Ava rolls her eyes.
She has created her finest playlist yet: a new 1980s mix—“Modern Love,” by Bowie, “Tainted Love,” “Life in a Northern Town.” She and Kevin dance and sing into imaginary microphones as they feed the masses. Men at Work, Wham!, Loverboy. It’s a good day, a very good day.
It’s made even better when Ava sees Shelby in line with her baby, Xavier, strapped to her chest in a BabyBjörn. Shelby gives Ava wide eyes and she mouths something, but Ava is bopping around to Cyndi Lauper and can’t make out what Shelby is saying. When it’s her turn to order, Shelby says, “I have to talk to you.”
“After work?”
“No,” Shelby says. “Right now. This instant.”
There is an expression of extreme urgency on her best friend’s face.
Bart? she thinks. Her stomach drops. But would Shelby be the one to deliver news about Bart? No.
“It can’t wait?” Ava asks.
“It can’t wait,” Shelby says. “I’m not even hungry. I just stood in this line so I could talk to you. I’ve texted you ten times already.”
“Okay, meet me out back,” Ava says. She grabs Kevin. “Watch the register for a minute?”
“Wha—” he says.
“Please,” Ava says.
Out behind the shack, Shelby reaches out to hold both of Ava’s hands. Xavier is fast asleep against her chest; his tiny lips make a sucking motion.
“Roxanne Oliveria…” Shelby says.
“Roxanne?” Ava says. “Did something happen?”
“She’s pregnant,” Shelby says.
That night, Ava is supposed to meet Scott at the Boarding House. They have plans to eat at the bar and then go to the Chicken Box to see Scott’s favorite band, Maxxtone. An hour before they’re supposed to meet, Scott calls.
He says, “I have to cancel.”
Ava has been thinking about how to handle this. She has decided to play dumb and let Scott lead the way. She says, “Really? How come?”
“Ava?” Scott exhales a long breath. “I’m going to be a father.”
I’m going to be a father. This statement tells Ava everything she needs to know. It doesn’t matter that Scott is in love with Ava; it doesn’t matter that he was planning on breaking up with Roxanne. Scott has a set of values made from solid gold. He always does the upstanding, honorable thing. Plus, he has always wanted a child, three children, ten children. He’s going to marry Roxanne and he is going to be a father. Ava can’t stand in his way.
“I’m sorry, Ava,” he says. They have to stop, cold turkey, he says. He can’t see her one-on-one ever again.
Devastation. Heartbreak. Loneliness.
Ava calls Shelby and cries over the phone. She tells Kevin the news and he gives her the next day off work. She drives out to the beach at Ram Pasture with a bottle of wine and a bag of peanut butter–filled pretzels. The beach is deserted—it’s the best-kept secret on the island—and this gives Ava the freedom to scream at the ocean and throw her pretzels to the seagulls. Roxanne is pregnant. Scott is going to marry her. Nathaniel is in Block Island, by now probably dating somebody else, some lucky Block Island girl that he met at the Oar, the bar that’s apparently the place everybody goes. Nathaniel has asked Ava to come visit, but she has declined. Until yesterday, she had been happy with Scott. She had chosen Scott, and Scott had chosen her.
That’s over now.
Scott will marry Roxanne, a woman he couldn’t tolerate for seven days even in the picturesque countryside of Italy, a woman who wears high-heeled, fur-lined boots and requests “Brown-Eyed Girl” everywhere there’s music playing. Ava pours herself a plastic cup of wine even though it’s only three o’clock in the afternoon. She used to have two boyfriends; now she has none. It serves her right. She toasts that old bitch Karma and drinks. There is today’s pain, which is bad, but she understands that today’s pain will pale in comparison to the pain she will feel when she bumps into Roxanne at the grocery store and is confronted with Roxanne’s burgeoning belly or when she sees the birth announcement in the Inquirer and Mirror or when, years from now, she sees Scott and his son or daughter having an ice cream at the soda counter of Nantucket Pharmacy.
