“Sorry,” she muttered, and the guy inside the sweatshirt caught her elbow and said, “Hey, hey.”Fantastic,was her first thought. Another guy grabbing at her, just what she needed. She lifted her eyes.
“You okay?” said the guy. The sweatshirt was white, or off-white—she couldn’t be sure under the dim outdoor lights—and said “Saint” in purple and “Michael’s” in gold. It was wildly unfashionable. She had seen this guy earlier, with Shelby McIntyre, who was a year ahead of Alexa, and some sort of cross-country star at UVM. (Cross country was a sport Alexa had never understood—it seemed hard and cold and messy—although the coach at the high school was said to be legendary.)
“Yes,” she said. “Fine. Just going inside.” It was then that she remembered the reason Zoe Butler-Gray always brought out the IPA at parties—not the pilsner—was because it had an alcohol content of about a million percent. She remembered that just about the same time she remembered that she had eaten neither lunch nor dinner before the vodka. She felt herself beginning to fall.
6.
The Squad
We took the center table at Plum Island Grille, the only one long enough to accommodate us. Some of us, arriving early, had met beforehand in the bar on the other side of the restaurant, from which you could see the famous Plum Island salt marshes and the turnpike (a grand name for a short stretch of road) we had just driven over to get there. Except for Esther, who lived on the island and had walked down. It was the only time of year it was in any way convenient to be Esther.
In the distance, if we squinted, we could see, or imagined we could see, the Pink House, long empty, much speculated about, which sits in the center of the marsh, paint peeling, roof leaking, cupola choked with birds’ nests. The Pink House was built in 1925 as part of a divorce settlement by a disgruntled husband for his ex-wife.You want your own house?the husband is rumored to have said.I’ll build you a house!And, bam, he built a house, in beautiful isolation.
After a time we repaired to our table to meet those who had just arrived. One of us couldn’t make it, and we were somewhat surprised to find that Brooke Kearney had taken it upon herself (without consulting the rest of us) to invite the new woman, Katie’s mother, to fill the spot. Sherri. With ani.Sherri from the beach.
We were surprised, but we weren’t going to be rude about it.We are nothing if not welcoming. Even though the look Esther shot Brooke when she realized what had happened . . . some of us agreed after the fact that that was borderline impolite.
It was a birthday! We started out with tequila shots, twelve of them, with twelve slices of lime and four salt shakers to share. That is how we always do birthdays. It was a good tequila, a Clase Azul, which had just come on the scene for us, and was so smooth you didn’t really need the lime. Then appetizers: tempura oysters, shrimp cocktail, crab cakes.
Sherri didn’t seem to have any compunction about ordering the surf and turf, we all noted. The rest of us stuck to the grill board with swordfish and pineapple salsa. It was bathing suit season, after all.
With the tequila, and the cocktails that followed, Sherri became a little more animated. Her clothing choices were just this side of okay—when one of us tucked in the label to her dress for her (It was sticking out! We weren’t snooping!), we noticed that it said Ann Taylor Loft. That’s just an observation, not a judgment. She’d worn lipstick, which was brighter than the rest of ours, and mascara, though studying her some of us thought that eyelash extensions would do wonders. Her mascara was clumping. It was hard to put a finger specifically on the rest of what was wrong. Well, nothing waswrong. But something was off. That’s the best way to put it. Something desperate in her laugh? Yes, that’s just it, that’s what it was. Something desperate.
7.
Rebecca
Rebecca took a bite of her scallops and thought,I don’t even know these women.She thought,These people are strangers to me. We were thrown together by happenstance, that’s all. Happenstance and geography.These were thoughts she’d been having more and more often lately. It wasn’t that she didn’t like her friends anymore, that wasn’t exactly right—it was that nobody here knew what to do with her sadness after Peter. Immediately after, sure: there was the food and the offers to take over carpools and so forth. But after a time, Rebecca could tell that secretly they thought (and maybe sometimes talked among themselves) that it was about time for Rebecca to get on with it. They wanted the old Rebecca back, the one who planned trips and organized sleepovers. They didn’t understand that that Rebecca was gone forever.
Brooke had invited an outsider to Esther’s birthday dinner, which was clearly vexing Esther, though she was trying her best not to show it. Rebecca considered the new woman, who was sitting next to her. She had seen her on the beach at surf camp, but Rebecca had been on the phone with Daniel for a lot of the morning. Daniel’s brother-in-law was having problems with his daughter, who was thirteen, and Daniel was trying to help him by having her stay with him while his brother-in-law went on a business trip to Cincinnati. Now Daniel himself was having trouble with the girl.
The woman was Sherri “with ani” (that was how she introduced herself, as though theiwere of particular value, a bonus). All Rebecca knew about her was that she had a daughter the same age as all of the girls and that she had moved from somewhere (Illinois?) after a divorce.
“Nice to meet you,” Rebecca had said automatically, even though it wasn’t, not really. She’d been reared on a steady diet of politeness—thank-you notes for every gift, a kind word for any person she ran across—and she’d carried many of these habits into adulthood and tried to instill them in her own children. But manners were thing number 758 that no longer mattered to Rebecca after Peter.
“Oh, hey!” said Esther, who sat on Rebecca’s other side. Alcohol always made Esther’s fair skin flush the color of a spring radish. “I’ve been meaning to say, it’s really too bad, what happened with Alexa and her friends. I heard the three of them don’t hang out anymore.”
Rebecca, startled out of her reverie, was surprised into showing her surprise. “Destiny and Caitlin?” she asked. (Rebecca had been wondering for months what had happened between Alexa and those two, but the answer was somewhere in Alexa’s vault, locked away, unattainable.) “Nothinghappened,” she added.
Esther assessed Rebecca’s ignorance too quickly. “Of course not,” she said.
“Why?” Faced with Esther’s knowing look Rebecca had no choice but to ask. “What didyouhear happened?”
“Oh my gosh,nothing!” said Esther. “I didn’t hear anything.” She put a hand nervously to her earlobe as if checking for a lost earring. “I just meant—I mean, I heard it had something to do with Alexa’s plans for next year. But you know what? I could be totally off-base. I’m not even sure who I heard that from, now that I think about it. I’m probably thinking of someone else entirely.”
Rebecca concentrated for a moment on the buzzing of the other conversations going on around her. She heard Georgia cry out, with a loud laugh, “We’ll have to get rid of her!”
“Alexa’s plan for next year is to go to Colby.” Rebecca didn’t sayas you know,and she didn’t say,obviously,but both were implied. Rebecca would not get caught up in the wasp’s nest of competing agendas. She would finish her scallops, and she would go home, and she would call Daniel to say good night, and she would be asleep by ten thirty.
Then she noticed that the woman on the other side of her, Sherri with ani,didn’t look quite right. Rebecca laid a hand on her arm and said, “Are you okay?”
“Completely fine,” said Sherri. “Really. It’s just a little warm in here, that’s all. Do you feel warm?”
“I do,” said Rebecca (she didn’t). She didn’t believe that it was the temperature. The woman looked to be in some distress. Her dress was droopy and her eyes were droopy and Rebecca could bet that underneath it all her soul was droopy. A divorce was a loss of a high order: not the death of a person, but the death of a union. Esther had turned away from Rebecca to talk to Dawn, and Rebecca leaned closer to the poor broken creature on her right.
“Tequila does that to me too,” she whispered. “I always have seltzer as my second drink. Sometimes I just can’t keep up.”
Sherri with anisaid, “Smart,” and gave Rebecca a grateful glance, and Rebecca felt a small, empathetic, recently underused part of herself begin to unfurl.
