On Thursday, December 15, Ms. Fox is on the website looking for the easy holiday hors d’oeuvre recipes that Hollis promised to post—Ms. Fox has a Yankee swap to attend—when a new Corkboard message from Hollis pops up on her screen.
To the Hungry with Hollis community:
My husband, Matthew, passed away this morning unexpectedly. I need to ask for privacy as I grapple with this devastating tragedy. I’ll be stepping away from the website for a while, as I’m sure you’ll all understand. I hope to return at some point, though right now, I can’t imagine when.
Hold your loved ones close.
With gratitude, Hollis
Ms. Fox gasps. Oh no! What happened? She searches Matthew, husband of Hollis Shaw. She knows Hollis is married—those rings!—though Hollis never mentions her husband. (Ms. Fox and some of the others wish he were more present, like Ina Garten’s Jeffrey.) Whenever Ms. Fox thinks of Hollis with someone, she pictures the high-school boyfriend, Jack Finigan, with his cute dimples.
The next morning in the Nantucket Standard, we all see the obituary: “Summer Resident Dr. Matthew Madden Killed in Car Accident.” There are also notices in the Boston Globe (“Renowned MGH Surgeon and Harvard Med Professor Killed in One-Car Accident in Wellesley”) and the New York Times (“Dr. Matthew Madden, Leading Cardiac Surgeon and International Lecturer, Dead at 55”).
Ms. Fox wants to reach out, and she’s not alone—within a matter of hours, there are 17,262 Corkboard messages offering thoughts and prayers, some posted by people who had themselves lost husbands, wives, parents, siblings, children. Hollis’s followers find her note so raw and relatable that they can picture her trembling fingers as she typed; they can hear her ragged sobs. They all want to offer solace… but their motives aren’t completely selfless. When will Hollis be back on the website? Valentine’s Day? (No, too soon.) Easter, maybe?
Here on Nantucket, we think how unfair life can be: Hollis’s mother died too young, and now her husband has as well. We wonder if Hollis will return to the island for the summer. Will she feel like playing tennis at the Field and Oar Club or drinking rosé at the Deck? Fast Eddie Pancik, our perennially thirsty real estate agent, asks his sister, Barbie, if it would be in bad taste to see if Hollis is planning on selling the house in Squam.
Yes, you idiot, Barbie says.
On June 21, the first day of summer, Romeo at the Steamship Authority reports that Hollis Shaw has just driven off the ferry in her trusty Volvo, which is packed with boxes, bags, and what looks through the window like a portable pizza oven; Hollis’s Serbian sheepdog, Henrietta, is asleep in the back seat. Good for Hollis! we think. She came home.
For a few weeks, sightings of Hollis around the island are rare. She doesn’t attend the Nantucket Book Festival or the annual Squam Road Homeowners Association meeting. Johnny Baylor, who drives for DoorDash, reports delivering sushi from Bar Yoshi to Hollis’s house one night and a lobster roll from the Sea Grille another. Hollis’s longtime neighbor Kerri Gasperson sees Hollis walking Henrietta at dusk, but Hollis has AirPods in, and Kerri doesn’t want to bother her.
We understand that it takes time to process a sudden, unexpected loss. We assume Hollis will spend her summer alone, practicing self-care and privately mourning the man she was married to for twenty-four years.
But when we hear about the Five-Star Weekend—so creative! so unusual!—we all agree: This could be just the thing she needs.
1. Accident Report I
It’s early morning on December 15; Hollis Shaw is in the kitchen of her Wellesley home prepping the dough for cheddar tartlets. Her husband, Dr. Matthew Madden, has a ten o’clock flight to Germany—he’s presenting a paper at a cardiology conference in Leipzig and will be gone for five days.
