She couldn’t articulate her real objection, which was that Deacon had bought the house and moved to Nantucket with Laurel. All his memories—short of the one perfect day with his father—were forged with Laurel. Belinda would be Laurel’s replacement, and Belinda worried that she wouldn’t be as good at Nantucket—did that phrase make any sense?—as Laurel had been. Deacon had solid gold memories of the place, and those memories were—they had to be—inseparable from the person he created them with. Belinda yearned to pick a new place, a place that had no history—Montauk, maybe, or Long Beach Island, if he had to be near the ocean. Even Martha’s Vineyard! But Deacon was dead set; Belinda at least had the perspicacity to realize this. If she wanted to keep Deacon, she would have to go to Nantucket and make the best of things.
Living in a house once occupied by Laurel was even more difficult than she’d anticipated. The furniture, Deacon said, had come with the house, and Belinda could tell—it all looked as though it had washed up on shore sometime during the Great Depression. But there were little things that Laurel had left behind—a hairbrush, a white tank top in the top drawer of a dresser that Deacon had said would be Belinda’s—and there was a framed photograph on a side table in the front room of Deacon, Laurel, and Hayes at the beach, their faces bathed in the rose-gold light of the sunset. Belinda had taken the photograph out of the frame, torn it in half, and buried it in the kitchen trash.
She remembered the first time she did the laundry, throwing towels and her underwear and shorts into the washing machine and then, an hour later, realizing there was no dryer. She had gone to find Deacon, and he had said, “We don’t have a dryer, so we normally hang stuff on the clothesline.”
Belinda had stared at him. The “we” he was speaking of was he and Laurel.
“Let me buy a dryer,” Belinda said. “Please.”
“No,” Deacon said. One thing about Deacon: when the man said no, he didn’t waver and he didn’t negotiate. “The clothesline is a part of the experience. It’s summertime. We dry our clothes and the sheets and the towels on the line. We aren’t getting a dryer.”
He’d eventually discovered that the picture of him, Hayes, and Laurel was missing—Belinda would have been well advised to have tossed the frame as well—and he confronted Belinda.
“What happened to this?” he asked.
Initially, she shrugged. He gave her an incredulous look until she said, “I threw it away.”
She had been stretched out on the bed, reading a script. Deacon sat next to her.
“Listen,” he said, “I know it must have been painful to see…”
“You don’t know,” she said.
“I do know,” Deacon said. “Your place in L.A. is filled with pictures of you with other men—you and John Lithgow, you and Pierce Brosnan, you and Brian Dennehy…”
“That’s not the same,” Belinda said.
“It is the same,” Deacon said. He took her hand. “We both have a past, right? A path that brought us to where we are now. I’m going to honor your past and try not to feel threatened or jealous, and I’d like you to do the same, okay?”
“Okay,” she’d said. But inside, she was glad the photograph was gone. If Deacon had sorted through the trash, he would have found that she’d torn it in half, right down the middle of Laurel’s face.
There had been other things Belinda had wanted to change. Frankly, she would have liked to have gutted the house and remodeled from the studs—or, better still, have sold the house and bought a house in town. She had a favorite: 141 Main Street. She had enough money that she could have knocked on the front door and made the owners an offer. But she had known better than to ask Deacon what he thought about this idea.
During the years she spent with Deacon, she had grown to love Nantucket for all the reasons he had listed, but also because on Nantucket, no one hassled her. Everyone knew she was Belinda Rowe, obviously, but she had never been followed by paparazzi, never been interrupted while at dinner, never been hounded by fans except the occasional autograph seeker. Belinda had been able to belt out “Send in the Clowns” at the Club Car and receive a good-natured round of applause without worrying about her picture appearing on Page Six of the Post. It was a welcome change, the opportunity to relax.
Once Belinda had dried her eyes, blown her nose, removed her hat, and shaken out her hair, she dealt with the pragmatic reality of her situation. Laurel had gotten here first, and she moved around as though she were completely at home, even though it had been nearly thirty years since Laurel had lived here.
“Where am I sleeping?” Belinda asked. That was officially the longest sentence Belinda had ever dared say to the woman.
“Clara’s room,” Laurel said.
“Clara’s room?” Belinda said. Clara had been a nursemaid to the Innsleys’ children back in the 1950s. Her room was hardly bigger than a closet! Of course Laurel had assigned Belinda to Clara’s room, with its ascetic twin bed, meant for a bony-assed spinster. “Who’s sleeping in the master?” Belinda asked, though she could easily predict the answer to that question.
“Me,” Laurel said. “I’m sorry if you don’t like Clara’s room, but the guest room is big enough for two people, and I wanted to save it in case Scarlett and Ellery show up…”
“Scarlett?” Belinda said. “I thought…”
“She’s in Savannah,” Laurel said. “But Buck left word with her about this weekend, and I’m still holding out hope that she’ll come.”
Belinda was speechless. If she had known there was even the slightest chance that Scarlett Oliver would show up, she would have gone home to Kentucky.
“Clara’s bathroom has a tub,” Laurel said. “I thought you might like that.”
“Does the tub work?” Belinda asked.
“Honestly, I didn’t check,” Laurel said.
“Well, it didn’t work twelve years ago,” Belinda said. Instinctively, she pulled her phone out to check if there were any flights back to Boston tonight. From there, she would fly to Louisville and take Bob by surprise. But she had no cell signal. “Is there no cell service out here? Still?”
“My phone works at the end of the driveway,” Laurel said.
“It’s 2016!” Belinda said. “Coming back here is like a time warp.”
“Tell me about it,” Laurel said wryly.
“What about Buck’s phone?” Belinda asked. “Buck must be pissed.” She bit off this last word; Mrs. Greene did not tolerate vulgar language around the girls.
“He fell asleep in the front room,” Laurel said.
“Fell asleep?” Belinda said.
“Yes,” Laurel said. “He’s exhausted. Can I offer you some iced tea? Or a glass of wine?”
Belinda didn’t like the way Laurel was playing hostess. This wasn’t her house; it hadn’t been her house since the administration of George H. W. Bush. Furthermore, Belinda had been married to Deacon for fifteen years and with him for seventeen, whereas Laurel had been married to him for six years and with him for eleven. But Laurel had always enjoyed a certain sense of entitlement because she had been Deacon’s first wife and therefore—due to some calculus Belinda didn’t understand—knew him the best.
Belinda would never have agreed to come if she’d known Laurel was going to act like the lady of the manor.
“I’ll have wine,” Belinda said, though it was only quarter past twelve. Mrs. Greene was judgmental about the amount of alcohol that Belinda and Bob drank. Belinda imported cases of Les Monts Damnés from the Chavignol region of Sancerre, which she tucked away in the custom-made wine cave she’d had built in the root cellar. And Bob drank bourbon, obviously—they lived in Kentucky! Bob’s clients, the filthy-rich men who owned the Thoroughbreds, brought him bottle upon bottle of Pappy Van Winkle—ten-year, thirteen-year, twenty-three-year.
Mrs. Greene was slightly gentler in her disapproval of Bob’s drinking, probably because he was a man. If Belinda popped a cork before five, Mrs. Greene cleared her throat and eyed Belinda over the tops of her spectacles. Mrs. Greene was, quite naturally, a teetotaler.