Barefoot

“Geez,” she said, and she laughed. “You shouldn’t sneak up on people like that.”

“I was wondering,” he said. He was turning his pencil again. “Would you like to grab some lunch?”

“What?” Brenda said. She checked the room. Who else had heard? Just her and the Jackson Pol ock. Was John Walsh asking her on a date?

Her, the professor? The first day of class? “I’m sorry, what? ”

He didn’t look embarrassed, not even a little bit. “I don’t have another class until two,” he said. “And I don’t know anybody here. This is my first semester. I was kind of hoping there might be some people here my age. I went to the orientation for ‘nontraditional’ students, but . . . you know, there were a couple of fourteen-year-old whiz kids and a housewife in her forties and a guy even older than that who was some kind of tribal chief in Zaire. I’m looking to make some friends.”

“But I’m your professor,” Brenda said.

“So you can’t go get a slice of pizza?”

“Sorry,” Brenda said.

He sighed in an exaggerated way, and then he smiled. He was so attractive that Brenda didn’t even feel comfortable sitting in a room alone with him. She had to get out!

“There are al these sil y rules,” she said. She had stumbled across the lines in her Handbook of Employee Rules and Regulations when she’d paged through it on the crosstown bus after her orientation. Romantic or sexual relationships are forbidden between a faculty member and a student. Romantic or sexual comments, gestures, or innuendo are forbidden between a faculty member and a student and will result in disciplinary action. There are no exceptions made for tenured professors.

“I’m over eighteen,” he said. “It’s just pizza.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Brenda said. “I’m sorry.”

Walsh slid his pencil behind his ear. “So I guess I’m eating alone again today. Ah, no worries. See you Thursday?”

“Yes.”

Brenda let him out ahead of her because she had to lock the door and reset the security code to ensure the safety of the painting. But Walsh lingered in the hal way, and they walked toward Mrs. Pencaldron’s desk together. Mrs. Pencaldron had her eyes trained on them al the way down the hal ; Brenda felt herself emitting guilt. But why? He had asked her to lunch, she said no.

John Walsh pushed through the door that separated the English Department from the rest of the drab university.

“Ta!” he said—to Brenda or Mrs. Pencaldron, Brenda wasn’t sure, nor was she sure what ta meant. She waved instinctively, relieved to see him go.

She handed the key to Mrs. Pencaldron. “He’s Australian,” she said.

“So I gathered.”

“We had a good class,” Brenda said. “Short. First day, you know. They hadn’t read anything. I went over my expectations for the class and the kids introduced themselves. That’s how I knew he was Australian.” Stop talking! Brenda told herself.

Mrs. Pencaldron tilted her head. “You reset the security code?”

“Uh . . . yes.”

“He didn’t see you do it, did he?”

“Who?”

Mrs. Pencaldron smiled impatiently. “The Australian.”

“Uh . . . no,” Brenda said.

“You’re sure?”

“I’m sure. He waited down the hal a bit. I shielded the keypad with my body.”

“Okay,” Mrs. Pencaldron said, though her voice sounded specifical y not-okay. She sounded like she suspected an international art theft ring.

“Giving the security code to a student is against the rules. Do you understand?”

“I understand,” Brenda said. “And nobody brought cans or cups into the room, either. Or bottles. None whatsoever.”

“Oh, I know,” Mrs. Pencaldron said. “I saw to that myself.”

So many silly rules, Brenda thought as they approached the hospital’s soda machine.

She had sandwiched the note that said Call John Walsh! into her copy of The Innocent Impostor and then locked the book in its briefcase.

Brenda wasn’t sure why she was keeping the note. She couldn’t think about John Walsh and Fleming Trainor at the same time; that much had already been proven.

“Are we getting a Coke?” Blaine asked. “Real y, are we?”

“Real y we are.” If this was what it took, this was what it took, Brenda thought. It wasn’t like she was offering the kids cigarettes, or shots of Jägermeister. She filched five quarters out of Vicki’s bag and let Blaine careful y slip them into the slot, but she couldn’t find any more change, and the smal est bil in Vicki’s wal et was a twenty. Porter babbled. “Ba ba ba, da da da.” The nonsense a person said before the real nonsense began.

“Wouldn’t you know,” Brenda said. “We need more money.”

Blaine, panic-stricken, looked at Brenda as they walked back to the admitting desk. “What about the Coke?” he said.

“We need more money,” Brenda said, and Blaine started to cry. Hearing Blaine cry made Porter start up again in louder tones. “Boys,” Brenda said. “Please. Just wait a second.” Was it any surprise that Nantucket had the world’s most expensive soda machine? She would have to break a twenty for one lousy quarter, but that made perfect sense. That was how her day was going.

And of course Didi, at the admitting desk, was now deep in conversation with someone else, a guy her age. Brenda tried to wave the twenty over the guy’s shoulder. Didi would hear the kids crying, she would sense urgency. But no—Didi was oblivious, she was completely focused on this other person, who was wearing a hunter green polo shirt and khaki shorts and grass-stained Adidas sneakers. He had a fresh haircut; there were short hair trimmings al over the back of his shirt. He was holding on to one end of a white envelope, and Didi held on to the other end, looking like she might cry.

“This is it,” Haircut Guy said. “And I want it back!”

“I know,” Didi said.

“By the first of July. Not the second. Not the fourth. The first.”

“Righty-o.”

“With interest.”

“What about Friday?” Didi said.

“What about Friday?”

“Zach’s party.”

“Are you going?” Haircut Guy said.

“Yeah.”

“Then I’m staying home.”

“Excuse me,” Brenda said, waving the twenty in the air. It was rude to interrupt, but Brenda couldn’t stand around with two screaming kids while Didi and her friend discussed some kegger. “I need change. For the soda machine.”

Didi wiped a finger under one eye. Her chest heaved. “I don’t have any change,” she snapped. “If you want change you’l have to go upstairs to the cafeteria.”

Oh, no, Brenda thought. No way. “I only need one quarter,” she said. “Please? Do you have a quarter you might just lend me?”

Didi snatched the envelope from her friend’s grasp. “No,” she said. “I don’t.”

Haircut Guy turned around. In his outstretched hand was a quarter. “Here,” he said. Then he looked at Brenda. “Hey,” he said. “It’s you.”

Brenda stared at his face for a second. She knew this person, but how? Who was it? One thing was for certain: She had never been so happy to see twenty-five cents in al her life.

Josh walked with Brenda and the kids to the Coke machine even though he heard Didi making noises back at the admitting desk. Blaine held the quarter and Josh lifted him up so that he could feed the machine, then push the button—and they were al silent as the Coke tumbled down the shoot. Even the baby was quiet. Josh took the Coke from the machine. “Shal I do the honors?”

“You’re the guy from the airport,” Brenda said. “The one who brought me my book. I’m sorry I didn’t recognize you. You got a haircut.”

She looked so astonished that Josh felt embarrassed. He cracked open the can. “Yep,” he said. “I’m Josh.”

“I’m Brenda Lyndon.”

“I know,” he said. “I remember. Dr. Lyndon.”

“I’m not a doctor doctor,” Brenda said. “I’m a doctor of American literature. The most useless kind of doctor there is. We’re here because my sister, Vicki, is having a port instal ed for chemo.”

“Chemo?” Josh said.

“She has lung cancer,” Brenda whispered.

“You’re kidding,” Josh said. But what did he remember about the other sister? Her heavy breathing. “Oh, man.”

Brenda shook her head, then made a motion over the kids’ heads. Blaine said, “Coke! Coke!”

Josh knelt down and helped Blaine with the Coke. Lung cancer? Pregnant? I’m not a doctor doctor. The most miserable-looking people he had ever seen. That’s what Josh had thought, right from the beginning. And no wonder.

“Are you here al summer?” he said. “Because I saw your friend Melanie at the airport a couple of days ago . . .”

“My sister and I are here al summer with the kids,” Brenda said. “The jury’s stil out on Melanie.”

“She seemed real y nice,” Josh said.

“Nice, yes, that she is. Very nice,” Brenda said. “Hey, you don’t know anybody who needs a babysitting job this summer, do you?”

“What kind of babysitting job?”

“Watch the kids twenty-five hours a week. Go to the beach, the playground, throw the bal , build sand castles, take them for ice cream. Twenty dol ars an hour, cash. We need somebody responsible. And I mean rock-solid. You would not believe the weekend we had . . .”

One thing about lending Didi the two hundred dol ars was that it meant Josh couldn’t quit his job at the airport. He had given her more than half his savings, and no matter what she promised him, he knew he would never see it again. But twenty dol ars an hour cash was a lot more than he was making now. He had taken the job at the airport because of his father, though it was truly dul . The most memorable thing that had happened al summer was when Melanie fel off the steps of the plane.

“I’l do it,” Josh said.

Brenda looked at him askance. “You already have a job,” she said. “And you’re a . . . guy.”

“I’m quitting the airport,” Josh said. “And I like kids.”

Brenda stuck the nipple of the pacifier in the can of Coke, then popped it into the baby’s mouth.

“Porter’s only nine months old,” she said. “He’s very attached to his mother.”

“I like babies,” Josh said. This was only true in the hypothetical; Josh didn’t know any babies. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Didi rise from her desk and start over toward them.

“Can you change a diaper?” Brenda said.

“Of course.”

As Didi closed in, Blaine chugged the Coke like a man who had been stranded in the desert. Josh gently pul ed it away.

“Whoa there, pal. Easy, or you’re going to get sick.”

“You’re available mornings?” Brenda said. “Weekdays, say, eight to one? Porter naps at one.”

“I’m available.”

“You have a car, right? The Jeep? Do you think the baby seats wil fit in the Jeep?”

“Baby seats?” Didi said. She was upon them, sniffing around in an accusatory way, as though what they were talking about were her business if only because it was taking place in admitting, which she considered her domain. She brandished a handful of quarters, as if to spite Brenda, and got herself a diet Dr Pepper.

“They should,” Josh said. He had no idea if the baby seats would fit in his Jeep; he didn’t know what baby seats were exactly, but the longer he stood here with this woman, the more desperate he was for a connection with her. “I can do it,” he said. “I real y want to do it.”

“Do what?” Didi said.

“Do you have a criminal record?” Brenda asked. She wondered how pissed Vicki would be if she hired this guy herself, without consulting Vicki.

A guy. Was that weird? With Ted gone, it might be good for the kids. It would be good for the kids, Brenda decided. It would be good for al of them to have a man around on a regular basis; it would even be good for Melanie.

“Criminal record?” Didi said, scoffing. “This guy is as straight-laced as they come.”

“Okay,” Brenda said. “You’re hired.”

S and on the kitchen floor, a collar around the toilet bowl, dandelions, running out of hot water in the shower, a bug bite scratched until it bleeds, losing the plot strands of Desperate Housewives , the New York Times Best Seller List, damp beach towels, mildew, Ted calling from the road to say he was stuck in a five-mile backup outside of New Haven, Ted calling to say the Yukon broke down and he was at a service station in Madison, Connecticut, Ted calling to say he was going to miss the ferry and not to expect him until tomorrow.

“I’m sorry, sweetie,” Ted said. “This is beyond my control.”

Beyond your control? Vicki thought. I thought I was talking to my husband, Ted Stowe, the man who rants and raves and throws money at problems until they’re solved. Vicki hated the defeated tone of Ted’s voice. Her cancer was making him helpless. He couldn’t even deal with traffic, or with an overheated engine. He was going to lie down and die.

“I need you here tonight,” Vicki said. “The kids are expecting you. Blaine has talked about nothing else al week. You can’t just not show. Take a taxi to the nearest airport and fly in.”

“And do what with the car, Vick? It’s ful of stuff.”

Ah, yes, the stuff: a case of Chardonnay from their favorite vineyard in the Russian River Val ey that Vicki was craving, the items she’d bought in bulk at BJ’s—paper towels, cleaning supplies, juice boxes, diapers. Then there was Blaine’s bicycle, a carton of the kids’ favorite children’s books, the paints and the Play-Doh, Vicki’s vitamins (she’d forgotten them on purpose because they made her vomit). Her extra suitcases, one of which contained a blond wig.

Gingerly, Vicki touched her port. A surgeon had instal ed it, and Vicki’s new oncologist, Dr. Alcott, decided to administer the first dose of chemo right away. Why not? Dr. Alcott said (cavalierly, Vicki thought, as though he were deciding to have a piece of Key lime pie for dessert). She had to admit that physical y she felt no better or worse than she had al along. She kept waiting for a change—was the chemo working? Was it gobbling up the cancer cel s like a Pac-Man with those stupid dots?—but the only thing the doctors could guarantee was that her breast milk would be poisoned. Her breasts grew warm and buzzed with pain every three hours like an alarm, but Vicki couldn’t feed the baby. Porter had screamed through the first night. He refused to take a bottle, though Brenda had gotten him to drink a little bit of water from the bathroom cup. Stil , Vicki told herself, things could have been a whole lot worse. She wasn’t nauseous and her hair wasn’t fal ing out in clumps the way she had feared. Brenda had hired the ramp attendant from the airport to babysit starting next week, and the sun was shining. As soon as Ted arrived, they could go to the beach as a family, proceed with the summer as though everything were al right. What Vicki realized during the phone cal , however, was that she had pinned al her hopes on today, Friday, the day of Ted’s arrival; he might as wel have been riding in on a white horse. Now he wasn’t coming.

He couldn’t leave the car ful of stuff. Vicki waited for devastation to set in, but instead, al she experienced was a scary nothing. She didn’t care.

Ted’s arriving one day late was just one more item on her List of Things That No Longer Matter.

She hung up the phone. Blaine and Brenda were sitting out on the front step, tossing pebbles into a paper cup. Porter sat on the tiny lawn in just his diaper, eating dandelions. Melanie was taking her third outdoor shower of the day. For some reason, the outdoor shower made Melanie feel better. She claimed it took her mind off Peter.

I’m sorry about all the hot water, she said.

Shower away, Vicki said.

Now, Vicki watched her children. They were happy, blissful, unaware. She wanted to be happy. What was going to make her happy? Anything?

What would make her happier than she was now? She heard the voices of the people in her cancer support group chanting in her mind like a Greek chorus. You have to make yourself fight. You cannot, under any circumstances, give up.

Vicki tapped Brenda on the shoulder just as she sank the first pebble of the game.

“Yes!” Brenda said with a raised fist. “Two points for Auntie Brenda.”

“Bren?” Vicki said.

Brenda looked up. “What?”

Vicki motioned for Brenda to step inside, though first she checked that the gate was latched—it would be just like her kids to take off on their own down Shel Street.

“Don’t move a muscle,” Vicki said to Blaine.

“And don’t cheat,” Brenda said. “I’l know if you cheated.”

Blaine threw a pebble in anger and knocked the cup over.

“What is it?” Brenda said.

“Ted’s not coming until tomorrow.”

“Oh, shit.”

“He got stuck in traffic, and I guess the Yukon overheated or something. He’l come in the morning.”

“You’re okay with that?”

“I want you to cal the sitter.”

“The sitter?”

“The boy. The guy. Josh. See if you can get him over here.”

“Right now?”

“In an hour. I want to go out.”

“You want to go out? ” Brenda said. “Are you sure you feel . . .”

“I want to go out,” Vicki said. “You, me, and Mel. I want to go into town and have a glass of wine. I want dinner. I want to go to the Club Car.”

“You want to go to the Club Car?”

“Cal the sitter. Cal the taxi. Cal the restaurant.” Vicki took a breath. She was spewing out orders, but her desires were singular. Go out with the girls. Feel like a person again.

Josh pul ed up in front of the house at seven o’clock. The gate was latched, the door was shut, there was a paper cup ful of rocks sitting in the middle of the flagstone walk. Josh got out of the Jeep. He had showered and put on aftershave, but then, because he felt like he was going to too much trouble for a simple babysitting job, he put on jeans and a Red Sox jersey.

He’d had to cal his father at work. “I’l leave dinner in the fridge,” he’d said.

“You’re going to Zach’s party?” his father said.

“No,” Josh said. “I’m babysitting.”

Predictably, there was silence. Just as there had been silence on Tuesday night when, over fried chicken and deli potato salad, Josh announced that he had quit his job at the airport.

That night, after a longer-than-usual swil of Sam Adams, Tom Flynn had asked, “What wil you do for money?”

“Babysit,” Josh had said. He watched his father for a show of surprise or disbelief, but this was a man who had found his wife of fifteen years dangling from the attic rafters. His face registered nothing. “For these two boys out in ’Sconset,” Josh continued. “It pays more than the airport. I’l get to spend time outside. There are these three women . . .” He shook his head; it was too complicated to explain. “The mother has cancer.”

Tom Flynn cut through a wedge of iceberg. “You’l finish out the week?” he said.

Josh had finished out the week and that made today, Friday, his last day. Carlo treated him to a beer at the airport restaurant, then another, and then another, at which point Josh entertained thoughts of going to Zach’s party despite Didi’s inevitable and annoying presence. Then his cel phone rang with a New York number. It was Brenda. She sounded as desperate as she had when she cal ed about her missing book. Could he be at their house to babysit in an hour?

Josh, not wanting to get off on the wrong foot with his new employer, felt compel ed to tel the truth. “It’s my last day of work. I just drank three beers.”

This was met with silence. Then Brenda said, “Have a cup of coffee. And come at seven. We’l get the kids al ready for bed. This wil be the easiest money you’ve ever made.”

When Josh knocked on the door, it swung open, taking him by surprise. He had never set foot inside of one of these little ’Sconset cottages, and he thought it might smel like a library book or a museum—ancient, dusty, preserved. But instead the air was redolent of clean hair and perfumed shoulders, toenail polish and swinging skirts. This was the house of the three . . . the three what? The Three Bears? The three beers? Three women step off of a plane. Wasn’t there some ancient tale about three sirens who led sailors astray? Josh knew what Chas Gorda would say: Listen.

Observe. Absorb. Because Josh had final y found his story. The story of his summer. Vicki, the mother, was the happiest-looking of the Three. She was wearing a sleeveless black sundress and a scarf in her hair. He tried to think cancer, chemotherapy, but the words didn’t stick. She padded around in bare feet, a pair of black high heels in one hand and a glass of wine in the other.

“Normal y I leave a list for the babysitter,” she said. “But not this summer. There wil be no lists this summer. Brenda assures me you’re competent, you have lots of experience with kids, you can change a diaper.”

Josh had had two cups of coffee, a Coke, and a bracing shower, but stil his mind was hangover-fuzzy, either from the beers or from the oddness of this situation. He felt something grab the back of his ankle—it was the baby, who had crawled up behind him. Josh felt like a total charlatan as he bent down to pick up the baby. If any one of the hundred people at Zach’s party could see him now . . .

“Yes,” he said.

“Great. Stories are on the nightstand. Eight-o’clock bed. Porter’s bottle is warming up on the counter. Give it to him before you lay him down.”

She paused. “Did that sound like a list?”

“No,” he said. Yes?

“Good,” she said. “My sister’s cel phone number is on the table. We’l be at the Club Car.”

