“At the end of the year.”
She was tempted to express some skepticism; he wasn’t
really
retiring. He would say he was retiring, but he would still go in to the office each day to keep tabs on his clients and his cases.
“Honestly?” Birdie said. “I can’t believe it. I never thought you’d retire. I thought you’d die first.”
He said, “My heart’s not in it anymore. The fire has gone out.”
“Really?” Birdie said. She was tempted to ask where his heart was and what would restart the fire, aside from her flicking away her cigarette.
“Really,” he said. He turned her face and kissed her. He kissed her like some other man. God, it was weird—this
was
Grant, right?—and it was thrilling, too. They fell back on the bed and Birdie realized she was going to make love to her ex-husband and she nearly laughed at the amazing wonder of it. Grant!
Later, when it was over and she lay spent and light headed on the bed, and Grant was heavy and snoring on the other bed (sleeping together in the same bed had seemed unnecessary), Birdie wondered about other couples who had divorced and then remarried. Had they been drawn back to their marriages out of loneliness, because they could find nothing better? Had they been drawn back out of habit? Or had they been drawn together as if they were two new people with new things to discover and appreciate about each other?
As she fell asleep, Birdie prayed for the latter.
They had one full day left, and one half day. Normally, Birdie spent the last day packing up, cleaning, gathering laundry, and cooking strange meals with the odds and ends left in the fridge. But as Grant reminded her, a cleaning crew came in after they left, and if they ended up throwing away half a stick of butter, the world wouldn’t end. Grant wanted to make a few sandwiches, walk to North Pond, sit on the beach, swim, and do a little fishing. He wanted Birdie to come with him.
“And look,” he said, setting his BlackBerry on the counter, “I’m leaving my phone here.”
Birdie said, “What about Chess? And India? It’s our last day…” It was all well and fine for Grant to want a romantic day with Birdie alone, but she had come to the island for a reason, and that was to spend time with her daughters and her sister.
“We’ll all go,” Grant said.
Birdie made coffee and bacon and blueberry pancakes. Grant ate seconds, then thirds. He smacked his lips and said, “I’ve missed your cooking, Bird. I haven’t had a home-cooked meal since we split.”
Birdie tried to think of a response to that (she didn’t believe him), but before she could, Tate and Barrett walked into the kitchen. Birdie beamed. She had feared Tate wouldn’t come back, but of course, here she was. She wouldn’t miss their last day.
“Breakfast?” Birdie said.
“Starving,” Tate said.
Barrett dropped off the final bag of ice as well as the cleaning supplies Birdie had requested. “This is it,” he said. “The last drop-off.”
India descended the stairs. “I think I’m going to cry.”
“It must have been quite a month,” Grant said.
“Oh, it was,” Tate said.
“Can you come for dinner?” Birdie asked Barrett. “And bring the boys? Please?”
“And spend the night?” Tate said. “Please? The boys can sleep in the bunks.”
“The boys are with their other grandparents this weekend,” Barrett said. “But I’ll come for dinner. And that means I can spend the night. But I’ll sleep on the sofa.”
“Damn right you’ll sleep on the sofa,” Grant said.
“I want to sleep with Chess anyway,” Tate said. She misted up, and Birdie handed her a paper towel; they were all out of Kleenex. “I can’t believe this is over.”
They still had today. One last, brilliantly blue Tuckernuck day, which seemed incredibly precious. Birdie had let other days slip by carelessly, it seemed now. She hadn’t appreciated them enough; she hadn’t wrung the life out of each minute; she hadn’t lived as fully as she might have. So much time wasted longing for stupid old Hank!
She would not squander today! She made lunches for everyone and packed chips, drinks, plums, and cookies. They walked together along the trail to North Pond. It was a bright, hot day, though the air was pure and clean and decidedly less sticky than it had been, and Birdie thought that what she would miss the most when she was back on the mainland tomorrow was the sterling quality of this air, the absolute purity of it. She wondered if Grant could appreciate the unadulterated beauty of this island now that he wasn’t consumed with the SEC’s pending case against Mr. So-and-so. There were wild irises blooming and red-winged blackbirds and the pervasive scent of
Rosa rugosa.
