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Caroline focuses her camera on the woman emerging from the Pilot’s passenger side. Caroline thinks,Well, that’s where Dylan gets his looks.Tatum is tall and slender and has long, dark, movie-star hair. She’s dressed in cutoff jeans and a navy-blue Whalers Lacrosse T-shirt. Tatum and Hollis hug—Caroline can’t help noticing that Tatum looks ten years younger than her mother—and then a burly guy with a seventies porn ’stache gets out of the driver’s side and Hollis says, “Hey, Kyle.” Caroline zooms in on her mother and Kyle McKenzie as they hug and rock back and forth. “It issogreat to see you,” Hollis says. “Thank you for driving our girl all the way out here. I’ll take good care of her, I promise.”
Kyle says, “Someone wants to say hello.”
At that moment, the back door of the Pilot opens and a bald guy with a silver goatee gets out. He’s pretty cute for a dad type and, wow, is he laser-focused on Hollis. Caroline turns the camera on her mother just in time to catch the shock on her face. This is an ambush of some kind, Caroline can see that, but who is this dude?
He steps forward, saying, “Hey, Halle Berry.” (Caroline will only realize when she views the footage later that he says “Holly berry,” not “Halle Berry.”) And Hollis whispers, “Jack?” like she’s a character in a period drama whose lover, reportedly killed in battle, has returned. They walk toward each other—but stop when they’re about a foot apart.
Caroline holds her breath. What is her motherdoingright now?
Jack extends his arms. “Come here.”
And Hollis goes to him.
Caroline lowers the camera. She doesn’t want to be the daughter who becomes indignant and jealous when her mother has a “moment” with somebody she used to know—but too bad, she is that daughter. Her face flushes, and she kind of wants to scream.
But she knows what Isaac would say: She should have stayed and gotten the shot. Conflict equals content. That dude, whoever he is, is a chink in the armor.
Jack Finigan,Hollis thinks once she’s in his arms. She sees ghosts of him whenever she passes Nantucket High School or drives out to Great Point; she sees him every time she’s at the Boat Basin because he and Kyle spent their summers working as first mates on fishing charters while Hollis and Tatum waited tables at the Rope Walk. They would all meet up after work, the boys with a couple of striped bass collars and the girls with the night’s leftover lobsters and a six-pack of Pabst, and they would head out to Fortieth Pole in Kyle’s beater CJ-7 and cook everything over a fire as they listened to Billy Joel on the Jeep’s tape deck.My sweet romantic teenage nights!
Hollis and Jack had been each other’s first everything; they had grown up together. Jack Finigan taught Hollis how to love.
She’d seen him once from afar on Main Street a bunch of years ago. It was around then that she began stalking the poor man on Facebook.
“I’m sorry about your husband,” he murmurs into her hair.
She takes a breath and pulls away. She’s aware they have an audience, one of whom is her daughter with a video camera. Jack’s arrival is very off brand for the Five-Star Weekend, which is supposed to be about her relationships withwomen.
Jack is a star of another kind.
“There’s too much…” she says. “Can we talk later?”
“Of course,” he says. “It was probably unfair of me to show up like this, but wild horses, you know.”
“We’ll ride them someday,”she says. It’s a song that’s so muchtheirsong she hasn’t been able to listen to it in thirty-five years; whenever it comes on the car radio, she changes the station.
Hollis turns to see Tatum and Kyle kissing goodbye, and she feels seventeen again.
Jack gets in the car. “Come on, Mom and Dad!” he calls out the window.
At that moment, Dru-Ann steps out of the guest cottage and thinks,What fresh hell is this?
Jack waves. “Hey there, Dru-Ann, it’s Jack Finigan.”
There’s a name from the past,Dru-Ann thinks. She squints at the bald dude and, wow, she gets sucked right back in time.
Jack Finigan shows up halfway through their first semester at UNC in his father’s pickup (which, it turns out, he’s driven seven hundred and fifty miles without permission). He knocks on the door of Hollis and Dru-Ann’s dorm room in Old East holding a bouquet of red roses that he must have grabbed out of a plastic bucket at the Kroger on Shannon Drive because the stems are still dripping. Hollis is at her American lit seminar and will be gone for two hours. The kid’s face crumples at this news. Honestly, he looks like he’s going to cry, and Dru-Ann can’t stand to see anyone cry. She’s happy for a distraction from her macroeconomics reading, so she takes Jack on a tour of the campus; she shows him Old West, Wilson Library, the Dean Dome (of course), the bell tower, and the Old Well.
“This used to be an actual well that students back in olden days would dip a ladle in anddrink from,” Dru-Ann tells him. Now it’s a water fountain, and during freshman orientation there was a line a mile long. Supposedly, drinking from the fountain as a freshman meant you would have a 4.0 GPA, and most people, including Hollis, just could not help themselves.
Jack gives the Old Well one second of his attention. He couldn’t care less, and can Dru-Ann blame him? He’s there only to see Hollis. Hollis has a collage of photos on the wall over her bed, and Jack appears in nearly all of them, but Hollis told Dru-Ann that they broke up right before she left.
Broke up,Dru-Ann thinks—and yet this poor kid drove thirteen hours, stopping only to relieve himself and buy those sad-ass flowers.
When Hollis gets back from class and sees Jack, she gasps and hugs him and seems overcome… but not entirely happy. The two of them go for dinner at Hector’s, and as they’re walking back to the dorm, Hollis breaks Jack’s heart (again). But Hollis is the one who stays up all night crying, and she keeps the roses on her desk until they wither, then presses the damn things in her copy ofBartlett’s Familiar Quotations.
After winter break, the collage comes down and is replaced by Monet’s water lilies. But for the next three and a half years, every time Hollis gets drunk, who pops up in the conversation? Jack Finigan. He’s not exactly the one who got away, but he’s something. Dru-Ann will tolerate five minutes, sometimes ten, of Jack-talk, but that’s her limit. The best thing about Hollis falling in love with the cute surgery resident in Boston, Matthew Madden, is that Dru-Ann no longer has to hear about Jack.
Except now, here he is.
