Dune Road

Table of Contents

 

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

VIKING
Published by the Penguin Group

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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:
80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
First published in 2009 by Viking Penguin,
a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

Copyright © Jane Green, 2009

All rights reserved
Publisher’s Note

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Green, Jane, 1968 -
Dune road : a novel / Jane Green.
p. cm.

eISBN : 978-1-101-06129-9

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Acknowledgments

T
hank you to the various people in the various places who, knowingly or otherwise, hosted me during the writing of this book, namely the staff of the Westport Public Library, and Michael, who kept me in delicious cappuccino at Cocoa Mi chelle.

My universally wonderful agents and teams at Penguin, Ford Ennals, Dina Fleischmann, Sally Ann Howard, Elise Klein, Clare Parkinson, Karen Siff, Martha Stewart, Nicole Straight, Paula Trafford, my ever-wonderful “Goddess Posse”: Heidi Ar mitage, Jennifer Brockman, Tina Gaudoin, Dani Shapiro.

My family: the Warburgs, the Greens, and all of our children.

And Ian, my beloved husband, who has changed the way I look at the world.

Chapter One

O
ne of the unexpected bonuses of divorce, Kit Hargrove realizes, as she settles onto the porch swing, curling her feet up under her and placing a glass of chilled wine on the wicker table, is having weekends without the children, weekends when she gets to enjoy this extraordinary peace and quiet, remembers who she was before she became defined by motherhood, by the constant noise and motion that come with having a thirteen-year-old and an eight-year-old.

In the beginning, those first few months before they worked out a custody arrangement, when Adam, her ex, stayed in the city Monday to Friday and collected the children every weekend, Kit had been utterly lost.

The house suddenly seemed so quiet, the huge new colonial they had moved into when Adam got his big job in the city, the house they thought they had to have, given the entertaining he now wanted them to be doing, the investors he wanted to invite over to dinner.

She still blames the house for the ending of the marriage. A huge white clapboard house, with black shutters, and a marble-tiled double-height entrance, it was impressive, and empty. Much the way Kit felt about her life while she was living there. The ceilings were high and coffered, the walls paneled. Everything about the house shouted expense, and it never felt like home.

There was nothing cozy about the enormous Great Room, the expansive master bedroom suite complete with his “n” hers bathrooms and a sitting room attached that no one ever sat in.

There was nothing comfortable about the formal living room, with its Persian rugs and hard French furniture, a room that they used perhaps three times a year, although no one lasted longer than twenty minutes in there before moving into the kitchen and crowding around the island in the one room in the house that felt welcoming and warm.

The kitchen was the room that Kit lived in, for the rest of the house felt like a mausoleum, and the day they moved in was the day it all started to go wrong.

Adam started commuting into the city during the week, leaving on the “death train” at 5:30 a.m. to avoid the crowds, getting home at 9 p.m.

From Monday to Friday he didn’t see the children, didn’t see her. She rattled around in that huge house, growing more and more used to being on her own, resenting his presence more and more when he was back for the weekends, feeling like he was invading her space, attempting to mark a territory that, without her knowing, or wanting it to, had undoubtedly become hers.

They became like strangers, ships that pass in the night, not able to agree on anything, not having any common ground, other than their children, and they’d make dinner plans on the weekend and beg people to join them, so they wouldn’t have to sit in restaurants in silence, looking around the room, wondering how it was they had nothing to talk about anymore.

When they separated, then talked divorce, Kit knew the house had to be sold. And she was glad. There was nothing in the house that felt like hers, no good memories, nothing but loneliness and isolation within its walls.

During the early days she felt, mostly, lost. For so many years Adam had been her best friend, her lover and, even toward the end, when they barely saw one another, she still knew he was her partner, she still always had someone to phone when she needed an answer to a question.

After the separation, during those first few days, when Adam and the kids pulled away from the house in his Range Rover, Kit would stand in the driveway watching them go, not knowing who she was supposed to
be
without her children, what she was supposed to
do
, how she was supposed to fill two whole days without mouths to feed and small people to entertain.

She lost her partner, her lover and her identity in one fell swoop.

