Page 7 of Sunset on the Solstice

Shelby furrowed her brow. The last thing she wanted to do was get a bit tipsy on a date and say all the wrong things. Unless not drinking was weirder than drinking? Her palms were sweaty, and she realized she’d begun to overthink everything. When he asked her a question about her time at Columbia, she found herself talking a mile a minute about one of her professors, who’d told Shelby that she’d written a very academic if “terribly boring” paper that would “set her up well” for applying for grad school.

“He said it was boring?” Hank looked briefly confused.

“I mean, he said it ‘fit’ what grad schools want,” Shelby said. “But I guess it wasn’t really a compliment?” She wasn’t sure why that was the story she’d chosen to tell. There were numerous other Columbia-related stories she might have chosen instead. Stories that made her seem interesting and smart and creative. Probably.

Her stomach tightened into knots. She’d sort of assumed dating was like anything else—an exchange of information and then saying “goodbye.” But she now understood something: Hank had agreed to this dinner thinking that maybe something would brew between them, that there would be sparks. Maybe he’d imagined kissing her at the end of the night. Had she imagined kissing him? She filled her mouth with Diet Coke and told herself she couldn’t go into the bathroom and call Lily for help. That would be the most pathetic thing of all.

Somehow, some way, Shelby and Hank made their way through dinner before Hank either faked or really had a phone call that tugged him away. He paid the bill, then told her he had a really good time. “Let’s do this again,” he said.

“Really?” Shelby blinked at him. Had he had a completely different experience than she did?

“Yeah,” Hank said, leading her out of the restaurant. “It was cool to meet you.”

Back at home, Shelby sat on the sofa with Chad and a few of Chad’s friends, watching a basketball game. It was raining, and lightning rocketed across the Nantucket Sound. She knew that it was standard protocol for Lily to talk to her clients before and after their dates, which meant that Hank had probably called her and told her what he thought one way or the other. Lily was out with Mick, but she’d be home soon. Shelby told herself not to hide in her room.

When Lily came into the living room, her eyes were falsely bright and shining. “Shelby?” She said happily. “How was it?”

The last thing Shelby wanted to do was talk about her date with Hank in front of Chad and his friends, so she followed Lily to Lily’s bedroom, where Lily closed the door and tried to maintain a feeling of positivity and “good energy.”

“So I don’t know if Hank is a perfect match,” Lily said. “But that was only your first date!”

Shelby, who’d never failed at anything outside of social situations, felt her heart crumple in on itself. She sat at the edge of Lily’s bed and put her head in her hands.

“He didn’t like me,” she said into her palms. She suddenly felt so stupid and naive, like those girls at Columbia University who gave away their hearts and minds to men.

“That isn’t it,” Lily said. “Plenty of people go out, talk, and find they have nothing in common.” She rubbed Shelby’s back, then asked, “Did you think you had things in common?”

“I mean, no,” Shelby said. But her eyes were filled with tears, and she understood: rejection was what she’d been avoiding all these years, not romance, not love.

4

Livingston, Montana

It was the evening after Shelby met their nosy neighbor Vivian, who’d strode across the stream and involved herself where she wasn’t wanted. Shelby still couldn’t get the memory of that woman’s gaze from her mind. Vivian had seen the light bruising around Shelby’s wrist, and she’d given Shelby a knowing look, one meant to tell her, I’m here if you need me. You aren’t trapped. I can help you. But there was so little that woman knew about Shelby, about Shelby’s children, and about Shelby’s husband. There was so little Vivian could understand from a glance.

Now, Shelby’s husband was out for the night, and Shelby’s three children were tucked away in bed, dreaming their dreams. It was eight thirty, which meant that Shelby still had another two or three hours before she wanted to go to bed herself and probably another four hours till her husband got back from wherever he was. Usually, when she was alone and the only one awake, there were countless chores to be done. Usually, she set about preparing for tomorrow: packing lunches, prepping breakfasts, or doing any of the innumerable tasks in their house of five people, going on six.

But for some reason, Shelby wanted to spend time within her own head today.

She didn’t want to break her back doing another minute of work.

She wondered if it was Chad’s wedding invitation that had made her so thoughtful and lazy. After she’d opened the letter, she’d known immediately to hide it from her husband, tucking it into the back corner of her dresser drawer, the one where she kept her personal underwear and toiletries. She didn’t want her husband to know that her family knew where they lived. She didn’t want to talk about it.

Then again, she didn’t want to let herself fantasize about attending the wedding. It was an impossibility, something she needed to shove out of her mind.

They had very few books in the house, and all of them had been written by men: Herman Melville, Ernest Hemingway, William Shakespeare, William Faulkner. Shelby had read all of them back at Columbia University. But right now, she ached for the kind of stories that they hadn’t told—female-driven stories that spoke of romance and heartache and women’s inner lives.

Shelby had moved quite a few of her notebooks from the East Coast to Montana, but she kept them hidden, also in her dresser drawers. Now, she tugged a few of them out and spread them on the dining room table, flipping through their pages to read her old and hopeful writing. Back in high school and early college, she’d loved writing love stories. She’d loved dipping into romance genres and subverting them. She’d loved building characters and worlds and finding new and interesting ways to build emotionality on the page.

She’d hardly written anything since she’d gotten married. There had been so much heartache and drama back then, so much life to be lived, that she hadn’t had time to put it on the page. Should she write about it now? she wondered. But rather than write of anything real, anything that had actually happened, she picked up her pen and started to write another romance, something silly that could take her away from her chores and her children and all their needs.

For more than an hour, she wrote, until her wrist felt numb and her heart felt floaty. In her romance novel, she crafted a twentysomething heroine who loved reading and going on adventures alone. She found herself falling in love with her own descriptions and the way they pulled her out of her life. She forgot about her pregnancy nausea. She forgot about all the dishes still in the sink.

Her wrist throbbing, Shelby decided to take a break. Her mind lost to stories of romance, and her heart thinking again about Chad’s upcoming wedding, she set the pages aside, then went to the bookshelf, where she dug around behind the Shakespeare and the Faulkner to find the little photo album. In it, she’d slotted the twenty-four photos they’d taken of themselves on their wedding day. The first was a photograph of only Shelby and her husband, holding hands, gazing into one another’s eyes. The looks on their faces seemed to say, We’ve fallen in love against all odds. We’re going to fight through this life together. Nobody else understands us. Nobody else can comprehend our love.

Despite everything, the photos touched Shelby’s heart.

After that, in the album were other photographs, ones of Shelby with her sister Lily and her mother Rebecca, wherein only Shelby was smiling, trying to generate for them the joy she wished they had for her. There was one of her husband with his parents, who scowled in the way they always scowled, being from out East and from so much money and expectation. There was a picture of their families together, with Shelby and her husband in the middle, Shelby clutching a bouquet and grinning. Every other face in the photograph was shadowed, as though they’d been put under some curse.