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Dru-Ann comments on SexyBexxx’s post:I was standing up for mental health!But then she deletes it. It’ll only make things worse.
Dru-Ann powers off her phone. She wants to flush it down the toilet but she can’t screw up Hollis’s plumbing. She’d like to bury it in the dunes, but she wouldn’t want anyone to say that Dru-Ann Jones doesn’t care about the environment!
She hears a commotion out in the driveway and for an instant, Dru-Ann worries it’s reporters who have discovered she’s at Hollis’s house and want a statement. This would actually be welcome; maybe Dru-Ann should be proactive and call the press. She has a solid contact atSports Illustrated.She could “break her silence” before her silence breaks her.
Dru-Ann peers out the window. There’s some clown standing on Hollis’s front porch waving his arms and shouting at Brooke.
Not on my watch!Dru-Ann thinks, and she steps outside.
28. Pardon the Interruption I
Caroline gives her mother, who is relaxing out on the beach, a heads-up. “Mr. Kirtley is here. He’s out front. And I think he had a couple pops at the Gazebo.”
“You’re kidding,” Hollis says.
“Not kidding. He asked me to get his wife.”
Hollis groans as she stands up from the chaise. She wakes Brooke up and says, “Brooke, honey, I guess Charlie is here.”
Brooke gives Hollis a glassy stare. “No.”
“He’s out front,” Caroline says. “Everything is okay, I think he’s just looking for you.”
“No,” Brooke says again and she closes her eyes. “Tell him to go to hell.”
Caroline and her mother exchange a look. Should they send Charlie away? Caroline is itching to grab her camera. Conflict is the best content.Look for the chink in the armor.
Brooke slides her feet to the ground, then staggers through the sand toward the house, Hollis and Caroline following behind.
When Brooke steps onto the front porch, Charlie says, “There’s my angel.”
Charlie’s angel.
There was a time when Brooke thought this was the sweetest thing she’d ever heard.
It’s a summer night in 1995, and Brooke is at the Tent in Quincy Marina. She’s dancing with her friends to “Waterfalls” by TLC—it’s the song of the summer—when she feels someone dancing close behind her. When she turns around, she sees a guy who’s cute in that frat-boy way she likes, and she’s flattered that he singled her out rather than her friends Amy and Megan, who are prettier. He says his name is Charlie and Brooke follows him to the bar, where they do kamikaze shots.Gah! Awful!Yet they have the desired effect, at least for Charlie. Brooke goes home with him that night to a town house in Dorchester that he and his brother are meticulously restoring. In the morning when Brooke wakes up, Charlie shows Brooke the crown molding in the dining room, the barn board in the kitchen, and a pew bench in the front hall that they salvaged from a church in Salem. Brooke mistakes Charlie for a person who cares about craft, quality, the integrity of old buildings (in reality, the person who cares is his brother. Charlie is merely parroting him in order to impress Brooke). The next week, Brooke again sees Charlie at the Tent and again they hook up. The morning after, Charlie takes Brooke out to breakfast at a bar down the street called Flanagan’s where the old bartender with an Irish accent knows Charlie by name and calls Brooke “luv.” They eat fried eggs, sausages, grilled tomatoes. This experience somehow leads to Charlie and Brooke dating, then getting engaged and married, then having boy-girl twins and buying a house in the Poet’s Corner section of Wellesley.
Brooke knows her marriage hasn’t been perfect—she’d been making excuses for Charlie’s dirty jokes and inappropriate behavior even before the first lawsuit—but she liked her life. She was able to stay home; she was deliriously happy being a mom. Will and Whitney were good kids, exceptional, even, and their success in school and on the stage and on the athletic fields made Brooke feel like she was doing something right. But there has always been something off between her and Charlie. Back in 1995, Brooke was afraid no one better would come along—and she’s been paying the price ever since.
“This is a girls’ weekend, Charlie,” Brooke says. “You’re not welcome, and frankly, it’s embarrassing that you showed up here to grovel.”
“I booked us a room at the Wauwinet tonight,” Charlie says. “And I made a reservation at Topper’s. You can rejoin the ladies tomorrow. Just spend the night with me, please. I need you. I’m not doing well, angel.”
Brooke studies her husband. His face is bright red and she can smell the Jameson emanating from his pores. “You’ve been drinking.”
“I had one beer on the boat.”
She stares at him.
“And a beer and a shot at the Tavern while I booked the hotel and dinner.” He reaches out a hand. “Come on, angel.”
“No,” Brooke says. She wants toscreamat him. He’s being sued because he groped some poor young girl. He lost his job because even the deplorable men he works with understand he went too far. He and Brooke can’tafforda night at the Wauwinet or dinner at Topper’s! But isn’t it exactly like Charlie to make such a wasteful and grandiose gesture? He could have sent apology flowers here—the other women might have been envious—but instead, he’d spent ten or twenty times as much money and to less effect. Brooke holds her tongue, however, because Hollis and Caroline are standing behind her.
As Caroline watches this domestic drama unfold, she thinks about how she could make an entire documentary about the Kirtley family. Here’s what has always puzzled her: Brooke and Charlie are both cringey, but they produced two of the coolest humans Caroline has ever known. Will and Whitney Kirtley are brilliant, funny, kind, and magnetic. Will goes to Wesleyan and Whitney is studying theater at Yale. They’re literallyamazingand have not one trait in common with either of their parents. Caroline once asked Hollis if Will and Whitney were adopted. (The answer was no.)
Brooke lowers her voice. “You have to leave, Charlie. Please,pleasedon’t make a scene.”I’m having a hard enough time fitting in as it is,she thinks. “Cancel the Wauwinet and take the next ferry home.”
Charlie’s face twists into a snarl and he starts to rant. “You ungrateful bitch, I’ve worked my ass to the bone for you and the kids, two college tuitions, the fancy house you had to have in Swellesley, the Escalade you begged for because you thought it would make you look cool in front of Electra.”
