Brooke leans forward and shouts, “Gigi and I had the best time! We went to Mitchell’s and Gigi bought me two books, the new Maggie O’Farrell and a novel by a debut author named Karen Winn, and I got one for myself—it’s a beach book set on Nantucket. What could be cooler than that?” Brooke pulls the beach book out of the brown paper bag at her feet and the pages flap in the breeze like the wings of a distressed bird.
Ha, Tatum thinks. The author of the beach book is a local, a client of McKenzie Heating and Cooling, but Tatum won’t mention this because Brooke’s enthusiasm is already pretty grating. Tatum wishes she were heading out to Smith’s Point with Kyle and Jack. They’d bring a cooler of beer and stay until sunset, and on the way home they’d stop at Millie’s for margaritas and lobster tacos. Instead, Tatum will be left to wonder what Kyle and Jack are getting up to. She can’t believe they saw Irina and Veda while they were out last night. Jack danced with them. Tatum will be damned if she’s going to become another sickening story: They were high-school sweethearts, married thirty-one years, then she died and he married her boss!
No. Tatum pulls cigarettes out of her purse and turns to Brooke. “Will it bother you if I smoke?”
But Brooke is on a roll and can’t be stopped. “Then we went to Murray’s!” she says. “And I got this Nantucket Reds skirt!” She pulls the skirt out, and the rushing wind over the car snaps the material like a flag. It doesn’t hit Tatum in the face but it comes close, and Brooke’s curly hair is also flying all over the place. She probably thinks it’s romantic, letting it loose in a convertible. Tatum edges away from Brooke, though she has only inches to spare. “You’re going to look like you dressed up as Nantucket for Halloween,” she says.
“Tatum,” Hollis says. “You and I both wore those skirts. You probably still have yours and it probably still fits.”
“That was for work,” Tatum says. The summers of 1986 and 1987, when she and Hollis scored jobs serving at the Rope Walk, they had to wear Nantucket Reds skirts and tight white T-shirts. “We didn’t wear them voluntarily. We didn’t spend good money on them.”
Brooke folds her skirt and tucks it back into the bag. “And I got a sweater,” she says meekly. “Gigi helped me pick it out.”
Brooke is a grown woman who needs help picking out her own clothes, Tatum thinks. That pretty much sums her up. What is Tatum doing here with these people? When they reach the rotary, she nearly asks Hollis to drop her off at home. It would be such a relief. But Tatum doesn’t quit things. She doesn’t abandon people.
Brooke leans into the front seat. “What did you get, Dru-Ann?” she asks. “Show us!”
“I don’t feel like showing you right now. And can you tone it down, please? You’re at an eleven and we need you at a three.”
Amen, Tatum thinks. At least they agree on that.
Brooke sinks back into her seat. She opens her mouth to apologize (she shouldn’t have had a coffee at the Handlebar Café; she knows too much caffeine makes her unbearable to be around, or so says Charlie), but no, she won’t. She will just sit quietly the rest of the ride. Forget enthusiasm, forget sharing.
Gigi squeezes Brooke’s forearm and it’s this tiny kindness that makes Brooke’s eyes burn with tears. Probably Gigi pities her. Brooke digs through her purse, finds an elastic, and ties back her hair.
Tatum can’t wait another second; she lights the cigarette. They are, after all, in a convertible. She inhales deeply, then blows smoke out the side and dangles her hand outside the car as well. Nobody complains. Gigi has her eyes closed and her head back. Hollis is watching the road and, Tatum would bet, dreaming about Jack. The two of them reverted right back to their seventeen-year-old selves. It was hilarious to watch.
Tatum takes another drag. She feels her tension ease a bit but then Dru-Ann whips around. “Are you smoking? You are—and you just blew smoke right into my hair!”
Tatum nearly exhales in Dru-Ann’s face, but that’s a step too far even for her. She lets the smoke slip out the side of her mouth and taps off her ash. “I most certainly did not.”
“Who smokes in a car full of people?” Dru-Ann says. “Talk about trashy.”
Tatum leans forward. “What did you say?”
“What you’re doing is beyond inconsiderate.”
“You called me trashy,” Tatum says. “I heard you.” Here it is, then, solid proof of what Tatum has suspected all along. “I’m sorry I don’t make six figures like you.”
