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“That’s neat,” the guy says and Hollis giggles. Who in the year 1995 uses the wordneat?“I’m Matthew Madden, a surgery resident across the street. Sorry if I was rude earlier, I just wanted to finish up reading on takotsubo cardiomyopathy, otherwise known as ‘broken-heart syndrome.’ I saw an unusual case in the cath lab earlier and I didn’t know what it was.”
“I’m Hollis Shaw,” she says. She and the green-eyed surgery resident at Mass General shake hands. Hollis thinks,It’s neat that he knows how the human heart works and can fix it if it breaks.
It’s possible there’s more conversation. She must mention that she lives a few blocks away; he must say that he still lives with his parents in Wellesley, which isn’t as pathetic as it sounds because he’salwaysat the hospital. She must say she grew up on Nantucket, and he must say that his family are summer-in-Maine people. But Hollis has lost most of this. What she does remember is that, after she pays the bill with her company card and after she tucks her notebook into her bag, Matthew says, “There’s a hospital fundraiser next Friday night. I’m expected to attend and bring a date. Are you free, by any chance?”
Hollis knows she should be surprised—they’ve been acquainted for maybe thirty minutes, and he’s asking her to a work function? Aren’t there a hundred hot nurses across the street?—but she doesn’t miss a beat. “Iamfree,” she says. “I’d love to go.”
“It’s black-tie,” he says. “At the Ritz. I’ll come pick you up at six thirty?”
Hollis smiles. “Sounds great!” she says, and when she gets home, she slips a note under Regency’s apartment door.You were right,the note says.It was as easy as shooting fish in a barrel.
Sean, the server, delivers their food and everyone digs in. Dru-Ann says, “If you think I’m sharing this chicken, you’re wrong. Look at this beauty!”
Gigi helps herself to the blue crab fried rice. “So your first date was a black-tie work event. Was it happily ever after from there?” She feels a keen, almost manic, interest. Matthew never talked about his history with Hollis.
“Pretty much,” Hollis says, though this is a wild oversimplification. Phrases likelove at first sightandhappily ever afteraren’t realistic. But Hollis has always been good at recognizingquality,in food, in service, in linens, in movies and books—and in people.
When Hollis sees Matthew Madden upright and groomed (his hair cut and combed, glasses polished) in his tuxedo (his own tuxedo, not a rental), she realizes that he is the rarest of finds. He’s not only a superstar surgery resident; he has also been raised a gentleman. He owns a tuxedo, he knows about wine (it’s Matthew who introduces Hollis to sauvignon blanc); he can handle elevated dinner conversation about topics as varied as the Sargent portraits at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, the budgetary woes of the Big Dig, and Seiji Ozawa’s expert conducting of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
Hollis is dazzled by Matthew’s moves on the dance floor and then by the make-out session when he takes her home.
The week following the fundraiser, Matthew invites Hollis to dinner at his parents’ house. The brick mansion in Wellesley Hills is grand but warm; there’s a fire lit in the library, where they have cocktails and talk about books. Matthew’s father, Robert, is an attorney who loves Boston crime novels; he lends HollisThe Friends of Eddie Coyle. His mother, Judith, sits on the board at the Boston Public Library; she turns Hollis on to Barbara Kingsolver and, since Hollis likes to write about food, the collected works of M. F. K. Fisher. They eat dinner in the formal dining room, which sounds stuffy but Robert and Judith make it feel intimate and fun. The two of them are clearly madly in love, clinking wineglasses and kissing before they eat. Hollis is mesmerized, watching them. She makes a joke about how many forks there are and if she doesn’t use the correct one, don’t hold it against her, she grew up in a five-room cottage on an island thirty miles off the coast. Judith says, “You could eat with your hands and we’d still find you delightful.”
When Hollis leaves, Judith gives her a squeeze and says, “I hope I’ll be seeing a lot more of you.”
Finding Matthew seems like an impossible stroke of luck, and yet it makes a certain kind of sense. Hollis hasn’t dated anyone seriously since breaking up with Jack Finigan seven years earlier. She has been waiting for the right person—and her patience has finally paid off.
“Matthew and I built a beautiful life together,” Hollis says. “I was blessed to have met him.”
In general, nothing drives Tatum crazier than when someone uses the wordblessed,though honestly, she could use a blessing herself.If Gigi picks up her wineglass before I count to ten,Tatum thinks,then I don’t have cancer. Tatum counts really slowly, but Gigi’s attention is fixed on Hollis.
Tatum feels a stab of dread.HER2-positive cancer,she thinks,must have been the kind her mother had. Aggressive.
Dru-Ann hands Tatum the platter of roasted chicken and crispy fries. “You’ll like this.”
You have no idea what I’ll like or won’t like!Tatum thinks, but she accepts the platter and takes some chicken. The fries look good too, actually. Tatum ended up sitting next to Dru-Ann because Brooke said, “Gigi asked to sit next to me,” as though they were girls in the middle-school cafeteria. Tatum turns to look out the front windows for Jack and Kyle. They said they’d meet her and Hollis “later”—and “later” can’t come fast enough.
Dru-Ann tries to becalmandpresent. She won’t dwell on, or even fully acknowledge, the fact that she has been fired from all three of her jobs. It’s actually funny (from, say, a nihilist’s perspective) how with one sentence, Dru-Ann vaporized her entire life. So what now? Well, now she enjoys her cocktail and helps herself to the Thai curry lobster and wonders what Hollis will say when Dru-Ann asks if she can live in the Twist forever.
Gigi wants to know more, she wants to know it all, a full history of Hollis and Matthew, how they acted when they closed on their first house, which side of the bed each of them slept on, how they named their daughter and chose their dogs. And where did things go wrong? How did Matthew Madden turn into a man who would lie about being divorced to a woman he met at an airport lounge—and then sustain that lie for seven months afterward?
But Gigi knows better than to ask any more questions right now. She turns to Tatum. “What do you do, Tatum? I don’t think I know.”
Tatum says, “I clean houses and run errands for a company called Irina Services.”
“That sounds so fun!” Brooke says. Brooke stopped working after she got married. Charlie is one of those men who want to be the sole provider. It’s a self-esteem thing, but also a power thing; he has spent the past twenty-something years calling the shots because hebrings home the bacon.“I’m jealous that you have a job. I basically do the same things—clean and run errands—only nobody pays me.”
“It’s honest work,” Dru-Ann says.
“I would appreciate it if the two of you would stop patronizing me,” Tatum says. “I’m not a fancy sports agent, I’m not an airline pilot, I’m not internet-famous. I’m a maid and a gofer. I work for people like you.”
Dru-Ann is about to say she wasn’tpatronizinganyone, but she knows Tatum won’t believe her.
Brooke says, “If I leave Charlie, I’ll probably get a job like you have.”
“At the rate I’m going,” Dru-Ann says, “I might too.”
“Please just stop,” Tatum says. “You don’t have to try to level the playing field. I’m a big girl. I can handle it.”