This opening scene, should Hollis show a video of it, would seem to be one of domestic bliss. Hollis wears a pair of tailored red-plaid pajamas; her hair is held back in a clip. She has a footed bowl of café au lait steaming next to the slab of cool, gray-veined marble where she’s rolling out her pastry dough. Carols play over the sound system; “The Holly and the Ivy” is Hollis’s favorite and she sings along in a faux-operatic voice. Hollis’s kitchen is all decked out for the holidays: spruce garlands encircle the weathered wooden beams, and her collection of copper pots gleam like new pennies on her open shelves. She’s trimmed a “kitchen tree” with culinary ornaments: a tiny metal whisk, a wooden rolling pin, a bone-china box of doughnuts. Hollis has also hung miniature wreaths on all her glass-fronted cabinets. (Her daughter, Caroline, would probably declare the wreaths—as well as the apothecary jars filled with ribbon candy and gumdrops—“too much.”) The picture window above the sink where Hollis does dishes looks over the mature oaks and evergreens of her side yard. The view offers a pleasant distraction, especially this morning as snowflakes as big and fluffy as cotton balls float to the ground. Hollis loves nothing more than snow during the holidays.
Her timer chimes, and Hollis pulls a tray of crispy bacon from the oven. Like magic, her Serbian sheepdog, Henrietta, jingles into the kitchen (Hollis has put bells on her collar) and raises her furry face.
“Fine,” Hollis says, and she gives the old girl a piece. She drains the rest on a paper towel next to the red-pepper-and-smoked-Gouda quiche she made earlier that morning. She cuts a wedge of quiche and arranges it on a plate with a few slices of bacon and sections of a Cara Cara orange, which are a delightful and surprising pink.
When she hears Matthew’s footsteps on the stairs, she closes her eyes and takes a sustaining breath.
Don’t bring it up, she tells herself. Let him go graciously.
But the truth is, this trip to Leipzig bothers Hollis; she was up half the night fretting about it. Matthew will present his paper tomorrow morning, so he could easily leave Germany tomorrow afternoon and make it home in time for their annual holiday party on Saturday. Hollis and Matthew have hosted a holiday gathering every year since they moved to Wellesley, and it’s always the third Saturday in December. Matthew claimed he “thought it was later,” so he made plans to stay at the conference until the end and then travel to Berlin to visit his mentor Dr. Emanuel Schrader, who was just diagnosed with Parkinson’s and can no longer practice surgery.
“But you can’t miss our party!” Hollis said when he told her.
Matthew had chuckled. “We can both agree this is your party, sweet-love. With all the Swellesley glitterati in attendance, you won’t even notice I’m not there.”
His tone had been light, playful even—but Hollis was still hurt. She did throw the party pretty much single-handedly every year. She made all the food—the cheddar tartlets, the tenderloin sandwiches, the tiny potatoes topped with caviar—she buffed the champagne flutes, lined the luminaires along the driveway, stuffed gift bags with her homemade toffee for guests to take home. She sent the invitations, and her list was longer every December (except for the year when Hollis broke up with Electra Undergrove and her crew).
Despite this, Hollis can’t imagine standing in the doorway to greet everyone without Matthew at her side. It’s literally unthinkable.
But apparently not for him.
Now Matthew walks into the kitchen. He always wears a suit when he flies, and today he has on the red Vineyard Vines tie printed with Santas in speedboats—the very tie Hollis purchased for him to wear to the party! He hums along to the carol currently playing—“Once in Royal David’s City”—and holds his right wrist out so that Hollis can help him with his cuff link, which is a silver reindeer. He’s certainly in the holiday spirit.
Hollis inhales the scent of his Kiehl’s shaving lotion. She loves the smell; it reminds her of date night and of the (increasingly rare) mornings when she wakes up in his arms.
She can’t believe he’s leaving.
She wills herself to say, Here’s breakfast, or Let me get your coffee—Matthew takes his coffee black and scalding hot, and she doesn’t pour it until he’s standing right in front of her. But instead what comes out of her mouth is “I really wish you’d change your plans.”
After Matthew leaves for the airport—far later than he wanted to—Hollis gathers the pastry dough into a ball, wraps it in plastic, and sets it in the fridge. She no longer feels like cooking. Matthew’s breakfast is untouched, but instead of covering the plate with foil and saving it for later—she deplores waste, one product of being Tom Shaw’s daughter—she scrapes the food into Henny’s dog bowl. Then she rips a paper towel from the roll and wipes at her eyes. She can’t believe how quickly their conversation escalated into a fight.