by Grace Palmer
“I want to stay here,” Grady said in a sigh, rolling his eyes.
Anyone who said the newborn years were the hardest clearly hadn’t reached the pre-teen phase yet.
“Mommy has a high school reunion,” Holly explained for the umpteenth time, kneeling down in front of Alice to tighten the straps on her backpack. She turned to Grady. “And if you stayed, you’d have to help me clean the guest room and mop the floors.”
Grady wrinkled his nose. “Never mind.”
As excited as Holly was to see some of her old friends and have a few days to herself, saying goodbye to her kids was never easy. It didn’t matter that Pete would be with them. It didn’t matter that Grady would have a blast seeing a game at Fenway Park and that Alice would talk about riding the swan boats in Boston Common for the rest of the summer. Holly still felt guilty.
If kids had a good time, but their mom wasn’t there to photographically document it, did they have a good time at all? Holly supposed it was about time she found out.
“You all will have so much fun,” she said, giving Alice a tight squeeze and ruffling Grady’s hair, which he hurried to fix the moment she lifted her hand. “And I’ll be waiting in this very spot when you get back.”
Pete spun in a circle in the parking lot. “Row C, parking space 23. X marks the spot.” He turned back to Holly with a smile. “I’ll hold you to that, Hollyday.”
She rolled her eyes, but let him pull her into a tight hug.
“Have fun,” he whispered in her ear. “Too-much-alcohol, staying-up-too-late, head-hurts-the-next-day kind of fun. Okay?”
Holly’s guilty heart gave another squeeze. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d had fun without Pete. But she nodded anyway. “I’ll do my best.”
Pete didn’t want to go to the reunion. He’d graduated two years earlier than Holly, and his fifteen-year reunion had been “a snooze fest,” in his opinion. His desire to do it again with Holly’s graduating class was similar to Holly’s desire to spend five hours travelling to Boston for a reunion where she’d know one in every four people’s names. In other words, minimal.
So this was as far as she went today. Holly stood in the parking lot, waving until her family made it up the gangplank and onto the deck. A few years ago, her kids would have blown her kisses and giggled while they bounced and waved with both hands. Now, they gave their mom a cursory wave before turning towards the interior of the boat, attention snagged by something more exciting.
That was fine. Two could play that game.
Holly turned around, taking a look around the Port Authority for the first time. The sun had been rising steadily for the last half hour, and the sky was a vibrant apricot flecked with peach and mango. Black and white oystercatchers perched on the wooden posts around the dock, scanning the water for their breakfast, filling the air with their repetitive peeping call.
For a week, Holly only had to care for herself. She had only herself to wake up, herself to feed, herself to dress. A week to do whatever she wanted. She’d be as free as a bird.
For one week, she could clock out of Mom Duties and clock into Holly Duties… whatever those were. It had been so long Holly hardly remembered how that went.
No matter. She had a week to figure it out.
Holly Duties would start once the house was clean.
Pete’s parents had been staying with them for a few days, and so the house was a patchwork quilt of activities they’d started and abandoned with the grandkids.
Rainbow sprinkles and frosting smears on the kitchen island from the sugar cookies Trisha and Alice had decorated the night before. Wood shavings on the tile from where Pete had been showing his grandpa the whittling kit Brent bought him for his birthday. Dirty towels piled in the bathroom laundry basket. A sink full of dishes crusting over with the fried flounder and creamy lemon sauce they’d had for dinner the night before. And enough dust that Holly felt certain she hadn’t properly dusted since they’d bought the house three years earlier. Even though her lower back still twinged from a similar cleaning frenzy the weekend before Pete’s parents had arrived.
Getting everyone packed up and out the door for the ferry had been madness. Cleaning had taken a back seat. Now, Holly had friends from Brooklyn and Miami arriving in less than four hours, and cleaning needed to take a front seat. The driver’s seat.
Holly whirled around the house like a top, spinning from one corner to the other, tidying, sweeping, and dusting as she went. Then she spun her way upstairs and made up the guest bed and Alice’s bed with fresh linens that she’d preemptively washed a few days earlier.
