendship, and the wisdom that comes from living a life with no regrets. Told with tenderness and humor, readers will love this journey back in time with Boop and the girls.”

  —Renée Rosen, bestselling author of Park Avenue Summer

  “In this reimagining of Dirty Dancing, Nathan demonstrates expert storytelling when we meet the charismatic Betty ‘Boop’ Stern as a young woman, and also as an eighty-four-year-old as she looks back on a difficult choice that altered the path of her glittering future. Told with empathy and lyrical prose, The Last Bathing Beauty is a winning tale of friendship, regret, and second chances with a ring of endearing and spirited women at its heart.”

  —Heather Webb, USA Today bestselling coauthor of Meet Me in Monaco

  “A thoroughly enjoyable, past-and-present tale of a life-changing summer and its echoes decades later. This story has it all—great characters, sensory-rich settings, and a sweet salute to believing in second chances. The finale will have you cheering.”

  —Susan Meissner, bestselling author of The Last Year of the War

  “The Last Bathing Beauty is an emotionally gripping story that captivated me from page one. Amy Sue Nathan knows how to thread the past and present together in a way that readers won’t soon forget. A moving tale about second chances and the fathomless depths of true love.”

  —Tina Ann Forkner, author of Waking Up Joy

  ALSO BY AMY SUE NATHAN

  The Good Neighbor

  Left to Chance

  The Glass Wives

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2020 by Amy Nathan Gropper

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Lake Union Publishing, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Lake Union Publishing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781542007092

  ISBN-10: 1542007097

  Cover design by Faceout Studio, Lindy Martin

  Dedicated to

  Elaine Bookbinder

  and

  Charlene Klein

  CONTENTS

  START READING

  SOUTH HAVEN, MICHIGAN

  PROLOGUE

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS AND AUTHOR’S NOTE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  It is not the Atlantic City of the west, as has been erroneously stated by ambitious writers. There is no comparison and probably never will be. It is simply the same old South Haven that has charmed so many thousands in the past and hopes to charm as many thousands in the future. Do not come to South Haven with the idea of finding a Coney Island or an Atlantic City, for you will be disappointed. If you are looking for an ideal place to spend a week, a month or a year in a rational sane way then come to South Haven and you will find it.

  Picturesque Michigan, pamphlet, 1913, author unknown

  SOUTH HAVEN, MICHIGAN

  PROLOGUE

  BETTY

  September 1951

  Any other bride might have gazed into the mirror, stepped away, and then glanced back over her shoulder for another peek. Not Betty. She hadn’t looked at herself once today, and in fact she’d avoided her reflection all week. She knew the person looking back from the mirror would not be her. Betty Claire Stern no longer existed. She wanted to say she died, but Betty was mindful of her reputation for melodrama.

  Perched gingerly on the window seat with a layer of crinoline crunching beneath her thighs, Betty studied her bedroom. Pink and floral, it had been perfect for growing up, for playing with her friends, and for private times. Her slice of North Beach and Lake Michigan was also perfect. She turned, glanced out the window to the west, and sighed.

  As of tomorrow, Lake Michigan would be to her east, and her bedroom—one she had never seen, but that likely wouldn’t have pink posies—wouldn’t boast a view of anything besides a patch of grass or a front stoop. Betty was moving from Michigan to Illinois, from South Haven on the lake to Skokie in the suburbs.

  It wasn’t really that far. Just a few hours’ drive.

  Would she have a car?

  Betty lifted the curl cluster at the nape of her neck with one hand and fanned herself with the other. She inhaled through her nose, puckered her lips, and exhaled so hard it sounded more like the wind than the sigh she’d intended. Perspiration gathered on her brow. If she blotted or wiped, the pancake makeup would lift, so she leaned toward the sill and a light breeze brushed over her face, refreshing her as it dried the dampness. The air chilled Betty’s skin, giving her a cold forehead to go along with her cold feet.

  Pre-wedding jitters, that’s all it was. According to Ladies’ Home Journal, it was normal. And hadn’t Betty longed for normalcy?

  Nerves were not the same as doubt.

  A man strolled at the lake’s edge; his shirt hung loose over his shorts; his arms swung wide. Betty’s heart pattered for a hopeful second, and then regained its steady beat. There would be no unexpected visitor today. No impromptu drive, hike, or ice-cream cone. The day had been perfectly planned from her dress to the guests, flowers, and food. She needed to stop daydreaming ab
out what-ifs. The fellow on the beach seemed capricious—without a care, a schedule, or a mandate. He was likely looking for dropped coins. No, he was probably collecting bits of beach glass for his sweetheart, the way visitors had done all summer.