She didn’t have the energy to go out, although her social life shrank to almost nothing anyway. A single woman, it seems, doesn’t have quite the same appeal in suburban Connecticut. Their couple friends initially invited her out, feeling sorry for her, or wanting to hear what had happened, but the invitations petered out, and she quickly realized that the friends she and Adam shared,
their
friends, would not necessarily remain her friends, because the chemistry just wasn’t the same.

And she couldn’t even think about dating (although it was extraordinary how many people offered to set her up on blind dates, within what felt like minutes of her separation), so she went to bed.

Days would pass when she barely emerged from the comfort of her cocoon in the grand master suite on the second floor, aided by Ambien at night and pointless reality shows on the television during the day. She once watched almost eight hours straight of
Project Runway
, even though she wasn’t the least bit interested to begin with—but by hour three she was desperate to know who was next going to be
auf wiedersehen
ed off the show by the glamazonian Heidi Klum.

And then, when they finally agreed a custody arrangement, she had the kids every other weekend, but by that time Adam had agreed to sell the house and split the proceeds, and the resulting house hunt was like a well-needed injection of energy.

They were lucky. Their house sold quickly, and Kit found a small cape on a pretty street behind Main Street, that was easily big enough for her and the children, and Adam rented a small farmhouse on the other side of town.

It took the best part of a year for Kit to start feeling like herself again after the divorce. And at the end of that time she was not the self she was during her marriage—the wife she had tried so hard to be—but the self she was before her marriage: her true self, the identity she lost in her quest to be the perfect wife.

 

It is extraordinary, she thinks, picking up the phone and scrolling back through the numbers to see who has called, how much her life has changed. She was a wealthy Wall Street widow in a large house, with immaculate children dressed in French designer kiddie wear, complete with Land Rover, a wardrobe stuffed with Tory Burch and a social life that involved going to the gym with the other Wall Street widows, then coming home to shower and change before attending a trunk show in someone’s home.

The trunk shows varied. Designer stationery featuring cute colorful cartoons of women who were supposed to look like Kit and her friends, or jewelry made by a local once-high-powered-but-now-looking-to-find-her-creativity mother, charging exorbitant prices for semiprecious gemstones strung together with pretty clasps. Some held children’s wear sales and displayed tie-dyed funky yoga pants for three-year-olds, sparkly navel-baring tops for toddlers. Others filled their homes with children’s clothes from the catalogues, trying to induce mothers to order copious amounts of clothes. Whatever the trunk show, what they all had in common was the aim to satisfy the instant gratification gene that all Wall Street widows seemed to have.

As soon as she and Adam separated, Kit knew she needed to work, but she didn’t want to go back into teaching. She had loved it while she did it—teaching at a Montessori school until she became pregnant with Tory—but she didn’t want to be an employee, as such, of
anyone
. She wanted to make some money, and retain her freedom. Adam paid child support, and the alimony was just about enough to live, but not enough to live the life she had grown used to in Highfield, heart of Connecticut’s Gold Coast.

It wasn’t even as if it was a big life, not compared to some of her friends. Certainly, her life was bigger when she was married, but one of the lovelier changes that occurred post-divorce was that she suddenly saw no reason to feel insecure around the women who used to cause her nervous breakdowns while waiting in the corridors outside the classrooms in preschool.

She doesn’t see the need to dress to impress these women anymore, because who else had she been carefully applying makeup for, popping diamond studs in her ears, carefully coordinating her ballet pumps with her bag?

She had felt those women looking her up and down, judging her, deciding whether or not she was good enough based on the cost of her handbag or the number of carats in her ears, and she had shrunk with inadequacy every time she walked in.

Since the divorce, she has found she doesn’t want to wear makeup anymore. Her daily uniform has become jeans and boots in winter, and shorts and flip-flops in summer. Sure, she still dresses up on the rare occasions she has to, but now if she bumps into one of the scary gala-obsessed women in Stop & Shop and she is in shorts with her hair shoved back in a ponytail, she doesn’t mind, doesn’t have an urge to hide behind the grapefruit stand.