It had been several years since she’d seen Lindsay or Diana, and Holly was bursting with nervous excitement. She wanted to catch up with them and hear how they were doing, but she also wanted them to see how she was doing.
Holly had a clean, four-bedroom house on Nantucket. A beautiful family. And she’d managed to follow along with enough dance workout videos once the kids were in bed that she was back down to her pre-pregnancy weight. Not her pre-pregnancy hips, of course. Holly had kissed her old, slim hips bye-bye years ago. Some things were beyond the powers of dance aerobics.
But hips aside, life was going well. She was excited to show that off.
She was in the middle of wiping toothpaste out of the guest bathroom sink when she heard the telltale thud of a car door. Holly bolted upright, head cocked towards the door, listening.
Laughter. High-pitched, trilling laughter.
Only one person in the world laughed like that: Lindsay.
No, no, no! Holly darted down the hallway to her bedroom and ripped her phone from the charger on her bedside table. She’d forgotten to charge it the night before, so she’d plugged it in after she got back from Port Authority and hadn’t checked it since. A fatal mistake, as it turned out.
Hey, Holls. We caught an earlier flight and just landed. Grabbing bags now. Be there in thirty!
Lindsay had texted her twenty-nine minutes ago. And Holly was only just now seeing it.
She blinked, the text message still flashing against her vision as she looked down and took in her appearance.
Her saggy, black jersey leggings—her “house leggings,” as she liked to refer to them—were dust-covered. The oversized t-shirt she wore came from Pete’s ancient collection of college intramural sports. This one congratulated his frisbee golf team for taking fourth place. Holly wasn’t previously aware that they made t-shirts for such accomplishments.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, looking down to assess her outfit had sent her greasy messy bun toppling forward. Lanky strands of blonde hair slipped from the elastic band and curtained her shiny, makeup-less face.
The first time Holly was going to see her friends in years, and she looked like…
Well, like a mom.
But not a normal mom. She looked like the decrepit, stereotypical image of a mom from television. One who hasn’t showered in four days, is running purely on caffeine and prayers, and eternally has a baby on her hip and a toddler clinging to her leg.
But before she could even consider how to rectify the situation, the doorbell rang. The chime seemed far too cheery for how Holly felt. Her skinny jeans were laid out on the end of her made bed with a slouchy gray pocket tee. An effortlessly cool look right there for the taking.
So close, and yet so far away.
Holly had planned to shower, blow out her hair, dab on just enough make up to look flawlessly bare-faced, and then get dressed. She was supposed to look cool, casual, collected. Chic.
Instead, Holly trudged across the entryway and opened the door like something undead.
“Holly! Hello, how are—” Lindsay’s voice trailed off, her waxed eyebrows rising up to her sharp blonde hairline. “Did you get my text?”
“I tried to text you before the plane took off, but my service was terrible.” Diana stepped around Lindsay, her curly brown hair braided back on either side into a low bun at the base of her neck. “Sorry we’r
e barging in on you early.”
“I was cleaning,” Holly said, gingerly hugging Diana back, keeping plenty of space between their bodies. “I’m sweaty. And dusty.”
“Well, I smell like airplane,” Diana grumbled.
“And airport bathroom.” Lindsay stuck out her tongue and then came in for a brief hug of her own. “We’re all gross.”
Except, no. They weren’t. Holly was gross, yes. That much was certain. Lindsay and Diana, on the other hand, looked like they could be the hosts of a television travel show. Had their hair and makeup team met them at Nantucket Memorial Airport?
Diana’s stylish braided bun was paired with breezy gray linen pants and a crisp white button down. The short sleeves were cuffed to reveal her toned, tanned biceps. Life in Miami clearly suited her.
Lindsay, on the other hand, was the image of a Brooklyn businesswoman. Her high-waisted black cigarette pants fit her like a glove, and she finished the look with a dark green tee French tucked into the waistband and a pair of shiny black flats. Her long blonde hair was as thick and long as ever, draped over one shoulder like she was a cartoon princess.