  Her whole life had included treasures for the taking right outside her door. Sometimes she’d grabbed them. Sometimes she’d overlooked them. But they’d been within reach. Betty flinched, about to abandon her room in search of riches, forgetting, for one sliver of a moment, that she was getting married today.

  That beach glass might as well have been on the moon.

  Turning away from the window, Betty pressed her hands against her thumping chest. No matter where she lived or traveled, South Haven would always be home to her heart. She had always counted sunsets as a way to mark time, tracked the migration of birds and the level of rain. She’d peeled carrots in the kitchen of her family’s resort at age eight and learned to use the rotary iron when she was twelve.

  Betty was accustomed to the unconventional calendar, composed only of summer and the off-season. She had always loved how, from Memorial Day until Labor Day, the town’s population swelled from six thousand to thirty thousand. Summer transformed her unassuming lakeside town into the “Catskills of the Midwest.” She was proud when that slogan was printed in big sunny yellow letters on the brochure for Stern’s Summer Resort, “the premier family destination in South Haven.” But she also loved the off-season—the serenity of autumn and the isolation of winter—when she had her grandparents’ full attention. The peculiarities of South Haven were as much a part of her as her blue eyes.

  Betty scanned the sparse pearls Nannie had sewn onto the tulle overlay on her tea-length wedding dress. They caught the sunlight and glinted, just like the sand. Her dress was perfectly fitted and flattering. Still, this wasn’t what her grandparents had had in mind for their only granddaughter.

  No matter, Nannie had ordered the finest material from a friend in Chicago who was a dressmaker, and then in record time had created the dress without a pattern. Had Betty been afforded the luxury of time or circumstance, it was the dress she would have chosen. She could almost picture herself poring over the latest bridal fashion magazines with Georgia and Doris, and then pointing to this very dress as “the one.” She’d already decided that would be the wedding dress story she would tell.

  The real story was that for three weeks Nannie had done little more than sew and bead, neglecting her duties at the resort until the end of the summer. And with pins between her teeth, she’d mumbled through it all in a mix of Yiddish and English about her troubles, her tsuris.

  Betty had told her not to go to the trouble of making a dress. She’d buy a pretty one at Lemon’s department store. But Nannie wouldn’t have her granddaughter married in a shmata off a rack. What would people say?

  Betty traced her hips with her hands and felt how her body curved like an hourglass beneath the gathered, full skirt that ended just below her knees. The dress was long enough to be modest but short enough to show off her calves, muscular from a summer of leading calisthenics, carrying piles of laundry, and dancing with her friends on the beach after dark. She clamped her lips at other thoughts and swept them from her mind like cake crumbs. She touched the neckline that scooped just below the gold locket at her throat, a present from her grandfather and a quiet gesture of hope for her future “to shine like this,” he’d said. Betty knew the gift was due to relief, but pragmatic Zaide would never say anything negative and tempt fate any more than Betty already had. She considered whether the locket could be her “something new.”

  “Knock, knock.” The door opened and Georgia entered as if walking onstage for a one-woman show. Her hair had been curled and teased into a fashionable bouffant—something Georgia loathed. Betty loved a good bouffant, and she’d never forget this effort of fashion and friendship.

  “I can’t believe you’re here,” Betty said.

  “Wild horses couldn’t keep me away.” She shrugged. “Plus, it’s Sunday. No classes. I came up yesterday and got this.” Georgia spun once and stopped, like a weary jewelry-box ballerina.

  Her dress was a sophisticated, sleeveless, corn-on-the-cob-yellow sheath that skimmed her curves and stopped just below her knees. The color accentuated her gold and copper hair and highlighted the amber flecks in her green eyes. Even Georgia’s freckles seemed to sparkle atop her nose. That the dress was more meant for summer than fall didn’t matter. She could have worn a romper or her tennis whites, Betty wouldn’t have cared.

  “You look beautiful. You’re not supposed to show up the bride, you know.”

  “Oh, Betty, don’t be ridiculous! You’re beyond stunning.” Georgia grabbed Betty’s hand and twirled her around like a dance partner until Betty stopped. “You’re going to have a wonderful life. I know it,” Georgia said. “Doris thinks so too, and she knows these things. She’s beside herself that she couldn’t get the day off.”

