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“Obviously very silly,” Caroline says.
“Yes, because I saw your post last night with the other boy. Such a smoke-show. I show it to Isaac. He agreed the two of you look beautiful together.”
Caroline and Dylandolook beautiful together in that picture on Instagram—but Instagram isn’t real life. In real life, Dylan was using Caroline to make Aubrey jealous. Caroline received a spate of texts from him after she left the Box.
Are you okay?
Aubrey is just really jealous of you, she has been since high school.
I’m going to take her home, maybe talk with her in the morning about trying again. LOL, my parents won’t like that. They hate her. But it will be better for O-Man.
It was fun hanging out this weekend. Ty!
Caroline composed several responses, which ranged fromAre you kidding me right now?toThis tracks, you two totally deserve each other.But in the end, the text she sent said:No prob.She doesn’t care about Dylan McKenzie in any meaningful way. It probablywillbe better for O-Man to have his parents back together, and if Caroline helped facilitate that, good. It gives her enormous satisfaction thatsheis the person Aubrey Collins is jealous of.
Sofia says, “I’m going to do a better job loving Isaac. I’m going to travel less and no more clubbing.” She inhales, exhales. “Maybe get married, have a—”
“That’s great, Sofia,” Caroline says. Sofia has speared Caroline’s heart with her stiletto; she can’t bear to hear another word. “I’ll be back Tuesday, see you then!”
“Maybe we can go to dinner, the three of us,” Sofia says. “You can tell us about your special weekend.”
Absolutely not,Caroline thinks, but she says, “Okay, ciao!” and hangs up. A second later, she’s tempted to call Sofia back and say,It was me! It was me with Isaac!But she won’t. She will let Sofia and Isaac be happy. She will let Dylan and Aubrey be happy.
She’s left with… her funny little project. And to that end, Caroline drags her ass out of bed. She wants to talk to Brooke.
42. The Drop II
Caroline finds Brooke in the kitchen making herself a cup of herbal tea. She’s still wearing her dress from the night before, the white LoveShackFancy, which is, Caroline has to admit, very pretty, though now it’s a bit rumpled and holds an odor that Caroline thinks of as classic Chicken Box—beer and sweat—and there’s an orange drip stain (it looks like pizza grease) on the front.
“You had fun last night?” Caroline asks.
She expects Brooke to say,So fun, best night of my life, those boys were so cute, can you believe they wanted to dance with me?
But Brooke just smiles and hops her teabag around in her mug as the air fills with jasmine steam.
“Do you have a few minutes to come downstairs so we can have a little one-on-one chat about your friendship with my mom?”
“Of course,” Brooke says. “Lead the way.”
Caroline shows Brooke where to sit and sets up the ring light.
“It feels like I should know this,” Caroline says once she gets the camera rolling. “But I don’t. How did you and my mom meet?”
Brooke takes a breath. “I met Hollis at Dr. Lambert’s office in Newton-Wellesley Hospital. She was pregnant with you, due three months sooner than I was, but we were the same size. There was some amazement about this on Hollis’s part—I’m sure she thought I’d way overdone it on the Oreos—until I told her I was expecting twins.”
Caroline laughs. She can’t believe how smooth and poised Brooke is in front of the camera. She’s a natural.
“Hollis introduced herself, said she and your dad had just moved to Wellesley from the city. We exchanged numbers and became friends. When you were born, I took her a platter of sandwiches from the Linden Store. When Will and Whit were born, Hollis brought over a roasted chicken with potatoes au gratin, a green salad with vinaigrette, freshly baked bread, a caramel and chocolate tart, a six-pack of Belgian ale that she’d found helped with her milk production, and two of the softest baby blankets I’d ever felt. I knew from the time and effort andthoughtthat your mom put into dinner and the gifts that we would be friends until our children graduated from high school, and beyond.” Brooke winks. “I was right.”
“What are your fondest memories of your friendship with my mom?”
Brooke takes a moment to think.
“There was the golden age, the years our children were nine, ten, eleven. Fourth and fifth grade.” Brooke pauses. “Of course you never realize it’s the golden age until it’s over.”
It’s 2011 in Wellesley. Brooke’s twins and Hollis’s daughter attend Fiske Elementary. Brooke and Hollis are part of a larger group of mothers that include Liesl, Bets, Rhonda—and Electra Undergrove, the unspoken leader. She organizes post-drop-off coffee at Maugus on Wednesdays and a monthly “Moms Night Out” in downtown Boston where they go to dinner at places like Mistral and the Bristol Lounge, then inevitably end up singing to the dueling pianos at Howl at the Moon. (The following morning, there’s always a round-robin of texts, the moms complaining about their hangovers and how they can’t handle soccer practice so the husbands will just have to do it for once.But it felt so good to be wild and free for a night, to be a person again, not just a wife and mother.)
When the kids enter middle school, Electra invents rock and roll football. The idea is a Sunday Funday at Electra’s house, which has an open floor plan with a huge television and a basement tricked out for her kids, Carter and Layla. (Beanbag chairs, video games, pool table, and a refrigerator filled with soda.) Every Sunday of football season, parents and kids gather at the Undergroves. Electra makes the main dish—fish tacos, white chicken chili, a spiral-cut ham—and the rest of the friends bring appetizers, side dishes, dessert. Electra’s husband, Simon, is the mixologist. He turns beers into Micheladas; he creates large-format cocktails that he serves out of an enormous glass jug with a stand and a tiny spigot; he blends up margaritas and daiquiris. The parents get… pleasantly buzzed while the kids are safely downstairs.