“Okay,” Josh said. The baby was chewing on his shirt, and a tiny moist hand grabbed his ear.

“Make sure Blaine pees twice before bed and brushes his teeth. Don’t let him eat the toothpaste, which is what he likes to do. And put Porter in a clean diaper. It’s too hot for pajamas tonight. The mattress on the floor is theirs, but normal y I let them fal asleep in the big bed and then move them later. Feel free to do the same.” She smiled at Josh. She was pretty, he thought. A real y pretty mom. “I can’t believe it,” she said. “I just made a list.

A verbal list with no less than ten items. I’m sorry. I’m getting out of here.” She walked out the front door, then turned around. “You look darling holding the baby like that, by the way.”

“Oh,” Josh said. Thanks?

“Darling,” a voice said in his ear. He turned to see Brenda, who had changed into a green strapless dress. Green again. She was a mermaid.

She went swishing out the door after her sister. The taxi pul ed up.

“Hi, Josh.” Melanie stood before him in white pants and a blue flowered halter top that left an inch of her midsection bare. Her hair was curly around her face, and she peered at him both shyly and hopeful y.

“Stil no word from my husband,” she said.

“Huh?” he said. He wondered if they’d had a conversation that he’d forgotten about.

“He’s such a jerk,” she said. Her eyes shone. What was going on here? “Blaine’s in the bedroom watching Scooby-Doo, by the way.”

“Oh-kay,” Josh said. Melanie walked out the door, and Josh watched her climb into the taxi. He tried to make the baby wave good-bye, but the baby started to whimper and Josh thought it best to close the door.

Time to get to work, he thought.

Josh poked his head into the bedroom. Blaine was splayed across the bed watching Scooby-Doo on a portable DVD player with a four-inch screen.

“Hey,” Josh said.

Blaine glanced up, startled. “What are you doing here?”

“Babysitting.”

“No!” Blaine said, and he started to cry. The baby, who had been content to slobber al over Josh’s Varitek jersey, began to fuss.

“Hey, man, calm down. Your mom just went to dinner. She’l be back.”

“What about my dad?” Blaine said. He kicked the DVD player off the bed. The machine landed upside down and a piece broke off and skidded across the floor, but Josh could stil hear Velma’s tinny voice talking about tracking down a phantom. Josh considered tending to the injured machine, then thought better of it. He remembered Blaine hurtling himself off the plane’s steps and knocking over Melanie. The kid was a loose cannon.

“Do you want to finish watching? Or we could . . . play a game? I saw a cup of rocks outside. Want to throw rocks?”

“What about my dad?” Blaine screamed.

Porter was official y wailing now. A baby crying was, Josh decided, the world’s worst noise.

“I don’t know anything about your dad,” Josh said.

“He’s supposed to come tonight!” Blaine said. Blaine’s face turned red right to the edge of his scalp, then the color crept through the part of his white-blond hair.

“Okay, wel ,” Josh said. He’d wondered why the Three had left so quickly, why they tiptoed down the walk like cat burglars. Vicki had left something off the list, something crucial. Blaine was expecting his father to show up. “Do you want to eat some toothpaste?”

“No!” Blaine screamed. He ran to the front door, which was closed. He ran to the back door and bul dozed through the screen.

“Whoa!” Josh said. Ouch. Blaine bounced back onto his rear end, but not before leaving a Blaine-shaped-and-sized bulge in the screen. Blaine howled and put his hand to his face, then showed Josh blood. The Three had been gone less than ten minutes and already there was damaged property and blood. The kids cried in stereo. Josh shut the back door. If the neighbors heard, they would cal the police. He set the crying baby down on the floor and went to the bathroom for a wet washcloth. Easiest money ever made? Hardly.

This was more like it, Vicki thought. The cab was approaching town, bouncing over the cobblestone streets, which were crowded with loaded-down SUVs, many of which, Vicki guessed, had just come off the ferry that Ted was supposed to be on. The sidewalks were teeming with activity—

couples headed for dinner or the art gal eries on Old South Wharf, col ege kids aiming for drinks at the Gazebo, crew members coming off yachts, looking to stock up on provisions at the Grand Union—it was Nantucket on a summer night and Vicki loved it. She had been stranded on Planet Cancer for too long.

Muffled strains of Beethoven wafted up from Brenda’s purse.

“That’s probably Ted,” Vicki said. “Cal ing to apologize.”

Brenda pul ed the phone out and checked the display. “Nope.” She shut the phone and tucked it back into her purse. Vicki and Melanie waited a beat.

“Was it John Walsh?” Melanie asked.

“It was not.”

“Was it your lawyer again?” Vicki asked.

“Please shut up,” Brenda said, casting a sideways look at Melanie.

“I promised John Walsh you’d cal him back,” Melanie said. “You did cal him back, I hope. He cal ed, geez, last Sunday.”

“I did not cal him back,” Brenda said. “And you had no right to promise him any such thing.”

“Come on, now,” Vicki said. “We’re trying to have fun.” The cab unloaded them at the restaurant. Melanie paid the driver. “Thank you, Mel,” Vicki said.

“Yes, thank you,” Brenda said, somewhat snidely.

“I’l buy dinner,” Vicki said, as if there had been any doubt.

“This was your idea,” Brenda said.

It was her idea, Vicki thought, and once they were seated in the dining room among the white linen and wineglasses and plates of pecan-crusted swordfish and phyl o-wrapped salmon revealed from under silver domes, it seemed like a grand one. She had ordered a bottle of riotously expensive Château Margaux, because if Vicki was going to drink wine she wanted it to be good wine. Even Melanie accepted a glass; Vicki encouraged her along like a bad teenager who had taken lessons in peer pressure. One glass won’t hurt. But the wine went to Melanie’s head, perhaps because she was out of practice, and she just started talking.

“I cal ed Frances Digitt’s apartment. Peter was there.”

“Oh, Mel,” Vicki said. “You didn’t.”

“I had to.”

“You had to?” Brenda said.

“I asked him if he wanted me to come home.”

“And what did he say?” Vicki asked.

“He didn’t answer.”

Brenda took a breath like she was about to speak, but then she clamped her mouth shut.

“What?” Melanie said.

“Nothing,” Brenda said. “There are just a bunch of things I don’t understand.”

“There are a bunch of things I don’t understand,” Melanie said. “Like first of al , why you need a lawyer, and second of al , why you won’t take his cal s.”

“Mel . . . ,” Vicki said. She had told Melanie about Brenda’s predicament at Champion—fired for her involvement with John Walsh—but she had only al uded to Brenda’s legal trouble, primarily because al Vicki knew about it was what she had been told by their mother: Brenda was under investigation for vandalizing a piece of university-owned art. Brenda herself had said nothing about it to Vicki, probably because she figured Vicki had gotten the story from El en Lyndon. For years, information had been passed between the two girls via their mother, who had no understanding of confidentiality, at least not when it involved family.

“What?” Melanie said, her cheeks flaring red now. “She knows my dirty laundry. What’s fair is fair.”

“The only reason I know your dirty laundry is because you can’t stop talking about it,” Brenda said.

“Enough!” Vicki said. “Let’s change the subject.”

“Yes,” Melanie said.

“Fine,” Brenda said. “What do you think of Josh?”

“He’s gorgeous,” Melanie said. Her cheeks grew even rosier.

“Wel !” Brenda said.

“That’s why you hired him,” Melanie said. “Don’t pretend it isn’t. I’ve heard you have a penchant for younger men.”

Vicki touched Melanie’s arm like a gentle referee. “How was your food?” Vicki asked. “Did you like it?”

Melanie poked at her steak, which she had barely touched. “It was fine. But rich. I don’t want to make myself sick.”

“You stil feel bad?”

“Horrible,” Melanie said. She pushed her wine away. “I don’t want this.”

“I’l drink it,” Vicki said.

Brenda glared at Melanie. “Just so you know, John Walsh, my former student, was not a younger man. He’s a year older than I am.”

“Real y?” Melanie said. “I thought Vicki said . . .”

“You know, Ted is bringing a box of that ginger tea I told you about,” Vicki said. “It wil help settle your stomach.”

“So please, no more references to younger men,” Brenda said. “It’s not only insulting, it’s inaccurate.”

“Okay,” Melanie said. “Sorry.”

“You don’t have to apologize,” Vicki said.

“Sure she does,” Brenda said.

Vicki set her fork down. Al around them, people were having lovely dinners, pleasant conversation—was it too much to ask to be one of them, if only for tonight? “I want champagne with dessert,” she said.

“Oh, Vick, are you sure?” Brenda said.

As Vicki flagged their waiter, Brenda’s phone rang.

“You should turn that off,” Vicki said.

Brenda checked the display.

“Ted?” Vicki said.

“John Walsh?” Melanie said. And then in a heartbreakingly earnest voice, “Peter?”

“Nope,” Brenda said. “It’s Mom.”

“Oh, God,” Vicki said. “Turn it off.”

Somehow, Josh got Blaine’s face cleaned up (the scratch was microscopic; Vicki might not even have noticed it had Blaine not insisted on the largest Band-Aid in the box). Blaine, patched up and abashed by his own antics, calmed down. Porter was stil wailing, however, and Josh was at a loss as to how to make him stop.

“Give him a bottle,” Blaine said. “He won’t take it, but Mom says we have to keep trying.”

Josh lifted the bottle out of the pan of hot water, tested the milk against the inside of his wrist like he’d seen it done in that movie where three grown men who don’t know anything about babies are left in charge of one, and then tried, with Porter nestled in the crook of his arm, to feed it to him. No such luck. The baby was too heavy to hold that way and he didn’t want the bottle. He threw it to the ground and shrieked with his lips curled back so that Josh could see al the way down his throat. Blaine looked on with mild interest.

“Does he always do this?” Josh asked.

“Yes,” Blaine said. “But Mom says we have to keep trying.”

“Okay,” Josh said. He sensed Blaine warming up to him, although he dared not become too optimistic. He held Porter in one arm and the bottle in the opposite hand, just out of Porter’s reach, hoping to entice him. Blaine, meanwhile, trudged back to the bedroom, where he unplugged the DVD player, pul ed out the cord, wound it around his hand, shut the cover, retrieved the broken piece from under the bed, and set the whole thing on his mother’s dresser. He was like a little adult, Josh thought. Then Blaine grabbed a pil ow and a blanket and three storybooks and left the room without so much as a glance at Josh, though Josh understood he was supposed to fol ow.

They moved into the bathroom, where Blaine brushed his teeth, took a leak (he was too short to reach the pul chain to flush, so Josh helped him out), and climbed, like it was second nature, with his pil ow, blanket, and the three books, into the bathtub. He made himself comfortable.

“You’re kidding, right?”

“Sit,” Blaine said. He held up Horton Hatches the Egg. “Read to me, please.”

Josh sat and the baby sat. The baby was just as baffled as Josh, perhaps, because he quieted. Josh set the bottle on the closed toilet seat. He opened the book, cleared his throat, and started to read.

A few minutes later, Josh thought, Yes, that’s right. I am Horton the Elephant, sitting on an egg for lazy Mayzie bird who flew off to Palm Beach. If anyone at Zach’s party could see me now, they would taunt and tease and torture me as surely as the other animals in the jungle taunted Horton. I am that unlikely. That well-meaning but misplaced. I am not competent. This is not easy money. I was led here by lust for the mermaid and a crazy sense that the Three and I were somehow connected. I am a fool, an idiot. I quit the airport. How dumb I am. Horton.

And yet, before Josh had finished the book, peace settled over the bathroom. Blaine, in the tub, had fal en asleep. Porter, lying on his side on the cool tiles, was sucking down his bottle. It was too good to be true. He drained the bottle, then crawled over to Josh. Josh picked him up and he burped.

“Good boy,” Josh said. “Good baby.”

Josh changed Porter’s diaper in the bedroom. The diaper was crooked, but it was on the right way and Porter seemed comfortable enough.

Somewhere in the folds of the covers, Porter discovered his pacifier. He popped it in his mouth and kicked contentedly.

“Do you want to go to sleep?” Josh asked. He could have sworn he saw the baby nod. It was barely dark out, but Josh was exhausted. Those beers. He took off his shoes and climbed onto the bed next to Porter. Porter grabbed his ear. Whose bed was this? Josh wondered, though he knew it was Vicki’s bed. The cancer bed. Josh thought about Brenda’s bed and Melanie’s bed. Then his cel phone rang.

He checked on Porter—asleep. Josh felt jubilant as he flipped open his phone. So jubilant that he answered even though he could see on the display that it was Didi cal ing.

“Hel o?” he whispered.

There was loud, thumping music in the background. Then Didi’s voice, as pleasant and soothing as smashing glass. “Josh? Are you there? Are you coming to Zach’s? Josh?”

Josh hung up the phone and closed his eyes.

The story had been told so many times with such precise sameness that it no longer seemed true, and yet, it was true: Victoria Lyndon met Theodore Adler Stowe at a late-night high-stakes poker game.

Vicki had been living in Manhattan for a little more than a year when she discovered the poker game. She’d harbored a vision of herself as a party girl—nothing was too late or too wild for her, she never ran out of gas—though the fact of the matter was, her weeks were consumed by work as a paralegal at an al -female law firm and her weekends fel into a postcol egiate pattern of dinner at cheap ethnic restaurants fol owed by drinks at a string of bars on the Upper East Side populated by extremely recent graduates of Duke, Princeton, Stanford, Wil iams. Vicki was ready for something different, something edgier, more authentical y New York, and so when a friend of a friend, a guy named Castor—who had long black hair and wore silver jewelry—invited her to a midnight poker game on the Bowery, she panted into the phone: Yes, yes, yes!

The address Castor gave her had once been a brownstone, but the windows were blown out and boarded over, the door was pocked with bul et wounds, and the place exuded an aura of shithole. Okay, Vicki thought, he must be kidding. Or he’s trying to scare me. Or he’s trying to kil me.

Because how wel , real y, did she know Castor? Or maybe she had the wrong address. Except he’d been very clear, and this was the place. Half a block down, music pumped out of CBGB, but despite that, Vicki clenched her rape whistle. She had thirty dol ars in the pocket of her leather pants, a lipstick, and her keys.

Castor pushed open the door of the building from the inside. “Come on in,” he said.

The building had smel ed like burning hair. The stairs were sticky with—blood? urine?—and Vicki heard the scuttling of rats.

“Where are we going?” she said.

“Upstairs,” he said. “Al the way up.”

She fol owed Castor up the stairs, down a pitch-black hal way, up some more stairs, toward a door outlined with green light.

“The color of money,” Castor said.

They pushed into a cavernous room, decorated like a 1920s speakeasy. It was someone’s apartment—a little bald man named Doolie, who was, in fact, a squatter. He had transformed this room into the hottest poker game in the city. A three-piece jazz combo played in the corner.

Juil iard students, Castor said. A bar was set up and a Rita Hayworth look-alike in a red flapper dress passed around fat corned-beef sandwiches.

The center of the action was a round table that sat twelve, though half the seats were empty. It was a poker game, six men grimacing at one another.

“It’s a hundred-dol ar ante,” Castor said. He handed Vicki a bil . “I’l spot you your first game.”

“I can’t,” Vicki said. “I’l lose your money.”

“You don’t know how to play?”

“I know how to play.” There had been some beer poker at Duke and, years before that, funny games with her parents and Brenda at the kitchen table. About as different from this kind of poker as Vicki could imagine.

“So play.” Castor nudged Vicki forward and she stumbled into one of the empty chairs. Only one of the men bothered to look up. A young guy with brown hair and dark green eyes. Preppy-looking. A kid who, much to Vicki’s dismay, looked like the hundreds of guys she met at the bars uptown.

He was wearing a Dartmouth Lacrosse sweatshirt. Her first thought was, If someone as standard-issue as you found this place, it can’t be that hot. But the other men were older, with the definite air that they knew what they were doing.

“You in the next hand?” Dartmouth Sweatshirt said.

She set the hundred out on the table. “I guess.”

The other men licked their chops. They wanted her money.

She won the hand with three queens. The men pushed the pile of cash her way, chuckling. “Betty won.”

“My name is Vicki,” she said.

She played again and won with a ful house. Castor brought her a martini. Vicki took an exultant sip, then thought, This is where I get off. Two more women joined the game and Vicki stood up.

“Oh, no,” one of the older men said. He was the hardest-looking and the loudest-laughing, the leader. “You sit your pretty bucket back down and let us win our money back.” She obeyed and won the third hand with a flush.

Then it was her turn to deal. Her hands shook as she shuffled. She thought of Crazy Eights with Brenda and shuffled with a waterfal . The men chuckled some more. Betty. She folded the next two hands, then won a hand. She ate half a corned-beef sandwich and had another martini. It was three o’clock in the morning and she had never felt more awake. In four hours, she would have to go to work, but she didn’t care. Dartmouth Sweatshirt was smoking a Cohiba. Do you want one? he asked. Sure, why not? She lost another hand then got up to join Castor at the bar. The band was stil playing. Who were these people? Music and writing students, Castor said. Young Wal Street, young production designers, young Madison Avenue, young Seventh Avenue.

“It’s who wil be running New York ten years from now.”

Vicki didn’t belong there. She would never run New York; she couldn’t even make a decision about law school. And yet she walked out of the building at five o’clock in the morning with twelve hundred dol ars. Dartmouth Sweatshirt offered to walk her home; Castor was headed uptown to 120th Street, so Vicki had no choice but to agree. The streets were deserted and intimidating, and she had so much cash.

“You played wel tonight,” Dartmouth Sweatshirt said.

“Beginner’s luck.”

“Coming next week?”

“Maybe. Do you go every week?”

“Every week. I like it. It’s different.”

“Yes.” Vicki looked at the guy. Out of the speakeasy, he seemed tal er and more confident. He was very cute. Vicki sighed. The last thing she needed in her life was another guy. But she was grateful for the walk home. So many men were like Castor. Sorry, going uptown.

“What’s your name?” Vicki asked.

“Ted Stowe.”

Vicki went to the poker game the fol owing Tuesday and the Tuesday after that. She didn’t tel anyone else about it. She had two thousand dol ars in cash in her sock drawer and Wednesdays at work she spent her lunch hour napping in the ladies’ room. But Vicki craved the poker game. Castor gave it up at the end of October. He was on to other things, but not Vicki. She learned to tip Doolie from her winnings before she left, and she learned never to use the bathroom because there were always people in there—people who couldn’t have cared less about poker and the pure high of gambling—doing drugs.

Al Vicki had wanted in the world was her martini, her half a sandwich, her Cohiba, her hand of cards, the John Coltrane, and the green, glowing color of money. This, she thought, is what it must feel like to be a man.

Ted was there every week, despite the fact that he was an awful card player. Some nights he didn’t win a single hand.

“You suck, Stowe,” the leader said. Vicki had learned that the hard-looking man with the Bridge and Tunnel accent was Ted’s boss on the trading floor at Smith Barney. Ken Roxby, his name was.

Ted was always good-natured, always even-tempered, even after losing five hundred dol ars in half an hour, even at four o’clock in the morning, even drunk.

“I’l get you guys back at golf,” he said.

