by Grace Palmer
He looked up and looked around. “What’s happening?”
No one answered until Pete finally decided he’d be the one to bite the bullet. “Eliza’s wedding is on Saturday,” he said quietly.
Marshall’s jaw fell open. “Oh no,” was all he could muster. “I shouldn’t have said anything.”
“No, no, it’s not your fault,” Eliza murmured. But in her head, all she could see was rain lashing at her wedding dress, lightning igniting the floral displays, an angry ocean whipped into a frenzy in the backdrop.
A beach wedding on Nantucket had once seemed like a fantastic idea.
Until, all of a sudden, it didn’t.
9
Mae
Marshall’s announcement had certainly put a damper on things. That was a crying shame, too, because it had been such a lovely dinner up until then. To her credit, Eliza had done the best she could at bucking up and putting on a smile. Everyone else based their reactions off hers. But Mae knew darn well that her eldest was crushed by the prospect of a storm ruining her wedding day.
And who wouldn’t be? Even Eliza—golden child Eliza, everything-always-works-out-for-her Eliza—would be devastated by something like that.
So, though she put on a stiff upper lip and faked it, Mae saw right through her façade. But Eliza didn’t want to be comforted. She wanted to go home and cry on Oliver’s shoulder, no doubt. Mae noticed how tightly she was squeezing her fiancé’s hand under the table. She had hardly touched her wine, either, which was a little out of character for her. All added up, it broke Mae’s heart. She had all the faith in the world that things would work out exactly as they were meant to, but she still didn’t want to see her firstborn daughter so heartbroken.
The kids had all cleared out in quick fashion as soon as the food was gone and the dishes cleaned up. Mae had insisted that she’d do things herself—“it’s really no bother; I like doing dishes!” she’d protested, like she always did—but the adults had waved her off and sprung to work. Clearing, scrubbing, washing, drying, stacking, storing all the leftovers in the fridge or taking some home for themselves. A blur of activity that hardly required much in the way of spoken communication between them. Then they’d said their goodbyes, given their mother a quick kiss on the cheek, and gone home.
In the end, she was left standing idly in the middle of the kitchen, wringing a dish towel between her hands and wondering what else might need doing.
She didn’t have too long to contemplate, though. Dominic came trudging down the stairs. She frowned when he rounded the corner and she saw his face. He had a stormy look in his eyes. She glanced down and saw that he had his cell phone in his hand with words on the screen. That in itself was unusual. Dominic was a well-known hater of text messaging. As a matter of fact, he was a vocal critic of the entire telecommunications industry. “They’re destroying the King’s English!” he’d say bitterly if she caught him when he was a few whiskeys deep and his writing had gone poorly that day. “All the LOLs and TTYLs and LMAOs are bringing about the ruin of the most beautiful language mankind ever devised.” Mae would just laugh and roll her eyes.
He stopped in the doorway of the kitchen, phone squeezed tightly in his hand. Mae tapped her foot and waited for him to explain what was going on. He’d been quiet all through dinner. That, too, was unusual. Dominic was a quiet man by nature, but he warmed up as he got to know people. So to hear him not utter a peep the whole meal had triggered the first of the alarm bells in her brain.
This here was number two.
“Well?” Mae asked, hands on her hips. “Are you going to keep me in the dark? Or shall we play a guessing game? I was never very fond of charades, I’m afraid.”
He didn’t laugh. The smile faded from her face.
“Dom, honey?” she continued. “Is everything all right?”
He didn’t look up, but when he spoke, it was in a strange, strangled voice she’d never heard from him before. “I just got a text message,” he said, nodding towards his phone. He started to say something else, but fell quiet again before the words got out.
“And …?” Mae prompted.
He looked up at her finally. His eyes were swimming with a baffling mix of emotions. She usually had a fairly good read on how he was feeling. He was reserved, yes, but after two years under her roof, she was typically pretty spot-on with reading the Dominic signs.
Now, though, she hadn’t the faintest idea what was running through his mind.
“It seems …” he said, clearing his throat. “It seems as though my ex-wife is coming to visit.”
The towel Mae was holding fell from her hands. It took every ounce of willpower not to stop her jaw from dropping, too.
“Your … your ex-wife,” she finally managed to say, “is coming. Coming here?”
He nodded.
Now, it was Mae’s turn to drown in a baffling mix of emotions. One thought stood out in stark relief above all the others: “You never told me you were married before, Dominic.”
His face was clouded over. Was it embarrassment? Shame? What else hadn’t he told her?
“I was.”
“For how long?”
“Seven years.”
“When was this?”
“Long before I came here, I assure you.”
Mae honestly didn’t know what to think. The first and most startling blow was to think that there were secrets in his past he had kept from her. A marriage was an awfully important life event not to even mention it once in two years of living together. It wasn’t that she was mad at him for being married before. She herself had been married, of course. But she certainly hadn’t concealed that fact, for crying out loud! Why wouldn’t Dominic tell her such a thing?
The existence of an ex-wife was going to take her a long time to brood over. That much was already apparent.
The more immediate and pressing concern was the fact that this mystery woman was going to be coming here.
