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Yes,Hollis thinks.
But then I came up with an idea,Moira wrote. She organized a girls’ trip for her best friends, one friend from each phase of her life. The photo accompanying the article shows a knot of smiling middle-aged women at a beachfront rental home in Destin, Florida. Moira, who is wearing a floppy-brimmed straw hat, is in the center with the friends orbiting her like planets around the sun.
I wanted to be surrounded by the people who knew me best,Moira wrote,even though a couple of the women I hadn’t seen or talked to in years. Even though our common ground had shrunk. Even though these women didn’t know one another well—or at all. I wanted to celebrate the friendships that had made me who I was.
Moira invited her best friend from her teens (Cate), her best friend from her twenties (Paige), her best friend from her “prime of life” (Phoebe), and her best friend from “midlife” (Liz). The five of them lounged on the beach readingWhere the Crawdads Sing;they rented a floating tiki hut and booze-cruised over Destin’s emerald-green water; they cooked a lasagna dinner at home on the first night withlots of wine and a special playlist that Moira made, which got us all dancing on the deck(wrote Cate), and the second night they wentbonkers(Phoebe’s word) at Lucky’s Rotten Apple. The ladies took lots of pictures on their iPhones and shared them in a closed Facebook group, and Moira had a commemorative album made on Shutterfly. The title of the album—and of the article—was “The Five-Star Weekend.”
Hollis can’t believe she hasn’t heard about this idea before. She’s struck not only by the poignancy of the idea (it’s your life story in friends) but also by the bravery—a weekend with four women whose only connection to one another isyou.
Hollis imagines hosting such a weekend.
Best friend from her teens: Tatum McKenzie.
Best friend from her twenties: Dru-Ann Jones.
Best friend from her “prime of life”: Well, there was Electra Undergrove—but she and Hollis no longer speak. Runner-up is probably Brooke Kirtley, who was such a help when Matthew died.
What about the fourth friend? Hollis wonders. The friend from “midlife” (which, Hollis realizes, meansnow). She doesn’t have any friends specifically from midlife. Why is this? It’s difficult to meet new people once your kids are grown, especially when you work from home. There’s cute Zoe Kern from Hollis’s barre class—but Zoe is twenty-nine years old and seven months pregnant.
But then Hollis realizes she does have one new friend. She has Gigi Ling.
Hollis leaves the “Five-Star Weekend” article up on her browser. She paces her Nantucket kitchen, weirdly energized,revved up,even, thinking about the possibility of hosting her own Five-Star Weekend. She loves the double entendre—five women for the weekend, and a weekend filled with elevated experiences worthy of five stars (if anyone can pull this part off, it’s Hollis). But what appeals to Hollis most is what Moira Sullivan said about honoring the friendships that had formed her.
Hollis isn’t naive enough to imagine this will be a Hallmark-movie experience where her guilt, her melancholy, and her loneliness will all magically disappear once she’s surrounded by her friends.
But yes, that is sort of what she imagines.
Nothing else has worked.
It couldn’t hurt. (Could it?)
She’ll do it, she decides. She’ll host a Five-Star Weekend here, on Nantucket, in two weeks.
She goes back inside, snaps her laptop shut, pads down the hall, and climbs into bed. For the first time since Matthew died, sleep comes easily.
2. The Invitation
The next morning, Hollis sends each of her four “stars” the same text (separately):Would you be up for a girls’ weekend at my Nantucket house, July 28 to July 31? All you have to do is show up. I’ll take care of everything else.
Brooke Kirtley is the first to respond (no surprise there):Girls’ weekend? Oh, Hollis, good for you. Are you sure you’re ready? If you’re ready, DEFINITELY count me in!!!
Hollis’s heart aches a little; Brooke loves nothing more than to be included.
Dru-Ann is next:How flexible are your dates? My life is… a blender.
Also no surprise. Hollis’s college roommate Dru-Ann Jones is the country’s premier agent for female athletes,andshe’s the cohost of an ESPN show calledThrow Like a Girlthat airs on Tuesday afternoons,andshe writes forNew Yorkmagazine about race and gender politics in sports.
When Matthew died, Dru-Ann was in Fremantle, Australia, signing an Olympic-bound swimmer. She’d asked Hollis what she could do to help and offered to drop everything and fly halfway around the world to Boston, but Hollis told her to wait. “I’ll need you later,” she said. “After all these people have gone.”
“I trust you’re telling the truth and not just being a martyr,” Dru-Ann said. “When you need me, I will show up.”
When Matthew died, you asked what you could do for me,Hollis texts now.You can do this.
There’s no response, and Hollis experiences a moment of desperation. If any of them can’t make it, she’ll cancel the whole thing, but she knows Brooke will want to come anyway, and can Hollis do a weekend with only Brooke? (Frankly, no.) She texts Dru-Ann again:I have a Peloton. And I’ll get your tequila. And organic limes.
Tequila, yes, but don’t worry about another thing,Dru-Ann texts.I’ll be there.
Two down,Hollis thinks. She tries to imagine a weekend with just herself, Brooke, and Dru-Ann, and a different panic envelops her. Dru-Ann and Brooke met a few years earlier at Hollis and Matthew’s Marathon Monday brunch—Dru-Ann was in town because she represented one of the elite runners from Kenya—and afterward, Dru-Ann described Brooke as the “human equivalent of something stuck in your teeth. Just. So. Annoying.” Meanwhile, Brooke developed an obsession with Dru-Ann. She watchesThrow Like a Girlevery week and she thinks it’sso coolthat Hollis went to college with someone who’son televisionand who, last year, appeared at number 74 onForbes’s Most Powerful Women list.
