Henrietta vibrates with excitement as though she understands. Henny will be happy; as the saying goes, she has never met a stranger.
“Caroline is coming,” Hollis says. There was a moment when Hollis questioned whether it was wise to include Caroline—Hollis was afraid of rejection; she was worried that once she offered the money, it would sound like she had to bribe her own daughter to visit; and she isn’t at all sure that any of what happens this weekend should be filmed—but now that Caroline has agreed to come, Hollis is optimistic. She and Caroline will be together and there will be other people around to make things less awkward.
Hollis flips open her laptop, goes to the Hungry with Hollis website, and clicks on the Corkboard. To the Hungry with Hollis community: The past seven months have been harrowing…
Hollis deletes harrowing and writes dismal, then she deletes that as well. Both words are accurate, as are lonely, bleak, and plain old sad, but she doesn’t want to be a Debbie Downer, nor does she want to make a big deal about her return; she just wants to move forward.
Hollis takes a breath, then types: I want to thank you all for your thoughts, prayers, and condolences and for the stories you’ve been kind enough to share with me. Knowing that your Kitchen Lights were still on here at Hungry with Hollis pulled me through some very dark days. Today I write to you with some more hopeful news. I’m hosting something called a Five-Star Weekend at my home on Nantucket. Let me tell you all about it.
5. Errands
It’s eight thirty on Thursday morning when Tatum McKenzie spots her oldest friend, Hollis Shaw, by the deli counter at the mid-island Stop and Shop. Hollis has a pair of sunglasses perched on her blond-gray head, and she’s wearing a pair of Lululemon running shorts and a Cisco Brewers T-shirt. She’s checking things off a list. Tatum smiles. Hollis has always loved a good list.
Without breaking stride, Tatum swings her cart around and heads in the opposite direction, her heart flip-flopping like a freshly caught fish. Quick, quick, quick! She races to the line closest to the exit and loads her bleach and paper towels onto the conveyor belt. Kathy Culbert, who was a year ahead of Tatum and Hollis in school, is behind the register, and as always, Kathy wants to chat. “How’s the little guy?” she asks. Kathy’s sister, Melanie, runs the day care that Tatum’s grandson, Orion, attends.
“Good, good,” Tatum says, cursing her lost opportunity to grab a rotisserie chicken. She wants Kyle to have something to eat while she spends the weekend in Squam with the very woman she’s running away from.
“I don’t understand why you agreed to go,” Kyle said to Tatum that morning. “You avoid Hollis every summer like she’s poison ivy, and now you’re spending the weekend at her house?” Kyle kissed Tatum’s nose and goosed her. “After all these years, I still can’t figure you out. It’s sexy.” They ended up having a quickie standing in front of the mirror, Kyle carefully avoiding the spot on Tatum’s right breast where she’d been stabbed by the biopsy needle.
The sex put Tatum behind for the morning. Dylan was still asleep—he hadn’t gotten home from work until two or three—so Tatum had to drop Orion off at Melanie’s before she came here for cleaning supplies, and now she has to go to Holdgate’s to pick up Mr. Albright’s shirts and still somehow get to the Albrights’ house by nine. Tatum is jonesing for a cigarette. Since discovering the lump, she’s been smoking twice as many as usual, which she understands is bad, but how is she supposed to handle the stress of possibly having breast cancer without smoking? Some women might be able to do it, but not Tatum.
When Tatum leaves the store, it’s a quarter to nine; she knows she has to seriously hustle and prays to the Virgin Mary that there isn’t a line at the dry cleaner. But even so, she can’t help messing with Hollis. She scans the parking lot until she sees the strawberry-red Bronco. Tatum quickly glances behind her, then hurries over. The driver’s-side window is open and there are the keys sitting in the console, just as Tatum knew they would be. Hollis leaves them right out in the open like a local, even though Hollis is a summer person now in every other way. Tatum grabs the keys and hides them under the driver’s seat.
