The most impressive of the family’s accomplishments was the large screened-in porch they built across the front of the cottage. They ate dinner together on the porch every night during the summer, gathered around the old wooden picnic table the girls had painted a high-gloss fire-engine red. After dinner, they’d camped out, reading and talking and listening to country music, rocking back and forth in the rocking chairs, and taking turns swinging in the hammock.
Despite their best efforts at remodeling, their charming quarters paled in comparison to the elegant plantation house next door—Moss Creek Farm—which Jackie now called home.
Built in 1850, the main house was the only structure on an old cotton plantation that survived the Civil War. In the property’s one-mile stretch along the waterfront, the remnants of an ancient concrete dock still occupied the bank about five hundred yards past the house. Prior to development of the area, families traveling from their summer cottages on the beaches had used the landing as their point of entry to their permanent homes inland.
While the house had been renovated many times since, the integrity of the building remained intact. With stately columns and wraparound porches, the three-story Georgian had endured Yankee occupation and weathered countless hurricanes, providing five different families a safe haven for more than 150 years.
The sweet scent of ligustrum from the hedge that separated the two properties drifted toward her, bringing with it her earliest memory of the women who would one day cause her downfall.
On a warm Saturday in late May, six months after Jackie and her family moved into the cottage, she was daydreaming the afternoon away, perched atop one of the upper branches of the sprawling live oak in their side yard. When she heard voices and soft music drifting over the ligustrum hedge from the house next door, she hopped down from her perch and climbed into the hedge, deep enough to stay hidden while she spied on the party.
Mimi Motte and her daughter, Julia, were hosting a garden tea party for several women and little girls. Dressed in matching floral sundresses, with blonde manes and backs ramrod straight, Jackie watched in envy as mother and daughter moved from table to table socializing with their friends.
A bee swarmed Jackie’s head, then another and another. She swatted at them, but that only made them mad. When the bees attacked her full on, she lost her balance and tumbled from the hedge. She landed on her fanny only feet away from where Julia sat visiting with her friends.
“Oh, no!” Julia set her lemonade down and rushed to Jackie’s side. “Are you okay?” she asked, helping Jackie to her feet.
“I’m fine.” Jackie brushed the grass off the back of her shorts. “A swarm of bees attacked me.”
“Did they sting you?”
Jackie searched her arms and legs for stings. “I don’t think so. My name is Jackie.”
“And I’m Julia. Why don’t you come sit down a minute. You need some refreshments.” Julia took Jackie by the hand and led her over to the table, gently pushing her down to the one empty chair. She summoned one of the maids in gray uniform who rushed over with a tray of sweets. The maid set an empty plate in front of Jackie, and used small silver tongs to load the plate with three small iced squares.
Jackie appeared skeptical.
“You’ll like them, I promise. Mama calls them petit fours, but I call them tea cakes.”
Jackie took a tentative bite. “It’s delicious.”
“These are my friends.” Julia pointed to each of the six girls, quickly introducing them. Jackie caught only two of their names, both of them Donna.
Julia’s mom appeared at her daughter’s side. “Who’s your new friend, sweetheart?”
“Mimi, this is Jackie. Jackie, this is my mom,” Julia said with a flick of her hand back and forth. “But you can call her Mimi. Everyone else does.”
“Is Jackie short for Jacqueline?” Mrs. Motte asked.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And what is your last name, dear?”
“Sweeney. I live next door.”
“Oh. I see.” Julia’s mother turned to her daughter. “I didn’t realize you’d invited the neighbors to the party.”
“She didn’t invite me, Mrs. Motte. A swarm of bees chased me into your yard. Julia was nice enough to give me some cake and lemonade.”
Another mother approached the table and cupped Jackie’s chin in her hand, turning her head first one way then another. “And who is this stunning creature?” she asked.
Jackie sensed evil lurking behind this woman’s attempt at kindness. While her smile was wide, her pointy canine teeth showed like vampire fangs when she parted her bloodred lips.
“Ethel, this is Jacqueline Sweeney. From next door. Jacqueline, this is Ethel Bennett, Donna Bennett’s mother.”
Mrs. Bennett’s hand fell from Jackie’s chin as though she’d been scalded. “Sweeney?” she asked, her perfectly plucked eyebrow raised in an arc. “You mean the family who runs the seafood market?”
Jackie hung her head. “Yes, ma’am.”
The woman moved to the Donnas’ side of the table, placing a hand on the shoulder of the Donna with the smug look on her face. “One of our reporters—our family owns the Prospect Weekly, you see—did an article on your parents awhile back. We named your mom and dad the most hard-working couple in town.”
Jackie’s face reddened. She did see—and perfectly clearly. In Mrs. Bennett’s book, being named the hardest working people in town was anything but an honor.
Jackie stood to go. “I should get home now. My parents are expecting me for dinner,” she said, even though it was only three o’clock.
Julia walked Jackie to the end of the hedge where a narrow passageway allowed her room to slip through. “Would you like to come over tomorrow afternoon?” Julia asked.
“Sure … but shouldn’t you ask your mom?”