One week, to her utter dismay, Vicki had a stomach virus and missed the poker game. Wednesday morning, her phone rang. Ted Stowe. “I won three hands last night.”

“You did not.”

“I made money,” he said. “For the first time ever.”

“And I missed it,” Vicki said.

“And I missed you,” he said.

Neither of them said anything for a second. Ted cleared his throat. “Hey, I was wondering if . . .”

“I don’t think so.”

“You haven’t even let me ask.”

“I don’t want to date anyone in the poker game,” she said. “I real y, real y like it and I want it to stay just the way it is.”

“Okay,” Ted said. “I quit.”

Vicki thought he meant he was quitting her, but no. He meant he was quitting the game.

“You’d quit for me?” Vicki said.

“Wel , you know what they say about hitting yourself over the head with a hammer,” he said. “It feels good when you stop.”

Now, here it was, more than ten years later: Vicki was lying in bed, nursing a hangover. She wanted to blame the malaise she felt on the chemotherapy, but the symptoms were al too familiar—the floury mouth, the fuzzy, buzzing headache, the sour stomach. She begged Brenda to take the kids for an hour, and bring her a chocolate milk, and Brenda did so huffily.

“I’m not actual y your slave,” Brenda said as she handed Vicki the milk.

Vicki nearly used the word “freeloader,” which would have been like setting a match to hairspray, but at that moment the front screen door clapped shut. There was a shuffle, some heavy footsteps, and then Ted’s voice. “Where are my little monsters?”

Vicki took a sip of her chocolate milk, then fel back into her covers. It was a little past nine; he must have gotten up at an ungodly hour to make the first boat. She listened to him horsing around with the kids. Ted Stowe, her husband. At another time, if she’d been separated from him for a week, she would have felt giddily excited about his arrival, nervous even. But now she felt the scary nothing.

He didn’t come in to see her right away. He was busy with the kids first and then with al the stuff. Vicki had her eyes closed, but she tracked his presence, his footsteps on the flagstone path, the creak of the gate, the clicks and thumps of the car doors opening and closing. She heard him teasing Melanie, and indignation bloomed in Vicki’s chest: Your wife has cancer! You might take a few seconds to check on her and say hello! By now, Vicki felt good enough to get out of bed, but she would wait (childishly?) for him to come to her.

When he did come, final y, it was al wrong. She knew it from the way he tapped on the door, from the tentative way he said her name. “Vicki?

Vicki?” He never cal ed her Vicki, only Vick. He was afraid of her now; she was a stranger to him.

And yet, they went through the motions. Ted knelt by the bed and kissed her forehead like she was a sick child. She pressed her face into his shirt and smel ed him. He had a strange smel that she hoped was just hotel soap.

“How was the rest of the trip?” she said.

He eyed the glass of chocolate milk. “Wel , I’m here.”

He was there, yes, but in the weeks since Vicki’s diagnosis, Ted had changed. He had become Mister Rogers. His voice used to boom and resonate, but now he sounded timid and supplicant, and if Vicki wasn’t dreaming, he was getting fat. He had stopped going to the gym after work.

She knew that with her and the kids gone, he worked late and either grabbed fast food from Grand Central or foraged through the freezer for one of the leftover casseroles. In the evenings he did onerous chores, things Vicki had been after him to do for years, like cleaning the attic. He did them now because he thought she was going to die. The day before Vicki left for Nantucket he threw away thousands of dol ars’ worth of Cuban cigars by ceremoniously breaking them in half over the kitchen trash. Really, Ted, Vicki had said. Is that necessary?

Their sex life had come to a halt. Ted had taken to kissing her on the forehead and cheek; he hugged her like she was his sister. That afternoon, while Porter was napping, Brenda took Blaine to the beach with a wink and a nod so that Vicki and Ted could have some privacy. Ted closed the bedroom door and kissed Vicki in a way that let her know he was trying. They fel back on the bed, Vicki reached down his shorts, and . . . nothing.

His body didn’t respond to her touch. For the first time in ten years, he could not get an erection.

He pul ed away, sunk his face into the squishy mattress. “I’m tired,” he said. “I barely slept last night.”

Vicki’s heart broke at this excuse. “It’s me,” she said.

“No,” he said. He touched her lips. She was trying, too. She had risen from bed to put on lipstick, to put on perfume and a thong—al to try to disguise the fact that she was sick. The port alone was enough to turn any man off. She felt as sexy as a remote control, as desirable as a garage door opener. There was no pretending it didn’t matter. Her husband had shown up, yes, but something vital, it seemed, had been left behind.

They fel asleep in the warm, stuffy bedroom and woke an hour later to Porter crying and the sounds of Brenda and Blaine playing Chutes and Ladders in the living room. They might have been tender with each other, apologetic—but instead, they started fighting. Ted took issue with the fact that Vicki had gone out the night before. “To the Club Car, no less.”

“What’s wrong with the Club Car?” Vicki said.

“Al those rich, divorced men on the prowl.”

“No one was prowling after us, Ted. I promise you.”

“And you got drunk,” he said.

He had her there. She drank three or four glasses of wine at dinner, two flutes of Veuve Clicquot with dessert, and a glass of port at the bar. She had become utterly intoxicated, savoring the pure defiance of it. Her spirits lifted; she felt herself leaving her body behind. Dr. Garcia and Dr. Alcott had both told her no alcohol, but she felt so fantastic, she didn’t understand why. She had even wanted to go dancing at the Chicken Box, chug a few beers and lose herself further, but Melanie had groaned and yawned and Brenda sided with Melanie.

It’s late, Brenda said. I think you’ve probably had enough.

“I got drunk,” Vicki admitted. The chocolate milk, now soured and separated, was stil on her nightstand.

“It was irresponsible,” he said.

“You’re Blaine and Porter’s father,” Vicki said, rising from bed. She felt light-headed and nauseous. “You are not, however, my father.”

“You’re sick, Vicki.”

Vicki thought of the circle of human beings that comprised her cancer support group. They had warned her this would happen: You’ll become your cancer. It will own you, define you. That was true even within the group itself. Vicki knew the other members of the group only by first name, type of cancer, and stage. Maxine, breast, stage two; Jeremy, prostate, stage one; Alan, pancreatic (there was no stage with pancreatic, it was always terminal); Francesca, brain, stage two; and the leader, Dolores, Hodgkin’s, five years in remission.

“So what?” Vicki, lung, stage two, said to her husband. “I’m an adult. I can do what I want. I wanted to have fun with my sister and Mel. Fun is al owed, you know. Even for people with cancer.”

“You need to take care of yourself,” Ted said. “Have you been eating kale, or broccoli? I noticed you left your vitamins at home. Dr. Garcia said . .

.”

“You don’t know what this is like for me,” Vicki hissed. She marched into the other room, past Brenda and Blaine, to the kitchen counter, where she snatched up Porter’s bottle. It was amazing how as some things fel apart, others came together. Porter had taken a bottle the night before for Josh, and another one this morning for Vicki, just like that, without a peep. Vicki stormed back into the bedroom and closed the door. Ted was bouncing Porter around, trying to get him to stop crying.

“Here’s his bottle.”

“Wil he take it?”

“He took one last night from Josh and another one this morning from me.”

“Who’s Josh?”

“The babysitter.”

“A guy?”

“A guy.”

“What kind of guy?”

“He’s going to be a senior at Middlebury. We met him at the airport the day we got here and now he’s our babysitter.”

Ted sat down on the bed and started feeding Porter the bottle. “I don’t know how I feel about a male babysitter.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“What kind of guy wants to babysit? Is he a pedophile?”

“Do you honestly think I would hire someone like that? Josh is extremely normal. Athletic, handsome, trustworthy. He’s a dol , actual y.”

“So you’re trying to replace me?”

“Stop it, Ted.”

“Was this Brenda’s idea?”

“Wel , sort of. But please don’t . . .”

“Ha!” he said. “I knew it. Your sister’s a pedophile.”

“Ted, stop it!”

“She’s going to have sex with the kids’ babysitter.”

“Ted!” Strangely, Vicki felt jealous. Josh didn’t belong to Brenda! Last night when they got home, the three of them stood over Josh as he slept with Porter on the bed and they did everything shy of coo and cluck. Then Josh opened his eyes and startled—he was like Snow White waking up to the curious gazes of the dwarfs. Vicki had started to laugh, then Brenda laughed, then Melanie asked Josh if he wanted her to walk him out to his car and that made Vicki and Brenda laugh so hard they nearly peed themselves. Josh had seemed mildly offended, or perhaps just embarrassed that they had found him asleep, but he woke up enough to give Vicki a ful report and she was so happy about Porter taking a bottle that she gave Josh a hundred dol ars and good feelings were restored al around. She did not want to be attacked for hiring a male babysitter, and she did not like anyone’s insinuation that Josh was somehow around because of Brenda.

“Just please be quiet,” Vicki said. She stopped herself from asking, Why did you even come?

Later, when it cooled down a bit, they went for a walk. Get out of the house, Vicki thought. The house was so smal , the ceilings so low, that words and feelings got trapped, they ricocheted against the wal s and floors instead of floating away.

Vicki and Ted put the kids in the double jogger and headed up Baxter Road, past the grandest of the island’s summer homes, homes they had long fantasized about owning and now could probably afford, toward Sankaty Head Lighthouse. Ted was pushing the kids, Vicki was trying not to let on how much the simple walk winded her.

“Do you remember the poker game?” she said.

“Of course.”

“It was like a lifetime ago,” she said.

“I’l never forget you in those leather pants,” Ted said. “Taking everyone’s money.”

“I’ve been thinking about al those cigars I smoked,” she said. “One cigar a week for two years. You don’t think . . .”

“No,” he said. “I don’t.”

She was quiet. A white-haired man wearing madras Bermuda shorts strol ed by, walking a golden retriever. Vicki smiled at him.

“Beautiful family,” he said.

That was how they appeared to others, she knew. Blaine was asleep in the strol er, Porter was sucking on his pacifier. A man walking a dog on a mild summer afternoon would never know that Vicki was sick, and he would never know that Ted couldn’t handle it.

But here they were on Nantucket, walking along the bluff with Sankaty Head Lighthouse like a giant peppermint stick in front of them, its flashing beacon steady and predictable. Being here made Vicki feel better. Beautiful family, the man walking his dog said, and whereas he was wrong, he was also right. They would gril fish for dinner, boil early corn, walk to the market for ice cream cones. After the kids were asleep, Vicki and Ted would try again in bed.

No sooner had these thoughts soothed Vicki, no sooner was the man with the dog past them and out of earshot, than Ted cleared his throat in a way that made Vicki nervous.

“I want you to come home,” he said.

One of the things Vicki loved about her parents, Buzz and El en, was that they were stil married; they had been married for thirty-five years. Vicki appreciated this more than Brenda did because she herself was part of a marriage, she was tied to Ted Stowe in a thousand ways—the children, the house, the friends, the community, their church, the ten years of breakfast, lunch, and dinner, bil s paid, birthdays, anniversaries, vacations, dinners out, movies, parties, plays, concerts, the countless conversations. It seemed when they were first together that their conversations had been about other things—worldly matters, politics, books, ideas—and now the conversations were only about themselves. Did that happen to every couple? These endless discussions of schedules and logistics, squash games and Junior League lunches, of Blaine’s fine-motor skil s, his bowel movements, the amount of TV he watched, of Porter sleeping or not sleeping, of should they have a third child, go for the girl, of Ted’s career, of their investments, their taxes, the warranty on the Yukon, of Vicki’s involvement with the neighborhood association, of which day for what kind of recycling. Was everyone so inward-looking? Or was it just their family, the Stowes, and especial y now, with Vicki’s cancer?

A few years earlier, El en Lyndon had said something curious to Vicki. Your father and I have been having the same argument for fourteen years, she said. Different manifestations, but the same argument.

Vicki was both grateful and disturbed to discover that she didn’t know what this argument between her parents might be about. She hadn’t lived at home since the summer after her sophomore year in col ege, true, but it unsettled her to think that she didn’t know her parents wel enough to be privy to the subject of their one and only argument. And yet she understood, because she was married, that her parents’ marriage was its own thing, an entity separate even from the children it produced; it was mysterious, sacred, unknowable.

Vicki’s marriage to Ted had its own nooks and crannies, false starts and dead ends, with its own arguments, repeated and repeated again. I want you to come home. Ted didn’t have to say another word—Vicki had the rest of his speech memorized. I love you, I miss you, I miss the kids, I hate coming home to an empty house, I’m sick of Chinese takeout and frozen waffles. The house is too quiet. Porter’s just a baby; he’ll forget who I am—he already cries when he sees me. I want you to come home so you can have chemo in the city, let’s not mess around, let’s get serious, let’s kill these cells, smug fuckers, get the best doctors, so what if the drugs are exactly the same, administered the same way? I want you at Sloan-Kettering so I can sleep at night, knowing you have the best money can buy, no second-guessing.

But what Ted was also saying was, I want you to come home because I’m afraid I’m going to lose you. Afraid like a little kid, Vick. Scared shitless. I’m going to lose you in September on the operating table, or at some point after that if the surgery doesn’t work, if the tumors aren’t resectable, if the cancer metastasizes to your brain or your liver, if they can’t get it all out.

I want you to come home, Ted said, because he had no faith. And that was what real y stood between husband and wife, that was what had turned him into milquetoast, that was what caused Vicki’s anger and Ted’s impotence: He thought she was going to die. And, too, he didn’t understand Nantucket the way Vicki did, he hadn’t grown up in the house on Shel Street, he didn’t feel the same way about the ocean, the sand, the reliable beacon of Sankaty Head Lighthouse. There were so many things that no longer mattered, but these things—this ocean, this air, this ground under her feet—did matter.

“I am home,” Vicki said.

Vicki made it crystal clear: The most important thing when caring for children was to establish a routine. Especial y when those children’s mother was sick. “The kids sense a change,” Vicki said. “They sense uncertainty, they know something is wrong. Your job is to keep them calm and secure.

Be consistent. Promote sameness.”

“No problem,” Josh said. “I’m al over it.” He nearly went on to describe life with his father: dinner at eight-thirty, the beer, the iceberg salad. Josh knew al about routine, he knew al about sameness.

And so, the summer started: Monday through Friday, Josh’s alarm went off at seven-thirty. It took him thirteen minutes to brush his teeth, shave, comb his hair, apply sunscreen, get dressed, and towel the dew off the seats of his Jeep—and anywhere from eleven to fourteen minutes to get from his house in Miacomet out to ’Sconset, depending on traffic by the high school. He pul ed up to the cottage on Shel Street right before eight and invariably found Brenda and Blaine on the front step throwing pebbles into a paper cup. Brenda was always in a short nightgown—she had two, he’d learned, one pink and a white one with flowers. Josh was convinced she stayed in her nightgown to torment him. When Josh arrived, she stood up and said, My work here is done, and disappeared into the house, into her room, where she changed into a bikini. Josh was on board with establishing a routine, but he couldn’t help appreciating variation—such as which nightgown Brenda was wearing, which bikini Brenda chose to put on, and the substance and duration of their conversations about her work. Because what Josh had learned early on, the first or second day on the job, was that Brenda was writing a screenplay. There had been one kid in Chas Gorda’s writing workshop who aspired to write a screenplay, a sophomore named Drake Edgar. Drake Edgar had the distinction of being the most earnest student in the class; he handed in scene after dreadful scene and wrote down everyone’s criticism, verbatim. Chas Gorda himself—though his first and best-known novel had been made into a film which could now most generously be described as “cult”—suggested early on to Drake Edgar that the writing workshop was a place for pursuing serious fiction rather than scripts for horror films or thril ers. The other students, including Josh, dismissed Drake Edgar, considered him eccentric, borderline maniacal—though every conversation about Drake Edgar ended with the disclaimer that he would “probably laugh himself al the way to the bank.”

Why not take screenwriters seriously? Josh thought. Everyone loved the movies. And movies had to be written.

“A screenplay?” Josh said to Brenda. “That’s fascinating. I’m a writer, too. Wel , I’m studying writing at Middlebury with Chas Gorda. You know of him?”

“No,” Brenda said.

“He’s great,” Josh said. “He wrote this novel cal ed Talk when he was only twenty-six.”

Brenda smiled knowingly. “Oh, he’s one of those. You know, prodigies who peak early and then never write another thing worth reading. God, I could teach an entire class on those people alone.”

Josh felt uncomfortable hearing Chas Gorda insulted, and he considered defending his professor, but he didn’t want to argue with Brenda.

Instead, he said, “What are you working on?”

“Me?” Brenda said. “Oh, I’m trying to adapt this thing . . .” Here she stroked the gold-leaf lettering of her old book, The Innocent Impostor. “But I don’t know. It’s not going that wel . It’s like this book doesn’t fit the screenplay formula, you know? There is no car chase.”

Josh laughed—too loudly, probably, and with the unsettling eagerness of Drake Edgar. Stil , what were the chances? He was a writer, sort of, and so was Brenda. Sort of.

“I can help you if you want,” Josh said. “I can offer my opinion.” ( That’s our currency here, Chas Gorda was always reminding the class.

Opinions. ) “I can give it a read.”

“It’s nice of you to offer,” Brenda said. “But who knows if I’l ever finish. Are you writing a screenplay, too?”

“No, no, no,” he said. “I’m more interested in writing short stories, you know, and novels.” The way Brenda stared at him made him feel ridiculous, as though he’d just told her he was dressing up as Norman Mailer for Hal oween. “But I could read your screenplay if you want feedback.”

“Maybe,” Brenda said. She tucked The Innocent Impostor back into its nest of bubble wrap and closed and locked the briefcase. “Maybe when I’m further along.”

“Okay,” Josh said. She was humoring him. He was a child to her, and yet he couldn’t stop himself, each and every morning, as they helped Blaine pick the pebbles up off the flagstone walk, from asking how the screenplay was going. Some days she said, Oh, fine, and other days she shook her head and said nothing at al .

Another variation of Josh’s day-to-day was what Vicki made for breakfast. Every morning it was something elaborate and delicious: blueberry pancakes, applewood-smoked bacon, cheddar omelets, peach muffins, eggs Benedict, crispy hash browns, cinnamon French toast, melon and berry salad. Josh and Vicki were the only ones who touched the breakfasts. Melanie was too queasy, she said, especial y first thing in the morning.

Al she could handle was ginger tea and dry toast. Brenda didn’t eat in the mornings, though she was a prodigious drinker of coffee and fil ed a thermos of it, doctored with a cup of half-and-half and six tablespoons of sugar, to take to the beach. The kids didn’t eat the breakfasts because they were respectively too smal and too picky. Vicki fed Porter pureed carrots or squash while Blaine ate Cheerios at the kitchen table. So the morning feasts were left to Josh and Vicki.

At first, Josh protested. “You don’t have to go to al this trouble for me,” he said. “I can grab something at home. Cereal, you know, or a bagel.”

