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Tatum can’t bring herself to echoHey, sis,though she does say, “I’m sorry about Matthew.” She shoves her phone in her back pocket and gives Hollis a real hug, squeezing her with both arms. Tatum had read Matthew’s obituary in theNantucket Standard,but she and Kyle opted not to attend the funeral in Wellesley. Now, of course, Tatum feels bad about that. She’s been meaning to send a card but she isn’t good with words like Hollis is, and she told herself that anything she sent would just get lost in the outpouring of love from Hollis’s crazed social media followers.
This now seems like a terrible misjudgment. If Kyle died (Tatum shudders even thinking about it, she loves the man so much) and Hollis didn’t acknowledge the loss in any way, Tatum would never forgive her. “And I’m sorry I didn’t call or write or come to the service. I did absolutely nothing.”
“But you’re coming this weekend,” Hollis says.
Tatum wipes at her eyes. She can run away from Hollis all she wants, but the fact remains that Hollis is the first person, other than her family, that Tatum ever loved.
“I’ll be there.” It’s now Tatum’s turn at the counter; she gives Amy the ticket, and a moment later, Amy hangs the pastel array of Mr. Albright’s shirts on the hook.
“Are thoseKyle’s?” Hollis says. “I can’t imagine him wearing pink… or peach.”
Tatum checks her phone: 8:58. “These are for a client.”
“Client?”
“I clean and run errands for…” She doesn’t have time to catch Hollis up. “I have to go. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Everyone’s getting in around four,” Hollis says.
Four works,Tatum thinks. She finishes work at three, then she’ll pick up Orion from day care and go home to pack. Or maybe she’ll pack tonight, and tomorrow afternoon she’ll treat herself to a blowout at RJ Miller. “See you then.” She leaves with a wave. She has approximately sixty seconds to make it to the Albrights’ house.
She opens the back door of her elderly Honda Pilot, sweeps Cheez-It crumbs off Orion’s booster seat, and carefully lays down Mr. Albright’s shirts. She has togo—but she can’t stop herself from heading back inside.
“Holly?” she says. “Who else is coming to this thing?”
Hollis smiles. “I didn’t tell you?”
“No,” Tatum says. She didn’t ask because she didn’t really care. Hollis’s friends are all interchangeable—all wealthy, watching their weight, debating plastic surgery, trying to get their children into Ivy League schools.
Hollis folds the list she’s still holding and reinforces the creases with her nails. “It’s a thing called the Five-Star Weekend,” she says. “So I invited one best friend from each phase of my life.”
Each phase of her life?Tatum thinks.What does that even mean?
“My friend Brooke from Wellesley is coming. Dru-Ann is coming. And the fourth is Gigi, a woman I met on my website. I’ve actually… never met her in real life, but she seems cool.”
Tatum nods briskly. She realizes the hook is that Hollis has invited someone she’s never even met to her house (who does that?), but Tatum’s attention is snagged by the second name.
Dru-Ann. Ugh.
Tatum opens her mouth to say,After your wedding, I hoped never to see Dru-Ann again.
But at that moment, Hollis steps up to the counter and says to Amy, “I’m here to pick up shirts for Matthew Shaw?”
The words are a bucket of cold water on Tatum’s indignation. If Hollis can be brave enough to pick up her dead husband’s dry cleaning, then Tatum can deal with Dru-Ann Jones for a weekend.
When she gets back in the car, her phone rings. The display saysNantucket Cottage Hospital.
Tatum flounders for a second. Should she answer it or not?Yes!she thinks. Then:No, no—she isn’t prepared, and she doesn’t have time. She hits Decline.
When she left the biopsy appointment the day before, the doctor said the results would be in “early next week,” which Tatum assumed meant Monday or Tuesday. Today is only Thursday. Why are they calling so soon? Does she definitely have cancer? Or does she definitely not? An alert sounds—voice mail. Her phone is now radioactive; Tatum is afraid to touch it. She lights a cigarette and inhales deeply. She wants to call Kyle but he’s got a big AC-install job at a new build out in Sconset where there’s no cell service.
When Tatum pulls up in front of the Albrights’ house at 9:02, Irina is waiting on the front porch. Irina is six feet tall with dyed yellow hair yanked into a ponytail; her upright posture—shoulders back, breasts thrust forward—reminds Tatum of an Olympic javelinist. Irina likes to go out on the town with a similarly built friend, Veda, who’s brunette to Irina’s “blond.” The two of them wear full makeup and sharp perfumes, and there’s nothing subtle about them or their mission—hunting rich men.
Tatum stubs out the cigarette and grabs the bags from the Stop and Shop and Mr. Albright’s shirts, which slid off the back seat into the footwell because Tatum was driving like a bat out of hell. Tatum couldn’t care less about Mr. Albright’s shirts. Tatum has serious beef with Mr. Albright, to be honest.
Do I have cancer?
When Tatum was a senior in high school, her mother, Laura Leigh—one of the coolest, most beautiful women ever to grace the planet, in Tatum’s opinion—was diagnosed with aggressive metastatic breast cancer (back then, the doctors didn’t say much about stages, but Tatum figured that Laura Leigh had probably been at stage eleven). She underwent the kind of chemo that left her curled around the base of the toilet twenty-three hours a day—Tatum remembers the moaning, the dramatic weight loss, Laura Leigh’s long cinnamon-colored hair falling out by the handful, leaving her as bald as a cue ball. She was dead nine weeks after the diagnosis; the line “You have six months to live” ended up being a pipe dream.
