“I met Muffy when I lived in New York. I wasn’t there too long, but we stayed close after I left because she hated Manhattan and fine dining, but she’d also invested so much time and energy into being a chef in the fine dining world of Manhattan and couldn’t convince herself to walk away.”
“And yet here she is.”
Sunny took a small sip of wine and set the glass on the table. “Yeah, some unpleasant things went down at her restaurant and that was it. She was done.” She grabbed a piece of bread and ripped it in half. “I met Meara in Boston. Her roommate was doing a semester abroad and I picked up the sublet. We did not love each other at first. It was a little tense, a little awkward. It took us a few weeks to figure out the vibe, and after that it was like we’d been friends forever. Like twins separated at birth. We were going to move into a different apartment after the lease ended, but then she got an amazing job offer in LA and I realized I didn’t want to stay in Boston without her.”
“I take it she didn’t have the two husbands at that point.”
“No, she didn’t meet them until after she moved to California. They came back out this way when some things changed with the husbands’ consulting firm.” She paused to sample the bread. “Bethany is a local, she’s from Rhode Island, and we had a few classes together at the community college while I was there. She started a juice business with her best friend, and when they got it up and running, I helped them with their farmers markets.”
“What happened to the best friend?”
“She sold everything and moved to a farm co-op in New Mexico last year,” Sunny replied easily, as if this was very common.
“Tell me about college,” I said. “I haven’t heard about that.”
She gave me a knowing grin, one that saidLance can’t be trusted to update anyone about anything. “Well, it was a compromise,” she said carefully. “I’d wanted to travel. Just go anywhere at all. I wanted to be somewhere other than this tiny town where everyone knew all about me, and live without anyone hovering around me.” She smiled down at the table, shook her head. “I don’t know if you know this but I was supposed to grow out of the childhood epilepsy. The doctors were convinced that the episodes would taper off—if not completely end—when I was seventeen or eighteen. My parents were skeptical and they said they’d support my travel plans if I could go one full year without a seizure. So, I took business classes at the community college, waited tables, read a lot of books that ended more happily than anything I’d ever experienced.” She leaned back, exhaling in a deep, exhausted way. “And I had a seizure two weeks before that one-year point.”
I took her hand but I wanted to scoop her up and hold her close to me. “I’m so sorry.”
She shrugged like it didn’t matter but it obviously did. “I spent another year at home. Took more classes. Read more books. Started bartending. Had another episode.” She ran her tongue over her teeth and I could see her fighting back the emotion rising inside her. “At that point, I didn’t care about compromises anymore. I had to go find some freedom for myself and I couldn’t let my parents keep me in that safe, protected box any longer. I knew they meant no harm but I was suffocating.”
“I understand that,” I said. And I did. I knew about being suffocated by people who wanted only the best. “Where did you go?”
She rolled her eyes, laughing. “Everywhere? Nowhere? Somewhere in between? I spent two years traveling compulsively. Small trips at first because, really, I’d never even been to a sleepover at that point. I went anywhere that sounded good, even if it was just a quick road trip. New York, of course. Hopped on the train and spent entire days just walking the island of Manhattan, top to bottom. I went all around New England. I worked on Nantucket for a summer, Bar Harbor another summer. Tons of wandering in the off-season. But after that, when I’d moved to Boston and was trying to figure out what to do when Meara left, was when I realized I was not a nomad.”
“That must’ve been the most upsetting realization after everything you’d been through.”
“I was so mad,” she cried, tossing up her hands. “I didn’t really accept it until moving to New York and living there for a few months, and realizing I had a small-town heart. Even though it was super frustrating to find myself back at the start of that loop, I know I needed the time to rebel after all those years of limitations, and my parents needed to see me living on my own and being healthy. I mean, they’ve never recovered from the years when I was very sick. Things got better as I grew up, but they were always waiting for it to get bad again. They’re still waiting.”
“It must’ve been hard on you, as a kid,” I said.
She swept her gaze around the courtyard before answering. “I had a good, loving family that did everything they possibly could to keep me safe. When the epilepsy was at its most unmanageable, my world never stopped getting smaller and smaller. There were only a few safe spaces for me. Everything was dangerous and my freedom was nonexistent. Like, I could read about horses and watch horse movies and I could even go to the Castros’ stables to visit horses but I could never ride a horse because I’d already had too many falls, too many injuries, and everything was too risky for me. And all I could do was build up these angry, silent icebergs because everyone was trying so hard to help me and I just wanted to run away from all thathelp.”
At some point while she was speaking, I realized a few things about Sunny. First, she wasn’t as young as I’d convinced myself she was. This woman was smart and sophisticated and mature in ways that far exceeded her age. The years between us didn’t matter. Not in any way that was worth caring about.
“Enough about me,” she said, brushing some crumbs from her dress. “What’s really going on with your parents?”
I swallowed half the wine in my glass. “The situation is bananas in pajamas.”
“Is that the expression? Not bananapants?”
“Both seem appropriately outrageous to me,” I said. “You know my parents. Right?”
“A bit,” she said with a shrug. “Enough to wave in the grocery store but not so much that we’d stop to chat.”
“Okay, well, you know they’re very kind, very generous. Everyone loves them. Much more than they like me and—”
“We will not be self-deprecating tonight,” she sang.
Another thing I noticed—and had probably known all along—was that Sunny was so much stronger than me. More than most people I knew. But it was the kind of quiet strength that didn’t show itself in any loud, aggressive way. It was steady and unwavering, and though I hadn’t realized it then, I’d heard it every time I pushed her away saying we couldn’t do this, and every time she pushed right back saying we could. Plus the many, many times she refused to let me get away with any shit whatsoever. I loved that about her. I wanted to breathe it like oxygen.
“No one likes me in this town. It’s the truth,” I argued. “Regardless, my parents aren’t the right people to run an oyster company. Great for hostessing, terrible for managing anything. Since I cannot run a restaurant in Rhode Island while living on the other side of the world and having a job of my own, I’ve always hired the most qualified people I could find to run the place for me. The best general manager, the best chef, the best front of house and bar managers, the best oyster farmer. I put all the right pieces in place. And the pieces cracked. I didn’t even see it coming.”
“You are not allowed to blame yourself for this,” she said.
“I should’ve known,” I said. “I should’ve had some clue that things were falling apart. That a goddamn criminal enterprise was being run out of my family’s business.”
“Like you said, you live on the other side of the world and you’ve been working at what I have to assume is a big, demanding job where you’re required to scowl and broodall day long. You cannot blame yourself for anything that happened at SPOC. You did the best you could and shit still happened, which means it was bound to happen regardless of whether you chained yourself to the raw bar and refused to blink.”
