“Nobody puts Baby in a corner,” I said, smiling.
“I just can’t imagine staying in a place like this all summer,” Ben said. “Seems like kind of a snobby, unrealistic way to raise your children.”
I felt my forehead wrinkle. I had always figured that I would spend my summers at the beach like my family had, raise my children on this same strip of sand that had raised me. “I guess it isn’t the real world, but I think it’s amazing to get to have this time that’s so carefree.”
Before I could elaborate, I felt a finger on my shoulder. I turned my head and hoped that my gasp wasn’t audible.
I hadn’t laid eyes on Holden Culpepper since the night I stormed out of his car more than a year earlier. In that instant, our entire past flashed before me, like the building was collapsing and I knew I was trapped. That completely forgettable face, with the mousy brown hair that was thick but somehow fell short of luscious orbeautiful, was peering at me. It was like looking at a man come back from the dead. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d even thought about him.
Oddly, the first thing he said to me, before we could even exchange hellos, was “Do you remember the night we met?”
I backed up nearly imperceptibly, afraid of where the conversation was going. But I remembered anyway. I was a freshman and he was a senior when I spotted Holden alone in the corner of a crowded fraternity house, music blaring, strobes flashing and smoke of every imaginable kind mingling through the orgy of dancers.
“That’s Holden Culpepper,” my big sister in the sorority had whispered, stumbling on grass-stained, five-inch heels. She was one of those girls that bleached her hair so the dark roots always showed through, the kind of girl that you knew would still be smoking a pack a day, stumbling drunk down the sidewalk at forty, while ruminating—loudly—that she hadn’t found a husband up to her impossible standards.
“You know, his dad’s the Culpepper Fund.” Then she leaned in closer and, with her thick breath, said, “Apparently Holden’s worth five million dollars already—and he’s only twenty-one.”
Casey would have been going after Holden herself, but she was already taken. She was dating her fraternity-president cocaine dealer, Jack, who was tall, dark, handsome and one hell of a dancer. “I like a self-made man,” she used to say. I could always picture Jack’s face on the front page of a newspaper, when he was all grown up, a captain of enterprise with a magazine-spread family, being dragged away to white-collar prison by his perky bow tie.
Holden, on the other hand, was precisely the kind of man a mother dreams her daughter will marry. Type A, straitlaced and possessing the kind of trust fund that generally only appears inTown& Country. And he had been what I wanted. When I had been that superficial college girl, enamored of money and appearances, Holden was exactly the kind of catch I was looking to hook.
Coming out of my memory and back into the present, I squinted at Holden, realizing his question was still hanging there, the last summer item on the sale rack. “Sure.” I shrugged.
“Well, you were right,” he said.
“Right about what?”
“White lighters.”
I smiled in spite of myself. I had walked to Holden that night and leaned beside him on a nonfunctioning radiator. I crossed my arms, looked down at his hands and sparked my lighter to the end of the cigarette hanging between his lips. He smiled out of one corner of his mouth and said, “Isn’t that supposed to go the other way around?”
I had shrugged and leaned in close enough that my bare shoulder brushed his blue-and-white-checked one. He was wearing my favorite combination: neat khaki shorts with an oxford, Gucci loafers and a monogrammed belt buckle.
“I guess it should,” I said. “But I looked over and saw what you were about to do, and I didn’t want you to be cursed.”
He looked confused, which made me notice a small scar over his eyebrow that lent his face something distinct. “White lighters,” I said. “Don’t you know they’re bad luck?”
I had thought I was completely in control of that conversation until the moment he stunned me, saying, “White lighter or no, seems like this night has been pretty lucky for me.”
“So why,” I asked Holden, snapping back into the clear sunshine of the present, “was that white lighter bad luck for you?”
“I didn’t catch a single fish today.” He smiled nervously.
I couldn’t decide if I was more pleased or confused by thisconversation. I would have imagined that Holden hated me, that he wished we’d never even met. But here he was, pleasant and joking, remembering with a smile what had transpired between us.
“Thanks for getting—well, you know—back to my mom.”
I nodded. “Right,” I stammered. “Well, it wasn’t right to keep the ring.”
The ring—the five-carat art deco family heirloom—was what Holden gave me, down on one knee at Jost Van Dyke, in the midst of one of the most famous New Year’s parties in the world. The glow of the lights from hundreds of boats crammed into the tiny harbor was almost as intoxicating as the rum punch or Kenny Chesney’s sweet voice on stage—an impromptu surprise from the star who was just a partygoer like everyone else that night.
It was a glorious beginning to what turned out to be a tepid engagement. Squinting at Ben’s back as he ordered, I realized that Holden was talking again, and, already, I wasn’t listening to what he was saying.
It was such a reminder of life with Holden after he had graduated from MBA school and the party was officially over. Every sentence out of his mouth started and ended with something about work or the market or a pain-in-the-ass client. I hadn’t seen him in more than a year, and it seemed like pretty much nothing had changed. When he started ditching our plans and all of our friends because he was working almost every weekend, that was the last straw. I had begun to feel as though the dress had appeared much more glamorous on the runway than in real life. Or maybe it just didn’t look as good on me as it did on the model.
That last night, heading down a Charlotte, North Carolina, highway on our way to his parents’ for dinner, I had spent my day at inane cake tastings, dress fittings, florist appointments and, in short,had had just about enough. As he blabbed on and on and on about mutual fund performance, I said, “Your cruise control isn’t working.”
“Of course it’s working,” he said. “It’s a brand-new Range Rover, for God’s sake. You just hit this button.” He leaned over me to instruct.