There are emotional landmines everywhere, but there are also pragmatic landmines. It’s three days before Margaret and Drake’s wedding, and now Ava doesn’t have a date. All of the wedding-guest numbers include Scott; without him, the event will be lopsided, off balance, or so Ava convinces herself. She is so desperate that she considers asking Scott if he will break his cold-turkey rule and escort her to the wedding and reception out of mercy; he can tell Roxanne he was grandfathered in. Next, she considers calling Nathaniel and begging him to come from Block Island, but she immediately realizes this is unfair, bordering on cruel. She could always suck it up and go alone.
When she walks out of Flowers on Chestnut carrying the box that holds her mother’s bridal bouquet as well as the bouquet that she, Ava, will be carrying as maid of honor, she hears someone call her name.
She turns but can’t identify the source of the voice. Town is packed. There are people everywhere—parents, children, grandparents, dogs, college kids, and couples, couples, couples.
“Ava!”
Okay, she isn’t imagining it. Male voice. She stands still. And then, crossing the street in a diagonal she sees… she sees… a man heading straight for her. Tall, dark hair peppered with gray, blue polo shirt, blue-striped shorts. It’s… it’s…
He offers her his hand. “Hi, it’s Potter. Potter Lyons? I met you in Anguilla.”
MARGARET
She is sixty-one years old and in two hours, she will be getting married for the second time. She would have said that the details of her wedding didn’t matter, anything was fine—and yet, with two hours left, she finds that things matter very much. She is wearing an ivory gown designed for her by Donna Karan that is possibly more flattering to her figure than her original wedding dress was, even though she’d worn that one at the age of twenty-three. She doesn’t want to make comparisons like that—first wedding versus second wedding—because after nearly forty years, so much has changed. She’s a different person.
But she is still, apparently, type A. She relaxes only once Patrick, Jennifer, and the boys have arrived, and she puts her hands on the sides of Patrick’s face and gives her firstborn a kiss.
“You have no idea how good it is to see you,” she says.
“I have every idea,” Patrick says. “I love you, Mom. Thank you for not giving up on me.”
“Oh, honey,” she says. For a second, she is speechless. Is she thrilled that Patrick broke the law and went to jail? Obviously not. But she knows him well enough to realize that he has learned his lesson and he’ll bounce back just fine. As for her giving up on him, well… he has three boys of his own, so he understands that no parent ever gives up on his or her child.
Patrick says, “I can’t believe you gave Dad my job. I thought I would give you away.”
“Your poor father,” Margaret says. “He’s earned it.”
The ceremony is simple but that doesn’t mean it’s uncomplicated. There are two dozen white chairs lined up on the beach, twelve on each side with a sandy aisle between. At the end of the aisle is the altar—a white arched trellis dripping with roses. There is a harp, a cello, and a trumpet, and Gordon Russell to sing. When all of the guests are seated—including George’s girlfriend, Mary Rose, wearing a remarkably large hat—Darcy, Margaret’s assistant and de facto wedding planner, gives the signal, and the harpist and cellist launch into Pachelbel’s Canon in D.
Ava, Kelley, and Margaret are standing on top of the dune, watching the action below. Ava advances down the aisle, looking beautiful in a pink silk sheath that is exactly the color of her flushed cheeks.
“Do you think she’s okay?” Margaret asks Kelley. Ava broke it off with Nathaniel back in June, and then only a week ago she and Scott broke up when it turned out that he’d gotten the other woman he was dating pregnant. Miraculously, Ava bumped into Potter Lyons, the nice young man she and Margaret met in Anguilla, and now he’s here as Ava’s date. Potter seems perfectly at home despite the fact that he knows exactly nobody; he is sitting with Kevin and Isabelle and Genevieve. Genevieve is old enough to stand on Kevin’s lap, and when she’s standing, she grabs Potter’s ear, but he doesn’t seem to mind. His eyes are glued to Ava as she proceeds down the aisle; Margaret can decipher the expression on his face even from a hundred yards away. He’s smitten.