Usually, Jennifer loves Thanksgiving at the Winter Street Inn. For starters, Nantucket is easy to get to. Last year was their year to be with Jennifer’s mother in San Francisco, which involved cross-country flights and, by obvious necessity, also involved Jennifer’s mother, Beverly, who is trying on her best day. Secondly, the inn is cozy and Nantucket is both festive and charming at the holidays. Mitzi is an uneven cook, but she does a pretty good job with this meal and she isn’t afraid to delegate. Jennifer has been assigned two salads.
But Jennifer can’t think about the salads, or about Thanksgiving at all, until she gives Danko an answer about Real-Life Rehab. She promised him an answer by Friday the seventeenth. When Jennifer asks for an extension, he gives her through the weekend, but he says he needs an answer by end of business on Monday or the network will hire their second choice.
Jennifer has told no one about the offer or about the fact that she has lost the penthouse project. She did pick up one small job designing and decorating side-by-side nurseries for a fantastically wealthy couple in Back Bay named the Printers, who just found out they’re pregnant with boy-girl twins after twelve years of in vitro. When Jennifer goes to meet with Paige Printer for the first time, she brings along her file of playroom ideas, and Paige loves them so much that Jennifer scores herself a third room to decorate in the Printer home.
The Printer project will take only sixty or seventy hours, sum total, to order for and install. It’s a snack, not a meal, but at least when Jennifer tells Patrick that she’s “off to work,” she’s not lying.
She needs to talk to Patrick! But she wants to think the decision through herself first, and giving real consideration to all the factors involved takes time. She bounces back and forth between Yes, I’ll do the show and No, I won’t with the regularity of a championship tennis rally.
Yes, she’ll do it: There are thousands of interior decorators in the country, and only a couple dozen viable design shows. Jennifer is phenomenally lucky to have been offered a job as the host—not a consultant, and not a pretty accessory to a man. The face, voice, and talent of this show will be Jennifer Quinn. The show has a message; it has a heart. They are rehabbing houses in neighborhoods that desperately need hope. And Jennifer, as a former pill addict, is sending her own message. There is life—a good life—waiting for people out there, postaddiction.
No, she won’t do it: She doesn’t want to be labeled as a pill addict. It’s shameful. It’s a dirty little secret. Danko said there would be endorsements and that her personal business would take off like a rocket, but who wants a known addict to walk into her home? Who wants a known addict repping his products? Nobody, Jennifer thinks. It will be a stain on her character; it’ll be the only thing people will think of when they see her. If she has a bad day, if she loses her temper, if she’s weepy or goofy or impatient or temperamental, people will wonder: Has she had a relapse? Is she back on the pills?
But perhaps the darkest reason Jennifer would say no to Danko’s offer is that once she has announced herself to the country as a recovering addict, she can’t go back on pills. That door—which Jennifer thought was opening ever so slightly a few weeks ago—would be slammed shut and locked forever.
Both the yes and the no arguments are so compelling that she can’t decide between them.
Patrick—she needs to discuss it with Patrick.
But first, for a practice run, Jennifer decides to tell Leanne.
It’s after barre class on Saturday morning, and Leanne has asked Jennifer to go for coffee at Thinking Cup. As soon as they get their coffees, muffins, and yogurt parfaits and sit down at one of the tiny tables, Jennifer leans forward so far that she can smell the cinnamon on the top of Leanne’s cappuccino and says, “I have something to talk to you about, and it’s going to be very difficult for me.”
Leanne says, “I’m a safe place for you, Jennifer. You know that.” She holds up her palms. “No judgment here.”
Jennifer couldn’t have hoped for a better response, and yet she fears Leanne will judge her. How could she not? But Jennifer has to start somewhere; she has forty-eight hours to make a decision. Whatever Leanne advises her to do, she decides, is what she will do.
Jennifer says, “About a year before I met you? While Paddy was in jail? I became addicted to pills. Ativan and oxycodone.”
Leanne gasps, “Oh, Jennifer!”
Here comes the judgment, Jennifer thinks. Leanne won’t want to go to barre class or get coffee anymore. She won’t want to be friends anymore. When people ask who decorated her house, she’ll say, “A former pill junkie named Jennifer Quinn.”
Leanne grabs Jennifer’s hand. “I feel honored that you’ve shared this with me. It must have been a difficult time for you.”
Jennifer lets a few tears fall into her latte. “It was,” Jennifer says. She blots her face with a napkin and thinks: Of course Leanne knows exactly what to say and how to react. “You don’t think I’m a horrible person?”
“Oh, sweetie,” Leanne says. “How could I ever think that?”
Jennifer proceeds to tell her the rest of the story: How she met with Grayson Coker, how he hit on her, how she quit. How Paddy is struggling to get his hedge fund up and running, how both he and Jennifer were depending on the penthouse project for money. How Jennifer has been approached to host a show on SinTV.
Here Leanne shrieks like a fangirl. “SinTV!”
“But I’d have to reveal myself as a former addict,” Jennifer says.
“Do it,” Leanne says. “You have to do it.”
“I’m not sure that I can,” Jennifer says.
“Why not?” Leanne says. “This is your big chance. So you tell the world you’re a recovering addict. People will care for five minutes, then they’ll forget. And the people who care longer than five minutes are those who are either recovering addicts themselves or who have addicts in their family—and to those people you’ll be an inspiration. A beacon of hope.”
“You think?” Jennifer says.
“You need to choose bravery over shame,” Leanne says. “Humility over pride. Otherwise, you’re hiding in the shadows. You think substance abuse doesn’t affect the affluent? The sophisticated? That addicts don’t live in Beacon Hill or Back Bay?” Leanne leans in. “It affects everyone.” She digs into her yogurt parfait. “I, for one, would be behind you a hundred and ten percent. And I can tell you without equivocation that Derek will be behind you as well. What does Patrick say?”
Jennifer raises her eyebrows.
“You haven’t told him?” Leanne says.
Jennifer picks a raisin out of her bran muffin. She shakes her head.
“Go home now,” Leanne says. She helps Jennifer wrap her muffin and secure the top to her latte. “Go home and tell him, and then call me later so I can hear about how wonderful he was.”
Patrick is in his office, of course, running through the close of Friday’s markets on the computer. The two younger boys are in the den playing Minecraft, and Barrett is at the Celtics game with his friend Saylor and Saylor’s father, Gregory. Gregory is in AA—he’s very open about this—and Jennifer doesn’t think less of him for it, does she? No. She doesn’t worry about Barrett when he’s in Gregory’s care. Why would she? Getting help is a sign of strength, of wisdom.
Jennifer closes the door to the office. “I need you to shut down the computer,” she says to Patrick. “I have something to tell you.”