by Mia March
Featuring a gallery Readers group Guide
In the bestselling tradition of The Friday Night Knitting Club and The Jane Austen Book Club, three women find unexpected answers, happiness, and one another, with Meryl Streep movies as their inspiration.
Two sisters and the cousin they grew up with after a tragedy are summoned home to their family matriarch’s inn on the coast of Maine for a shocking announcement. Suddenly, Isabel, June, and Kat are sharing the attic bedroom—and barely speaking. But when innkeeper Lolly asks them to join her and the guests in the parlor for weekly Movie Night—it’s Meryl Streep month—they find themselves sharing secrets, talking long into the night . . . and questioning everything they thought they knew about life, love, and one another.
Each woman sees her complicated life reflected through the magic of cinema: Isabel’s husband is having an affair, and an old pact may keep her from what she wants most . . . June has promised her seven-year-old son that she will somehow find his father, who he’s never known . . . and Kat is ambivalent about accepting her lifelong best friend’s marriage proposal. Through everything, Lolly has always been there for them, and now Isabel, June, Kat—and Meryl—must be there for her. Finding themselves. Finding each other. Finding a happy ending.
MIA MARCH lives with her family in a small village on the coast of Maine. Visit her website at miamarch.com.
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“Out of Africa is my favorite movie of all time,” Lolly said. “So many lines undid me the first time around that I didn’t think I could ever see it again. But I’m ready now.”
As Meryl Streep’s reverent narration began, I had a farm in Africa, everyone was quiet and riveted to the screen.
Lolly hit PAUSE three quarters of the way through the film. She dabbed at tears under her eyes. “That was the line I’ve always thought about over the years. When after all she’s endured, all she’s lost, Meryl says that just when she thinks she can’t endure another moment of pain, she remembers how good things once were, and when she’s sure she can’t handle another second, she goes another second more and knows she can endure anything.” Her smile seemed so far away. “It’s true.” She hit PLAY again.
Kat held her mother’s hand. She noticed she wasn’t the only one sitting stock still, not eating popcorn, barely breathing, as Meryl Streep, breaking her own heart, told Robert Redford that what he was offering wasn’t enough for her.
“Oh God, hit PAUSE.” Isabel sat up straight. “I’ve learned there are some things worth having, but they come at a price, and I want to be one of them,” she said, repeating Meryl Streep’s words. “I’m going to write that down and carry it with me in my wallet.”
Kat knew in that moment that what she’d been so ambivalent about all along wasn’t getting married or staying in Boothbay Harbor. She’d been ambivalent about herself, who she was, deep down, what she thought she was worth.
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2012 by Mia March
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First Gallery Books trade paperback edition June 2012
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
ISBN 978-1-4516-5539-1
ISBN 978-1-4516-5541-4 (ebook)
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
READERS GROUP GUIDE
‘FINDING COLIN FIRTH’ EXCERPT
In memory of Greg.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Alexis Hurley, literary agent extraordinaire at InkWell Management, fierce advocate with a brilliant editorial eye, believed in this novel from the beginning. There isn’t enough good chocolate in the world to say thanks for everything—and there’s a lot of everything.
Because the universe works in wonderful ways, Karen Kosztolnyik, executive editor at Simon & Schuster/Gallery, is my editor and helped me shape and strengthen this novel with such care and affection for the characters. To many more books!
To Louise Burke and Jen Bergstrom at Gallery for believing in me and this book. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
A special thank-you to Kara Cesare, fairy godeditor.
To my friends and family, particularly my beloved son, who inspires me every minute of every day with his questions and smile and kid-energy. A movie lover as I am, he thinks Meryl Streep is cool because she was the voice of Mrs. Fox in Fantastic Mr. Fox.
A long time ago, I caught Meryl Streep on Inside the Actors Studio. When James Lipton got to his last question—“If heaven exists, what would you want to hear God say to you when you reach the Pearly Gates?”—Meryl, with a big sweep of her arms, answered, “Everybody in!” This sums up why I love her. I’ve been a fan of the beautiful and breathtakingly talented actress for as long as I can remember, and I thank Meryl Streep for her fifty-plus roles, for making me laugh and cry and think and believe. My novel is my tribute.
Perhaps he knew, as I did not, that the earth was made round so that we would not see too far down the road.
—KAREN BLIXEN, PLAYED BY MERYL STREEP IN THE FILM OUT OF AFRICA
The Meryl Streep Movie Club
The Bridges of Madison County
The Devil Wears Prada
Mamma Mía!
