Tatum blinks. What is Hollis doing here? Did she follow Tatum? Does she know that Tatum hid her keys? Tatum imagines Hollis searching frantically through the Bronco and nearly grins, but the Hey, sis stops her. Hollis is using the old nickname as though no time has passed, as though they’re still meeting up in the school hallway, Hollis straight from honors English, Tatum from phys ed.
But that’s not fair. Every interaction of the past fifteen years—since Hollis moved back and built the huge house in Squam—has been awkward. Hollis is always overly dramatic, using a fake, high-pitched, singsongy voice—Tatum McKenzie, you never age a day, how are things, how’s Kyle, how’s Dylan, show me pictures—and Tatum stonewalls her, answering in monosyllables and ending the interaction as soon as she can. Because it feels lousy, bumping into a person who used to be as close as a sister, closer than a sister! (The girls Tatum and Hollis knew growing up all hated their sisters.) Best friends didn’t begin to describe their relationship. They were each other’s everything. Despite all the pains of growing up, Tatum never felt alone. She always, always had Hollis.
And then, one day, she didn’t.
Tatum can’t bring herself to echo Hey, sis, though she does say, “I’m sorry about Matthew.” She shoves her phone in her back pocket and gives Hollis a real hug, squeezing her with both arms. Tatum had read Matthew’s obituary in the Nantucket Standard, but she and Kyle opted not to attend the funeral in Wellesley. Now, of course, Tatum feels bad about that. She’s been meaning to send a card but she isn’t good with words like Hollis is, and she told herself that anything she sent would just get lost in the outpouring of love from Hollis’s crazed social media followers.
This now seems like a terrible misjudgment. If Kyle died (Tatum shudders even thinking about it, she loves the man so much) and Hollis didn’t acknowledge the loss in any way, Tatum would never forgive her. “And I’m sorry I didn’t call or write or come to the service. I did absolutely nothing.”
“But you’re coming this weekend,” Hollis says.
Tatum wipes at her eyes. She can run away from Hollis all she wants, but the fact remains that Hollis is the first person, other than her family, that Tatum ever loved.
“I’ll be there.” It’s now Tatum’s turn at the counter; she gives Amy the ticket, and a moment later, Amy hangs the pastel array of Mr. Albright’s shirts on the hook.
“Are those Kyle’s?” Hollis says. “I can’t imagine him wearing pink… or peach.”
Tatum checks her phone: 8:58. “These are for a client.”
“Client?”
“I clean and run errands for…” She doesn’t have time to catch Hollis up. “I have to go. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Everyone’s getting in around four,” Hollis says.
Four works, Tatum thinks. She finishes work at three, then she’ll pick up Orion from day care and go home to pack. Or maybe she’ll pack tonight, and tomorrow afternoon she’ll treat herself to a blowout at RJ Miller. “See you then.” She leaves with a wave. She has approximately sixty seconds to make it to the Albrights’ house.
She opens the back door of her elderly Honda Pilot, sweeps Cheez-It crumbs off Orion’s booster seat, and carefully lays down Mr. Albright’s shirts. She has to go—but she can’t stop herself from heading back inside.
“Holly?” she says. “Who else is coming to this thing?”
Hollis smiles. “I didn’t tell you?”
“No,” Tatum says. She didn’t ask because she didn’t really care. Hollis’s friends are all interchangeable—all wealthy, watching their weight, debating plastic surgery, trying to get their children into Ivy League schools.
Hollis folds the list she’s still holding and reinforces the creases with her nails. “It’s a thing called the Five-Star Weekend,” she says. “So I invited one best friend from each phase of my life.”
Each phase of her life? Tatum thinks. What does that even mean?
“My friend Brooke from Wellesley is coming. Dru-Ann is coming. And the fourth is Gigi, a woman I met on my website. I’ve actually… never met her in real life, but she seems cool.”
Tatum nods briskly. She realizes the hook is that Hollis has invited someone she’s never even met to her house (who does that?), but Tatum’s attention is snagged by the second name.
Dru-Ann. Ugh.
Tatum opens her mouth to say, After your wedding, I hoped never to see Dru-Ann again.
