“Yes,” Kelley says. “Yes, I do.”
“But you miss Uncle Bart more, right?” Pierce says.
“The situations are different,” Kelley says. “Your dad is in Shirley, and I go visit him once a month and I know when he’s coming back. Your Uncle Bart is a prisoner of war. I don’t know if he’s safe and I don’t know when he’s coming back. So I guess you might say I’m more concerned for Bart. But I miss them both a great deal.”
“I like Uncle Bart,” Pierce says. “I want to be in the Marines.”
“They’ll never take you,” Barrett says. “You’re too annoying.”
Okay, Kelley thinks. He’s done here. He tried. He switches on the TV just as Jaime walks into the room eating a chocolate chip cookie.
“Where’s mine?” Barrett says.
“It was the last one,” Jaime says.
Before Barrett can reach out to punch his brother, Kelley turns back to the TV.
“Go back to stealing cars,” he says. “I’ll make some more cookies.”
The boys grab their controllers. Kelley stands in the doorway to the den for a second, watching them. He’s pretty sure that his words of wisdom have had zero effect.
Pierce glances up and smiles. “Thanks, Grandpa,” he says. “Good talk.”
JENNIFER
The woman in front of Jennifer at Murray’s Liquors looks familiar, even from the back. It’s something about the angular cut of her hair, and the severe red and black dye job. Jennifer can’t quite figure out who it is… not someone from Beacon Hill, she doesn’t think… possibly someone from here? But how many people does Jennifer know on Nantucket? Not many.
Then the woman spins around clutching a bottle of Smirnoff vodka and a bottle of Kahlúa by the neck and Jennifer sees the snake tattoo jumping off the woman’s neck. It’s not a tattoo that anyone forgets. Jennifer gasps.
“Norah!” Jennifer says. “Hi!”
The woman sniffs at Jennifer and marches out of the store with her purchases.
Jennifer sets her two bottles of cold chardonnay on the counter and tries to collect her wits.
Did that just happen?
Norah Vale, Kevin’s ex-wife? Here, on Nantucket? On the weekend of Genevieve’s baptism? Norah Vale, Jennifer thinks. Cautionary Tale. The way Norah was holding the bottles made it seem like she was heading home to make some Black Russians. Was she living here? Norah Vale grew up on Nantucket. Possibly she was just home visiting her family. The family situation is a hot mess, if Jennifer remembers correctly. The mother has six children by three men, but Norah, the youngest, shares a father with the oldest brother—because, as Norah once phrased it, her mother saw nothing wrong with making the same mistake twice. The father isn’t in the picture anymore, but Norah used to be close with her older brother, Danko, the tattoo artist. Danko was the genius who had talked Norah into the trompe l’oeil python that looks like it’s striking from off Norah’s neck.
Jennifer pays for the wine, takes the bag, and hurries up Main Street with half an idea that Norah Vale is lurking behind a tree somewhere, intending to jump out and harm Jennifer.
For six years, they were sisters-in-law, married to brothers, a delicate relationship to manage under the best of circumstances, but Norah and Jennifer had really hated each other. Which is more accurately to say that Norah had hated Jennifer while Jennifer tried to be as kind and patient and accommodating with Norah as possible, but Norah found Jennifer’s attention—even the most innocuous comments—patronizing. Jennifer was, in Norah’s words, a “snobby pop-tart,” whatever that meant. Norah resented that Jennifer had grown up on Nob Hill in San Francisco, that she had graduated from Stanford, that she wore Ray-Ban aviators and carried Coach handbags, that she and Patrick devoted so much time and energy to “being perfect.”
When Jennifer assured Norah that she was far from perfect, Norah had responded with some choice expletives.
Jennifer desperately needs to talk to Patrick. She feels the urge to call him seventy or eighty times a day, but she can’t—nor can she email or text. He’s only allowed one half-hour phone call per week, which is always scheduled for Sunday afternoons at four.
But by Sunday afternoon at four, the baptism will be over, and Jennifer needs him now. He’s been in jail for almost an entire year, and yet it still feels surreal. Every morning for nearly a year, Jennifer has woken up—often Jaime, her youngest, has climbed in with her, an egregious habit she allows because she knows how much he misses his father—and she has thought, My husband is in jail.
Jail.
It has such a stigma, it’s so beneath a person of Patrick’s caliber, it indicates such nefarious behavior and bad judgment that even now, eleven months later, Jennifer can’t believe it.
She didn’t think she would be able to face any of her friends or any of her and Patrick’s Beacon Hill neighbors, or any of the other parents at the kids’ schools. But Jennifer’s best friend Megan stood stalwartly by her. Megan is a breast cancer survivor—she went through a double mastectomy, chemo, radiation, the whole bag of tricks—and because of this she is revered, and widely considered a hero. When Megan supported Jennifer, everyone else who mattered followed suit, and Jennifer enjoyed a kind of reverse celebrity. Rather than judging her or hating her, people seemed to pity her. Or maybe they didn’t pity her, maybe they just understood that Patrick had made a mistake and crossed a line in his tightly regulated business. Insider trading. Many people referenced Martha Stewart, who had served her time for the same crime, and then bounced right back to making buttercream icing and mulching the peonies.
Megan had also given Jennifer a stash of pills: oxycodone for during the day (“It’s jet fuel,” Megan said) and Ativan to help her sleep. At first, Jennifer turned down the offer of the pills, but Megan insisted. (“Just take them in case you need them, Jen. I’m not suggesting you become an addict, but suffering through a crisis like this without a little pharmaceutical help is unnecessary martyrdom.”) Jennifer took the pills and buried them deep in her purse. Just in case.
As it turned out, not everyone was interested in letting Jennifer off the hook. A mother of twins in Pierce’s grade named Wendy Landis lobbied fiercely to have Jennifer removed from the parents association, citing the Quinn family’s “poor choices and lack of integrity.” Jennifer had taken this very hard. Wendy Landis was a member of Jennifer’s church and she lived only six houses away on Beacon Street. Jennifer had always idolized Wendy Landis for having a career—she was a named partner at one of the best law firms in the city—and somehow also being one of those everything moms.
Jennifer took her first oxycodone before she went into a meeting with the headmaster of Pierce’s school to combat Wendy Landis’s slur campaign against her. Megan had been right: the oxy made everything better. It gave Jennifer wings and cast a golden glow of optimism over the entire situation. Jennifer explained to the headmaster that she had not committed a crime; in fact, she had earned an A in her Introduction to Ethics class at Stanford, and as for Patrick, he had fully admitted his wrongdoing and was now paying his debt to society.
The headmaster had sided with Jennifer; she would remain on the executive board of the parents association. Jennifer felt so vindicated when she walked out of the school that she took another oxy in celebration. Unfortunately, she felt herself slipping down the back side of that pill at the same time that the boys arrived home from school with their attendant clamor and chaos, and so she took a third pill. The third pill kept her revved-up, but with a bit of a manic edge; she engaged Barrett in yet another embittered confrontation about his bad attitude. By the time the effects of the third pill wore off, it was time for Jennifer to pour herself a glass of wine, but the wine didn’t settle her like it normally did, and so Jennifer also popped an Ativan.
The combination of the wine and the Ativan was magnificent! Suddenly Jennifer could see how manageable everything was, despite Patrick’s absence. She floated around the kitchen making pumpkin risotto and a kale Caesar salad, and at the end of the meal she asked the boys to clean up while she retreated to her room and fell promptly asleep.