Heartburn
Defending Your Life
Kramer vs. Kramer
Postcards from the Edge
It’s Complicated
Out of Africa
(Honorary mention: Julie & Julia)
PROLOGUE
Lolly Weller
Fifteen years ago
New Year’s Day, 2:30 a.m.
The Three Captains’ Inn, Boothbay Harbor, Maine
Silkwood was on. Lolly’s favorite actress, Meryl Streep, with the shag hairstyle that Lolly had gotten as a teenager, and Cher, who Lolly had always thought was spectacularly fierce. The word fierce had been applied to Lolly herself, usually by her sister, but Lolly didn’t think she was fierce at all. There was another word for Lolly, and if only she were Catholic, she would spend every day, twice a day, in confession.
After the phone rang the first time that night, Lolly did something that would haunt her for the rest of her life, something she’d never forgive herself for. The first call had come just after two o’clock in the morning. Her sister, Allie, slaphappy drunk on New Year’s Eve, laughing into the phone about how her husband was in the middle of the Boothbay Resort Hotel’s posh lobby, dancing like John Travolta in Pulp Fiction. They’d had four or five glasses of champagne each, and could Lolly or her husband come get them? They were just five minutes away.
Five minutes there. Five minutes to get them to their apartment and safely inside. Five minutes back home to the inn. That would give Lolly fifteen sweet, stolen minutes. And so she’d woken her own husband, Ted, who’d muttered under his breath about damned drunks, but put on his down parka over his pajamas and headed out to pick up the Nashes.
Lolly had done a quick check on the girls. Since Lolly and Ted’s New Year’s Eve plans only involved providing horn blowers and complimentary champagne to their guests at the Three Captains’ Inn, they’d agreed to babysit their nieces overnight. Lolly crept downstairs from the third floor of the inn to the second and quietly opened the door to the utility room, where she kept her vacuum and cleaning supplies. Sixteen-year-old Isabel Nash had dragged her mattress, pillow, and blanket, as she did every time she visited, to the utility closet and was fast asleep, her beautiful face so peaceful you’d never imagine the hollering and cussing that could come out of that pink mouth. Just an hour ago, Isabel had come sneaking in at one thirty, despite the strict twelve-thirty holiday curfew her mother had set and the terrible argument the two had had before everyone had gone his or her own way for the evening. Lolly pulled the down-filled comforter up over Isabel’s shoulder and noticed the fresh hickey on her neck. Wait till her father saw that.
Back upstairs, Lolly checked on her other niece, thirteen-year-old June Nash, who was sharing Lolly’s daughter’s room for the evening. The little room across from Lolly and Ted’s was barely big enough for one bed, let alone the two cots Ted had squeezed in for Isabel and June, but the Three Captains’ Inn was fully booked for New Year’s. Jane Eyre lay open on June’s rising and falling chest, a small, red flashlight shining up at her chin. Lolly turned off the flashlight and put it and the book on the bedside table, moving a thick lock of June’s curly auburn hair off her face. June was never any trouble.
Across the room was Kat Weller, Lolly’s ten-year-old daughter. Kat had woken up when her father had come down the stairs and, within seconds, had on her coat and hat and mittens, begging to go with him. “Please, can I, Daddy? There’s no school tomorrow.” But it was too late and bitter cold and drunks were on the road, so Ted had tucked her back into bed.
Kat was asleep again, her purple mittens still on and her old, stuffed Eeyore under her arm. Lolly tiptoed over, grateful that her daughter was facing the wall. If Lolly had walked in and seen that sweet face, so like her father’s, Lolly’s heart might have burst, as it often felt like it might these days. She carefully peeled off the mittens, and Kat shifted, but didn’t wake. Lolly bit her lip on the guilt that hit in her stomach, then crept back out.
She had ten minutes or so. She darted upstairs to her bedroom, closed the door, and lay down with the TV remote and the telephone on her stomach. She changed the channel; much as she loved Silkwood, she’d seen it at least ten times and again just a few months ago. She flipped channels, came across When Harry Met Sally, raised the volume just enough to mask her voice, and made her phone call. As they spoke, her heart moved in her chest as it always did, reminding Lolly of what she used to dream about. She whispered, but loud enough to be heard over Billy Crystal telling Meg Ryan just what was wrong with her.
Thirty, forty minutes later—Lolly had lost track of time—an operator broke through the phone line with an emergency. Lolly bolted up and said yes, of course she accepted. It was the Boothbay Harbor Police.
They were sorry.