“You’re doing me a favor,” Vicki said. “I need to keep my strength up, and I would never make any of this for just myself.” For Vicki, every forkful was an effort. She had no appetite, she felt specifical y un-hungry. She gazed at the tiny portions on her plate and sighed. She picked a blueberry out of a pancake, she considered half a piece of bacon or a single cube of fried potato. “Here goes,” she said. “Down the hatch.”

Josh couldn’t say how long it had been since someone had made a meal just for him; it was, he realized, one more part of having a mother that he missed. Vicki and Melanie watched him eat with appreciation, or maybe envy. They loaded his plate with seconds. Melanie nibbled her dry toast in the seat across from Josh; Vicki ate as much as she could, then she did the dishes, lifted Porter from his baby seat, washed his face and hands, changed his diaper, slathered him with lotion, and put him in his bathing suit. Blaine liked to dress himself—always in the same green bathing suit and then, as the days passed, in a shirt the same color as the shirt Josh was wearing. Yel ow shirt for Josh, yel ow shirt for Blaine. Green, red, white.

Blaine cried the day Josh wore his Red Sox jersey.

“I’l have to buy him one,” Vicki said.

“Sorry,” Josh said.

“It must be tough being his hero,” Vicki said.

Josh ruffled Blaine’s blond hair, uncertain of what to say. There was no point denying it. Blaine hadn’t given Josh a single bit of trouble since the first night of babysitting; he was resolutely wel behaved, as though he were afraid that if he did something wrong, Josh would leave and never come back. Most days, Josh took the kids to the town beach right there in ’Sconset and sat in the shadow of the lifeguard stand (at Vicki’s insistence).

Josh and Blaine would dig in the sand, building castles, looking for crabs, col ecting shel s and rocks in a bucket. Porter spent time in his pack ’n’

play under the umbrel a chewing on the handle of a plastic shovel or chugging down a bottle or taking his morning nap. Blaine clearly liked it best when Porter was asleep; he wanted Josh al to himself. Other kids sidled up to Josh and Blaine with varying degrees of confidence, peering in the bucket, sizing up the sand castle. Could they play? Blaine shrugged and looked to Josh, who always said, Sure. And then, in the interest of fostering good socialization skil s, he said, This is Blaine. What’s your name? Josh had learned to be careful, though, not to show anyone more attention than Blaine—otherwise Blaine would skulk off and sit under the umbrel a, surreptitiously slipping rocks and shel s of chokable sizes into his brother’s playpen. Being with Blaine, Josh decided, was like being with a jealous and possessive girlfriend.

Babysitting was harder work than he thought it would be. It wasn’t the hundreds of times Josh had to throw the Wiffle bal ; it wasn’t the half hour side by side eating the sandwiches that Vicki had packed talking about Scooby-Doo; it wasn’t the fifty-seven items on Vicki’s nonlist list, none of which could be forgotten (such as: never leave the house without a pacifier, make sure the milk stays cold, Blaine must finish his raisins before he has a pudding, sunscreen, sunscreen, sunscreen!, medicine for Porter’s poison ivy to be applied every ninety minutes, shake the towels out, rinse off the Boogie board, stop by the market on the way home and pick up some Fig Newtons and some Bounce sheets, here’s the money . . .). Rather, what drained Josh’s energy was the emotional load of caring for two little people. From eight until one, five days a week, Blaine and Porter depended on Josh Flynn to keep them safe. Without him, they would dehydrate, drown, die. When viewed in this way, the job was really important.

Despite the sort of flukiness of his taking this job, the oddness of it, and the suspicious nature of its beginning (his lust, plain and simple, for Brenda), Josh felt himself becoming attached to the kids. Hero worship? He loved it. At some point during the second or third week, Blaine took Josh’s hand and said, You’re my best friend. And Josh felt his heart grow three sizes, just like the Grinch in Dr. Seuss. A little kid affecting him this way? No one at the airport would have believed it.

Tom Flynn occasional y asked over dinner, How’s the new job going?

Josh answered, Good. Fine. And left it at that. There was no use explaining to his father that he was making progress—he could now tel the difference between Porter’s cries (hungry, tired, pick-me-up-please) and he was teaching Blaine to keep his eye on the bal . He would never admit that he had memorized entire pages from Horton Hatches the Egg and Burt Dow, Deep-Water Man, which Blaine liked to read upon their return to the cottage in the minutes before Josh left for the day. He couldn’t articulate the tenderness he felt for these kids who were in danger of losing their mother. If Vicki died, they would be just like him—and although Josh would say he was wel adjusted by anyone’s standards, this made him sad.

Every time Josh saw Vicki, he thought, Don’t die. Please.

So with his father, he tried to stay noncommittal. The job is good. I like it. The kids are a hoot.

At this, Tom Flynn would nod, smile. He never asked what the kids’ names were or anything else about them, and Josh, for the first time in his life, didn’t feel compel ed to explain. His job, the routine, his relationship with the kids and the Three—these were things that belonged to him.

Josh was so immersed in his new life that seeing Didi in the parking lot of Nobadeer Beach came as a very rude surprise. Josh had taken to swimming nearly every day at six o’clock, after most of the crowds had packed up and gone home, after the heat had dissipated but the sun was stil mel ow and warm. It was a fine hour of his day, and Josh usual y toweled off and sat on the beach a few extra minutes watching the waves or tossing a piece of driftwood to someone else’s dog, feeling fortunate, and smart, for taking control of his summer. So on the day that he climbed the narrow, rickety stairs from the beach and spied Didi sitting on the bumper of his Jeep, he fil ed with an old, familiar dread. There was no use pretending this was a happy coincidence; she was waiting for him. Staking him out. Josh thought back to the previous summer and the summer before that—Didi had surprised him every once in a while in this same way, and back then he had counted himself lucky. But now he felt creeped out. If her eyes hadn’t been trained on him, he would have tried to sneak away.

As it was, he barely concealed his disgust. “Hey,” he said. He whipped his damp towel into the open back of his Jeep.

She made a noise. At first he hoped for a snicker, but no such luck. She was crying. “You don’t love me anymore,” she said. “You fucking hate me.”

“Didi—”

She sniffed and swiped at her nose with the heel of her palm. She was wearing her old cutoff jean shorts from high school, the ones with white strings dangling down her thighs, and a pink T-shirt that said Baby Girl in black cursive letters. She was barefoot; her toes, painted electric blue, dug into the dirty sand of the parking lot. Josh did a quick scan; he didn’t see Didi’s Jetta.

“How did you get here?” he said.

“Someone dropped me.”

“Someone?”

“Rob.”

Rob, her brother, who cruised around in a huge Ford F-350 with a shiny tool chest on the back and a bumper sticker that said I give rides for gas, grass, and ass. Rob was a carpenter with Dimmity Brothers, where Josh’s mother used to work. The island was way too smal . So Rob had dropped Didi off, and barefoot, no less; now Josh was trapped. He would be forced to give her a ride somewhere. She knew he was too nice a guy to strand her.

“Where’s your car?” he said.

“They took it.”

“Who took it?”

“The repo man.” New tears fel ; her mascara streaked. “It’s gone forever.”

Josh took a breath. “What about the money I lent you?”

“It wasn’t enough. I’m in trouble, Josh. Big trouble. I can’t make my rent, either. I’m going to get evicted and my parents have made it perfectly clear that they do not want me back at home.”

Right. After twenty years of overindulgence, Didi’s parents had moved on to tough love. Too little, too late, but Josh couldn’t blame them for not wanting their grown daughter back in their house. She would drain their liquor cabinet and run up their phone bil .

“You have a job,” Josh said. “I don’t get it.”

“I get paid shit,” Didi said. “It’s not like I’m a nurse.”

“Maybe you should go back to school.”

Didi raised her face. She looked like a zombie from Night of the Living Dead. “Now you sound like them.”

Josh kicked at the ground. He wanted to go home and shower. He was hungry; he was making quesadil as tonight for dinner. “What do you want from me, Didi?”

“I want you to care!” She was screaming now. “You never cal me anymore. You didn’t show up at Zach’s party—”

“I had to babysit,” he said.

“You’re probably in love with that woman with the kids,” Didi said. “You’re probably sleeping with her!” This accusation was flung out there with such wild abandon that Josh didn’t feel the need to respond. He didn’t like having Brenda or Vicki or the kids brought into the conversation, especial y not by Didi. She knew nothing about them or about his time with them. If Brenda and Vicki, or even Melanie, could see him now, they would shake their heads. Poor girl, they’d say. Poor Josh.

He grabbed the car door. “Get in,” he said. “I’m taking you home.”

Didi did as she was told, making Josh believe that he was in control of the situation. But once Josh started driving, Didi started up again, bombarding him with nonsense. “You’re sleeping with her, just say it. . . . You don’t love me—you used to love me but now you’re a real hotshot, a col ege-boy hot shit, think you’re better than . . . They don’t pay me shit, and after taxes . . . They took the car with my Audioslave CD stil in it . . . My own mother won’t have me.” Tears, sobs, hiccups.

For a second, Josh feared she was going to vomit. He drove as fast as he possibly could, saying nothing because anything he said would be twisted around and used against him. He thought of Brenda in her nightgown with her notepad, her thermos of coffee, her briefcase for her old first-edition book. Brenda was a different quality of person: older, more mature, way past al this self-generated drama. Who needed fabricated drama when they were living through the real thing? Vicki had cancer. And Melanie had some kind of husband problem. Didi didn’t even know what trouble was.

He swung into her driveway. “Get out,” he said.

“I need money,” she said.

“Oh, no,” he said. “No way.”

“Josh . . .” She put her hand on his leg.

“I lent you money,” he said. “And you promised you’d leave me alone.” He picked up her hand and dropped it into her lap.

“I only need—”

“The answer is no,” he said. “And don’t forget, you stil owe me. Just because you asked me again and I said no doesn’t mean you don’t owe me from before. You owe me two hundred dol ars, Didi.”

“I know that, but—”

Josh got out of the car, stormed around to the passenger side, and opened her door.

“Out,” he said.

“You don’t love me.”

So needy. Al the time. Nothing had changed with Didi since senior year in high school. Her T-shirt caught his eye again. Baby Girl. That’s right, he thought. He reached across Didi and unbuckled her seat belt. Then he took her arm and pried her from the car. He was gentle but firm, just as he would have been with Blaine. He knew how to handle Baby Girl; he dealt with children every day.

“I only need five hundred dol ars,” she said.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I can’t help you.”

“You’re NOT sorry!” she screamed. Her nose was running and she was crying again and hiccuping like a cartoon drunk. “You’re not one bit sorry, you don’t care what happens to me!” Her voice was shril and hysterical. It was like she wanted her neighbors to peer out their windows, sense a domestic disturbance, and cal the police.

“Hey,” he said. He looked at the house where Didi rented her apartment; he checked the yard and the woods around him. Now he wished someone would come out, ask what was going on, and help him deal with her, but there was no one around. “You just can’t scream like this, Didi.

You have to get ahold of yourself.”

“Oh, fuck you,” she said.

“I’m leaving,” he said.

“I need the money,” she said. She put her fists by her ears and shuddered until her face turned red. Josh watched her with disbelief. She was so far out of bounds that Josh thought maybe she was acting. Because hers was the kind of behavior Josh had only seen on soap operas; it was the behavior of the poverty-stricken, downtrodden, and criminal y inclined people on COPS.

“Didi,” Josh said. “Go inside and get a glass of water. Take a shower. Calm down.”

She looked at him in a way that was both cunning and desperate. “If you don’t help me,” she said, “I’m going to kil myself.”

He reached out and grabbed her chin. “You forgot who you’re talking to,” he said. “That isn’t funny.” He was real y angry now, because he could hear the calculated tone of her voice. She did know who she was talking to. She was trying to use his mother’s death to her advantage. That was the kind of serpent Didi was; that was how she operated. Now Josh was the one with clenched fists. But no—in getting this angry, he was letting her win. Didi may have sensed that she’d crossed a line because her voice changed to a plea.

“It’s just five hundred dol ars. I know you have it, Josh.”

“No,” he said. Thinking: Consistent message. “Good-bye, Didi.”

Nobody was more surprised by the passage of time than Melanie—the days passed, then a week, then another week. And here she was, stil on Nantucket. She couldn’t decide if she remained on the island out of sheer inertia (was she just avoiding the enormous effort it would take to get home?) or if she was starting to like it. The first days had been awful, with Vicki and Brenda fighting and then Vicki and Ted fighting and Melanie alternately vomiting, sleeping, or showering in an attempt to ameliorate the acute pain of Peter’s affair with Frances Digitt. It was pain like Melanie had broken her arm and the bone was sticking through, pain like habanero chili sauce on an open cold sore. But one morning Melanie woke up and her first thoughts weren’t about Peter and Frances, but rather about the secret that her body contained. She thought of the bud inside of her, the human being the size of a lima bean, a life that had taken root and held on in her body. This baby, unlike al the others (seven tries, eleven embryos), had recognized Melanie as its mother. She was seven weeks pregnant now, and although her body looked the same, she liked to lie in bed with her hand on her bel y and imagine she could feel the flutter of a tiny beating heart. At this same time every morning, a wren perched on the gate outside Melanie’s window and serenaded her. But the imagined sound of a beating heart and the wren’s song were only preludes to what Melanie was real y listening for. What she had started anticipating was the crackle of the Jeep’s tires over crushed shel s. Josh.

Okay, Melanie thought. There is something wrong with me. He is nearly ten years my junior. He is in col ege. I am an old woman to him, an old pregnant woman. And yet—what was it Woody Al en said?—“the heart wants what it wants.” (Were her desires as moral y ambiguous as Woody Al en’s? Maybe they were; who was she to judge?) Melanie couldn’t help what she felt, and what she felt when she heard the Jeep’s tires crunch over the shel s, when she heard the car door, the lifting of the gate latch, Blaine’s delighted cry, and Josh’s voice— Hey, buddy, how’s it hanging? —

was happy.

Melanie’s routine, then, included climbing out of bed and making it into the kitchen for tea and toast while Josh was eating breakfast. Ideal y, she would have liked to be home from a five-mile power walk, showered and dressed; she would have liked to be eating with him, buttering a scone, reading him something funny she had seen in the Globe. Instead, it was al she could do to sip her tea, nibble her toast, and make the most basic conversation.

She was dismayed to discover that he was a writing student—not because Melanie held anything against writing students, but because this gave him something in common with Brenda. Melanie heard them joking about writer’s block. Happens to the best of us, Josh would say. And Brenda would point at him and say, Keep telling me that. The writing linked them in a way that irked Melanie and made her dislike Brenda more than she already did. It seemed hardly worth mentioning that Melanie also appreciated literature. She read serious, literary novels as wel as trashy, commercial ones. She was a fan of Donna Tartt and Margaret Atwood— and Nora Roberts. She read the fiction in The New Yorker, maybe not every week, but often enough. Melanie understood, however, that reading was different from writing; she had no desire to write a short story or a novel. She wouldn’t even know where to start.

Melanie searched for details she could share about herself that would resonate with Josh. She had been a history major at Sarah Lawrence. She had spent a year in Thailand teaching English: she had touched the Reclining Buddha’s golden foot; she had commuted from her apartment to the school by water taxi; she had bought a parakeet at the bird market and named him Roger. Roger stopped singing after six weeks and then he died.

When Melanie relayed these tidbits of her personal history, Josh nodded and chewed his food and seemed interested, at least until Brenda walked into the kitchen to get her coffee. Brenda stole his attention every time. Josh looked at Brenda. It became part of Melanie’s routine to count the number of times Josh looked at Brenda and then feel jealous about it. How could Melanie blame him? Brenda was beautiful and oblivious; she lived in the house with the rest of them, but it was clear her mind was someplace else. On the lover back in New York, maybe, or on the lawyer whose phone cal s she avoided each day, or on her stupid screenplay. Brenda had been fired from Champion University in the midst of a sex scandal—

was Josh aware of this? Did he know she was in trouble with the law? Somehow Brenda rose above the smoldering fire of her recent past and managed to maintain a grip on her life. Not only was she writing a screenplay, which Josh found fascinating, but she had acquired something of a halo, taking care of Vicki and the kids in the hours when Josh and Ted weren’t there. Melanie found herself detesting Brenda and at the same time wanting to be more like her.

In the afternoons, while Porter was napping, Melanie enlisted Blaine’s help tending the gardens around the cottage. They weeded the front beds

—Blaine trailing Melanie with a plastic Tupperware bowl that she fil ed and he dumped, periodical y, in the kitchen trash. When the bed was weeded and the daylilies deadheaded, they patted down dark, sweet-smel ing mulch. Melanie cut back the trel ised New Dawn roses on the front of the house as wel as the rosebushes that lined the back fence while Blaine watched. (He was afraid of thorns, and the bumblebees.) That’s the funny thing about roses, Melanie told him. If you cut them back, they’ll be even lovelier next time.

Blaine nodded solemnly and then ran into the kitchen for a jel y jar fil ed with water. His favorite part of gardening was when Melanie cut flowers for the jar, which he then took inside and presented to Vicki.

“Those are pretty flowers,” Josh said once, about a bunch of cosmos on the kitchen table.

“Melanie and I grew them,” Blaine said. “Right, Melanie?”

“Right,” Melanie said. Josh no doubt thought that gardening was a pastime for old ladies, but Melanie couldn’t deny her proclivity for flowers, for privet hedge, for closely cropped lawn. She had always loved the sight and smel of things growing.

As the days passed, Melanie became more engaged in life on Nantucket, which meant Josh, the kids, Brenda—and Vicki. Melanie had been so consumed with her own woes that she had al but disregarded the fact that Vicki had cancer. Vicki went twice a week to chemo. Vicki was too sick

—too weak, too exhausted and confused—to walk to the beach with Melanie, no matter how hard or gently Melanie prodded.

“It wil be good for you to get out of the house,” Melanie said. “And good for me, too.”

“You go,” Vicki said. “I’l wait here until the kids get back.”

“I’l wait with you,” Melanie said. “We can sit on the deck and drink iced tea.”

They did this a few times, though for Melanie it was as awkward as a blind date. Vicki didn’t seem to want to talk about her cancer, and the one time Melanie asked how Ted was dealing with it, Vicki said, “Ugh. I can’t get into it.” So there was something there—angst, anger, sadness—but when Melanie pushed a little harder, Vicki changed the subject to Peter, which was, for Melanie, like scratching a mosquito bite or wiggling a loose tooth. Painful, but irresistible.

“Have you spoken to him?” Vicki asked.

“No, not since before.”

“So you haven’t told him about the baby?”

“No.”

“But you wil .”

“Eventual y, I’l have to,” Melanie said. “Does Ted know?”

“No. He has no idea. He’s in his own sphere.”

“Yeah, I guess. I just don’t want Peter to find out from anyone but me.”

“Obviously.”

“Josh knows.”

“He does?”

“I told him accidental y. Did you know Josh gave me a ride home that first Sunday, when I tried to fly back to Connecticut?”

“He did?”

“Yeah. Isn’t that weird? I told him then, on the ride.”