“She won’t care. She pretty much gives me anything I want. We have to go to church first, and then brunch at the club. I’ll come over and get you around two.”
Jackie half-expected her new friend not to show up, but to her great delight, Julia appeared at two o’clock sharp. Together, the girls crawled back through the hedge, leaving a hole that would eventually become a permanent passageway between their two houses.
“Jackie, dear, how lovely to see you,” Mimi said, when the girls sought her out in her rose garden to ask permission to go swimming.
Jackie could tell Julia’s mother was neither expecting her nor glad to see her, but she refused to let that ruin her afternoon. Instead, she set about proving herself worthy of Julia’s friendship. Aware of Mrs. Motte’s eyes watching her every move, she made certain she used her very best manners.
Over time, Mimi softened toward her. Julia and Jackie spent hours playing dress-up in Mimi’s closet, or decorator with her discontinued fabric and carpet samples. They seldom fought and would’ve spent every waking hour together, if Mimi hadn’t insisted Julia continue her relationships with her other friends. Whenever Julia had one or both of the Donnas over, Jackie resumed her perch in the tree and spied on them over the hedge. On the rare occasion when Julia invited her to join them, Jackie usually declined, preferring solitude to spending time with the Donnas.
Jackie had been obsessing over plans for her birthday party since before Christmas. But now, hearing voices coming down the driveway, she wanted nothing more than to put on her silk pajamas and crawl in bed with her book. She listened carefully, hoping to hear Julia’s slow Southern drawl, but all she heard was the sound of her mother’s cackling laughter.
Julia had responded a week ago to the party invitation. “I’ll try and stop by before I go to Donnas’s supper club. You know I can’t miss their supper club. It’s the biggest event of the year.”
She was all too aware of the Donnas’s supper club, a party they held every year on the second Wednesday in June. The Donnas claimed they had a conflict with the annual wildlife benefit for the second Wednesday, but Jackie had a hunch they’d moved their supp
er club up a week, to the night of her birthday, to get under her skin.
Jackie and Bill had been invited to the supper club every year until now, but she wasn’t surprised when their invitation never arrived in the mail, considering the chilly way the Donnas had been acting toward her of late.
“It’s because of Caroline,” Julia had said when Jackie confronted her about the Donnas’s behavior a few weeks back. Caroline was Corey’s mom, the boy who was killed in the Gator accident with Jamie. “The Donnas feel it would be awkward for Caroline to be around you right now.”
“That’s funny. I’ve been to see Caroline many times. She’s the only one in this town who doesn’t blame Jamie for the accident.”
Julia gave her hand a little squeeze. “Caroline is overcome with grief. One minute she says one thing, the next another. She just needs a little time. You understand, don’t you?”
Jackie understood perfectly. Her friends were using Caroline as an excuse to get Jackie out of the way so they could talk openly about Bill’s affair with his dead patient’s wife.
Two weeks ago, Jackie had spotted Bill and a woman she’d never seen huddled together in the back booth of the Inlet Coffee Shop, with two caffé lattes and a blueberry muffin on their table. Jackie assumed the woman was a pharmaceutical sales rep, until she saw her husband gently brush a blonde wisp of hair off the woman’s forehead. Jackie had started paying attention after that. She found smudged pink lipstick stains on his button-down collars, and unexplained charges from Victoria’s Secret on their American Express card.
Worse than his act of betrayal and the public humiliation was the knowledge that she had failed him as a wife. Theirs was never an overly passionate marriage. They had some spark in the beginning, a dim flame that lasted until she got pregnant with the twins. Jackie’s waddling around with two babies in her belly, carrying an extra fifty pounds, twenty of it in her ass, wasn’t exactly a turn-on for her super fit husband.
She couldn’t deny that Bill had been a good provider. Three years after they were married, when Mimi decided to build her 6000-square-foot dream house on a peninsula of land overlooking the marsh ten miles outside of town, she came to Jackie and Bill with an offer for them to buy Moss Creek Farm. Bill accepted with very little negotiation. “Anything to make my bride happy,” he’d told Mimi.
Jackie had wanted to live at the farm all her life, but she’d learned that having your dreams come true didn’t always make you happy.
If she had to pick a date that marked the beginning of the end of their marriage, it would be Christmas Eve of 1998. The twins were seven months old and still not sleeping through the night. Bill had come home midday from deer hunting and found her in the kitchen, Christmas wrapping paper spread across the pine table, a baby on one hip, a burned piecrust in the opposite hand, and Gerber sweet potatoes congealed in her hair.
He gave her a perfunctory kiss on the top of her head. “You look tired.”
“What the hell do you expect?” She slammed the piecrust down on the counter. “I haven’t gotten a decent night’s sleep since the babies were born. And now, with shopping and decorating and cooking for the holidays, you’re damn right I’m tired.”
“Have you ever thought of getting a nanny?”