Five people are waiting in line at Holdgate’s Island Laundry, and Amy, the manager, is nowhere to be found. Tatum checks her phone, sees it’s 8:51. Tatum’s boss, Irina, is a stickler; she fired a girl the week before last for showing up hungover. Tatum texts Irina: I’m at Holdgate’s, there’s a line, do you want me to come now or get the shirts?
Irina texts back: Get shirts. Then she writes: Cleaner opens at 8:30. You should have gone earlier.
Tatum’s fingers hover over the screen. What she wants to say is I quit. What she does say is Sorry! Irina is young enough to be Tatum’s child; she’s only a year older than Dylan. She arrived on Nantucket from Lithuania in 2015 and went from cleaning houses herself to owning a cleaning-and-concierge company, the best on the island, called simply Irina Services. The company does more than just clean; staffers run errands like picking up dry cleaning, taking packages to UPS, provisioning (their clients don’t deign to eat anything from the Stop and Shop—for them, it’s Bartlett’s or Nantucket Meat and Fish), filling the house with bouquets from Flowers on Chestnut, and even taking the family dogs to be groomed at Geronimo’s. Irina has filled a niche; she has thirty-seven clients and a staff of sixteen, among whom Tatum is (a) the oldest by twenty years and (b) the only local. Irina gives Tatum the cushier jobs, like picking up the dry cleaning and buying supplies; the younger girls, Tatum knows, will be elbow-deep in the Albrights’ toilets by the time she arrives. This is one reason Tatum doesn’t quit; the other is the salary. After splitting gratuities with the other girls, Tatum is making something like fifty bucks an hour. It’s a lot of money for a daytime job, though it’s peanuts compared to what she made waiting tables. Tatum worked at the Lobster Trap for over twenty years, but she quit when Orion was born. She’d missed too many baths, stories, and bedtimes when Dylan was young—she didn’t want to miss them with her grandson.
Amy appears from the back and the line moves faster. It’s 8:54. The racks clickety-clack as they spin, Amy runs the credit card of a woman who must have sixty items hanging on the hook, bright party dresses from the looks of it, lots of Lilly Pulitzer. Normally, this would make Tatum roll her eyes—she wants to declare wearing Lilly Pulitzer to any Nantucket social function an official cliché—but today, Tatum’s mind wanders to the weekend ahead. Hollis sent an itinerary (with a note that she would be paying for everything, thank God), and there was some dress-up stuff on the list—Saturday-night dinner at Nautilus, Sunday lunch at the Galley—along with “suggested colors” for each event. Saturday night: black or white. Sunday: orange or hot pink. Tatum would have rebelled against wearing the “suggested colors,” but she has both black and white outfits as well as a cute orange Lilly Pulitzer shift dress hanging in her closet (she bought it on sale when Dylan was a baby, over twenty years ago, but it will still fit). Should Tatum wear it? It would be perfect for the lunch.
Should she be a cliché?
When Kyle asked why Tatum wanted to go to the girls’ weekend, Tatum said, “I feel like I should. She lost her husband, Ky. Can you imagine?” Kyle’s face darkened. Since the discovery of the lump, the bad mammogram, and the biopsy, both of them could only too easily imagine.
A more frivolous reason why Tatum is going to Hollis’s little weekend is that she wants to live like a summer person for a couple of days. Tatum enjoys her summers. She loves the cottage roses and the hydrangeas; she swings by Sandbar to grab an ice cream cone at the end of her shift, then goes for a swim on the strip of public way between Cliffside and the Galley; she spends weekend afternoons with Kyle out at their secret beach, and once a week they get a sitter for Orion and go out for a nice dinner (this normally means Cru because Dylan works there and gets them 30 percent off the check). But Tatum knows there’s a whole sparkling social life going on that she has no access to—benefits with pricey tickets, cocktail parties held in private gardens, dinners on the decks of yachts—and, although it’s slightly embarrassing to admit this, she wants to be a part of it.
Standing in the line at Holdgate’s, she feels a tap on her shoulder and hears, “Hey, sis.”
Tatum turns around. It’s Hollis.