Vicki stared at Melanie in an inscrutable way. Melanie felt like she had just confessed that she and Josh had a secret history. Did Vicki disapprove? It was just a ride from the airport, nothing more, but how to explain the bizarre, nascent feelings she now harbored for Josh? She should keep them to herself. It was probably just her hormones.

“I don’t know what to do about the baby, Vick.”

“You’re going to keep it, though, right?”

“Keep it, yes. But then what?”

Vicki was silent, sipping her iced tea. “There wil be people to help you. Ted and I wil help you.”

“The baby needs a father.”

“Peter wil come around.”

“You sound pretty sure about that.”

“He must miss you.”

Melanie scoffed. “He hasn’t cal ed once. Not once.”

“And you haven’t cal ed him. I’m proud of you.”

“I’m proud of myself,” Melanie said. She hadn’t cal ed Peter; she hadn’t tipped her hand. She was being patient, waiting things out. Along the back fence, the roses bloomed and the bumblebees were fat and happy. Ted had cut the grass over the weekend and it smel ed wonderful and fresh. The sun was warm on Melanie’s legs. Josh would return with the kids at one o’clock; this thought alone was enough to make Melanie glad she was here and not back in Connecticut. “Thank you for letting me come,” Melanie said.

“I’m happy you’re here,” Vicki said.

“Are you?” Melanie said. Before the tumultuous events of the spring, Vicki and Melanie had talked on the phone three or four times a day; there were no taboo subjects. They excavated everything, leaving no stone unturned. Now, here they were, living under the same smal roof, but they were each alone with their misery. Melanie worried that Vicki was angry at her for the things that happened the first week. Was she mad that Melanie had al owed Blaine to wander down the beach unnoticed, or that Melanie had fal en off the airplane steps with Porter? Was she pissed that Melanie had tried to leave Nantucket without saying good-bye? Did she resent having to hire a babysitter to take care of the children when her best friend should have been perfectly capable of doing so? Did she begrudge Melanie her pregnancy? Compared to Vicki’s, Melanie’s body was a piece of ripe fruit. And Melanie had done nothing to help Vicki with her chemo. Brenda had her role: She was the driver, the facilitator, the sister. Melanie was, and had been from the beginning, extra baggage. “Are you sure I’m not the worst friend you ever had?”

Vicki put her hand—which shook a little, like an old person’s hand—over Melanie’s, and instantly, the negative feelings receded. That was Vicki’s gift. Kiss it and make it better. She was everybody’s mother.

“Not even close,” she said.

Every Tuesday and Friday when she took Vicki to chemo, Brenda sat in the waiting room pretending to read magazines and she prayed for her sister. This was secret, and strange, because Brenda had never been particularly religious. Buzz and El en Lyndon had raised the girls as lazy Protestants. Over the years, they’d attended church sporadical y, in fits and bursts, every week for three months around Easter and then not again until Christmas. They’d always said grace before dinner, and for a while El en Lyndon attended early morning Bible study and would try to tel the girls about it as she drove them to school. Both girls had been baptized at St. David’s Episcopal, then confirmed; it was their church, they considered themselves Christians, their pastor performed Vicki and Ted’s wedding, a ful service where everyone took Communion. And yet, religion had not played a central role in family life, not real y, not the way it did for the Catholics or the Baptists or the Jewish people Brenda knew.

There were no crucifixes in the Lyndon house, no open Bibles, no yarmulkes or prayer shawls. They were so privileged, so lucky, that they had never needed religion, maybe that was it. Buzz Lyndon was an attorney in Philadelphia, he made plenty of money but not enough to cause trouble; El en Lyndon was a gifted housewife and mother. The Lyndon kitchen was, quite possibly, the happiest room in southeastern Pennsylvania—there was always classical music, fresh flowers, a bowl of ripe fruit, and something delicious about to come out of the oven. There was a blackboard in the kitchen where El en Lyndon wrote a quote each day, or a scrap of poem. Food for thought, she cal ed it. Everything had been so lovely in the Lyndon household, so cultivated, so right, that God had been easy to overlook, to take for granted.

But now, this summer, in the pearl-gray waiting room of the Oncology Unit of Nantucket Cottage Hospital, Brenda Lyndon prayed her sister would live. The irony of this did not escape her. When Brenda had prayed at al growing up in the Lyndon household—if she had prayed secretly, fervently

—then it was, without exception, that Vicki would die.

For years, Brenda and Vicki fought. There was screaming, scratching, spitting, and slamming doors. The girls fought about clothes, eyeliner, a Rick Springfield tape of Brenda’s that Vicki lent to her friend Amy, who mangled it. They fought over who sat where in the car, who got to watch which TV program, who used the telephone for how many cal s, for how many minutes. They fought over who col ected the most beach glass from their walks around the Jetties, who had more bacon on her BLT, who looked better in her hockey skirt. They fought because Brenda borrowed Vicki’s pink Fair Isle sweater without asking, and in retribution, Vicki ripped Brenda’s paper about The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—

painstakingly typed on their father’s Smith Corona—in half. Brenda smacked Vicki, Vicki pul ed out a hank of Brenda’s hair. They were separated by their father, Vicki cal ed Brenda the c word from behind her bedroom door. El en Lyndon threatened boarding school. Honestly, she said, I don’t know where you girls learned such language.

They fought over grades, teachers, test scores, and boys—or, Brenda corrected herself, boy—because the only boy who had mattered to Brenda for the first thirty years of her life (until she met Walsh, real y) was Erik vanCott. Erik vanCott had been not only Brenda’s best friend, but her secret, unrequited love. However, he had always nurtured a thing for Vicki. The pain of this alone was enough to fuel Brenda’s fantasies of Vicki, dead. Car accident, botulism, heart attack, choking, stabbed in the heart on South Street by a man with a purple Mohawk.

Al through high school the girls openly claimed they hated each other, though Brenda suspected it was she who had said the words more often, because what reason would Vicki have had to hate Brenda? Brenda was, in Vicki’s opinion, pathetic. Lowly Worm, she cal ed her to be mean, a name cruel y borrowed from their favorite Richard Scarry book growing up. Lowly Worm, bookworm, nose always in a book, gobbling it up like a rotten apple.

Can I invite a friend? Vicki always asked their parents, no matter where they were going. I don’t want to be stuck with Lowly Worm.

I hate you, Brenda had thought. Then she wrote the words in her journal. Then she whispered them, then shouted them at the top of her lungs, I hate you! I wish you were dead!

Brenda shivered with guilt to think of it now. Cancer. Their relationship hadn’t been al bad. El en Lyndon, distraught by the girls’ open hostility, was constantly reminding them of how close they’d been when they were little. You two used to be such good friends. You used to fall asleep holding hands. Brenda cried the day Vicki left for kindergarten, and Vicki made Brenda a paper plate covered with foil stars. There had even been a moment or two of solidarity in high school, primarily against their parents, and, in one instance, against Erik vanCott.

When Brenda and Erik vanCott were juniors in high school, and Vicki was a senior, Erik asked Vicki to the junior prom. Vicki was entangled in an on-again / off-again relationship with her boyfriend Simon, who was a freshman at the University of Delaware. Vicki asked Simon for

“permission” to go to the junior prom with Erik “as a friend,” and Simon’s response was, Whatever floats your boat. Fine. Vicki and Erik were going to the junior prom together.

To say that Brenda was destroyed by this news would be an understatement. She had been asked to the junior prom by two boys, one decent-looking and moronic and the other just moronic. Brenda had said no to both, hoping that Erik would ask her out of pity, or a sense of duty, or for fun.

But now Brenda would be staying home while Vicki went to Brenda’s prom with Erik. Into this drama stepped El en, with her belief that al aches and pains—even romantic, sister-related ones—could be cured by a little Nantucket sand between the toes. When she got wind of the predicament and confirmed it with the sight of Brenda’s long face, she took the bottle of Nantucket sand that she kept on the windowsil and poured some into Brenda’s Bean Blucher moccasins.

“Put these on,” El en ordered. “You’l feel better.”

Brenda did as she was told, but this time, she swore to herself, she would not pretend that the sand treatment worked. She would not pretend that it was August and she was seven years old again, climbing the dunes of Great Point. Back then, the most important thing in her life had been her sea glass col ection and her Frances Hodgson Burnett books— A Little Princess, The Secret Garden.

“See?” El en said. “You feel better already. I can tel .”

“I do not.”

“Wel , you wil soon. Is the sand between your toes?”

As the night of the prom drew nearer, El en plotted a distraction. She wanted Brenda to go with her and Buzz to the country club’s annual Rites of Spring Dance, held the same night as the prom. Going to a different dance with her parents as her escorts was supposed to make Brenda feel better? Apparently so. El en asked if Brenda would prefer the salmon croquettes or the veal Oscar. When Brenda refused to answer, El en made a joke about Oscar the Grouch. The woman was a one-act in the theater of the absurd.

Brenda didn’t watch Vicki get ready and she did not get ready herself. She hid under the comforter of her bed wearing sweatpants, reading Vanity Fair (the novel). She was boycotting the country club dance, salmon croquettes, Maypole and al . She was going to stay home and read.

An hour before Erik was to arrive, Vicki knocked on Brenda’s bedroom door. Brenda, natural y, did not answer. Vicki, who had no sense of boundaries, tried the knob. The door was locked. Vicki scratched on the door with her fingernails, a noise that Brenda could not tolerate. She flung open the door.

“What the fuck?”

“I’m not going,” Vicki said. She was wearing her dress—a strapless black sheath—and her blond hair was in a bun. She was wearing El en’s wedding pearl on a gold chain. She was as glamorous as a soap opera star to Brenda, but this fact only served to piss Brenda off. Vicki pushed into Brenda’s room and threw herself facedown on the bed, as though she were the one with a broken heart. “He wants to meet up with al these people I don’t know at the Main Lion. Lame. And afterwards, he wants to go to a breakfast party that some kid in the marching band is having.

Lame.” She lifted her head. “I just don’t feel like making the effort.”

“You don’t feel like making the effort,” Brenda said. Now here was a classic Vicki Lyndon moment. She had a great dress and an even better date to a dance Brenda would have murdered to go to—and she was threatening to stay home . . . why? Because it wasn’t cool enough for her.

“You should go with him,” Vicki said. “He’s your friend.”

Yes, Erik was Brenda’s friend. However, in the universe of proms and prom dates, this mattered little. “He didn’t ask me,” Brenda said.

“Wel , he’s out of luck,” Vicki said. “Because I’m not going.”

“Mom wil make you go,” Brenda said. “She’l say it’s rude to stand him up. And in very poor taste.”

“She can’t make me go,” Vicki said. She eyed Brenda in her sweatpants. “She’s not making you go to Rites of Spring.”

“She hasn’t started trying yet,” Brenda said.

Vicki unzipped her dress and wriggled out of it, like a snake shedding its skin. “We’l stay home together. Rent a movie. Drink Dad’s beer.”

Brenda stared at her sister. Was she being serious? Vicki didn’t like staying home, and especial y not with Brenda. But maybe . . . wel , if nothing else, Erik would see Vicki’s true colors. He would realize he should have asked Brenda instead.

“Okay,” Brenda said.

Vicki cal ed Erik at home to spare him the indignity of showing up at the Lyndon house in his tux with a gardenia in a plastic box.

“Sorr-eee,” she said. “I don’t feeeeel wel . I have real y bad men-strooool cramps. I’d better stay home.” She paused. “Sure, she’s right here.”

Vicki passed the phone to Brenda.

“I just got dumped,” Erik said. “What are you up to tonight?”

“I’m supposed to go out,” Brenda said, though she did not tel him where or with whom. “But . . . since Vicki’s not feeling wel , I might stay home and keep her company.”

“Can I come over?” Erik asked.

“Come over?” Brenda said.

“Yeah. To hang out with you guys.”

Vicki sliced her hand across her throat.

“Sorry,” Brenda said. “Not tonight.”

In the end, Erik went to the prom by himself, and when word spread that he’d been stood up by Vicki Lyndon, his popularity swel ed. The band let him sing a Bryan Adams song. It was the best night of his life. The next day, he cal ed Vicki to say thank you. Brenda and Vicki had stayed home and made popcorn and drunk warm Michelobs and watched their favorite movie, This Time Forever, which made them both cry. They fel asleep on either end of the sofa, with their legs entwined in the middle. Brenda sat in the oncology waiting room pretending to read People magazine, but in truth she was praying fast and furiously, her lips moving while she crossed herself with her right hand. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen. Dear Lord, please let Vicki live. Please, Lord, please, I beg you, please: Let. Her. Live.

It became usual that, at some point during Brenda’s waiting-room vigil, her phone would ring. Brenda always checked the display with a mixture of hope (for Walsh) and dread (of Brian Delaney, Esquire)—even though it was almost always her mother. After a while the nurses who wandered in and out from behind the administrative desk knew to expect El en Lyndon’s cal . They thought it was cute—the cal from mama. Brenda vacil ated between gratitude for the cal s and annoyance. El en had had her left knee replaced just after Easter— all that skiing caught up with me—and she was stil recovering. Otherwise, she would have been right there—either living in Melanie’s room instead of Melanie, or renting Number Twelve Shel Street, where she could monitor al developments herself. El en Lyndon was more frantic about Vicki’s condition than Vicki was, and thus it was left up to Brenda to placate her mother, to assure her that yes, everything was going along as expected, Vicki’s blood count was holding steady, and the kids were fine. This gave Brenda a sense of empowerment and calm control. But Brenda became increasingly irritated by her mother’s anxiety. Twice a week it became Brenda’s responsibility to talk her mother off the ledge. Brenda found herself saying the same phrases over and over until her mother became hypnotized and repeated the phrases back to Brenda. Never once during these phone cal s did El en Lyndon ask about Brenda. Brenda tried to ignore the fact that her mother had ceased acknowledging Brenda at al , except as a messenger. Now, Brenda took the cal , saying, “Hel o, Mom.”

“How is she?”

Brenda couldn’t help being maddening in return. “How are you? Stil with the cane? Is there Nantucket sand in your knee brace?”

“Very funny, sweetheart. How’s your sister?”

“She’s fine, Mom.”

“Her blood count?”

“Red cel s steady. White cel s down, but not by much.”

“Has she lost . . .”

“Half a pound.”

“Since Tuesday?”

“Yes.”

“Has she been vomiting? What does her hair look like?”

“No vomiting. Hair looks the same.”

“Your father and I should be there.”

“How’s your leg, real y?” Brenda asked.

“When al was said and done, it would have been easier to amputate. But I’m final y off my painkil ers.”

“Good,” Brenda said.

“How are the kids?” El en said. “And Melanie, poor thing. How is she doing?”

Brenda was in no mood to comment on poor Melanie. “Why not ask how I’m doing? You have two daughters, you know.”

“Oh, darling, I know. You’re such an angel to be there for your sister. If you weren’t there . . .”

“But I am here. And everything’s fine. Vicki is fine.”

“You’l have her cal me as soon as . . .”

“I’l have her cal you,” Brenda said. “I always have her cal you.”

“I worry so. You don’t know how I worry. And your father, although he doesn’t say it as much, worries just as much as I do.”

“Everything’s fine, Mom. I’l have Vicki cal you.”

“Everything’s fine,” El en Lyndon said. “You’l have Vicki cal me.”

“There you go. You got it.”

“Oh, Brenda,” El en Lyndon said. “You have no idea what this is like, sitting here a mil ion miles away, unable to help. God forbid you ever have to go through something like this.”

“I am going through it, Mom,” Brenda said. “She’s my sister.” Repentance, Brenda thought. Atonement. “Good-bye.”

“Have Vicki cal me!”

“Good-bye, Mom.”

N eedlepoint Christmas stockings, flossing, the score of the Red Sox game, corn silks clogging the kitchen sink, corn silk hair, clumps of it, clogging the bathtub drain, poison ivy, the weather, the outlandish price of gasoline, Homeland Security, money, erections, sex.

At first, the chemo was no more painful or inconvenient than a trip to the dentist. The Oncology Unit at the Nantucket Cottage Hospital was smal , with a close-knit staff—or, as they liked to cal themselves, “the team.” (They al played summer league softbal and had been champions three years running. When you see what we see, day in and day out, the head nurse, Mamie, said, you need an outlet for your aggression. ) The team consisted of Mamie, a woman about ten years older than Vicki who was single-handedly raising four boys, and two other nurses: a young black man named Ben and a heavyset girl with a pierced lower lip who was just out of nursing school named Amelia—and the oncologist, Dr.

Alcott. Dr. Alcott, by happy coincidence, was an acquaintance of Dr. Garcia’s back at Fairfield Hospital through years of tireless conference-attending.

We have a few drinks together now and then, Joe and I, Dr. Alcott said when Vicki first met him. I promised him I’d take good care of you.

Dr. Alcott was probably fifty but he looked about thirty. He was blond and tan, with very white teeth and expensively tailored clothes underneath his white jacket. He told Vicki he liked to fish, loved to fish, actual y, and that was what had brought him to Nantucket from Mass General in Boston

—the potential for late-night and absurdly early morning trips to Great Point in his yel ow Jeep Wrangler. Three or four times a summer he chartered a boat with Bobby D. to hunt down shark or bluefin tuna, but at heart he was a solitary catch-and-release man—a bluefish was good; a striped bass, false albacore, or bonito even better. Dr. Alcott was the softbal team’s secret weapon, an ace pitcher whom no one in the league could hit. Vicki was half in love with Dr. Alcott, but she supposed everybody was.

When Vicki got to the hospital, either Ben or Amelia weighed her, took her blood pressure, and drew a blood sample to check her white count.

Then Vicki waited for Dr. Alcott to appear.

Just checking in, he said. How are you? How do you feel? You’re okay? You’re hanging in there? You’re a trouper. Joe told me you were going to be a star patient, a real fighter. The blood counts look okay, they look fine. You’re okay. I’m proud of you, Vicki. You’re doing a great job.

These words of encouragement were ridiculously important to Vicki. She was used to excel ing at things, though never once had she considered chemo something that a person might be good or bad at. It was random, the luck of the draw, how a body reacted to the chemicals. But she appreciated the cheerleading from Dr. Alcott nonetheless. He was going to save her.

The chemo room was smal and pleasant, with three recliners and two partial wal s for privacy. Vicki chose what she hoped was a lucky chair—it looked like the chair her father had relaxed in al his life—and waited as Mamie hooked her up to the poison. There was one TV, always tuned in to ESPN’s SportsCenter because the oncology team took the Red Sox scores very seriously.

For the first week, then two, Vicki thought, This is okay. I can do this. It wasn’t great—of al the places on Nantucket that Vicki wanted to be, this was a notch above the island’s one jail cel and the Lewis Funeral Home—however, it was better than the horror stories she had heard from people in her support group about the units at bigger hospitals where chemo was unscheduled and a person might sit around for three or four hours waiting for a chair to open up. Vicki looked forward to her time with Dr. Alcott, she listened to Mamie tel Ben about her sons’ escapades and mishaps (her fourteen-year-old got caught at three o’clock in the morning driving a car he had “borrowed” from the Grand Union parking lot), she listened to Ben tel Amelia about the crazy, drunk girls that he encountered in his second job as a bouncer at the Chicken Box. There was a lot of animated chatter on mornings after their softbal games. In short, the Oncology Unit was its own universe where Vicki was a visitor. She could contribute as much or as little as she liked; nobody asked her about her cancer. Why would they? It was a matter of fact, a given, her cel s were like rotten teeth the team had to extract. No judgments were made; it was just business.

