Tabitha will have to call Meghan and ask her to stay at the carriage house. There is simply no one else. Meghan is as big as a house, and her pregnancy has been a trial—she has developed carpal tunnel syndrome and gestational diabetes. Her ankles are so swollen that she can’t wear shoes, only flip-flops; she has to pee every ten minutes, and when she leaves the other sales associate, Mary Jo, in charge of the store while she goes to the bathroom, something inevitably walks out of the store unpaid for. Mary Jo is seventy-eight years old and myopic. Tabitha has to fire her, but she’s worried about getting slapped with a lawsuit for being ageist.
Meghan will watch Ainsley. She is beholden to Tabitha because Tabitha is paying her through her maternity leave despite the fact that she is a seasonal employee. But Meghan won’t want to do it. All Meghan wants to do when she gets home is eat the low-sugar snacks she’s allowed to consume and watch Ellen. On the one hand, Tabitha thinks it would be good for Meghan to get some hands-on parenting experience, albeit at the other end of the spectrum. This is what your child will be like at sixteen if you’re very unlucky! On the other hand, Tabitha knows she should let Meghan enjoy her last two or three weeks of caring for herself and spending quiet time with her husband, Jonathan.
But if not Meghan, then who?
The next day finds Tabitha in a different waiting room, alternately paging through back issues of Town & Country and dozing with her head up against the concrete block wall. Eleanor is expected to be in surgery for a few hours, but Tabitha is afraid if she leaves the hospital something awful will happen. If she stays here and suffers, Eleanor will be fine.
At twelve thirty, Tabitha’s phone rings. She checks the display: It’s Ainsley. Twelve thirty means Ainsley is at lunch. No doubt she’s wondering how much longer she’s going to be left an orphan.
“Hi, sweetie,” Tabitha says. “I’m trying to find someone to stay with you.”
“I called Aunt Harper,” Ainsley says. “She can be here tomorrow night and stay for as long as you need her to, but she wants to make sure you’re okay with it.”
“No,” Tabitha says. “Not Harper.”
“Just let her come, Tabitha. Mama, I mean—sorry. Please? Please please please? That way you can take care of Grammie and not worry about me. Aunt Harper can stay as long as you need her to. She quit her job.”
Quit her job? Tabitha thinks. More likely she got fired. Tabitha doesn’t want Harper to be the one to fix things, because Harper never actually fixes things. She only makes things worse. Look at her life. Tabitha caught the doctor’s wife’s champagne in the face!
And yet having Harper come to watch Ainsley is an answer of sorts. It would allow Tabitha to go back to the town house on Pinckney Street once Eleanor is safely out of surgery to get some much-needed sleep.
But then the memories assault Tabitha: Harper walking into the rental cottage on Prospect Street with a bouquet of wildflowers. Harper singing a song in Julian’s tiny ear as she rocked him. The song was “If I Had $1000000” by the Barenaked Ladies; it calmed Julian immediately. It was the only thing that could. Harper making cioppino with clams and mussels, the tomato-rich broth the first real food Tabitha had eaten since Julian’s birth.
Harper braiding Tabitha’s hair and ironing Tabitha’s dress.
A bottle of champagne with their bare feet dangling off the end of Old South Wharf, dinner at 21 Federal, all eyes on the two of them. Dancing in the front row of the Chicken Box to a band that played old U2 songs. Harper’s arm crooked around Tabitha’s neck as they belted out the lyrics to “With or Without You.”
Tabitha can’t think any further. It is simply too awful.
“No,” Tabitha says to Ainsley now. “I’m sorry, but no. Not your Aunt Harper.”
“But Mom—” Ainsley says.
“No,” Tabitha says, and she hangs up.
HARPER
Tabitha must be really desperate if, as Ainsley said, she approved of Harper staying with Ainsley for the summer. So Harper packs up just what she will need for the season—clothes, shoes, toiletries, books, computer, one good kitchen knife, her food processor, her cast-iron skillet, leashes, chew toys, rawhides. What else? She is nearly forty years old, but she has acquired very little in the way of material things. Will she need her surf-casting pole or her mountain bike? Doubtful.
Fish follows Harper around as she tucks things in boxes.
“Go lie down,” Harper says, pointing to his Orvis bed. But he won’t.
“I’m not going to leave you behind,” Harper says, and she kisses his snout and rubs his back, his mostly black fur silvered now.
She throws away everything in the fridge and most of what’s in the cabinets. What should she do with Billy’s ashes? she wonders. She doesn’t want to leave them here, in the nearly empty duplex, but taking them off the Vineyard feels wrong as well.
She decides to take them over to Billy’s house, where she places the urn on his mantel. Billy’s clothes she’ll donate, but later. When? When she comes back?
Yes, she decides. She will come back in a few weeks, a month or two, by the end of the summer. For now, she takes Billy’s invoices and accounts-payable file; she can work on his paperwork while Ainsley is at school this week.
Before she leaves the house, she snaps a bunch of pictures—every room and the yard, so she has them for posterity. She has decided to sell the house as a teardown, which pains her. As bad as it might have been, it was Billy’s. But the idea of a gut renovation—finding talented, available, reasonably priced people to hire, then managing them—is simply not an option. Harper has been fired; she has no income. She doesn’t have the money to pay for a renovation. Billy has around ninety grand in his savings account, but according to Polly Childs, it will cost nearly double that to do the work required. Harper will have to sell the house as is, pay off Billy’s mortgage, and split the difference with Tabitha. That part can’t be avoided. Harper had taken Billy to his lawyer in Edgartown, and they went over the terms of the will: everything was to be split down the middle with Tabitha. Mrs. Tobias had served as a witness. If they sell the house as is, they will each walk with a hundred grand, maybe a little more. Would it be nice to sell it for a million and get triple that amount? Sure. But Harper isn’t up for the challenge.
Harper wants to see Reed, but she can’t call him and she can’t text him. She cannot walk into the hospital to confront him in person, which is what she has wanted to do since he left the reception.
But Harper does drive through the hospital parking lot; Reed’s Lexus is there. It looks the same; nothing about it announces a major upheaval in his life.
What is it like for him at home now? Harper imagines the air is crackling with things unsaid. How has he explained the affair to Sadie? Has he said it was a mistake, a lapse in judgment? Has he blamed Harper, called her a vixen, a temptress? Has he told Sadie he loves Harper? Has he admitted to being torn and confused? And what has he said to Greenie? Reed isn’t a demonstrative man. He is serious and discreet; he is a doctor. Being caught like this, talked about, discussed as the object of gossip and rumors, must be soul-shredding for him.