Jackie had never considered hiring someone to look after her children, but she realized that might be the solution to restoring some sense of normalcy. Two weeks later, she hired Carlotta, the sister of a mate on Captain Mack’s fishing boat. By the end of January, the twins were sleeping through the night, the house was organized in a way it had never been, and Bill was getting hot meals for dinner. Having Carlotta in charge of all the domestic affairs left little for Jackie to do. Within the month, she’d returned to work and begun once again to focus on her social life. She often felt like a stranger in her own home, but Jackie didn’t mind. She considered the quiet woman who worked behind-the-scene miracles a godsend.
Jackie and Bill nurtured their boys over the years, but they failed to nurture their marriage. Lately, she sensed Bill gathering courage to ask for a divorce. He’d even started the conversation a couple of times—“Jack, we need to talk”—only to be interrupted by one of the boys, or the ringing or text dinging of his cell phone. She would give him his divorce, but not before she made him grovel. Jackie was prepared to fight for the house, the kids, and full control of their brokerage account.
Bill snuck up behind her and gave her a little peck on the cheek. “Happy Birthday, Jack.”
When was the last time he’d given her a real kiss?
“Speak of the devil, I was just thinking of you.”
“All good thoughts I hope.” He flashed a smile, but she didn’t smile back. “Your guests are beginning to arrive.”
She leaned over the balcony railing, hoping to catch a glimpse of Julia’s blonde curls. But the only people in the driveway were Sam, Faith, and the kids.
“Sam and Faith aren’t guests. They’re family. You can count on us having plenty to eat and drink, because I doubt anyone else will show up.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. I saw your guest list on the counter in the kitchen. Plenty of people have responded that they’re coming. It’s still early.”
“Julia promised to stop by on her way to supper club with the Donnas.”
Bill leaned back against the railing. “So this is about Julia, is it?”
Jackie bit back tears. Although Julia was part of it, Jackie’s fragile emotional state was about so much more than her best friend acting cold toward her. She hated her husband for cheating on her, but she couldn’t bring herself to kick him out. Letting him go meant a lifestyle change she wasn’t ready to face.
He turned her chin toward him. “Let me offer you a little advice. Turning fifty is a big deal, Jack. Look at it as an opportunity to make a major change in your life if so warranted.”
“And what do you suggest I change?” Her heart pounded. Surely he wasn’t about to ask her for a divorce before the start of the most monumental birthday party of her life.
“You need to stop settling for mediocre. You deserve to have better friends than these selfish women who don’t feel the same about you as you feel about them. It’s time to clean house, rid your life of everything that causes you heartache. Take a chance on something new, maybe a new career, or even the same career but with a boss who appreciates you.”
Jackie glared at him. “And what big change did you make last year on your fiftieth birthday?”
His face softened in sorrow and regret. “Jack, I—”
She held her hand up to stop him. She’d opened the door for him to confess his infidelity, then realized she wasn’t ready for the truth. “You know what, save it. I don’t want to hear it. Not tonight. Not on my birthday.”
The band picked up their tempo from the soft, background music they’d been playing, and Sam waved from the terrace below.
“They’re playing Van Morrison for you, Jackie,” Sam called. “Come join the crowd. ‘It’s a marvelous night for a moondance.’”
Jackie closed her eyes and tried to clear her mind of unpleasant thoughts. As the music took over her body, her feet began to move. She vowed not to let anyone ruin her party—not her husband or her backstabbing friends. Tonight she would dance with someone young and handsome, and first thing tomorrow morning, she would start cleaning her house by taking out the trash. Tomorrow morning she would kick her philandering husband out on the street.
Five
Samantha
Sam and Faith had parked at the end of the driveway, blocking others from pulling up close to the house. The vacant field across the street provided sufficient parking for guests.
Jamie refused Sam’s offer of help and struggled to maneuver his chair over the bumpy cobblestoned driveway. Bitsy skipped alongside him, babbling on about balloons and birthday cake, while Faith and Lovie followed close behind. When they reached the end of the tunnel of live oak trees, Jackie’s majestic old plantation home stood before them, d
ecked out for the party in all her glory. Not a blade of grass was out of place on the manicured lawn. Pink roses and white hydrangeas bloomed in the flowerbeds adorning the terrace. The shutters sported a fresh coat of black paint, and the original blown-glass windows gleamed against the late-afternoon sun.
Linen-draped tables surrounded the parquet dance floor under an enormous circus tent. With a generous variety of liquor and wine at hand, three bartenders stood ready to fulfill any request. Waiters, dressed in black and white, presented champagne in glass flutes to guests as they arrived. The scene was classic, a party that could have taken place during the sixties, the seventies, or even the roaring twenties. The funk band wore traditional attire—no-frills tuxedos for the men and a black sequined dress for the female lead singer.
The twins came out to the driveway offering hugs for their grandmother and aunts, high-fives for Jamie, and whistles for Bitsy when she twirled her dress for their approval. With their good looks and easygoing personalities, Cooper and Sean were teenage heartthrobs in the making. For now, though, hunting and fishing and football occupied their attention.
With their auburn hair, freckled faces, and ocean-blue eyes, the two brothers reminded Sam so much of her father that she often choked up when she saw them. Much to Oscar’s delight, Jackie had named the twins after his older brothers, Cooper and Sean Sweeney, who had been killed in the same boating accident when they were in their early twenties.
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