Vicki was almost embarrassed when the side effects kicked in. It happened gradual y; there was a noticeable decline during the second week, and each day things got a little worse. Vicki’s appetite died; she had to make herself eat the way other people made themselves exercise. Her skin dried out and started to flake, she became confused (she repeated herself, she thought she was talking to Brenda but it was Melanie, she lost her train of thought in the middle of a sentence). She dropped ten pounds despite the fact that she was eating diligently, she became too weak to walk to the beach or even the market, she spent whole afternoons and then whole days—beautiful, sunny, perfect days—in bed. Brenda brought home sand from the beach and sprinkled it in every pair of Vicki’s shoes. Melanie bought Vicki al the books on the paperback bestsel er list, but Vicki couldn’t concentrate for more than a few pages. The only good times of the day were the mornings, when she had enough energy to make breakfast, and at one o’clock, when Porter snuggled in next to her for his nap. She inhaled the scent of his hair, she stroked his satiny cheek, she watched his mouth work the pacifier. When Porter woke up, Blaine often came in with a jar of freshly cut flowers and a pile of picture books for Vicki to read to him. Vicki usual y made it through one or two before her attention gave out.

That’s enough for now, Vicki would say. Auntie Brenda will finish. Mommy’s tired.

Vicki tried to store up her energy for the weekends, when Ted was around. When he appeared on Friday afternoons, she was always sitting up in bed, pretending to read, pretending everything was fine, she was okay—but the expression on his face told her that he knew otherwise. He would sit on the edge of the bed, his face an inch away from raw fear. What are they doing to you? he whispered.

I don’t know, Vicki thought. Dr. Garcia had said the chemo would be brutal, but Vicki hadn’t understood what that meant at the time. Now, of course, she did. She was weak, her finger bones as crushable as pieces of chalk, her lungs as brittle as honeycomb. Her breasts, because of the chemo and the normal shrinkage after nursing, didn’t even fil a training bra. Her nipples were like two old raisins. Gone were her curves, her smooth skin, her silky blond hair. Now her body was twigs and leaves. Her hair was frayed thread. She was ugly, hideous, a carcass. Her sex drive had vanished, and yet in her mind, she didn’t want to let that part of her life go. She was terrified Ted would seek out sex elsewhere—there were mil ions of women in the city, there were prostitutes, escort services, expensive ones that men on Wal Street knew about and utilized for clients.

There were women in Ted’s office, in his building; there might be a woman wearing a certain perfume on the elevator. It happened al the time, cheating. It had happened to Vicki’s best friend! And so, Vicki pursued sex with Ted like she hadn’t in al the years they’d been married, and he, clearly, thought she was nuts.

“I want this,” she said, pul ing him into bed. It was Sunday afternoon, and Brenda had agreed to keep the kids at the beach for an extra hour.

“Let’s take a shower together.”

“Outside?”

“I want to be close to you.”

“Vicki, Vicki, Vicki. You don’t have to do this for me.”

“For us,” she said. “It wil make me feel better.”

“Okay,” Ted said, and he kissed her hair. “Okay.”

Vicki got up and pul ed the shades; she wanted it dark. She went to her husband and slid his bathing trunks off his body. She took him in her mouth. Nothing. Ted lay back, pale, sweating, flaccid, his eyes squeezed shut, a pained look on his face. He was trying to block her out, probably.

He was trying to remember the woman she’d been before, or he was thinking of some other woman.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“You’re not attracted to me,” Vicki said. She slumped on the floor. “You think I’m ugly.”

“You’re not ugly, Vick. You could never be ugly.”

“What is it, then?”

“I don’t know. It’s a mind game. The cancer. I’m afraid I’m going to hurt you.”

“I’l tel you what hurts,” she said. “And that is not being able to excite my husband. Do you get an erection at home? When you wake up in the morning? Does it work then?”

“Vicki, please don’t.”

“Do you jerk off when I’m not there?”

“Stop it, Vick.”

“I want to know.”

“No.”

“You don’t? I don’t believe you.”

“Yeah? Wel , why don’t you come home and find out for yourself.”

“Ohhhh,” she said. “Okay, I see.” There was going to be a fight, which was the last thing she wanted, but she was powerless to stop herself.

“You’re punishing me for leaving Connecticut? You won’t have sex with me until I agree to come home?”

“That’s not it, Vick. That has nothing to do with it.”

“Wel , what’s wrong with you, then?” she said. She wanted to stand up, but she was too tired, so she remained on the floor, staring at Ted’s knees. Their sex life had always been healthy; before Vicki got sick, Ted had asked for her every night. That was how it worked—Ted asked, Vicki gave in. Never once had Ted failed to show up like this. It was so unusual, they didn’t even have the words to talk about it.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” he said.

“You’ve slept with someone else,” Vicki said. “I know it.”

Ted sat up. He pointed a finger at her. “Don’t you ever say that again. Don’t say it and don’t think it. It’s insulting to me and to our marriage and to our family.” He pul ed on his swim trunks and started pacing the room. “Do you honestly think I would do that to you?” he said. “After ten years of being my wife, do you honestly give me so little credit? ”

Vicki started to cry. “I’m afraid,” she said. “I’m afraid of what’s happening to my body. I’m ugly. I left you by yourself at home and I know you’re angry about that and I just have these awful thoughts about you screwing somebody else, of you fal ing in love with somebody else and the two of you waiting for me to die so that you can be together and raise the boys. . . .”

Ted knelt down. He held her face and she fel into him. She was overreacting, she knew it, but she was glad she had spoken because those were her fears. Sexual y, she felt like a failure. Having cancer felt like a failure, and what Vicki realized was that she wasn’t used to failing at anything.

Things had always come easily to her; that was part of who she was.

Ted was due to leave at five o’clock, giving Vicki another five days to fret about trying again.

“Wil you hold me?” Vicki asked.

Ted squeezed her tighter. “What do you think about trading in the Yukon?” he said.

“Excuse me?” she said.

“We could buy a Volvo. It’s safer.”

Vicki shook her head. It was such a non sequitur she wasn’t even sure she’d heard him correctly. Could Ted real y be concerned about the car?

She forced herself to acknowledge the monstrous anger eating away at her. She couldn’t believe the things that mattered to other people! A safer car? Mixed in with her anger was envy. Vicki envied everybody everything: Melanie’s pregnancy, Brenda’s screenplay, Josh’s strong arms—he could carry the pack ’n’ play, the umbrel a, the towels, the cooler, and the baby and make it al the way to the beach without stopping or dropping anything. She envied Mamie her sons, al of them safely into teenagerhood; she envied Dr. Alcott the thirty-eight-inch striped bass that he decided to take home and gril for his family for dinner; she envied the tattoo on Amelia’s lower back (her tramp stamp, Ben cal ed it); she envied chatter about a missed fly bal . She envied Porter his pacifier—she wanted a pacifier! She envied Ted’s career, its demands and rewards; he would fly back to New York and consume himself with making money. That was his job! Vicki wanted her job back—housewife, mother. She wanted a normal life, a life fil ed with things other than chemo treatments and a darkened bedroom and a wistful, impotent husband. She wanted a life busy with things other than cancer.

Brian Delaney, Esquire, had cal ed nine times since Brenda had been on Nantucket, and Brenda had yet to return a single phone cal . She had hoped that dealing with the charges the university was slapping her with in regard to the Jackson Pol ock painting could be done via voice messages and e-mail, but Brian Delaney, Esquire, seemed intent on having a person-to-person chat on the phone at the cost of two hundred and fifty dol ars an hour. The reason, plain and simple, why Brenda didn’t want to talk to the man was that she didn’t want to pay. He must have sensed this. On the tenth cal , he said, Call me back or I’m dropping your case.

And so, once Brenda was safely away from the house, ensconced on a stretch of deserted beach that she’d discovered north of ’Sconset Bluff, she cal ed him back.

Brian Delaney, Esquire’s secretary, Trudi, put Brenda right through. Seconds later, Brian Delaney, Esquire’s voice boomed over the line, with as much unleashed testosterone as a linebacker from Ohio State, which was, in fact, what Brian Delaney had been in his previous life.

“Brenda Lyndon! I thought for sure you’d fled the country!”

She should have a snappy comeback for that, she knew. When she’d first met Brian Delaney, Esquire, she’d been ful of snappy comebacks, and that was one of the reasons he’d agreed to take her case. He liked her. It wasn’t just his Big Ten jock inferiority in the face of a near–Ivy League professor; he also liked the fact that she was young, attractive, and sassy. I can’t believe you’re a professor, he kept saying. Despite the damage done to her reputation by her relationship with Walsh, Brenda had worn a snug pencil skirt and very high heels to her initial meeting with Brian Delaney, Esquire, in the hope that he might cut her a break on his fee. No such luck—though Brenda seemed to be rewarded by his confidence.

This case was fun for him, it was a no-brainer. He was used to dealing with criminals, he said. Thieves, rapists, drug lords. Next to these people, Brenda looked like Queen Elizabeth.

“Nantucket is another country,” she said. “It feels like it, anyway. Sorry I haven’t cal ed you back. I told you about my sister, right? She’s going through chemotherapy? And I’m responsible for watching her kids? I’m very busy.”

“Right,” Brian said tentatively. Brenda had also thought that mentioning Vicki’s cancer might inspire him to lower his fees, but it was clear he didn’t remember what she was talking about. “Wel , I’ve been in contact with the university’s counsel, and she’s been talking to both the head of the Art Restoration Program and the chair of the English Department—because, as you know, it’s the English Department that technical y owns the painting—and they are coming at this from two different places. The art restoration guy, Len, his name is, says that only a smal amount of damage has been done to the painting. It just needs what he cal s ‘a little work.’”

“Thank God,” Brenda said.

“Wel , hold your horses there, sister. ‘A little work’ is going to cost you ten thousand dol ars.”

“What?” Brenda said. There wasn’t another soul on the beach for as far as she could see in either direction and so she felt free to shout. “What the hel ?”

“There’s a divot in the lower left quadrant of the painting where the spine of the book hit it. The divot is three-quarters of an inch long.”

“A divot?”

“Would you rather I cal it a gouge? Fine, it’s a gouge. It needs to be stitched up, fil ed in, whatever it takes to restore the glory of Pol ock’s fine work. But that’s not the bad news,” Brian Delaney, Esquire, said. “The bad news is the other woman, the chair of your former department.”

“Atela?”

“She’s pursuing a grand larceny charge.”

“Grand larceny?”

“It’s art,” Brian Delaney, Esquire, said. “The value is al perceived. It doesn’t have to be taken from the room to be stolen. Atela is convinced you were trying to sabotage the painting.”

“We went over this in the deposition. I threw the book in anger. It was the heat of the moment, which makes it second degree. Possibly even third degree because it was an accident.”

“Listen to you with the legal jargon.”

“I wasn’t aiming for the painting.”

“She’s claiming that you went into that room with the intent to destroy.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me, Brian. Doesn’t that seem a bit extreme to you?”

“A jury might believe it.”

“So what does that mean?” Brenda said. “Is there going to be a trial?”

“They’l threaten with a trial. But what they real y want is a settlement. Which means more money.”

“I am not giving the English Department a single dime,” Brenda said.

“You may not have a choice,” Brian said. “They’re asking for three hundred thousand dol ars.”

Brenda laughed. Ha! Though the number was funny like a slap across the face. “No chance,” she said.

“The painting’s been appraised at three mil ion,” Brian Delaney, Esquire, said. “They want a tenth of the value.”

“Do you think I compromised one tenth of the painting’s value?” Brenda said. “The art guy said there was just a little divot.”

“What I know about art I could write on my thumbnail and stil have room for one of Andy Warhol’s soup cans,” Brian Delaney, Esquire, said. “The point is, they feel you’ve compromised one tenth of the painting’s value. But I can get them down to a hundred and fifty.”

“This is why I don’t take your cal s,” Brenda said. “I can’t stand to hear this.”

“In some people’s eyes you did a bad thing,” Brian said. “You made a series of very bad judgment cal s. It’s time to own that.”

She owned it, al right. Her fal from grace was spectacular. She felt not like Queen Elizabeth at al but rather like Monica Lewinsky, Martha Stewart, OJ Simpson. Her good name had been slandered across Champion’s campus and campuses across the country. She would never work again, not like she was meant to. And if that weren’t punishment enough, she had separated herself from Walsh. But, as with everything, there was the issue of money, of which Brenda had very little. Brenda couldn’t own her mistake to the tune of a hundred and sixty thousand dol ars plus however many mil ions Brian Delaney, Esquire, was going to charge her.

“I don’t have that kind of money,” Brenda said. “I just flat out do not have it.”

“How’s the screenplay coming along?” Brian asked. “Sel that baby for a mil ion dol ars and al the rest of this wil look like milk money.”

“The screenplay is going just fine,” Brenda said. This was an out-and-out lie. In truth, she’d written one page. “I real y have to go, so . . .”

“Time to flip over, huh?” Brian Delaney, Esquire, said. “Too much sun on your face?”

Was she real y paying him two hundred and fifty dol ars an hour for this?

“Good-bye,” Brenda said.

A hundred and sixty thousand dollars. Each time Brenda thought it, it was like a medicine bal to the stomach. In other circumstances, she might have cal ed her parents and asked for a loan. Despite the inevitable comments that she was thirty years old, and a reminder that they had subsidized her income through eight years of graduate school, the money would appear from somewhere. But Brenda had to downplay her misfortunes with her family. They knew the basics: fired from Champion, a “misunderstanding” about an important painting that was making it necessary for her to retain a lawyer, but she had kept it at that. The Lyndons had always been open-minded and tolerant, but this stemmed from a sense of their own superiority. Their behavior was impeccable; they lived up to very high expectations but they understood, in their infinite wisdom, that not everybody was like them. Vicki thought this way, too—and so, for a long time, had Brenda. She couldn’t stand being numbered among the sinning masses, the moral y bankrupt, which is right where her parents would place her if they found out what she’d done. They might lend or flat-out give her the startling sum of money, but they would think less of her, and Brenda couldn’t abide that. And, too, she couldn’t bear to burden her parents with the details of her own idiotic scandal when Vicki was so sick. As it was, Brenda was going to have to start lying to her mother about Vicki’s condition. Because despite Brenda’s prayers, Vicki was getting worse. The chemo was taking its tol . Al the things the doctors warned might happen, happened. Vicki had lost more than ten pounds, she was chronical y tired, she had no appetite—not even for gril ed steak or corn on the cob. Her hair, which had always been like corn silk, began fal ing out in ghastly clumps; in places, Brenda could see right through to her scalp.

Vicki had a wig in one of the suitcases she’d brought from home, though Brenda couldn’t bring herself to suggest Vicki wear it.

One morning, a Tuesday, a chemo morning, Brenda found Vicki in her room, rocking back and forth on the bed with both of the kids in her lap, crying.

“I don’t want to go,” she said. “Please don’t make me go. They’re trying to kil me.”

“They’re trying to help you, Vick,” Brenda said.

“Mom’s not going to the hospital today,” Blaine said.

“Come on,” Brenda said. “You’re scaring the kids.”

“I’m not going,” Vicki said.

“Josh wil be here any second,” Brenda said. “You haven’t made him anything for breakfast.”

“I can’t cook anymore,” Vicki said. “Just looking at food makes me sick. If Josh is hungry, Melanie wil make him something.” This had happened two or three times now: With Vicki too sick to cook, Melanie had attempted to step in and cook for Josh. There had been a platter of scrambled eggs, somehow both watery and burned, and some limp, greasy bacon—after which Josh said he would be happy with just a bowl of Cheerios.

“You can’t skip chemo, Vick. It’s like any medicine. It’s like antibiotics. If you stop taking it, even for one day, you’l go back to being sick.”

“I’m not going,” Vicki said.

“She’s not going!” Blaine shouted. “She’s staying home!”

Vicki made no move to shush Blaine or reprimand him for yel ing at his aunt who was, it should be pointed out, just trying to do the right thing!

The family was going to hel in a handbasket.

“I’l give you a few minutes,” Brenda said. “But we are leaving at eight-thirty.”

Brenda left the room, dreading her mother’s inevitable phone cal . How is she? El en Lyndon would ask. And what could Brenda possibly say?

She’s scared. She’s angry. She hurts. It wasn’t possible to give their mother a dose of that kind of unadulterated truth. She’s fine, Brenda would say. The kids are fine.

As Brenda was feeling guilty for lies she hadn’t even told yet, she heard the predictable crunch of tires on shel s. Josh. Somehow, Brenda thought, Josh would keep them afloat. Now that Brenda was a regular communicator with God, she believed Josh had been sent to them for a reason. Brenda tiptoed down the flagstone path and met Josh by the gate. She was stil in her nightgown and it was a misty, chil y morning. She crossed her arms over her chest.

He furrowed his brow. “You’re not throwing rocks today?” he said. “Is something wrong?”

“Kind of,” Brenda said. “I need your help.”

“Okay,” Josh said. Brenda saw his eyes brighten. In this, he was like Walsh. Being typical y Australian, Walsh loved to help. “Anything.”

“I need you to talk to Vicki.”

Another person might have said, Anything but that, but Josh had no problem with Vicki. He liked her; he wasn’t afraid of her cancer. He cal ed her “Boss,” and each day he teased her about her “non-list list.”

“Okay,” Josh said. “Sure. What about?”

“Just talk to her,” Brenda said. “She needs a friend. She’s sick of me.”

“No problem,” Josh said. “I’m here for you.”

Brenda was about to lead him into the house, into Vicki’s bedroom, but those words, I’m here for you, even though they were said in a casual, lighthearted way, nearly made Brenda weep with gratitude. She suspected that Josh wasn’t a col ege student at al , but rather, an angel. Brenda placed her hands on his shoulders, stood on her tiptoes, and kissed him. He tasted young, like a piece of unripe fruit; his lips were soft. She felt him move toward her, he took hold of her waist.

Immediately, Brenda realized she’d made a mistake. What was wrong with her? Gently, she pushed Josh away. “I’m sorry,” she said. “That was unfair of me.”

“You are so beautiful,” Josh said. “You know I think so.”

Yes, Brenda knew it. She had seen how he looked at her in her nightgown and her bikini, but she had done nothing to encourage him. When they spoke, she was friendly but never more than friendly. If anything, she had worked to keep Josh at arm’s length. The last thing she wanted was for anyone to think . . . But, as ever, her good judgment fled her for one instant. She had kissed him—and it was a real kiss—so now, suddenly, on top of everything else, she was a tease. She had so much on her mind, so many heavy, difficult things, that the idea that there was someone wil ing to help, even a little bit, overwhelmed her good sense. She had made a mess of nearly everything in her life, but she didn’t want to make a mess with Josh.

