Hollis is a hostage to her grief; she’s not eating, not sleeping. She breaks down, calls Dr. Lindstrom, and asks for a prescription for Ambien. The pills help her fall asleep, but by one in the morning, Hollis is wide awake, at which point she pads out to the kitchen and flips open her laptop. With her face bathed in blue light, down the rabbit hole she goes. She types in What to do when your husband dies, and the results pop up: “How to Deal with the Death of a Loved One,” “A Guide to Grief Journaling,” “Sex and the Widow.”
“Sex and the Widow”? she thinks. As if.
She takes a bite of one article, a nibble of the next; nothing helps, nothing helps, nothing helps! She brings up Jack Finigan’s Facebook page. There are still no new pictures of Mindy, but even that doesn’t make Hollis feel better.
She texts Caroline asking how she likes her internship.
OK.
And what about the sublet? (That I’m paying for, Hollis thinks but does not say.)
OK.
Would you please answer my calls, Caroline?
No response.
Then, on July 15, the seven-month anniversary of Matthew’s death (she experiences every day in relation to Matthew’s death), Hollis finds something unexpected.
On a site called Motherlode (Hollis has never heard of it), she reads about Moira Sullivan, age fifty-nine, whose husband of thirty years dropped dead at the hardware store while he was buying birdseed for Moira’s feeders.
I was devastated, Moira wrote. I fell apart.
Yes, Hollis thinks.
But then I came up with an idea, Moira wrote. She organized a girls’ trip for her best friends, one friend from each phase of her life. The photo accompanying the article shows a knot of smiling middle-aged women at a beachfront rental home in Destin, Florida. Moira, who is wearing a floppy-brimmed straw hat, is in the center with the friends orbiting her like planets around the sun.
I wanted to be surrounded by the people who knew me best, Moira wrote, even though a couple of the women I hadn’t seen or talked to in years. Even though our common ground had shrunk. Even though these women didn’t know one another well—or at all. I wanted to celebrate the friendships that had made me who I was.
Moira invited her best friend from her teens (Cate), her best friend from her twenties (Paige), her best friend from her “prime of life” (Phoebe), and her best friend from “midlife” (Liz). The five of them lounged on the beach reading Where the Crawdads Sing; they rented a floating tiki hut and booze-cruised over Destin’s emerald-green water; they cooked a lasagna dinner at home on the first night with lots of wine and a special playlist that Moira made, which got us all dancing on the deck (wrote Cate), and the second night they went bonkers (Phoebe’s word) at Lucky’s Rotten Apple. The ladies took lots of pictures on their iPhones and shared them in a closed Facebook group, and Moira had a commemorative album made on Shutterfly. The title of the album—and of the article—was “The Five-Star Weekend.”
Hollis can’t believe she hasn’t heard about this idea before. She’s struck not only by the poignancy of the idea (it’s your life story in friends) but also by the bravery—a weekend with four women whose only connection to one another is you.
Hollis imagines hosting such a weekend.
Best friend from her teens: Tatum McKenzie.
Best friend from her twenties: Dru-Ann Jones.
Best friend from her “prime of life”: Well, there was Electra Undergrove—but she and Hollis no longer speak. Runner-up is probably Brooke Kirtley, who was such a help when Matthew died.
What about the fourth friend? Hollis wonders. The friend from “midlife” (which, Hollis realizes, means now). She doesn’t have any friends specifically from midlife. Why is this? It’s difficult to meet new people once your kids are grown, especially when you work from home. There’s cute Zoe Kern from Hollis’s barre class—but Zoe is twenty-nine years old and seven months pregnant.
But then Hollis realizes she does have one new friend. She has Gigi Ling.
Hollis leaves the “Five-Star Weekend” article up on her browser. She paces her Nantucket kitchen, weirdly energized, revved up, even, thinking about the possibility of hosting her own Five-Star Weekend. She loves the double entendre—five women for the weekend, and a weekend filled with elevated experiences worthy of five stars (if anyone can pull this part off, it’s Hollis). But what appeals to Hollis most is what Moira Sullivan said about honoring the friendships that had formed her.