“When is she arriving, Dominic?”
He swallowed hard. Mae watched his Adam’s apple rise up and down. “Tomorrow.”
That was perhaps the biggest shock of all.
Her boyfriend had an ex-wife, who was coming to visit them unexpectedly.
Tomorrow.
Four days before her daughter’s wedding.
“Please tell me you are joking, Dominic.”
He shook his head and said nothing else.
“This week, of all weeks.”
“I’m sorry,” he whispered.
She had never seen him look so defeated before. If she didn’t feel anger boiling up deep within her, she might actually feel pity for him. He was normally such a proud, dignified man. A quiet strength exuded from him all the time.
Now, he looked like he wanted to retreat within himself and never come back out.
She didn’t have much capacity for pity at the moment, though. She felt more like she’d been slapped in the face.
He had lied to her. A lie by omission, but a lie nonetheless. That had to mean that there were other lies swimming below the surface, just waiting to be dragged up into the light. Mae gripped the edge of the kitchen counter to steady herself. Her head was swimming. She didn’t quite trust her balance all of a sudden. It didn’t need to be said that she didn’t quite trust the man in her kitchen all of a sudden, either.
“I’m sorry,” Dominic said again. Then he turned and walked away before she could find the words she wanted to say, shuffling back up the stairs in his house slippers.
Mae stood in the sparkling clean kitchen for a long time. Just an hour ago, this place had been full of life and laughter and love. Now, it felt like the lowest point on earth. She didn’t know what to do or say or think.
And she didn’t have much time to figure those things out.
Because this woman was coming tomorrow. Was she intending to stay with them? Would she be expecting to attend Eliza’s wedding? What was she like? Where was she from? What was her name?
What
was her name?
That, of all the billions of questions percolating in Mae’s head right now, felt for some bizarre reason like the most important one of all of them.
What was her name?
She wondered what kind of woman a younger Dominic would have swooned over. “Mae” was a simple, honest name. But those traits didn’t seem to match the expression that had been marring Dominic’s face when he broke the news to her. One did not harbor such fear for a “Mae.”
So it was something more exotic then. A “Priscilla,” maybe? No, too fussy. A “Florence”? That didn’t feel right either.
What about an “Estelle”? That seemed classy, opaque, with an undercurrent of mystery to it. Yes, Mae decided, she would be opening her home tomorrow morning to a woman named Estelle. She could just hear Dominic pronouncing those syllables with his rippling accent. Estelle would be tall, no doubt, verging on Amazonian. Or maybe short? Petite? Would she be blonde or brunette, redheaded or raven-haired? Busty, thin? Friendly, cold? A million possibilities swirled around in Mae’s imagination, every single one of them worse than the last.
Jealousy stabbed through her like a lightning bolt. She had that same befuddled feeling she’d had the other day when she was reminiscing on how strange it felt to call Dominic her “boyfriend.” Jealousy was a problem she’d left behind almost half a century ago. Or so she thought. But now it was back, and back with a vengeance for having been so long neglected. It was an ugly feeling. Mae wanted badly for it to go away.
She thought of calling Debra or Lola to vent, then thought better of it.
For now, she wanted to lie down in the darkness and brood. “Estelle” was coming tomorrow. Mae needed to get her thoughts in order.
Part II
A Guest Arrives
10
Holly
Wednesday morning.
Four days until Eliza’s wedding.
Holly woke up on Wednesday like a little kid on Christmas morning. She was out of bed about three seconds after her eyes opened. By the time four or five minutes had passed, she was downstairs—dressed, makeup on, hair and teeth brushed—and putting on breakfast for everybody. Waffles for the kids, eggs and bacon for Pete, coffee and a bagel for her. She was whistling as she cooked.
There was one big, big reason she was so excited: today, the first batch of furniture for Goodwin & Payne Law Firm was due to arrive.
She’d made quick work of the ordering as soon as Pete had given her the go-ahead on Monday. As a matter of fact, she’d stayed up late into the night, finalizing her ideas and placing the initial orders. The truth was that she’d had rough sketches penciled into her notebook for months now, ever since Pete had first broached the possibility of handing the project over to Holly. So it had taken her no time at all to get all her ducks in a row. And since the first order had been placed with a local Nantucket furniture company, it was only a one-day turnaround on the shipping. Light-speed. Holly couldn’t be more thrilled.
She wanted to touch something, to put a project together with her own two hands. Raising her children as a stay-at-home mom felt both slower and less tangible than she might’ve thought. Sure, there was plenty of day-to-day work that required her getting her own hands dirty. Laundry, cooking, cleaning, helping out with homework—the list never ended, really. Those things were all satisfying in their own way. No one loved a clean house more than Holly Goodwin.
But it wasn’t the same as turning an empty space into something beautiful. Moving into the new house had scratched some of that itch, though the manner in which the whole house-theft thing went down had poisoned it somewhat. This, however, was a fresh opportunity. Clean slate. From nothing to something.
She couldn’t wait.
Pete lumbered downstairs a few minutes after her. “Good morning, sweetheart!” she beamed, pecking him on the cheek when he passed by.