Something Lolly always remembered about that night was how she’d dropped the phone, her body, her breath, going so still as she stared, in horror, at Billy Crystal’s face. All these years later, she still wasn’t able to watch anything with Billy Crystal, couldn’t bear to look at him, hear his voice. Her dear friend Pearl had noted that thank goodness Lolly had flipped the channel from Silkwood. Or she’d never have been able to look at Meryl Streep again.
CHAPTER 1
Isabel Nash McNeal
Isabel’s plan to save her marriage involved three things: an old-world Italian recipe for three-cheese ravioli, the remembrance of good things past, and a vow to never again mention what was tearing Edward and her apart. She loved her husband, had since she was sixteen, and that had to be that. She stood at her kitchen counter, the recipe, scrawled in black ink she could barely read, next to the lumpy, gray blob of pasta dough she’d made from scratch. Was it supposed to look like this?
Isabel grabbed a cookbook from the shelf above the counter, Giada De Laurentiis’s Everyday Italian, and flipped to pasta dough. Hers looked nothing like Giada’s. She’d just start over. She had five days to get the recipe right. Her tenth wedding anniversary was Tuesday, and Isabel was determined to re-create the last night of her honeymoon in Rome, when she and Edward, just twenty-one years old and so in love, had come upon a tiny gem of a restaurant with outdoor seating and late hours, around the bend from the Trevi Fountain, where they’d thrown coins and made wishes. As they’d sat down at a little round table under a crescent moon on a beautiful, breezy August night, Italian opera playing softly from somewhere, Edward had said he’d wished into the fountain that life would always be like this, that she was his life. Her wish had been similar. Over three-cheese ravioli that they’d both declared otherworldy, Edward had told her he loved her more than anything, that he’d love her forever, and then stood, held out his hand, and dipped her for a long, passionate kiss that had charmed the owner of the restaurant into inviting them inside for the ravioli recipe. In the old kitchen was his ancient mother, who looked something like a witch with her hooked nose and severe, long black dress, a heavy black bun wound at the back of her head as she stirred big black pots on the stove. But she’d smiled at them and kissed them on both cheeks, then written down the recipe in Italian, and her son had translated below it, adding, My mother says this recipe has magical properties and will ensure a long and happy marriage.
All these years Isabel had kept the folded piece of paper in her wallet and had once planned on making the ravioli for every anniversary, but for one reason or another she and Edward had gone out to dinner or been away on vacation. Besides, that honeymoon plate of ravioli they’d shared had worked its magic all these years and she hadn’t needed any assurances of a long and happy marriage; she’d had exactly that. Until recently.
Until their marriage had turned into some kind of cold war because Isabel had begun to want something she wasn’t supposed to want, wasn’t supposed to need, with a fervency that scared her, excited her, made her feel alive in a way she never had. Made her cry—in the shower, in the supermarket, in the car, and late at night in bed—because it would never be.
She threw out the lumpy
dough, and as she reached into the sack of flour with her measuring cup, she heard a swishing sound by the front door. She leaned back and glanced through the hallway; an envelope had been slipped under the door. Odd. Isabel wiped her hands on her apron and headed to the foyer, her heels clicking on the polished marble floor.
The envelope, like the letter inside, typed on plain white paper, was unaddressed, unsigned:
Your husband is having an affair. I’m not sure if you know, or if you want to know. What I do know is that you were kind to me once, and in this town, that’s saying something. I’d want someone to tell me—something tells me you would too. 56 Hemingway St. The black Mercedes is always parked in the back around 6pm.
—Sorry.
Isabel gasped and dropped the letter to the floor. She picked it up and read it again. Edward? Having an affair? She shook her head, her knees feeling like rubber, and sank down on the padded bench in the entryway. This had to be a mistake. It had to be.
Yes—a mistake, she decided. Sorry had delivered the letter to the wrong house. It was likely meant for her next-door neighbor, Sasha Finton, whose white Colonial, with its red door, black shutters, and impatiens-lined stone path, was identical to the McNeals’. Sasha’s husband flirted openly at neighborhood potlucks and birthday parties for toddlers.
Isabel’s heart went out to Sasha, who was always polite, who’d waved at Isabel with a tight smile that morning, even though Sasha had clearly been upset as she’d followed her grim-faced husband out to his car.
A black Mercedes, no? Just like Edward’s.
She sucked in a breath and darted into the living room and pushed aside the heavy drapery at the far window. If she strained, she could just see the Fintons’ driveway over the ornate white wrought-iron fence. Only Sasha’s silver BMW was there now. But Isabel was sure Darin Finton’s Mercedes was black. She glanced at her watch; it was just after six o’clock. Perhaps Darin’s car wasn’t in the driveway because it was parked behind 56 Hemingway Street.