Cold Spring Harbor (1986) was the final novel by American writer Richard Yates. Plot summary At seventeen, Evan Shepard gets Mary Donovan pregnant accidentally, so they marry, live together, the baby, Kathleen, is born, but they're too young for matrimony and family life, it isn't working out, so the couple break up. Mary passes the infant to her parents to look after so she can go to college. Evan moves back home, staying in his tool-apprentice factory job. Some years later, when Evan is nearly twenty-four, his father Charles gets Evan to drive him to New York to attend an optometrist's appointment for his bad eyesight. The car breaks down on the way. They seek use of a telephone at a random house to call a car repair garage. This connects them to the home-owner, Gloria Drake, an overbearing divorcee, and her two children: daughter Rachel, 17, and a son, Phil, 15. Evan, immediately attracted to Rachel, resolves to return soon, to see her again. He does so the following week. They strike up a relationship, and soon they want to marry. Charles (who would have preferred a deferral but doesn't get his way) suggests that the wedding be held in his neck of the woods - Cold Spring Harbor - with the reception afterwards to be at his home residence. With her daughter flown the nest, and her son away at boarding school, Gloria goes home alone to an empty home. She decides to try to put herself where her daughter is, and so, locates a large house available near Cold Spring Harbor available to rent, then offers to share use of the property with Rachel and Evan. By now Rachel is pregnant. All four - Evan, Rachel, Gloria, Phil (who arrives home from boarding school for the summer) are thus under one roof. But there is tension; the house is damp, ramshackle, lacking internal soundproofing: the sharing arrangement isn't working well. To make matters worse, Evan falls out with Phil, now sixteen, while giving him his first driving lesson. This sets the tone for bad relations between the two. An encounter with a schoolmate from Phil's boarding school who lives in the area, Gerald "Flash" Ferris, involves Gloria, Rachel and Phil with Flash's rich grandmother. Talmage, and leads to Phil having someone his own age to hang out with during the long vacation. But then Phil gets a