Try seven, Dru-Ann thinks, but she doesn’t say it and now she wishes she’d kept her mouth shut because she doesn’t want Tatum to hate her any more than she already does. “It’s not about money,” Dru-Ann says. “It’s about manners.”
“We’re in a convertible!” Tatum says. She flicks the cigarette away. “But whatever, I’m sorry.” She hates herself for apologizing to Dru-Ann, though, really, she’s apologizing to Hollis. “I hope your hair survives.”
Hollis is tempted to speak up on Tatum’s behalf—the poor woman is awaiting biopsy results—but if she does, Dru-Ann will no doubt say, Why do you always protect her? You’ve been doing it your whole life, and then Tatum will jump in and say, Because she’s known me her whole life. Hollis is quiet, and everyone else is quiet, and Hollis exhales, hoping that’s the end of it. The ride home, she thinks, is a three-star experience, maybe only two stars. When they pull into the driveway, the only person smiling is Gigi.
Thank God for Gigi, Hollis thinks.
25. Maybe: Sofia
When Caroline wakes up for the second time on Saturday, there’s a note on the kitchen table from her mother. Shopping in town. Back at noon, it says. Hallelujah, Caroline thinks. She has the house to herself. Breakfast has, of course, been cleaned up (her mother is so type A, she’s triple A), but Caroline finds the morning buns wrapped in an origami of wax paper and she makes herself a bowl of café au lait with almond milk. She repairs to her favorite spot on the property—the footbridge over the pond.
The bowed middle makes a fine perch from which to survey the Shaw–Madden kingdom. Caroline sits cross-legged in the sun, enjoying the breeze across the pond and the view of the beach over the dunes. She sips her coffee, devours the first morning bun in three bites, then tosses pieces of the second bun into the pond. There’s a soft plashing sound as the fish break the surface of the water. A dragonfly hovers over Caroline’s bare forearm. Nature, she thinks. Introspection. Is she having a moment? Maybe, but it’s fleeting. She thinks about the night before and how strange it was that Dylan didn’t try to sleep with her. Caroline didn’t particularly want to have sex with him, though it would have been nice to feel desired. If Caroline told Isaac that she’d slept with her longtime crush, she knows he would be happy for her because Isaac’s generous heart would not want Caroline to be alone. After all, he isn’t alone. He’s with Sofia.
Caroline pulls out her phone and googles Isaac Opoku and Sofia Desmione—and then, like the pathetic weenie she is, she starts to scroll.
There’s the article from the New York Post on December 5, 2018, speculating that Isaac and Sofia were dating (“It’s the crossover we didn’t know we needed!”). Next is a picture of Isaac and Sofia on the red carpet at the 2019 Oscars—Isaac looking absolutely fine in a midnight-blue velvet Oscar de la Renta tux, Sofia in Givenchy. There’s a link to a New York magazine article predicting that documentaries are the only kind of films that will survive into the next decade; Isaac is mentioned. Finally, Caroline lands on Sofia’s Instagram page with its 19.3 million followers (a lot of them Italian; Caroline has checked before). There are five pictures of Isaac in Sofia’s feed. Four of these are at public events—the Toronto Film Festival, Sundance, Cannes, and the Givenchy show during Paris Fashion Week. (Caroline takes a moment to feel awe that she has slept with Isaac, and Isaac has won awards at Cannes, making Caroline Cannes-adjacent.) But the best and most heartbreaking picture on Sofia’s feed was taken this past April, after Caroline submitted her application for the internship but before she’d been chosen. The photograph is of Isaac sitting on the white Kagan sofa in the loft. He’s wearing a white T-shirt, jeans, and white Chucks; the New York Times crossword puzzle is open against his thigh, and there’s a cup of golden tea on the table in front of him. It seems as though Sofia has caught him by surprise, as if she called his name and he looked up. His brown skin is luminous; his eyes are wide and soulful. In the other photos, Isaac’s expression is guarded, but in his face here, Caroline can see the nine-year-old boy who lost his mother. Caroline is arrested not only by his beauty but by his vulnerability.
The caption reads, simply, My love.
A text comes in and Caroline assumes it’s Hollis with their ETA, but when she looks, she sees it’s from a number with a 917 area code, and the caller ID reads Maybe: Sofia.
What? Ever so gingerly, Caroline swipes on the alert. The text says: Hi, Caroline, how is your weekend?