If her interior design skills were anything like her fashion sense, it was no wonder she worked with a roster of A-list clients. Lindsay never name-dropped, but Holly had done enough online sleuthing to know just how in demand her friend was.
“You two look incredible,” Holly said, ushering them inside and closing the door. “I, however, need a minute or ten to get myself together.”
Diana waved a hand. “Don’t primp for us. Wear whatever you usually wear. Pretend we aren’t here.”
Is this how Diana imagined Holly looked all the time?
“You’re living that mom life,” Lindsay said with a wink, rolling her hard-shell suitcase into the living room. “We understand.”
“Diana lives the mom life, too,” Holly said, doing her best not to sound defensive.
One of the last times they’d been together had been for Diana’s baby shower four years earlier. Her tech millionaire husband had secured the presidential suite at the Ritz Carlton for Diana and her closest friends. They’d lounged on furniture that could have paid years of Holly’s mortgage while Diana opened gift after gift after exquisitely wrapped gift.
Holly had worn a real outfit then. A dress she’d spent way too much money on from an upscale boutique in Boston. Diana knew Holly was capable of pulling herself together.
But her friends hadn’t seen her in years. They didn’t know what she usually looked like. And Holly couldn’t expect them to. She’d have to show them.
“Darn right I do,” Diana said, giving Holly a high-five. “But I’m not living the mom life this week. Neither are you! This week, we are kid-free.”
Lindsay snorted. “You have a live-in nanny, Di. I’m not sure that’s the ‘typical mom life.’”
Diana’s eyes narrowed, and Holly could sense a classic Lindsay-Diana blowout coming. The two of them could be at each other’s throats in a moment’s notice.
Before either of them could say anything else, Holly interrupted. “Give me fifteen minutes to… well, let’s be nice and call it ‘get myself together.’ Make yourselves at home. Raid the fridge and the pantry. I’ll be right back.”
Then Holly hurried down the hallway and into her bedroom, pulling down the shirt to hide her saggy backside.
There wasn’t time for a shower, so she had to settle for running a comb through her hair and pulling it back into a tight ponytail. And her flawlessly bare-faced makeup look had already been revealed as a lie since Diana and Lindsay had just borne witness to the pimple brewing on Holly’s chin. So she opted for a quick brush of blush on her cheeks and some lip gloss.
Changing out of her dusty, sweaty clothes was a necessity. But the jeans and t-shirt she’d set out felt drab and boring. But even that simple look had taken her twenty minutes to put together, and Holly didn’t have time to rifle through her closet again.
She wriggled them on with a sigh, her mind racing all the while. Since when did Diana have a nanny? She and Holly didn’t keep in the closest of contact, but they texted often enough. Mostly jokes and gossip about people they’d gone to school with.
Even then, Diana was the one who almost always texted first. Probably because she had a nanny. She had more time to devote to correspondence, as if she was a regency-era noblewoman.
And Lindsay didn’t have kids or a partner at all. This week was like any other for her. She only ever had to worry about herself. Which no doubt gave her plenty of time for shopping and regular salon appointments.
Holly tightened her ponytail and rolled her neck on her shoulders, ashamed of the bitter bend to her thoughts. She had a clean, four-bedroom house. A beautiful family. And a relatively trim figure.
Just like her friends didn’t know much about the ins and outs of her life, she didn’t know much about theirs, either. They shouldn’t judge her for one moment of stretched out leggings and a bleach-stained shirt, and she wouldn’t judge them based on the most cursory information about their lives.
No. Instead, Holly would march out to the dining room, pour everyone a mimosa, and relax.
Except, when Holly walked into the kitchen, Diana and Lindsay were bent over in front of the pantry, oblivious to Holly’s reappearance.
“How long has it been since you’ve had a bag of fruit snacks?” Lindsay asked, laughing as she plucked a package out of the box. “Oh, wait. You have a kid.”
