“I threw the game,” Tatum tells Caroline. “I’ve been ashamed about it for thirty-five years. I robbed not only Hollis but our team and our school—hell, our island—of a championship title. I was the ultimate poor sport.”
Caroline’s expression is more fascinated than horrified, Tatum thinks. She’s getting way more than she probably expected.
“So then what happened?” Caroline asks.
“Hollis left for college,” Tatum says. “And she never came back. Not really.”
Hollis returns to Nantucket for the holidays her freshman year, but the summer after freshman year, when Tatum thinks they will both work at the Rope Walk again, Hollis announces she’s staying in Chapel Hill to wait tables at Chili’s.
Chili’s? Tatum thinks. Why would Hollis want to stay in swampy, sweltering North Carolina slinging fajitas when she could come home and make three times as much money with a view of the water? It makes no sense!
Tatum calls Hollis long-distance and begs her to reconsider. By that point Tatum’s mother, Laura Leigh, has been dead a year and Tatum’s father is dating Alison, a young woman he recently hired at the pharmacy. Tatum needs Hollis. Hollis is her sister.
“I promise I’ll go out on the yachts with you,” Tatum says, though she knows she won’t because of Kyle. “I’ll help you find a rich husband.”
“Sorry, Tay,” Hollis says. “Dru-Ann and I have decided to stay here.”
Dru-Ann, Tatum thinks. Of course. Hollis talks nonstop about Dru-Ann Jones, her roommate, whose father is some bigwig on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.
“We’re working at Chili’s and conquering our summer reading list—Nella Larsen, Joan Didion, Angela Carter.”
Tatum doesn’t know or care who any of those writers are and Hollis knows she doesn’t know or care. Hollis is like a snake, Tatum thinks, shedding her old life as though it’s a skin she’s grown out of.
“So when my mom stopped coming back here over the summers, did you two stop being friends?” Caroline asks.
“No, we were still friends,” Tatum says. “But it wasn’t the same.” She pauses; she needs a cigarette. “Kyle and I got married, and your mom was my maid of honor—she and I did our dance, things were still fine. Then… your mother got engaged.”
Hollis calls Tatum to say that Matthew is finishing his surgery residency and they’ve decided to get married. Tatum wants to know about the ring, the proposal, was it romantic?
“He didn’t get down on one knee or anything,” Hollis says. “I cannot imagine him doing that.”
Right; Tatum can’t either. She and Kyle met Matthew the one and only time Hollis brought him to Nantucket. They went to the Lobster Trap for dinner and Matthew became absorbed with dismantling his lobster with precision so as not to leave a single shred of meat behind. Every time Tatum or Kyle asked him a question, he startled as though he’d forgotten he was at dinner with other people.
Hollis goes on to say that she and Matthew will be married in Wellesley, where Matthew grew up, in February—because that works best with Matthew’s schedule. Matthew’s mother, Judith, is planning the wedding. Hollis doesn’t have to do a thing.
“Great?” Tatum says. She and Kyle had a small wedding on the beach at Brant Point, followed by a reception at the Admiralty Club in Madaket, but she made every decision herself. Tatum gets down to what she assumes is the reason for this call. “How many bridesmaids are you having?”
“Six,” Hollis says. “You, Dru-Ann, Matt’s cousin Cora, Gretchen and Ellie from UNC, and Regency from Boston.”
Tatum has never met Gretchen and Ellie, though she knows they’re a couple, and she has never heard of Regency from Boston nor even realized that Regency could be a first name. But fine, whatever. “Just get me everyone’s address, I guess,” Tatum says, “so I can organize things.”
“Organize things?” Hollis says.
“I am the matron of honor,” Tatum says. “Right?”
What follows is a beat of silence that Tatum can only describe as loaded. Loaded like a gun threatening to murder their friendship once and for all.
“Yes, of course!” Hollis says. “You and Dru-Ann both! I’m having one matron of honor, you, and one maid of honor, Dru-Ann.”
Tatum’s mother, Laura Leigh, was a kindergarten teacher, and because of this, Tatum was raised to share. But no, sorry, not in this instance. Hollis is supposed to choose her best friend as her maid—or matron—of honor. Best is a superlative; there can be only one. If there’s more than one person, the job becomes watered down, it means only half as much. Hollis is diminishing Tatum, and (Tatum hates herself for this) her response is to cry.
“I have known you your entire life, we’re not just friends, we’re sisters, my family took you in, my mother treated you as her own!” Tatum feels affronted not only for herself but for her mother, who braided Hollis’s hair and got the grass stains out of her softball uniform and helped her shop for a prom dress. Tatum realizes that Hollis and Dru-Ann grew close in college and she felt wildly jealous about this (and in response started hanging out with Terri Falcone more than she might have otherwise), but there’s no way Dru-Ann and Hollis are as close as Tatum and Hollis. Hollis is just impressed by Dru-Ann, or maybe she’s been strong-armed by her.
Hollis goes into damage-control mode. “I definitely want you to be my matron of honor, Tay, it’s just that Dru-Ann knows the other girls better and she has all these cool ideas.”
“What kind of ideas?”
“She wants to have the bachelorette party at the Ritz-Carlton in Boston with a spa day and then dinner at Sorellina—”
Tatum can’t afford the Ritz-Carlton and she doesn’t know what Sorellina is. “So what you’re saying is that she has more money and fancier taste.”
“No!” Hollis says so emphatically that it can only mean yes. She sighs. “Please don’t be like this, Tay.”
Tatum’s tears have dried; now she’s just angry. No, not just angry—furious. “Like what?” she says, though she knows: She’s being possessive and small-minded and jealous when apparently what she should say is Great, Dru-Ann and I will divvy up the responsibilities and shoot rock-paper-scissors to see who walks in last.
Instead, Tatum says, “I don’t want to do it at all. Have fun getting married without me.” And she hangs up.
Hollis calls right back. Tatum lets the answering machine pick up. Hollis leaves a message; now she’s crying, which Tatum childishly finds satisfying. Hollis says she can’t get married without Tatum, she’d rather elope, but please can’t Tatum understand that she’s working on a compromise here, she’s trying to make everyone happy but she feels like King Solomon’s baby (whatever that means).
The next day, Tatum decides to be the bigger person and she calls back and says fine, she’ll be the co–maid/matron of honor as long as she can be the one to walk in last.
“But it was a crushing disappointment,” Tatum says now to the camera. “I was hurt. Your mother went away and met another person who became her best friend and I stayed on Nantucket and didn’t. Hollis has always been my only best friend. Even all the years we weren’t really talking, I thought of her as my best friend.”
This story is so much… more than Caroline anticipated. She thought it would be a stroll down memory lane with sound bites she could share on the website. But Tatum has given her real stuff, heartbreaking stuff. “But it all worked out in the end, right?” Caroline asks. “Because you’re here?”
Not really, Tatum thinks. This is backstory, but it’s also front story: Things have never been the same between Tatum and Hollis. Tatum hides from Hollis every summer, runs away when she bumps into her at the grocery store, turns down every invitation to come to the house for dinner. Tatum is still angry at Dru-Ann because of the things that happened over the bachelorette weekend in Boston and also because of what Dru-Ann said to Tatum in the bathroom at the Wellesley Country Club during the wedding reception.
Tatum won’t get into it. She’s emotionally exhausted from the demands of this weekend, from hearing about Kyle and Jack’s night out, and from trying to keep the biopsy results out of her mind, which is like holding back a wall of water. Tatum wants to go outside and have a cigarette, then go to her room, call Kyle, and take a nap.
She stands up. Chat over.
31. Heart-to-Heart