“It was unfair of me because I’m in love with someone else,” Brenda said. “Someone back in New York.” She thought of the damn napkin tucked into her book; the ink was smeared now. Call John Walsh!

“Oh,” Josh said. He looked pissed off. He had every reason to be; he had every reason to leave Number Eleven Shel Street and never come back, but Brenda hoped he wouldn’t. She hoped he was here for reasons a lot more powerful than any crush he might have on her.

“You’l stil talk to Vicki, won’t you?” Brenda asked. “Please?”

He shrugged. His eyes were fil ed with hurt and boyish disappointment. “Sure,” he said.

The bedroom was dim, with the muted morning light peeking in around the edges of the pul ed shades. Vicki rocked on the bed, holding both kids, but Brenda lifted Porter out of Vicki’s arms and said to Blaine, “Come on out now. We have pebbles to throw.”

“I want to stay with Mommy,” Blaine said.

“Outside,” Brenda said. “Now.”

“I need to talk to your mom anyway,” Josh said. “I’l be out in a couple of minutes.”

This was so unusual that neither Blaine nor Vicki protested. Blaine left quietly, shutting the door behind him, and Vicki fel back on the bed. She was wearing gray athletic shorts and a navy Duke T-shirt that hiked up her midsection. She was a lot thinner than she’d been when Josh first saw her at the airport. She was wearing a bandanna over her head like a rap star; her hair was nearly gone.

“Brenda told you I don’t want to take my medicine?”

“Actual y, she told me nothing,” Josh said. “Except that she’s in love with someone else, not me.”

At this, Vicki made a noise somewhere between a laugh and a hiccup. Josh was astounded at his own candor. But there was something about Vicki that put him at ease. She was too young to be his mother, though there had been times in the past few weeks when he’d felt like she was his mother, and he had relished it. She was sort of like an older sister might have been, or a very cool older girl best friend, the kind he’d never been lucky enough to have. He cal ed her “Boss” as a joke, though why this was a joke he wasn’t sure; she was his boss. And yet she didn’t come across as his boss, despite the fact that she was always tel ing him what she wanted him to do and she was always asking for a ful report of his and the kids’ activities—their every word and deed and fart—when he got home at one o’clock. Stil , she gave the impression that he was the boss, that he was ultimately in charge—and that was, he supposed, why Brenda had asked him to come in and talk. Vicki would listen to him.

“She’s in love with someone named John Walsh,” Vicki said. She sat up, plucked a tissue off the nightstand, and blew her nose. “One of her students, back in New York. I can’t believe she told you.”

“I can’t believe I told you she told me,” Josh said. “I thought I was sent in here to talk about something else.”

“You were,” Vicki said. She sighed. “I’m not going to chemo.”

“Why not?”

“I’ve had enough,” Vicki said. “It’s not helping. I can feel it not helping. It’s hurting. It’s kil ing me. You know what chemotherapy is, right? It’s control ed poisoning. They try to poison the cancer cel s, but most of the time they poison healthy cel s, too. So the way I feel is that I used to have healthy cel s and now al I have are poisoned cel s. I am a vessel fil ed with vile green poison.”

“You look the same to me,” Josh said, though this was a lie.

“I can’t eat,” Vicki said. “I’ve lost twelve pounds, and I’m bald. I can’t cook, I can’t stay awake through a Scooby-Doo, I can’t concentrate long enough to play Chutes and Ladders, I can’t land a single pebble in the damn paper cup. I can’t do anything. What was the point in coming to Nantucket if I only go outside to get to the hospital? I want to go to the beach, I want to swim, I want to drink my Chardonnay on the back deck, I want to feel better. I’m done with chemo. There was never a guarantee it was going to shrink my tumor anyway. It’s just a gamble the doctors take, a gamble with my body. But I’m putting an end to it today. I’m al done.”

“I’l point out the obvious,” Josh said. “If you don’t go to chemo, your cancer might get worse.”

“It might,” Vicki said. “Or it might stay the same.”

“But if they think the chemo wil help, you should take it. You have the kids to think about.”

“You sound like my husband,” Vicki said. “Which is too bad. One thing I real y appreciate about you is that you’re nothing like my husband.”

Josh felt himself redden. He had yet to meet Vicki’s husband, Ted Stowe, though he had heard about him in detail from the kids. Ted Stowe came every weekend, he was some kind of financial wizard in New York, and Blaine had let it slip that Ted didn’t like Josh.

But I don’t even know your dad, Josh said. We’ve never met.

Trust me, Blaine said. He doesn’t like you.

If Ted Stowe didn’t like Josh, then Josh was determined not to like Ted Stowe. Josh understood, however, that whereas he fil ed a certain role, there were other men—Ted Stowe, Melanie’s husband, Peter, and now this guy Brenda was in love with—who fil ed another role, a more important, more substantial role, in their real lives, away from Nantucket.

Josh sat down on the bed next to Vicki. He felt himself about to become self-referential and he recal ed another one of Chas Gorda’s much-repeated phrases: Be wary of your own story. Josh tried to stop himself, but it was pointless. Just this once, he told himself.

“My mother died when I was twelve,” he said. “She kil ed herself.”

Vicki did him the favor of being matter-of-fact. So many women—the girls he met at Middlebury, Didi—met this statement with a gush of sympathy, as useless to Josh as a lace handkerchief.

“Did she?” Vicki said.

“She hanged herself while I was at school.”

Vicki nodded, like she was waiting for the rest of it.

There was nothing else to say. Josh had bounded off the school bus and headed home just like any other day. Except that day, his father was in the living room sitting on the sofa, waiting for him. There were no police, no sirens or lights, no other people. It was the lack of other people that Tom Flynn chose to address first.

I told them to wait, Tom Flynn said. They’ll all pour in around suppertime.

Who? Josh said.

Josh didn’t remember any other exact words. His father got the story across somehow—he’d come home for lunch as always (this was back when he worked the six-to-three shift) and found that the stairs to the attic had been pul ed down. It was December; Tom Flynn thought his wife was up searching for Christmas decorations. He cal ed to her but got no answer. He climbed the attic stairs and found her dangling. Tom Flynn cut her down and drove her to the hospital, even though it was clear she was already dead. He’d never described to his son how his wife had looked or what she’d used to hang herself or how he’d felt as he cut her down. Was he shaking? Was he crying? These were things that Josh would never know; they were things he’d been protected from. Not knowing if his mother’s face was discolored, or if her head had hung at a funny angle because her neck had snapped, kept Josh from having to relay these details to others.

“She didn’t leave a note,” Josh said. “So I’l never know why she did it.”

“Do you hate her?” Vicki asked.

“No,” Josh said. “But if you stop going to chemo today and your cancer gets worse and you die and leave Blaine and Porter motherless, I’l hate you.”

Again, the noise, the laugh or the hiccup.

“No, you won’t,” Vicki said. But stil , she stood up.

Melanie threw open the lower-left kitchen cabinet, yanked out the only decent frying pan in the house, and slammed it against the largest burner of the electric stove. She was furious!

For the first time in nearly two months she had woken up early, feeling not only okay but good. She had energy!—and she rifled through her dresser for her exercise clothes. She power walked through the misty, deserted streets of early morning ’Sconset—al the way to the town beach and back—swinging her arms, breathing in through her nose and out through her mouth, feeling like she had final y, final y turned a corner. Al the pregnancy books described how healthy and vibrant and capable a woman felt while carrying a child, and now, today, Melanie understood. Gone were the sickness and the fatigue—she had blossomed.

But then she turned a literal corner—from New Street onto Shel Street. She was on her way home, her heart pumping, her blood surging in a way she had missed; she was actual y hungry, craving protein, a couple of eggs over easy on buttery toast. She was so busy thinking of breaking the bright yel ow yolks of the eggs and of the health of the fetus inside of her, grateful for exercise and nourishment, that what she saw taking place down the street inside the white picket fence of Number Eleven didn’t, at first, register. What Melanie witnessed was two people kissing, then embracing. Melanie recognized the people, of course, at least she recognized them separately, but together, as a couple, they made no sense. It was Josh and Brenda.

Melanie stopped in her tracks. She ducked down behind the neighbor’s Peugeot, which was parked in the street. She could hear Brenda’s voice, though not her actual words. Whatever Brenda said was beside the point; Melanie had seen Brenda and Josh kissing, she had watched Josh grab Brenda’s hips. It was an awful scene, worse somehow than the vision of Peter lying with Frances Digitt in Frances’s early-nineties-model Japanese futon on sheets covered with brown dog hair. At that moment, Peter and Frances seemed very far away, whereas this betrayal by Josh and Brenda was immediate; it was a betrayal in Melanie’s new life, her safe summer life.

Forget the sense of wel -being. Melanie was going to be sick. She retched by the Peugeot’s front tire. Jealousy and anger bubbled up from the pit of her stomach. It was gross, disgusting, Brenda and Josh together. It wasn’t fair, Melanie thought. She spat at the ground, her knees wobbled.

She raised her head, ready to catch them in the act, but the front yard was empty. They were gone.

Melanie took a shorter walk to the ’Sconset Market for a Gatorade, al the time talking to herself in her mind, and occasional y muttering a word or two out loud like a crazy person. Utterly revolting. Unacceptable. Josh was twenty-two. He was the babysitter. And yet there they’d been, in the front yard, like a couple of horny teen-agers, Brenda stil in her stripper’s excuse for a nightgown. Melanie gulped the Gatorade and walked slowly back to the house, nurturing her hatred of Brenda. Brenda was a . . . slut, she was easy, she was after every man she met, she targeted them for sport, like a shameless game hunter poaching elephants for ivory or tigers for rugs. She had no scruples, she’d slept with her student, the Australian who had phoned. Next thing they al knew, she’d be after Ted Stowe—that was only logical with Vicki so sick—Brenda would sleep with her own brother-in-law.

“Arrumph,” Melanie said. She walked down a side street in search of her favorite pocket garden. Brenda was as treacherous as Frances Digitt, as deficient in honor and integrity. What did she care if she slept with somebody else’s husband? Melanie gazed at the neat patch of iris and bachelor’s button. She closed her eyes and saw Brenda and Josh kissing.

Josh.

By the time Melanie got back to the house, the Yukon was gone, which meant Brenda had taken Vicki to chemo. Melanie stormed into the house, flinging open the screen door. Her body was stil craving the eggs, and thus Melanie went rip-roaring through the kitchen slamming doors and surfaces, thinking, Bitch, slut, bitch. It felt like her hair was standing on end, like her skin was going to blister and pop.

“Are you okay?”

Melanie whipped around. Josh had emerged from Vicki’s bedroom holding the baby. Blaine stood next to Josh, a mini-Josh, as he now emulated Josh’s every word and gesture; his face held the same look of baffled interest. Melanie swil ed the last of her Gatorade and pitched the empty bottle, with no smal amount of force, into the kitchen trash.

“I’m fine, ” she said, making sure the word sounded as far from its actual meaning as possible. She turned her back on them. On the stove, the empty frying pan started to smoke. She dropped a pat of butter into the pan then pul ed eggs out of the fridge, flinging the door open and shut so violently that the poor old fridge shuddered. Real y, it was impossible to hate Josh, he was infuriatingly adorable, standing there with the kids. The boys loved him, he loved the boys, it made him irresistible. Damn it! This was awful. Melanie was jealous, as jealous as she’d ever been in her life.

She wanted Josh to like her, she wanted Josh to kiss her in the front yard. She wanted Josh to look at her the way he looked at Brenda. Never mind that he was so young. He was an adult, sort of, a young man, kindhearted and wel raised, as quality a person as a woman could ask for, and with the way Melanie was feeling, she might have been only fourteen herself. I have a crush on him, she thought. So embarrassing to admit, but true. I like him. I love him. This is ridiculous! Melanie cracked the eggs into the pan, where they sizzled. There was no noise behind her and she was afraid to turn around. Let him wonder what was wrong. Let him guess. Melanie salted her eggs and tried to flip them but failed. She was making a mess.

She dropped two pieces of bread into the toaster. The room was silent and Melanie figured the boys had slipped out or retreated to the safety of the bedroom, but when she turned around to check, the three of them were sitting at the kitchen table, watching her.

“What?” she said. “Aren’t you going to the beach?”

“In a little while,” Josh said.

“These eggs are for me,” Melanie said. “If you want to make your own breakfast when I’m finished, be my guest.”

“I’m al set,” Josh said. “If you’re eating, you must be feeling better.”

“I do feel better,” Melanie said. She buttered the toast and slid the jumbled egg mess on top, then sat down.

“You seem real y angry,” Josh said. “Is it your husband?”

“No,” Melanie said. “For once, it’s not my husband.”

“Is it anything you want to talk about?” Josh asked.

She glanced up from her plate. He was looking at her very intently. He was looking at her the way she wanted him to look at her, or maybe she was just imagining this. Those green eyes. Porter was working his pacifier, his head resting against Josh’s chest. Melanie had hoped that because Josh was young, he would be different. He wouldn’t have taken for granted, yet, his power over women. But clearly he understood it. He knew al of Peter Patchen’s tricks and then some. It came with the territory of being handsome and strong and accomplished and, no doubt, spoiled by his mother. Any which way, he was showing what could only be described as undivided interest in Melanie for the first time ever, when less than an hour before, he’d been kissing Brenda. Was this some kind of parlor game—seduce al the women at Number Eleven Shel Street? Would Vicki be next?

“I have to pee,” Blaine announced. He looked to Josh, as if for permission, and Josh nodded, his eyes stil trained on Melanie. Blaine left the table.

Melanie cut into her eggs; the yolks weren’t as runny as she’d hoped. “I saw you kissing Brenda,” she said.

Josh hissed like a bal oon losing air and leaned back in his chair. “Yeah,” he said. “She kissed me, actual y.”

“It didn’t look terribly one-sided,” Melanie said.

“I thought maybe she meant something by it,” he said. “But she didn’t. She was just feeling desperate, you know, about Vicki, and she wanted my help.” He shifted Porter in his arms and brushed his lips against the top of Porter’s head. Melanie ate her eggs and toast. She couldn’t bear to hear any more, and yet she had to know.

“Help how?”

“Talk to Vicki. Get her to go to chemo. Which I did, I guess. I mean, I don’t know if I did anything, but she went.”

Melanie nodded. The bereft, third-wheel, left-out feeling returned. There were dramas taking place al over this house that she didn’t even know about. “So, what about Brenda?”

“Wel , she’s in love with someone else,” Josh said. “Some student of hers back in New York.”

“John Walsh,” Melanie said. She took another, more lustful bite of her eggs. Her anger and confusion were starting to clear. Melanie heard the toilet flush and Blaine cal ed out for Josh. He smiled and stood up.

“So . . . whatever. It’s no big deal. She digs somebody else. I mean . . . wel , you know how it is.”

“Yes,” Melanie said. “I do.”

PART TWO

JULY

Brenda had been on Nantucket for more than three ful weeks, and she had gotten nowhere on the damned screenplay. Day after day she left the house by nine o’clock for the beach, and she settled on her deserted stretch of sand with a thermos of coffee and her yel ow legal pad. She knew the story of The Innocent Impostor so intimately it was as if she had written it herself. The book would make a great movie if she could get it right. It was an undiscovered classic with lots of drama and an ambiguous moral message. Brenda could keep it period, cast John Malkovich as Calvin Dare and dress him in fril y lace-col ared shirts and a wig. Or maybe she should modernize it: turn Calvin Dare into a Jersey City construction worker who accidental y kil s Thomas Beech with his Datsun 300ZX while backing out of a parking space at Shea Stadium after a Bruce Springsteen concert—and who then, through some careful y constructed coincidences, takes over for Beech on the trading floor of Goldman Sachs and starts dating Beech’s fiancée, Emily, who manages the Kate Spade store in Soho. Brenda could visualize the movie as a huge critical and commercial success either way. She even had a tenuous connection in the “business”—her former student Amy Feldman’s father, who was the president of Marquee Films.

But she couldn’t write.

Al her life, Brenda had been easily distracted. To work, she needed solitude and absolute quiet. Her parents had arranged for this in high school

—El en Lyndon turned off the classical music she played on a Bose radio in the kitchen, she turned off the ringer on the phone, she al owed Brenda to skip dinner in order to study in the strictly silent reserve room of the Bryn Mawr Col ege library. And then, in col ege and graduate school, Brenda sought out places where no one would ever discover her so she could have long, uninterrupted hours of reading and writing. She dead-bolted her apartment door and pul ed her shades. One year for Christmas Vicki gave her a sign to hang from her door: Do Not Disturb: Genius at work. This was al very tongue in cheek; Vicki was the last person who understood single-mindedness. She had been born a multitasker before such a talent even had a name. But Brenda couldn’t think about two things at once, much less four or five things, and therein lay her problem. How was she supposed to write a screenplay when her mind was crowded with the details of her disgrace, her legal and monetary worries, her absorbing concern for Vicki and the kids—and most of al , her lingering obsession with John Walsh?

Brenda couldn’t stop thinking about Walsh. It was absurd! Brenda was now thinking that she should go to the doctor—she needed medication or, better stil , surgery. Remove the obsession with John Walsh. It’s eating me up like cancer; it’s growing in me like a baby.

In three weeks, John Walsh had cal ed only once, right at the beginning, on the day that Blaine was lost and then found, when Melanie answered Brenda’s cel phone and scribbled the message that Brenda had since kept tucked inside her copy of The Innocent Impostor. She hadn’t heard Walsh’s voice since she left New York; she hadn’t seen his face. He had pledged his love so ardently, so convincingly, that she thought the phone cal s would be as incessant as those from her mother and Brian Delaney, Esquire; she thought Walsh would pursue her until she gave in. But no: There had been the one phone cal and that was it. How typical y Australian he was! If you want me, he was no doubt thinking, you know where to find me. Or maybe he just didn’t love her anymore. Maybe he took her words to heart and decided that nothing good could come of their relationship. Maybe now that Brenda’s career was in tatters and her good name sul ied, he had lost interest. Maybe he had met someone else. It was fruitless to speculate, but she couldn’t help wondering how he was spending his summer days in the city. Was he back working for the construction company? Was he sitting on scaffolding, hard-hatted and shirtless, eating a sandwich out of a metal lunch box? What did he do at night? Was he working the slow summer-evening shift at the law library as Brenda hoped—or was he out at the clubs, dancing and sleeping around? Al of the girl-women in Brenda’s second-semester class had been in love with him—even Kel y Moore, the purple-haired soap opera actress, even Ivy, the lesbian, and especial y Amrita, the brownnoser. That had been the problem.

Brenda felt like she was trying to scramble out of a gravel pit but couldn’t unbury her feet. She found it impossible to concentrate. Every five or six minutes she would stare at her yel ow legal pad and see the faint blue lines and the empty space between them and she would admonish herself.

“Focus!” But the movie playing in her mind wasn’t The Innocent Impostor. The two reels endlessly spinning were Brenda and Walsh Together ( The Joy Ride) and Brenda and Walsh Torn Apart ( The Crash).