Tomorrow, Birdie would be back on I-95 with the Cracker Barrels and the Olive Gardens and the Targets; even the rarefied acreage of the New Canaan Country Club and her favorite bistro and independent bookstore would seem like offensive, man-made artifice. Would she be able to bear leaving? She had no idea. It felt like this every time she left: like her heart was being ripped out.
They reached the pond and they set up camp: chairs set firmly in sand, towels spread, lunch cooler placed in the shade of the chairs. Grant had brought his fishing pole and he took Tate with him to the other side of the pond. India wanted to walk out to Bigelow Point; she couldn’t finish her book, she said, because she’d lost her reading glasses.
Birdie was aghast. “You lost
Bill’s
reading glasses?”
“Lost them,” India said. She seemed strangely unconcerned. The glasses she had treated like a pet—washing them with Windex and a paper towel each morning, keeping them around her neck at all times except when swimming and sleeping—were
lost?
“They might turn up, but I kind of doubt it.”
India then wandered off toward the point in search of whelk shells. That was what she wanted to bring home to everyone as a gift: perfectly spiraled bone white whelk shells with satiny peach insides. She wanted one for the president of the board, Spencer Frost, as well as one for her assistant, Ainslie, and one for a student.
“Are you playing favorites?” Birdie asked.
“Sort of,” India said.
That left Birdie alone with Chess, who was lying facedown on her towel. Birdie suddenly felt the pressure of twenty-nine days. She hadn’t had the talk with her daughter that she’d meant to have. She hadn’t heard the whole story, or any of the story. To force a talk now would be awkward and unfair. Wasn’t that typical of the time on Tuckernuck, or of any summer vacation, for that matter? The hours had stretched out like an endless highway, and then all of a sudden, they were gone. Evaporated. And here was Birdie on the very last day, trying to cram it all in.
She sat down in the sand next to Chess’s towel.
“Chess?” she said.
There was no response. Chess’s breathing was deep and steady. Her sleep seemed peaceful. Birdie didn’t have the heart to wake her.
E
verybody was going to get a happy ending but her.
Her parents were reuniting. That was what was happening, right? Her father had come here to Tuckernuck, a place Chess would have said he’d never liked in the past—but now he was liking it. And he was looking at her mother in a way that Chess had never seen him look at her before. He was attentive—doting, even; he carried the chairs and the cooler to the pond; he ran after Birdie’s straw hat when it blew off down the dirt trail. He set up Birdie’s chair and rubbed lotion onto her shoulders. He kissed her on the lips in a way that was very tender, which left Chess embarrassed. She knew her parents had slept in the same bedroom the night before, and when she saw the kiss, she thought,
Sex.
Her parents had had sex. She felt confused—possibly more confused than she’d felt when they told her they were separating. The divorce had hurt her somewhere deep inside, but it had made sense. This reunion made her happy somewhere deep inside, but she worried. If her father disappointed her mother again, it would be far worse than if some other man disappointed her mother. If her father was coming back, he was going to have to do everything right.
He would; Chess felt this in her bones. Theirs would be an unlikely love story, one to be envied. Chess wished it was Nick who had shown up out of the blue. If it could be her father, why couldn’t it also be Nick?
* * *
Tate had Barrett. She told Chess the story of Barrett and Anita Fullin as they walked to the pond.
Chess said, “So what are you going to do? Stay here?”
“I have a job in Pennsylvania on Monday. I’m going to work there, then come back for a few days, then go out to Beaverton to do a job for Nike, then come back. I’m trying not to think too far ahead. Do you know how hard that is?”
Chess did know. She was facing a vacuum. But she’d had one idea, like a spark in a dark room. She wanted to cook. She had a culinary degree, after all. She knew the restaurant life was punishing—the hours, the heat, the chauvinism—but a little punishment would suit her. Cooking was the first thing she had felt a stir of passion about since Michael died. Cooking—somewhere good, somewhere market driven, clean, consistent, uptown, downtown, East Side, West Side. She would have choices.
Choices: it wasn’t true love, but it was something.
Chess stood at the edge of North Pond and threw rocks into the water.