  Betty coughed, and then burst into tears. Her throat felt as if she had swallowed sand, and she imagined her mascara dripping and scattering like polka dots onto the dress. She tapped at the tears with her fingers, but then Georgia reached into her ivory satin clutch and handed Betty a folded handkerchief. Betty dabbed beneath her eyes, and then Georgia yanked her to sit on one of the matching twin beds they’d used for sleepovers. “You’ll see Doris soon; you won’t be far from her at all once you’re in Skokie.”

  Betty shook her head.

  “That’s not why you’re upset, is it?” Georgia reached her arm around Betty’s shoulder. “You’re going to be fine. You made the right decision.”

  “Did I?” Betty gasped. “Maybe it’s not too late for me to go to college. I could say there’s been a change of plans, defer my admission. Do you think they’d still take me? I could go forward with my original plan.” Or at least a version of her original plan.

  “Is that really what you want? Guests are starting to arrive.”

  Even Georgia didn’t want to hear her misgivings. Betty kept her truths inside, where they disquieted only her. She fiddled with the one-carat-diamond engagement ring, not yet accustomed to its weight on her finger, or the intensity with which it sparkled.

  Footsteps echoed down the hall. Nannie stepped into the doorframe. Four feet eleven never looked so tall.

  Georgia stood and blew Betty a kiss.

  The doorbell rang.

  “Everyone should be going around back to the patio. It was right on the invitations,” Nannie said. “Georgia, would you answer the door and redirect the guests? I know it’s only a dozen or so, but I don’t want everyone traipsing through the house.”

  “Of course, Mrs. Stern.” She leaned down to Betty’s ear. “You’ll be fine. Better than fine. You always are.”

  The closeness should have comforted her, but her best friend’s confidence was unsettling. “Fine,” Betty realized, was subjective. Georgia sauntered away in her ivory satin slingbacks, her calf muscles still defined from a summer of tennis. She left the door open.

  “Let me see you.” Nannie waved her hands so that Betty would stand. “Turn around.”

  Betty didn’t turn. Instead she stood tall, with her back straight and her shoulders square. Her three-inch satin pumps meant she towered over Nannie, and it was Betty’s only advantage, even if imagined.

  Nannie would have none of Betty’s resistance. Dressed in a royal-blue dress she’d made herself, along with a matching felt pillbox hat that had small white feathers on one side—the same ensemble she’d worn for Betty’s high school graduation back in May—Nannie tugged her in a swift but gentle motion away from the window, in front of the oval gilded mirror that hung above the dresser. Betty, Georgia, and Doris had always pretended it was the magical mirror from Snow White, even when they were too short to see into it.

  “You’re beautiful.” Nannie sighed as she smoothed the front of Betty’s hair, which was unnecessary considering the can of Aqua Net that had already been sprayed on it. But the so
ft touch of her grandmother’s hands forced Betty to close her eyes and wish that when she opened them it would be June again, when she could relive the summer. A silly thought, a girlish whim really, but one more couldn’t hurt.

  Nannie withdrew a small red ribbon from her pocket, tied it into a bow no bigger than the tip of her little finger, and then pulled a straight pin out of her hat. In one quick motion she pushed aside the neckline of Betty’s wedding dress and pinned the red ribbon to her brassiere strap.

  “I don’t think you need to protect me from the evil eye,” Betty said.

  “Kinehora, kinehora, poo-poo-poo.” Nannie sputtered the Yiddish words and spit the sounds that would ward off evil spirits coming to siphon Betty’s good fortune. “You know if you think things are going well and we forget to say ‘kinehora’ then something bad will happen.”

  “I know.”

  “Every bride wears a red ribbon. This way you look imperfect to the evil spirits. It’s extra protection.”

  “Nannie . . .”

  “All people will see today is a beautiful girl in a beautiful dress marrying a handsome boy.”

  Betty rolled her eyes.

  “Fine, he’s not so handsome. But handsome isn’t always so good.”

  Betty turned away, the summer nipping at her heels, urging her to run. “I’m not so sure about this anymore.”

  “I’ll tell you a secret. I had the jitters before I married Zaide.”

  “No!”

  “Yes. I was moving away from my parents. From everything I knew. Marriage is a whole new way of living, and I had no idea if I’d be any good at it. Or if I’d like it,” she whispered. “But if you tell Zaide, I’ll deny it.”

  Betty smiled, the lump in her throat receding.

  “The jitters will go away, and you’ll have a husband you can build a life with.” Nannie placed her index finger beneath Betty’s chin. “You are a very lucky girl.” She cleared her throat, and her low, firm voice cleared as well. “And do you know what else?”

  “What?”