“Yeah, but we avoid sugary snacks,” Diana explained. “He mostly eats fruits, veggies, and rice crackers. Occasionally, the nanny brings him organic Greek yogurt that we flavor with local honey.”
“That sounds amazing. I’d eat that,” Lindsay moaned.
Alice had picked the roasted carrots off her dinner plate the night before, and Holly had optimistically spooned cut melon onto Grady’s plate, which he’d pushed around with a sour expression for ten minutes before Holly had enough and told him he could be excused.
Rice crackers? No shot. Not unless they tasted like pepperoni pizza and came in the shape of a dinosaur.
Holly cleared her throat, batting back her bitter thoughts. “I have mimosas and a fruit tray in the fridge.”
Her friends jumped at the sound of her voice. Lindsay slammed the cabinet closed. “Ooh. Yum. I want!”
“Me, too,” Diana said, tossing Holly a smile. As she passed, she pinched the fabric of Holly’s t-shirt between her fingers. “I love a well-worn t-shirt. So soft!”
The tee was soft. But that didn’t stop the compliment from feeling backhanded.
Holly let out a breath, grabbed the freshly-dusted champagne flutes from the counter, and led her friends out to the back patio. Maybe she wouldn’t be able to relax, but she could still drink. That much was still in the cards.
5
Eliza
Oliver & Eliza’s House
The house looked small from the driveway.
Eliza never really stopped to see her house from this angle anymore. To observe it as if she was visiting for the first time.
Before they’d bought it, Eliza and Oliver had toured the place, walking through the empty rooms. They’d stood in the front lawn and gazed up at the façade, imagining what their lives would look like inside.
They were dead wrong, of course, as young couples usually are about that sort of thing. Home ownership hit them hard and fast as soon as they’d moved in. The water heater and furnace were over twenty years old, the copper pipes were prone to leaks, and termites had taken up residence under the wood shingles on the back of the house.
One by one, they’d fixed those problems or patched them up as best they could. But now the house seemed small. Too small. Sometimes, when Eliza couldn’t sleep, she’d look up at the ceiling and wonder if it hadn’t moved closer when she wasn’t paying attention. As if the greige walls were closing in on her.
The modest house worked while the girls were little. But what would happen when they got older? When the
y wanted to have sleepovers with their friends and have birthday parties in the backyard? Eliza couldn’t depend on her mom and the inn to host every event she ever wanted to have.
They would have to buy a bigger house. And how would they afford that? Which one of them would get a new job to pay for that expense?
Maybe they’d have to move off the island. At that thought, Horton the elephant placed a paw on Eliza’s chest.
She followed her routine. She breathed in calm, exhaled stress. Breathed in peace, exhaled worry. Focus on what you can control. The line had been written on the back of a self-help book Eliza had picked up at the bookstore, holding it only long enough to read the synopsis. She didn’t buy it—she certainly didn’t need self-help; she was merely checking it out of curiosity—but the line echoed in her head anyway.
Focus on what you can control. Which was what? Nothing, Eliza thought bitterly.
But that wasn’t entirely true. What could she control?
She could control getting out of her car and unloading the groceries. She could control the smile on her face when she walked through the front door to find Oliver inside with their daughters, playing on the living room floor.
Inhale. Exhale.
Once she put the groceries away, the feeling would fade. She just needed a fresh start. To take on a new task. Put the groceries away. Exhale the stress. Start over.
After all, Eliza had two healthy daughters inside. Well, mostly healthy, with the temporary exception of Summer’s lungs. She had a loving husband. A cozy house. Eliza should be grateful for all of that. More to the point, she would be grateful, just as soon as she got inside, unloaded the groceries, and—
Three quick raps on her window sent Eliza jolting halfway across the console. A loaf of bread squished beneath her elbow.
When she looked up, Oliver was standing on the other side of the glass, dark eyebrows raised in both amusement and curiosity. “What are you still doing in the car?” he asked once Eliza finally hit the right button to roll down the window.