Get rid of the heavy stuff. Get rid of it.
Then she lay in the warm sand by the pond. She had only one more day to nap in the sun.
She awoke to Birdie staring at her.
Chess thought,
She wants to see me smile. She wants to know I’m going to be all right.
Chess smiled.
Birdie smiled. She said, “I love you.”
Chess said, “I love you, too, Bird.”
And what about India? India had been the wild card when they started out on this vacation, an unknown quantity. Chess knew her better now. India was really and truly strong; she had gone through what Chess had gone through, only worse, and she had come out on the other side whole. She would pursue a relationship with the female painter or she wouldn’t, and either way, India would be okay. India was the person Chess was the most envious of. India was the person Chess aspired to be: she was her own happy ending.
T
hank God for his sunglasses. No one could see how close he was to tears.
There were logistics to deal with: Emptying the cooler and defrosting the refrigerator, checking and double-checking that the windows were shut and locked, gathering the sheets and towels for the Laundromat, shutting down the generator, storing the propane gas from the camp stove, buttoning up the Scout and hanging the key back on the hook by the front door. Storing the picnic table and, finally, taking down the
TATE
sign and stowing it away in its place in the kitchen drawer. A cleaning crew would come in after they were gone; later, Barrett would bring the sheets and towels back wrapped in plastic, and he would weatherproof the windows and doors.
Grant had taken a load of luggage down to Barrett’s boat. This left Barrett and the four women staring forlornly at the front of the house.
“Is it going to be another thirteen years before this island sees you again?” Barrett asked.
A sob escaped—from Birdie. Suddenly she was in Barrett’s arms, hugging him.
“I don’t know what we would have done without you,” she said. “I just don’t know what we would have done.”
India was on him now, too, hugging him from the left. “Those days you sent Trey were a complete hell,” she said. “He just wasn’t as
cute
as you were. I couldn’t even bring myself to whistle at him.”
Chess grabbed his right side. “Thank you for taking me to the hospital,” she said. “You saved my life.”
And from behind, Tate grabbed him. His girl. “I love you,” she said.
The four of them were on him at his cardinal points: north, south, east, and west. They hugged him and squeezed him and someone pinched his butt; he suspected it was India.
Grant came huffing up the stairs. India said, “Grant, take our picture! Quick—the four of us with Barrett!”
India handed Grant her disposable camera, and Barrett and the women arranged themselves into a pose and smiled.
“Life is good!” Tate said.
“Life is good,” Birdie said.
“Life is good,” India said.
There was a pause. Grant was waiting before he took the picture. Barrett himself was too choked up to speak.
“Life is good,” Chess said.
Grant snapped the picture, then another one for backup. He looked at Barrett over the top of the camera.
“You are one lucky guy,” he said.
S
eptember 25 marked the day that Mary Francesca Cousins was to have married Michael Kevin Morgan.
TATE
T
ate was at Fenway Park. She had left her seat to go to the bathroom and pick up popcorn for Tucker and an ice cream for Cameron. The popcorn stand was near the bathroom, but the ice cream—the kind that Cameron wanted, served in a mini batting helmet—was half a stadium away. Tate found the ice cream vendor eventually, but she waited so long in line that she couldn’t remember if she should go left or right to get back. She didn’t have her ticket stub and she had left her cell phone in her purse, which was back at her seat. There were hundreds and hundreds of people streaming past her, all of them different and yet somehow the same in that they were all strangers.
God, there were so many people in the world. How could you ever be sure you’d found the right one?
She had talked to Chess once the afternoon before, acknowledging that that was to have been the night of the rehearsal dinner, tapas and caipirinhas for a hundred close friends at Zo, Chess radiant in her orange polka-dot dress—but it was not to be. Acknowledging this, they both decided, was better than ignoring it. Chess had sounded weepy, but she ended strong; she was on her way to work. She had gotten a job as the sous chef at a popular French Vietnamese bistro in the Village; the kitchen staff was all-female and the head chef was a woman named Electa Hong, who had become a friend to Chess. Chess had moved back into her old apartment, but she was thinking of moving someplace closer to work. Too many memories in the old place, she said.