He scratched his head and smiled. “Someone’s up and at ’em today.”
“Why wouldn’t I be? It’s another day in paradise with you, my love.”
Pete shot her a sideways glance as he poured himself a cup of coffee from the French press. “And yet, I’m worried. Should I be worried? You’re worrying me.”
The waffles popped out of the toaster. Holly was quick to plate them and set them in the kids’ places at the breakfast bar. “The only thing you need to be worried about is how much I love you, darling.”
He chuckled as he took a sip and immediately winced. Pete hated hot coffee. Another Pete Thing. “I haven’t been worried about that since the day we met, Hollz.”
The kids came scampering down before Holly could do anything but smile. They slid onto their stools. Grady immediately started pouring an obscene amount of syrup onto his food, while Alice picked up her fork and knife and began to fastidiously cut her waffles into circles. That was her new thing. Circles tasted better, apparently.
“Grady!” reprimanded Holly. “That is plenty of syrup, hon.”
He grumbled but set the syrup aside and went to town on the waffles with his bare hands. Holly rolled her eyes and let it go for the time being. She was in too good of a mood to keep lecturing everybody. If Alice wanted circles, let her have circles! If Grady wanted to eat like a caveman, let him do it! It was a beautiful day, the birds were chirping, the sun was shining, and nobody on the planet could do her wrong.
She busied herself with packing the kids’ lunches as Pete disappeared back into their bedroom to get dressed for work. She glanced up to check the clock on the microwave as she finished zipping up the lunch boxes and setting them on the entranceway table so the kids could grab them on their way out the door. It was 7:43 in the morning. She had to drop the kids off at school, then be over to the old firehouse by eight-thirty to supervise the furniture delivery and unloading process. Plenty of time. This morning was going swimmingly already.
She thought about Eliza out of nowhere and felt a pang of pity. The bombshell Marshall had dropped last night about the incoming hurricane had really ruined the evening. Holly still had her fingers crossed that it wouldn’t be a problem, but Pete had checked on some weather websites last night and agreed with Marshall’s assessment. “It looks a little grim, to be honest,” he’d said. “Let’s hope it works out.”
Pete reemerged in his suit and tie.
“Look at my dashing husband,” Holly exclaimed giddily, with just a touch of over-the-top melodrama, because it always made Pete smile. She grabbed him by the lapels of his suit jacket and smooched him on the lips. Behind her, Grady and Alice made gagging noises.
Pete’s eyes were twinkling as they separated. “Now I’m definitely worried,” he commented. “You going to be okay today, bossing around all those moving men?”
“I was born to do this,” she answered at once.
He laughed again. “That I believe,” he said. He checked his wristwatch. “All right, I gotta scoot. We’ve got clients coming in at 8:15. Text me and let me know how everything goes?”
“Will do, honey.”
He kissed her again, gave each of the kids a kiss of their own on the top of the head, then went out the door.
Holly made short work of the kids’ plates and cutlery as they went to finish getting ready for the school day. Summer break was in the very near future. She could sense that they were already antsy to be free of their teachers. They were both excited to go to their respective summer camps, too. Holly had found a science program for Grady that looked great, primarily because it involved blowing things up. Alice would be going to a ballet “boot camp” with a couple of her friends from dance class. Holly thought that sounded a little intense for a seven-year-old, but it seemed to be all the rage, so she just shrugged it off.
By 7:58, they were all loaded up into the minivan and pulling out of the driveway. Holly clicked on the radio and sang under her breath to an old Shania Twain song as they made their way across the island and into the car drop-off line at Nantucket Elementary.
“Bye, honeys!” she said when
she dropped them off. Alice waved back, Grady grunted something that vaguely resembled a goodbye, and then the door clicked shut and they were gone.
Furniture time!
As Holly drove over to the future home of Goodwin & Payne, drumming her fingers on the steering wheel to the tune, she wondered for a minute if she was being silly. It was just furniture, after all. Surely she had more important things in her life to get excited about.
Well, yes, that might be true, but who cared? Let her get excited about this! Enthusiasm was in such short supply in the world these days. It was better to let people like what they liked. Holly liked furniture, she liked decorating, she liked pretty things and neat spaces. If that made her happy, then so be it.
When she was about thirty seconds away from her destination, she realized suddenly that she had left the keys to the building at home. “Shoot!” she said, slapping herself in the forehead. What a dumb mistake. She thought about just turning around, but she thought she spied the corner of the delivery truck sticking out around the corner. She’d just pop in and let them know she had to run back real quick.
She pulled around and saw that the delivery was in fact there already, ahead of schedule. The two uniformed men were leaning against the hood of the truck. She waved at them.
“Hi!” she hollered out of her open window. “I’m so sorry, but I forgot the keys at home. It’ll be just a sec; I’m going to grab them right now.”
“No worries, ma’am,” the taller one replied with a friendly smile. “If it’s all right with you, we’ll just start getting the stuff off the truck, then?”
She gave him a thumbs-up and a “Go for it!” Then she turned the car around and headed back home. It was 8:12 now according to the car clock, and it would take her at least ten minutes each way. Oh well, nothing she could about it. They seemed like nice men.