Lake Effect

Set in Rochester, New York, the novel follows two neighboring families on Cambridge Road, the Larkins and the Finnegans, whose lives are upended by an elopement in 1977 and its reverberations across two decades.

Nina Larkin is a food columnist and cooking instructor married to Sam, a Xerox marketing executive. They have two teenage daughters: seventeen-year-old Clara, confident and sharp, and fifteen-year-old Bridie, anxious and watchful. Across the street live Finn Finnegan, president of a regional grocery chain called Finnegan's Grocer, and his wife, Honey. Their children are Dune, a senior, and Fern, who has a stutter and struggles with her weight. The novel opens with Bess Pfeiffer, the block's first divorcée, purchasing seven copies of The Joy of Sex for the neighborhood women's group, establishing her role as the street's provocateur.

At Sam's late October birthday dinner, conversation turns to a function on Xerox's new personal computers called "universal undo," which can reverse any action. The concept lingers as a metaphor. After the guests leave, Finn stays to help Nina wash dishes, pulls her close, and whispers her name, revealing an affair that began months earlier at a Memorial Day barbecue, when they kissed passionately in a boathouse during a rainstorm.

Nina's marriage to Sam has always lacked physical intimacy. Sam's backstory reveals a lifetime of concealing his homosexuality, from furtive encounters during college to anonymous sex on business trips. Nina's suspicions crystallize when a young colleague named Garret brings Sam home drunk, driven by Margaret, Nina's former landlady who runs a bar welcoming to gay patrons. When Nina presses Sam, he gaslights her, suggesting menopause is causing her to imagine things. She asks for a divorce. He laughs.

Clara and Dune are secretly dating, rehearsing together for the school production of Godspell and planning to go public at the New Year's formal. Bridie discovers The Joy of Sex in Nina's closet and brings it to Clara; the sisters share a rare moment of bonding while paging through its illustrations, laughing until they cry.

Finn, who survived a cardiac event and near-death experience the previous winter, is determined not to waste his remaining years. Honey's aversion to intimacy traces back to a sexual assault by her cousin when she was fifteen, a trauma she never disclosed. Finn places a manila envelope in the Larkins' mailbox containing airline tickets to the Dominican Republic and an article about "divorce tourism." Dune, watching from across the street through binoculars, sees his father acting furtively but is distracted when Clara appears.

One December morning before dawn, Finn and Nina leave together. Fern, awake early, watches Nina hurry across the snowy street with a suitcase as Finn kisses her. Fern runs barefoot into the street, screaming for her father to stop, but the car drives away. Clara finds her mother's farewell note in the kitchen. Honey takes Dune and Fern to the family lake house. In the Dominican Republic, Nina wavers, racked by guilt, but Finn steers them through the process. They divorce on Thursday and marry on Friday. A woman named Judith, there for her own divorce, takes the only wedding photo they will ever display.

Back in Rochester, a malfunctioning refrigerator at Finnegan's Grocer causes a salmonella outbreak that sickens dozens and kills the grandmother of the deli employee who prepared the contaminated sandwiches. Helen Harper, Finn's strategic partner at the company, manages the crisis alone. Finn's uncle Dennis, who holds a ceremonial board seat, leaks the elopement to the newspaper to divert attention. When Finn returns, the board strips him of his presidency.

Clara responds with sustained fury. She refuses to see Nina, takes over the household through obsessive cleaning and cooking, and confronts Dune, confessing her love; he tells her to go home. When Dune demands a new scene partner in Godspell, the drama teacher offers Clara a choice, and she decides to leave the play herself. She defers her Cornell acceptance to stay home for Bridie's senior year. The community shuns Nina and Finn, and Nina loses her desire to cook entirely, realizing cooking had been her way of filling a loveless house.

Part Two jumps to 1994. Clara, now thirty-three, is a food stylist in New York with a pattern of heavy drinking. She begins dating Philip Woolf, a photographer who connects her to the fledgling Food Network. On a Mother's Day episode of a cooking show called Tre al Tavola, Clara impulsively tells the host that Nina is dead. Paradoxically, the lie thaws something, and she begins calling Nina more often. Sam has moved to San Francisco, where he struggles to find his place in the gay community. Clara visits and addresses his sexuality directly, asking only that he be careful during the AIDS crisis.

Bridie and Dune reconnect at a fundraiser and fall in love. When Dune delivers a wedding invitation in New York, Philip mentions his sympathy for Clara losing her mother. Dune is bewildered, and when Clara arrives, Philip confronts her about the lie. Clara attends the wedding in Rochester, but at the hotel bar afterward, drunk, she corners Dune and moves to kiss him just as Bridie appears.

The wedding is cancelled. Over breakfast the next morning, Nina delivers a frank reckoning, acknowledging her own failures while refusing to excuse Clara's behavior. She explains she left because of Sam's secret, their ill-suited marriage, and her love for Finn. Clara drives back to New York and recognizes for the first time that the force behind twenty years of bad decisions is not anger but grief.

Months later, Bridie and Dune marry quietly at a courthouse. Dune gives Bridie his ninety-day Alcoholics Anonymous sobriety chip. All parents attend; Clara stays away at Bridie's request. She later returns to Rochester carrying half-moon cookies, Bridie's favorite, and stands at Bridie's screen door. Bridie bites back a smile and opens it.

Part Three moves to 1998. At Bridie's baby shower, Fern, now a hospice nurse living with her partner Naomi, notices Nina's fatigue, bruising, and petechiae, or tiny red dots on her skin. Blood work confirms acute myeloid leukemia. Chemotherapy fails, and Fern becomes Nina's nurse at home. Clara returns to help Bridie through postpartum depression after the birth of her daughter Josephine, named after Nina. She cooks compulsively, putting forgiveness into every bowl. In Nina's nightstand, the sisters find a hidden box of elopement keepsakes: photos, matchbooks, and a tiny pink soap from the Dominican Republic hotel. Neither sister ever asks Nina about the trip.

During a lucid moment near the end, Nina apologizes to Fern for the morning of the elopement: She saw Fern standing in the snowy street and almost waved back. Fern says it no longer matters, but Nina insists it does. In her final moments, Finn holds Nina's hand on one side while Clara and Bridie sit on the other. Clara whispers that they love her and that they are going to be fine. Nina's mind drifts: She hears a baby crying and thinks it is infant Clara. Then she is in the front seat of a car and Finn is brushing snow from his hair, reaching for her hand. He says, "Here we go." She says, "Thank you."