“Wrong place, wrong time of day,” Anna said. “But seriously. How did this happen? And also, how did this happen without Mimi?”
Glances again. It was as if her two friends had developed a secret language behind her back. Mimi’s name hung in the air. Anna thought about her meeting with Mimi, at Honeycomb, how different everything had been back then. Sitting at this same table, sunlight in their eyes, Mimi had been the main attraction. If they had stayed for half the morning instead of half an hour, the town would have come in to greet her the way they were now greeting Anna.
“You did this, so don’t undersell yourself,” said Mary.
“I do want to say something, though. About all this,” Anna said.
“Take a bow,” Di said.
“No, it’s not a valedictory,” Anna said. “It’s about the . . . other stuff. The bad stuff. It’s been weighing on me, I guess.”
Mary and Di exchanged glances. They gave Anna the floor.
“It’s just that—it’s not that I take any of this stuff seriously, exactly. The texts, or the stupid notes, or even the people who have been icing me out. But I do wonder if this is just going to make all of it worse.”
Mary nodded. “I see what you’re saying. I think it’s probably safe to assume that it’s going to get worse if you win,” she said.
“Right,” Anna said. “Am I prepared for that?”
“Only you can answer that question,” Di said.
“This shouldn’t be this difficult,” Anna said.
“Being a star never is,” Di said.
In truth, Anna hadn’t spent much time entertaining the thought of it—that she could really be the president of the PTO. But now she was close. She could win. She could make a difference in a town where iniquity was practically baked into thepain au chocolat. And Anna Plummer realized, suddenly, that she very much wanted this. She wanted to win, wanted to be wanted. For all the things that she had given up because she was sure that she was not quite good enough (Richter be damned), she was following through to the bitter end because she knew that she would be an excellent president—kind, respectful, thoughtful, willing to listen, open to new ideas. If she had given up on things before because she thought she was not quite good enough, this was an inflection point. She was not only good enough; she was great. Hamilton could be great with her help. She believed that, too.
And here she was, one January later, same place, different crowd. Mimi Mar, dethroned, except not really. That was just a vision. Anna had never quite recovered from that look, that one dark look Mimi had given her at this very table. She would not forget that look.
The forecasters were warning of snow, but for now it was just cold and icy. Anna ducked back into the house before the kids returned from school. Denny never asked where she was going or where she had been.
Denny came in from the shed as the sun was slipping into the trees. “Should we just go out?” he said, rubbing his hands together from the cold. He did have an uncanny way of knowing when she was unprepared for dinner. And she was unprepared. Her mind had been elsewhere, with the little black book and the notes of what to fix in Hamilton and with all the things she would have to do if she actually did win.
“That’s fine. We can just head over to the Tavern.”
“Whatever you want. Can I jump in the shower?” She nodded. And she wondered what Denny would think of all of this—that Anna Plummer was about to be the Queen Bee. She’d have to tell him eventually, but maybe it could just wait until after the election. Maybe he would laugh and laugh, the way he had when they were just a couple of kids on the Montauk docks.
“Take your time,” she said, and she meant it. The kids peeled their backpacks off like snakes slithering out of old skin and darted into the playroom, ignoring her completely. In the family room, she looked at that damned green velvet couch, which had been a mistake. Jewel-toned in the pictures, but they didn’t tell you what could happen if you had a dog.
“Alexa, play Joni Mitchell,” she said into the silence, and at once the room swelled with music, the kind of melancholy music that Di was always getting on her case about.Don’t listen to that bullshit around me. It just makes me depressed.Joni wishing for her river that she could skate away on, teaching her feet to fly. A river so long. That song always came on the radio at Christmas, butit wasn’t really a Christmas song. It was a song about loss, a song about realizing that what you had was no longer there for the taking. Mimi would wake up one cold morning, Anna realized, and discover that it was all gone: the PTO, the presidency, the reign. What then? What would she fight for? Who would she be in Hamilton when she was just another mom?
The songs cycled through. No one ever listened to albums anymore; no one ever listened to the songs in the right order. Joni Mitchell’s career highlights zoomed on the speakers:Mingus, Blue, Clouds, Ladies of the Canyon. Anna’s eyes were just beginning to flutter shut when she heard Denny’s voice from the kitchen, like a ghost, like a lifeline, tugging her back to earth, tugging her back to remind her of all the work that remained undone.
“Are you ready?” he asked. “Are you ready to go?”
Chapter 21
ALL THROUGH THEwrenching fall, Denny struggled to make sense of the pieces. Anna would have said that there were no true coincidences. Sticks and Ellen. Ellen and Mimi. The knotting together of these Hamilton friends and family members. If at first Denny had suspected that this was merely the convergence of people who happened to find themselves in the same place at the same time, he had shifted his perspective. Something about that push at the pool and about Mimi’s web of connections had forced his mind into an uncomfortable space. He couldn’t explain it, but he knew she was responsible somehow. Was it possible that she had looped in a cadre of like-minded conspirators? The crazier and more outlandish the story sounded, the more Denny began to believe that it was possible.
He had opened a fake Instagram account. Finsta, Anna used to call it, even though he never even would have understood how to operate the social media part of his life if it hadn’t been for her. Through the account, he could see Mimi’s stories, charting the end of summer and the start of fall. Mimi was at Crane Beach,in August, head tilted back into the sun, arms up as if in prayer. When fall breezed through, her photos displayed a storybook New England landscape: crimson maple leaves, her rosy-faced daughter in a pumpkin patch, a reel of a nighttime walk through Long Hill, in Beverly, where pathways had been converted into glowing coils of jack-o’-lanterns, and a photo of her cheering on the Pats (fair-weather fan as Denny imagined she was) in a box at Gillette, with a caption designed to make people jealous.Thanks to our friend @sama for the epic seats!She had tagged Sam Altman. Speaking of making people jealous, there was Easter, too, a pastel-perfect Mimi Mar standing alongside her family in front of the White House at the iconic Easter Egg Hunt.
Her outward-facing life was perfect.
Ellen Wilson did not have an Instagram account. Denny had wasted plenty of hours on the computer looking for information about her, but he’d come up short. She had married right out of college and moved from Rowley to Hamilton, according to a local announcement in the paper—and, of course, according to Sticks. That was about all Denny knew. What she did for a living, who she was friends with, how deep her allegiance to Mimi lay: all this remained a mystery, and he wasn’t sure how to begin to solve it.
There was another mystery that lay right in front of him—his wife’s office. Nearly a year had passed now since her death, and Anna’s belongings were still where they’d been, as if they were awaiting her return. Denny had slowly started to throw away some of the things that he could bear to part with: shampoos, toothbrush, and other items in the medicine cabinet. But he had yet to deal with Anna’s office; it still haunted him. Walking past it at night, he could almost see her shadow in the dark, hunched over a chair, working, thinking, leaning into the present as if it were not the past.
The kids asked for waffles for breakfast. Afterward, Denny dressed them up for the cold, reminded them not to lose theirmittens, packed their lunches, and stood at the end of the driveway waiting for the bus to chug by, always at least five minutes off schedule. Normally, he would head back in through the side door, refill his coffee, and duck back out to the shed, but today he walked back in through the kitchen and around to Anna’s office. The gray January light made the room look particularly flat and empty, despite the fact that it was full of Anna’s stuff. Bookshelves of thumbed-through texts, tiny crystal vases, Wedgwood China in various sizes and shapes—all robin’s-egg blue—that she had collected, and papers heaped on a green antique chair.