But at that moment, Hollis steps up to the counter and says to Amy, “I’m here to pick up shirts for Matthew Shaw?”
The words are a bucket of cold water on Tatum’s indignation. If Hollis can be brave enough to pick up her dead husband’s dry cleaning, then Tatum can deal with Dru-Ann Jones for a weekend.
When she gets back in the car, her phone rings. The display says Nantucket Cottage Hospital.
Tatum flounders for a second. Should she answer it or not? Yes! she thinks. Then: No, no—she isn’t prepared, and she doesn’t have time. She hits Decline.
When she left the biopsy appointment the day before, the doctor said the results would be in “early next week,” which Tatum assumed meant Monday or Tuesday. Today is only Thursday. Why are they calling so soon? Does she definitely have cancer? Or does she definitely not? An alert sounds—voice mail. Her phone is now radioactive; Tatum is afraid to touch it. She lights a cigarette and inhales deeply. She wants to call Kyle but he’s got a big AC-install job at a new build out in Sconset where there’s no cell service.
When Tatum pulls up in front of the Albrights’ house at 9:02, Irina is waiting on the front porch. Irina is six feet tall with dyed yellow hair yanked into a ponytail; her upright posture—shoulders back, breasts thrust forward—reminds Tatum of an Olympic javelinist. Irina likes to go out on the town with a similarly built friend, Veda, who’s brunette to Irina’s “blond.” The two of them wear full makeup and sharp perfumes, and there’s nothing subtle about them or their mission—hunting rich men.
Tatum stubs out the cigarette and grabs the bags from the Stop and Shop and Mr. Albright’s shirts, which slid off the back seat into the footwell because Tatum was driving like a bat out of hell. Tatum couldn’t care less about Mr. Albright’s shirts. Tatum has serious beef with Mr. Albright, to be honest.
Do I have cancer?
When Tatum was a senior in high school, her mother, Laura Leigh—one of the coolest, most beautiful women ever to grace the planet, in Tatum’s opinion—was diagnosed with aggressive metastatic breast cancer (back then, the doctors didn’t say much about stages, but Tatum figured that Laura Leigh had probably been at stage eleven). She underwent the kind of chemo that left her curled around the base of the toilet twenty-three hours a day—Tatum remembers the moaning, the dramatic weight loss, Laura Leigh’s long cinnamon-colored hair falling out by the handful, leaving her as bald as a cue ball. She was dead nine weeks after the diagnosis; the line “You have six months to live” ended up being a pipe dream.
Tatum knows all about the BRCA gene, though she’s never been tested because she and Kyle pay for their own health insurance, and besides, Tatum has always been the picture of health. Now, of course, she feels like she’s run out of luck, that the Grim Reaper is lurking outside the door. Tatum thinks about her dark hair swirling around the shower drain, about nurses inserting IVs, about the chemo they call the Red Devil coursing through her bloodstream. She thinks about sweating, puking, shivering, about lying on the operating table like a roast on a platter, her very existence in the hands of a surgeon who is, like her, a mere mortal. She thinks about no longer having sensation in her breasts; she thinks about tattooed-on nipples; she thinks about being unable to lift a gallon of milk. There are plenty of scenarios where she’ll have to quit her job and Kyle will have to take a leave of absence from his business because who else is going to take care of her? How are they going to afford all the trips back and forth to the hospital in Boston? For the past thirty years, she and Kyle have joked about winning ten million dollars in the lottery—they play Powerball every single week—but even without any windfalls, they’ve nearly paid off their house. Tatum is supposed to work only another two years, then she and Kyle are going to take some real vacations. Now she thinks about not being around to watch Orion grow up or see Dylan get married. She had a horrifying dream where she was dead and Irina came over to their house on Hooper Farm Road to clean out all of Tatum’s things—and Irina ended up in bed with Kyle.
“Ridiculous!” Kyle cried when Tatum told him about the dream. “I will never sleep with Irina. I will never sleep with anyone else, baby. My life begins and ends with you. Why are we even having this conversation? You’re going to be fine, you have to believe that.”