“What is up with you?” Hollis says. She’s ready for a fight; she has a lot of frustration she’d like to vent, but Matthew just shakes his head and says, “Fine, I’ll go. But under protest.”
Sunday, Hollis has been invited to the Deck for lunch by one of the women she plays tennis with at the club. This woman’s wife is coming to lunch as well. The wife sits high up on the masthead at Bon Appétit and has specifically asked to meet Hollis.
“They might want to do a feature on my website!” Hollis tells Matthew.
In a rare moment of what Hollis can only describe as mocking, Matthew says, “Oh, heavens, you can’t miss that. By all means, sacrifice an entire Sunday getting plastered on rosé!”
Hollis has no intention of “getting plastered on rosé,” and yet, because she is so angry, that’s exactly what she does. She Ubers home, leaving the Bronco in the parking lot at the Deck, and immediately falls asleep in a chaise by the pool. When Matthew wakes her up, the sun is low in the sky. It’s time to go to the ferry, and they have to take the Volvo because she left the Bronco at the Deck. There’s the predictable quarrel—he told her she was making a bad decision but she did it anyway and now she’ll have to figure out how to get the Bronco back home if it hasn’t been towed already—and Hollis says, “Do you get tired of being so righteous?” in the nastiest voice she can muster. That ends the conversation. They say nothing else, and there is no kiss, which is frankly no surprise, since they haven’t had sex since April.
Things continue in this vein throughout July and August. It’s good luck but also bad luck that Bon Appétit does want to do a feature—and they want to shoot it in the Nantucket house at the end of August. Matthew is extremely put out and Hollis feels bad—it’s the last week before things ramp up at the hospital and Matthew’s semester starts for the class he teaches at Harvard. It’s Caroline’s last week before returning to NYU, and Matthew says, “I’ll hang with you, honey, since your mother is busy.”
Hollis wants to ask who spent the first two decades of Caroline’s life “hanging” with her, but she feels guilty. The shoot is invasive. There are people dressed in black everywhere, cameras and lights, hair, makeup, wardrobe, and food stylists. Frankly, with Matthew and Caroline out of the house, it’s easier, though it’s not at all the last week of summer that Hollis imagined.
On Sunday afternoon, the camera crew finally leaves. Hollis has scheduled her usual family photo shoot with Laurie Richards at five o’clock, enough time to take an hour’s worth of pictures before Matthew has to go to the ferry. Is Hollis cramming this in? Yes, but what choice does she have? The shoot threw a wrench in things—she shouldn’t have agreed to it, but it was a big deal; it will take Hollis’s website to the next level. Both Matthew and Caroline understand that, don’t they?
Maybe they don’t. They headed out to paddleboard earlier that morning and haven’t returned. Hollis calls their respective cell phones and is blasted straight to voice mail on both. She texts: Where are you? Don’t forget we have our family photo at 5! Henny and I are waiting! But there’s no response.
At 4:45, Hollis has heard nothing from her family, and she’s frantic. She doesn’t want to waste Laurie’s time but she also doesn’t want to miss this photo shoot. It’s a tradition, the last weekend of the summer, out on the beach; they’ve been doing it for fifteen years. Hollis gets the idea in her head that if they don’t take the portrait, the family will fall apart. Then she tells herself she’s being ridiculous. It’s only a picture.
When Laurie arrives, Hollis explains that Matthew and Caroline are running late. Not a problem, Laurie says, she’ll go down to the beach to get set up. Tonight is a beauty, maybe the best weather they’ve ever had. Hollis is wearing her signature blouse, this one in lavender; she has asked Caroline to wear white and Matthew navy. But at this point, she’ll take them in anything, she’ll take them naked, where are they?
Hollis calls them both again—nothing—but she doesn’t text for fear of saying something regrettable. She told them both about the photo shoot this morning before they left the house—but then she groans, wondering if maybe they thought she was still talking about the Bon Appétit shoot. No, no, she thinks, she definitely said, Laurie Richards, family photo, and they both said, Yes, okay, or something like that.
At five thirty, as Hollis is apologizing to Laurie—she’ll pay Laurie for her time, of course—Matthew and Caroline appear over the dunes. Hollis deserves an Academy Award for her performance as an only mildly annoyed wife and mother. “Where were you guys?” she says. “Laurie was just about to leave.”
“We were up at Great Point,” Matthew says. “I was surf-casting, Caroline was reading. It was the best day of the summer.”
Hollis isn’t sure how to read his tone. It was the best day of the summer and Hollis missed it? Or it was the best day of the summer because Hollis wasn’t there?
But she notices he’s wearing the navy polo and Caroline is in the white eyelet halter just like she wanted, so they cluster together, rein Henny in, and smile for the camera.
As Hollis peers over Gigi’s shoulder at the photo, she thinks how Gigi won’t be able to see that what binds Hollis to Matthew in that particular photo are waves of anger and resentment. To Gigi’s eyes, they must look like the perfect couple.
But they weren’t at all.
You’ve changed. And we’ve changed.
It feels like Gigi is holding a lie.
30. The Drop I
In the home theater in the basement, Caroline sets up two chairs across from each other and turns on the ring light.
“Is it okay if I film this?” Caroline says. She thinks it’s a stroke of genius to have clips of Hollis’s friends for the website. She doesn’t want this to be like The Office—that’s the most imitated format in Hollywood these days—but yes, she’s thinking exactly that.
Tatum shrugs. “I look like a dirt sandwich, but sure, have at it.”
Tatum’s hair, which was so sleek and glossy yesterday, is now damp from swimming and pulled back into a ponytail. She’s gotten some sun on her face, and freckles pop across her cheeks. She doesn’t have a swim cover-up like the other ladies; she wears a gray Nantucket Whalers T-shirt and jeans shorts, and her feet are sandy in flip-flops. (She must have missed the footbath outside the door; Hollis will have a fit, but it’s too late now.) Caroline couldn’t have styled her any better. Her look is Local Island Girl.
“Great, thank you,” Caroline says. She feels a little awkward, to be honest, but maybe only because she hung out with this woman’s son the night before and woke up in her house.
Tatum knows that Caroline and Dylan met up because right before Hollis crashed breakfast, Jack was telling Kyle and Tatum that he’d found Caroline in their driveway trying to order a Lyft, and Jack ended up driving her into town.
While Tatum was on the beach she sent Dylan a text that said: Caroline, huh?
Dylan texted back: It was one kiss. She slept on the sofa.
Tatum laughed. Dylan tells her everything, a result, she supposes, of how calmly she handled the news “I got Aubrey pregnant. We’re having a baby.”
Tatum typed: Do u like her????
She’s nice, Dylan wrote back.
There’s nothing worse than calling someone “nice,” and Tatum is disappointed. She wants Dylan to find someone to take his mind off Aubrey. There’s also her crazy idea that if Dylan and Caroline get married and have children, Tatum and Hollis will be sister-grandmothers—Tatum the cool one, Hollis the rich one. Tatum laughs, and Caroline gives her a quizzical look.
“I’m ready,” Tatum says. “What do you want to talk about?”
Caroline says, “Let’s start at the beginning, I guess. How did you and my mom become friends?”
Tatum says, “I can’t remember ever not being friends with Hollis. Our mothers taught kindergarten in adjacent classrooms at Nantucket Elementary, so it was a big deal when they both got pregnant at the same time because they both went out on maternity leave, and back then, you took the whole school year. They would get together a few times a week, take us for walks, push us in the baby swings, that kind of thing. And then—we were both far too young to remember this—Hollis’s mother, Charlotte, died.”