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Caroline has to wipe away tears. “Wow,” she says. “I don’t mean to get all emo, but I never knew any of this.”
“Yeah, well,” Dru-Ann says. “We didn’t talk about it much after that. We moved on.” She takes a deep breath. “This has been a fun stumble down memory lane.” She’s being a smart-ass, but she means it. For the past forty minutes, she has been transported to the Chapel Hill of decades ago. What an unexpected gift. “But I should get back upstairs and get ready for dinner.”
“Yes,” Caroline says. “Thank you for this.”
Dru-Ann heads upstairs and Caroline takes some time to compose herself. Is she having an aha moment about her mother? She has always known that Hollis’s mother died when Hollis was a baby. But it’s only now that Caroline realizes Hollis didn’t have… a Hollis of her own. She had to borrow Tatum’s mother—and once she left Nantucket, she had to figure things out by herself.
Caroline has romanticized the memories of her father because he’s gone. But Hollis was the one who showed up with Caroline’s forgotten flute case; Hollis was the one with a regular spot at Sprague Fields during Caroline’s soccer games. Hollis took Caroline on her college visits and spent six hours at Copley Place helping Caroline shop for a cotillion dress. Hollis kept up with the friend drama, the boy drama, the academic drama. Hollis was her every day. Hollis was her unconditional. How had Hollis known how to be a mom? Thinking about it now, Caroline finds it sort of amazing.
Caroline is yanked from her feelings by the buzzing of her phone.
She checks the screen. It’s Isaac.
33. Intermezzo
Hollis garnishes the sour cream and roasted onion dip with a sprinkle of chives snipped from the herb pots on the back deck. She puts out two bowls of potato chips—one kettle, one truffled—and sets out cocktail napkins she bought specifically for this weekend: an image of two women, one whispering to the other,Who is this Moderation we’re supposed to be drinking with?The kitchen smells divine. Hollis takes a few pictures of the chips and dip, then gets a close-up of the napkins. Her followers will go crazy.
Hollis doesn’t care.
She pours herself a glass of Sancerre—just that morning she’d sworn she’d never drink again, but she needs something to improve her mood—and heads to her bedroom to get dressed for dinner. She puts Dru-Ann’s playlist on the sound system and the first song is “Poison” by Bell Biv Devoe. Hollis tries to summon the energy of her twenty-one-year-old self dancing on the deck at He’s Not Here, her T-shirt soaked with beer. It seems impossible she was ever that young and carefree. Her black linen Eileen Fisher dress hangs on the back of the bathroom door. It’s a shapeless sack, and the black strikes her as funereal rather than elegant. She pulls out white jeans and a white silk halter top that she hasn’t worn in years because she doesn’t like the way her arms look. But who cares? No one cares. She’ll look happier in white.
She takes another swallow of wine and pulls her hair out of its elastic. The song changes to “Suicide Blonde” by INXS and Hollis thinks about how these “getting ready” moments used to be some of the happiest of her life. The night ahead should be amazing—the reservation at Nautilus, dancing at the Chicken Box—but Hollis wants to tell everyone to go without her.
She sits on the bench at the end of her bed and drops her head into her hands.
Caroline is right. Sheisa phony, overly concerned with the appearance of things. Her dip is garnished, her cocktail napkins clever.You’ve changed,Matthew said.And we’ve changed.
Hollis wants to go back in time. (Right,she thinks. Her and everyone else who has ever lived.) She can see it so clearly now: She and Matthew could have been happier. They just needed another try.
Brooke wakes up from her nap to find she has four missed calls from Charlie as well as a string of profane texts from him.
“Hmmmpf,” she says. She feels sorry for him. He’ll be driving back to Wellesley with the start of a hangover while she takes a glorious outdoor shower. Hollis wasn’t kidding when she said it was the best. It’s located under an arbor draped in climbing roses; the water is hot, the pressure is as strong as a Swedish massage, and Hollis has stocked the shower caddy with luxury bath products that smell of lemongrass.
Brooke wraps herself in the soft white Turkish-cotton towel and squeezes the water from her hair. Tonight, she decides, she’ll blow out her curls, something she does approximately twice a year. Her skin is tight from the sun; she might have gotten a bit of color. A little moisturizer will make her glow against the white eyelet of her dress. Brookelovesthe idea of matching colors; the five of them will look like members of an exclusive club.
When she steps into the house, she sees Gigi in the hall, wrapped in a pink silk robe.
“The outdoor shower isjust gorgeous,” Brooke says in her new faux-British accent. The words just pop out of her mouth. Why, she wonders, must she be so weird?
Gigi laughs. “I had such fun with you in town today. Sit next to me at dinner, will you?”
Brooke has to stop herself from gushing,I will! I will! I had so much fun too!Instead, she says, “I’d like that,” and disappears into her room.
Tatum sits on her bed in a towel. She spends fifteen minutes on WebMD and other websites that offer “expert medical knowledge” studying the survival rates for breast cancer. Stage 0 means you have a noninvasive tumor. Stage 1—before the cancer spreads to the lymph nodes—is curable, though lots of stage 1 patients have mastectomies. Triple positive is good—this means the tumors respond to hormones—though triple-positive patients often go on a drug called tamoxifen, and everyone hates it because it makes you gain weight and zaps your sex drive. In stage 2, the cancer has spread to the lymph nodes; they sometimes feel swollen. Tatum checks under her arms again; she thought she felt some swelling the other night, but tonight, nothing. HER2-positive breast cancer is aggressive—treatment is effective but it nearly always includes chemotherapy. You can order a “cold cap” so your hair won’t fall out, but it’s expensive. What evenisa cold cap? Tatum imagines an old lady’s bathing cap made of ice. Does it put you in a prolonged state of brain freeze? Stage 3 has to do with the size of the tumor, and stage 4 is metastatic breast cancer, which means the cancer has spread to other parts of the body, such as the brain or the liver. Stage 4 can still be treated but the cancer will get you eventually unless you get hit by a bus or drown in a riptide first.
Or give yourself a heart attack by looking at all these websites, Tatum thinks.
She remembers the expression on her mother’s face when she and Kyle took pictures in the living room before the senior banquet: part delight, part longing, part resignation. It would be the last time she ever saw Tatum dressed up.You look beautiful, Tater.Eyes shining.
Tatum moves on to what she thinks of as Mastectomy TikTok—cancer survivors, most of them even younger than Tatum, who have had their breasts removed and reconstructed. They’re all preposterously upbeat.I love my new boobs! I will never wear a bra again!
Tatum sighs. She doesn’t want new boobs; she likes the ones she has. Kyle likes the ones she has. She knows that what these women aren’t mentioning is that they can’t feel their new boobs. All sensation, all sexual arousal, is gone. Who cares about how theylook,Tatum thinks, if you can’t feel anything? Then again, she does care about the way they look. She reads about tattooed-on nipples; one woman got her breasts tattooed with middle fingers. That’s what Tatum will do too, she decides, if it comes to that.
Will it come to that?
Tatum finally sets her phone down and gets dressed. She pulls on her white jeans and a black lace bustier that she bought at Forever 21; it shows a lot of cleavage. If you’ve got it, flaunt it, she thinks. And she’s got it. For now, anyway.
She picks up her phone and texts Kyle.You and Jack should meet us in town after dinner.Then she sends him a picture of herself.