Hollis isn’t naive enough to imagine this will be a Hallmark-movie experience where her guilt, her melancholy, and her loneliness will all magically disappear once she’s surrounded by her friends.
But yes, that is sort of what she imagines.
Nothing else has worked.
It couldn’t hurt. (Could it?)
She’ll do it, she decides. She’ll host a Five-Star Weekend here, on Nantucket, in two weeks.
She goes back inside, snaps her laptop shut, pads down the hall, and climbs into bed. For the first time since Matthew died, sleep comes easily.
2. The Invitation
The next morning, Hollis sends each of her four “stars” the same text (separately): Would you be up for a girls’ weekend at my Nantucket house, July 28 to July 31? All you have to do is show up. I’ll take care of everything else.
Brooke Kirtley is the first to respond (no surprise there): Girls’ weekend? Oh, Hollis, good for you. Are you sure you’re ready? If you’re ready, DEFINITELY count me in!!!
Hollis’s heart aches a little; Brooke loves nothing more than to be included.
Dru-Ann is next: How flexible are your dates? My life is… a blender.
Also no surprise. Hollis’s college roommate Dru-Ann Jones is the country’s premier agent for female athletes, and she’s the cohost of an ESPN show called Throw Like a Girl that airs on Tuesday afternoons, and she writes for New York magazine about race and gender politics in sports.
When Matthew died, Dru-Ann was in Fremantle, Australia, signing an Olympic-bound swimmer. She’d asked Hollis what she could do to help and offered to drop everything and fly halfway around the world to Boston, but Hollis told her to wait. “I’ll need you later,” she said. “After all these people have gone.”
“I trust you’re telling the truth and not just being a martyr,” Dru-Ann said. “When you need me, I will show up.”
When Matthew died, you asked what you could do for me, Hollis texts now. You can do this.
There’s no response, and Hollis experiences a moment of desperation. If any of them can’t make it, she’ll cancel the whole thing, but she knows Brooke will want to come anyway, and can Hollis do a weekend with only Brooke? (Frankly, no.) She texts Dru-Ann again: I have a Peloton. And I’ll get your tequila. And organic limes.
Tequila, yes, but don’t worry about another thing, Dru-Ann texts. I’ll be there.
Two down, Hollis thinks. She tries to imagine a weekend with just herself, Brooke, and Dru-Ann, and a different panic envelops her. Dru-Ann and Brooke met a few years earlier at Hollis and Matthew’s Marathon Monday brunch—Dru-Ann was in town because she represented one of the elite runners from Kenya—and afterward, Dru-Ann described Brooke as the “human equivalent of something stuck in your teeth. Just. So. Annoying.” Meanwhile, Brooke developed an obsession with Dru-Ann. She watches Throw Like a Girl every week and she thinks it’s so cool that Hollis went to college with someone who’s on television and who, last year, appeared at number 74 on Forbes’s Most Powerful Women list.
A little while later, Hollis’s phone lights up with a text from her best friend from when she was growing up, Tatum McKenzie, who still lives on Nantucket year-round: Does “girls’ weekend” mean I would spend the night at your house in Squam?
Hollis writes back: Yes, won’t that be fun?
Okay, Tatum says, which isn’t really an answer to the question. But it sounds like she’s a yes, and Hollis feels cool relief pass through her. Every summer since Hollis and Matthew built the new house on her father’s property, Hollis has invited Tatum and her husband, Kyle, over for dinner, and every summer, Tatum comes up with an excuse for why they can’t make it, so Tatum has never been inside Hollis’s house. Once, a few years earlier, Hollis got a text from Tatum out of the blue: Kyle and I went for a Sunday drive and ended up at your place in Squam. We peeked in the windows, danced on your pool cover, and had sex in your outdoor shower. (Just kidding!) You have officially become a Summer Person, Holly. Just like you always wanted. This was followed by the one-tear crying emoji.
Hollis wrote back, trying to be funny: You did have sex in the outdoor shower. I know you did.