Brenda set her notebook aside and lay back on her towel, raised her face to the sun. She preferred to indulge in the first reel. The Joy Ride. The night Brenda and Walsh first got together had started out innocently enough. Brenda met her best friend and forever-secret-true-love, Erik vanCott, and his girlfriend, Noel, at Café des Bruxel es for moules et frites. Brenda hated Noel—she had always hated Erik’s girlfriends—but she especial y hated Noel because, according to Erik, Noel was “marriage material.” Erik had actual y spoken these words out loud, forcing Brenda to face a tough reality: Erik would, most likely, spend his life with someone else, someone who was not Brenda, despite her years of devotion and despite Brenda and Erik’s rich, shared history. Brenda understood that she needed to break away from Erik; loving him was like staying on the Titanic and drowning in her stateroom. However, she couldn’t give him up cold turkey, and to see Erik these days meant also seeing Noel.

Noel’s eyes were a warm yel ow-brown and her hair was as long and luxurious as a fur coat. She was wearing a white cashmere sweater and little pearl earrings. The three of them were seated at a table meant for two, with Brenda stuck off the side like a tumor. Before the famed frites even hit the table, a startling thing happened: Erik and Noel started fighting. Noel wasn’t eating, and Erik had chosen this night of al nights to accuse her of being anorexic.

“You’re not having any bread?”

“It’s my business what I eat. Why do you care?”

“Why do I care? Are you asking me why I care? ”

Brenda, meanwhile, busied herself with the crusty bread; she slathered it with butter as Eric looked on approvingly. “That’s my girl,” Erik said.

“Brenda real y knows how to eat.”

“Yeah, wel ,” Brenda said. “You know me. Indiscriminate.”

A while later, the mussels arrived, with the fries. Noel made a face.

“You real y don’t want any?” Erik said to her. “Not a single frite? ”

“No,” she said.

“That’s okay,” Erik said. “That’s just fine. Brenda wil have some, won’t you, Brenda?”

Brenda looked between Erik and Noel. She was being lobbed like a grenade at Noel’s fortress. That was what happened when you were a single person out with a couple; you were either ignored or used as ammunition. Thus, Brenda did the only reasonable thing: She pretended to excuse herself for the ladies’ room and she snuck out of the restaurant.

She stood on Greenwich Avenue at nine o’clock on a Friday night, with people streaming around her like a river around a rock, unsure of what to do next. Her confidence bobbled around like it was attached to a spring. She couldn’t decide if walking out of the restaurant had been a bril iant move or an unforgivably rude one. What would her mother think? At that moment, Brenda’s cel phone rang. John Walsh, the display said. She knew she should let the cal go to her voice mail—because what were the chances John Walsh was cal ing to ask about the syl abus? However, Brenda was reeling from Erik and Noel–caused anxiety. Her good sense splattered al over the sidewalk, like she had dropped a melon. She answered the phone.

Brenda met John Walsh at the Cupping Room on Broome Street. She arrived first and ordered a fat glass of Cabernet to calm her nerves, and lo and behold, the bartender informed her that a man at the end of the bar had offered to pay for it. What man? A portly man in a suit with a gray handlebar mustache. A man slightly younger than Brenda’s father. Brenda felt flattered, then creeped out. She was swimming in unfamiliar waters: She was alone in a bar waiting for her student to show up, and a stranger wanted to buy her drink. What was the etiquette here?

“Thank you,” Brenda said to the bartender. “That’s very nice. But I’m meeting someone.”

“Fair enough,” the bartender said. Meaning what, exactly?

No time to think because in the door strol ed Walsh, looking so handsome that everyone at the bar stared at him, not least of al the man with the handlebar mustache. Walsh was wearing a black shirt and a black leather jacket, and with his close-cropped hair, his skin, his eyes, wel , he was a lethal dose of something. Col ege sophomore. Ha! Brenda took a mouthful of wine, hoping it didn’t turn her teeth blue, and stood up.

He kissed her.

One of her heels slipped on something wet under the bar and she fel back. He caught her arm.

“Hi,” she said.

“Hel o.” He grinned. “I can’t believe you agreed to meet me.”

That made two of them.

“This is very bad,” Brenda said. “You’re my student. If anyone sees us . . .”

“We’re in Soho,” Walsh said. “It’s like another country.”

For the next three hours, Brenda decided to pretend this was true. She drank her wine and Walsh drank Tanqueray. At first, Walsh talked, which al owed Brenda to obsess. College sophomore, my student, what the fuck am I doing? He told Brenda about the town he came from in Western Australia. Fremantle. South Beach, the Cappuccino Strip, the seafood restaurants on the harbor, the weekend markets, the taste of a passion fruit while sitting under a Norfolk pine with the Fremantle Doctor sweeping in off the Indian Ocean. The waves at Cottesloe, a day of sailing on the Swan, the wine and cheese from Margaret River. His family lived in a hundred-year-old limestone-and-brick bungalow in South Fremantle: his mum and dad, his sister, a niece and nephew he had only seen in pictures. His sister’s partner, Eddie, lived there, too, though Eddie and the sister weren’t married and to make matters a bit more dickey—that was his word and Brenda couldn’t help grinning—Eddie was on the dole.

“Not to give you al the grim details up front,” Walsh said. “My mum has a rose garden and my dad final y joined the twenty-first and bought a digital camera, so he sends me pictures of the roses and the tots doddering among the roses.”

“Sounds lovely,” Brenda said. And it did.

“It’s paradise,” Walsh said. “But there was no way for me to know that until I left, only now that I’m here, it’s hard to get back.”

“Wil you go back?” Brenda asked.

“Either that or break my mum’s heart.”

The bartender appeared and Walsh ordered a burger. Did Dr. Lyndon want anything?

“Please don’t,” she said.

“Don’t what?”

“Cal me Dr. Lyndon. Do it again and I’l leave.”

He grinned. “Okay, then, Brenda.” He pronounced it “Brindah.” “Want a burger?”

“I’l have a bite of yours, if that’s okay.”

“No worries. My burger is your burger.”

“I ate a little something earlier,” she said, and with that, she ordered another glass of wine.

“You were out?”

“I was out.” She told Walsh the short story of her aborted dinner with Erik and Noel, then the long story of Erik. “I’ve loved him since I was sixteen,”

Brenda said. “Normal y people grow up and move on. But not me.”

“I reckon love at sixteen is the best kind of love,” Walsh said. “For its purity. I loved a girl named Copper Shay, Abo girl, poorest girl I ever knew, and I loved her al the more for it. When I think about Copper I think of choices I could have made that would have put me back in Freo with Copper and four or five kids, and I bet I would have been happy. But that wasn’t how things worked out.”

“No,” Brenda said, and she was glad.

Another glass of wine and they were kissing. Their bar stools were practical y on top of each other, and Walsh had his knees on either side of her legs. When he kissed her, his knees pressed her legs together, and Brenda couldn’t help thinking about sex. At the end of the bar there was laughter, some sneaky applause, and Brenda thought, Everyone is watching us, but when she looked up, no one was doing anything but drinking and minding their own business, except the man with the handlebar mustache, who winked and raised a glass in their direction.

“You’re not thinking of Erik now, are you?” Walsh asked.

“No,” she said. “I’m not.”

At quarter to one, Walsh switched to water. He had a rugby game in the morning at Van Cortlandt Park, he said. Did she want to come watch?

“I can’t,” she said. She was swimming in four glasses of wine, plus the drinks she’d imbibed earlier in the evening to blur the image of marriage-material non-eating Noel, and now, in this dark bar with the sexy jazz playing, she was a hostage to some very new feelings. She liked this guy, really liked him. The one man in Manhattan who was off-limits . . . and here they were.

“Okay,” she said, pul ing away, disentangling, trying to orient herself with her bag, her cel phone, her keys, some money for the bil , her coat. “I have to go.”

“Yes,” said Walsh, yawning. He gave the waiter the high sign and a credit card slip arrived. Walsh, somehow, had already paid.

“Thank you,” she said. “You salvaged my night.”

“No worries.” He kissed her.

She touched his ears, she ruffled his very short hair. She was melting away with desire. She wanted to hear his accent vibrate against her chest

—but enough! He had rugby and she had . . .

“Cab?” Walsh said.

“I’l get my own,” Brenda said. “East Side, you know.”

“You sure? We can stil share.”

“I’m sure.”

“Okay, then.” Kiss, another kiss. Another, longer kiss. “I’l see you Tuesday. Brindah.”

“Tuesday?”

“In class.”

Brenda stood up from her beach towel; she felt dizzy. She walked toward the ocean. She had made no progress on the screenplay again today, and tomorrow was Friday, which meant taking Vicki to chemo, which meant Ted instead of Josh, which meant Brenda would be cal ed in as backup to watch the kids and keep the peace. She had agreed to these duties wholeheartedly. ( Repentance, she thought . Atonement. ) This weekend they had an excursion to Smith’s Point planned, complete with bonfire and boxed-up lobster dinners, in an attempt to get Vicki out of the cottage, to get her eating, to get her engaged in the summer and family life—and yet what this really meant was that no work got pursued again until Monday.

Brenda waded out past the first set of gently breaking waves and dove under. She wondered what the water felt like in Australia. Back at her towel, she scrol ed through the previous ten cal s to her cel phone, just in case Walsh had cal ed during her three-minute dip, just in case she had missed his number in the hundred other times she had checked her messages. No, nothing. Brenda had left her copy of The Innocent Impostor at home in the briefcase, where it would be safe from the sand and salt air, but if she closed her eyes, she could see the smeared note. Call John Walsh!

She would cal him; she would invite him to come to Nantucket. The beach, the swimming, the fresh air—he would love it here. Did Walsh like lobster? Probably. Being typical y Australian, he would eat anything (including, he used to tease Brenda, what he cal ed “bush tucker”—grubs, tree bark, snail eggs). But no sooner had Brenda punched the first four digits into her phone—1-212 ( I could be calling anyone in Manhattan, she thought)—than the second reel started spinning against her wil . The Crash. Brenda tried to block out the dominant image, but it came to her anyway. The Jackson Pol ock painting.

It had taken weeks for Brenda to discover the painting’s al ure, but then, in the days when she was fal ing in love with Walsh, she became entranced by it. She had a favorite blue line in the painting that ran like a vein from a massive black tangle. The blue was a strand of reason emerging from chaos. Or so she had thought.

You will never work in academia again, Suzanne Atela had said, the harshness in her voice belied by her lilting Bahamian accent. I will see to it personally. As for the vandalism charges . . .

Vandalism charges: The phrase sounded so crass, so trashy. Vandalism was a teenage girl taking a Sharpie to the bathroom wal , it was hoodlums spray-painting the skateboard park or breaking the front window of a pizzeria. It had nothing to do with Brenda and Mrs. Pencaldron exchanging words in the Barrington Room. But Brenda had been so, so angry, so confused and frustrated; she had wanted to throw something!

Even as Mrs. Pencaldron shrieked and ordered Augie Fisk to stand in the doorway, lest Brenda try to escape, even as campus security arrived, Brenda could not take her eyes off the painting. The nasty black snarl mesmerized her; it was like hair caught in a drain, like real feelings shredded by a series of bad decisions.

A hundred and sixty thousand dol ars, plus legal fees. This was only the monetary price; this did not even begin to address the damage done to Brenda’s reputation. She would never work in academia again.

Call John Walsh! the note shouted. But no, she couldn’t do it. She shut off her phone.

The first of July came and went—and stil there was no sign of the two hundred and ten dol ars from Didi. Josh wasn’t surprised; lending money to Didi was as good as flushing it down the toilet. He wrote a threatening letter to Didi in his journal ( You need to grow up! Take responsibility for your actions! You can’t keep jumping in the deep end and then crying out because you’re drowning! ). Writing was cathartic, and Josh decided to count himself lucky for not enabling Didi a second time. When she’d asked for more money, he had said no, and he hadn’t heard from her since. She did not appear in the parking lot of Nobadeer Beach and she had stopped leaving drunk, late-night messages on his cel phone. Josh would have been happy to let the loan fade from his memory, but the problem was that somebody—Josh would never know who—had mentioned the loan to Tom Flynn, and in the world of Tom Flynn, when you lent out money that you’d earned with your own two hands, you should damn wel make a point to get it back. Much to Josh’s dismay, the topic came up at dinner.

“You lent the Patalka girl money?”

Josh had started dating Didi sophomore year in high school—so, six years earlier—and Tom Flynn stil (and had always) referred to her as “the Patalka girl.”

“She was in a pinch, she said.”

“She always says. Doesn’t she have a job now?”

“At the hospital,” Josh said, though his father knew this.

“Then why . . .”

“Because she was in a pinch, Dad,” Josh said. He did not want to be tricked into saying anything more. “I’l get it back.”

“See that you do,” Tom Flynn said. “What’s yours is yours. You aren’t working to support her. She doesn’t have col ege bil s to pay.”

“I know that, Dad,” Josh said. “I’l get it back.”

Tom Flynn said nothing else, which was unfortunate because the “I’l get it back” hung in the air as the final words on the topic, making them into a promise Josh knew he couldn’t fulfil . He would never, in a mil ion years, cal Didi up to ask for the money, if for no other reason than she obviously didn’t have it and any exchange with her on the topic would be depressing and pointless.

And so, when Vicki mentioned, a few days later, that she wanted Josh to join them on an evening picnic out to Smith’s Point on Saturday night, he said yes right away, thinking it would mean another hundred dol ars that he could tel his father was from Didi. But it quickly became clear that Saturday night wasn’t an invitation to work; it was simply an invitation. The Three were getting lobster dinners from Sayle’s, they were going to build a bonfire and make s’mores with the kids, they were going to light sparklers and locate constel ations and, if the water was warm enough, go for a nighttime swim.

“My husband, Ted, wil be there,” Vicki said. “I real y think it’s time you two met and hung out a little.”

At that point, Josh tried to backpedal. His role at Number Eleven Shel Street was becoming blurry enough without having him join in on family beach picnics. And the last thing Josh wanted to do was meet Ted Stowe. Normal y, Josh left Number Eleven at one o’clock on Friday afternoon and Ted arrived around four; Ted left on Sunday night and Josh returned at eight o’clock on Monday morning. With this schedule in place, Josh had hopes of avoiding Ted Stowe altogether—at least until Ted took his vacation at the end of August. Josh feared two things from Ted Stowe—his dislike (already in place) and his judgment. Josh, in one fleeting but beautiful moment, had kissed Brenda, and now he was starting to pick up funny vibes from Melanie. Ted might perceive this; he might, as the only other man in the house, sense a connection between Josh and one or more of the women. Josh didn’t want to get fired, or beat up, by Ted Stowe. And so, a day after he’d agreed to go on the beach picnic, he took the path of least resistance and approached Brenda.

He caught her on his way out to his Jeep at one o’clock. She was returning from the beach with her notebook, her thermos, and her cel phone.

“How goes the screenplay?” he said.

“Don’t ask,” she said.

“Okay,” he said. “I won’t. Hey, listen—I can’t make the picnic thing on Saturday night. I just remembered, I have something else. You’l tel Vicki?”

Brenda gnawed her lower lip. “Ohhhh,” she said. “Shit.”

“What?”

“Vicki real y wants you to come,” Brenda said. “I mean, she’s talked about how much she wants you there. To meet Ted. He’s bringing fishing rods so you guys can surf cast.”

“Us guys?” Josh said. “Surf cast?”

“With Blaine,” Brenda said. She took a deep breath; her chest rose and fel . Josh tried not to look. She was in love with someone else. “I’m afraid if you cancel, Vicki wil do something funny. Like bag the whole thing. With the way she is now, that’s exactly what she’l do. Toss the whole night out the window. And it’s real y important that we get her out. We have to boost her spirits.”

“Right,” Josh said. “But it’s a family picnic. I’m not a part of your family.”

“Neither is Melanie,” Brenda said. “And she’s going.”

Josh looked at the ground. Thinking about Melanie only confused him further.

“Is there any way you can reschedule the other thing?” Brenda said. “Any way at al ?” She lowered her voice. “I’m happy to pay you.”

“No, no, no,” Josh said quickly. He felt like his true motivation had been discovered and it embarrassed him. “You don’t have to pay me. I’l come.”

Brenda looked so happy and so relieved that Josh thought she might kiss him again. But no such luck. She just smiled in a real y nice way and touched his arm. “Thank you,” she whispered. “Thank you.”

T he high-performance rating of two fishing rods bought from Urban Angler on Fifth Avenue, the Yukon’s tire pressure, four wooden pallets

“borrowed” from the Stop & Shop, five adult lobster dinners complete with boiled new potatoes, corn on the cob, Caesar salad, buttermilk biscuits, half a dozen cherrystone clams, and a two-pound cooked and cracked lobster with drawn butter, a cooler full of Chardonnay and Stella Artois, three perfectly whittled roasting sticks, a box of graham crackers, a bag of marshmallows, a twenty-four-ounce Hershey’s bar, a package of sparklers purchased in Chinatown, the National Audubon Society’s Guide to the Constel ations .

Vicki didn’t care about the beach picnic. Any other year she would have been the organizing force—did they have bug spray? Was the beach permit prominently displayed on the bumper? Did they have jumper cables, just in case, and a tow rope? Were there hot dogs for the kids, and ketchup, and juice boxes? Did they bring baby powder to get the sand off the kids’ feet? Extra diapers? Porter’s bottle of warm milk? Trash bags?

A corkscrew and a bottle opener? The camera? Now, Vicki lay back in bed, listening to Ted and Brenda and Melanie trying to cover al this ground in her stead. She didn’t care. She had gone from feeling like her body was a box of broken toys to feeling nothing at al . A week earlier, in response to her complaints, to her tears, to her tantrum, Dr. Alcott had prescribed a new medication—for depression, he said. For six days, the world had come in and out of focus as Vicki’s consciousness nuzzled the ceiling like a lazy bal oon. It was a hundred times worse than pain, this loopiness, this numbness, this sense of disconnect from the real world—the island, the cottage, the people in the cottage, the kids. On Thursday, Vicki flushed the pil s, which, she understood, was only a precursor to what she would do the fol owing day. What she did on Friday was skip chemo.

It had been a piece of cake because Brenda was Vicki’s gatekeeper, and although Brenda was doing a good job, exemplary even, Vicki knew Brenda inside and out and playing to her sister’s weaknesses was a piece of cake. Friday morning they slipped into the car—discreetly, as always, so as not to alert the kids—and Vicki noticed the yel ow legal pad and The Innocent Impostor crammed into Brenda’s handbag. This was unusual because although Brenda took the yel ow legal pad with her everywhere else, she had never once brought it to chemo. Chemo, for whatever reason, was the time Brenda reserved for reading out-of-date People magazines.

“Are you planning on writing today?” Vicki asked.

“I’m real y behind,” Brenda said.

“You know, you don’t have to stay at the hospital with me,” Vicki said. “In fact, the more I think about it, the more I think it’s a waste of your time. I know the ropes now, and the team takes good care of me. They’ve never needed you for any reason. Why don’t you just drop me off at the door and

—oh, I don’t know—go get a cup of coffee and sit and write at the Even Keel? You’d probably get a lot of work done.”

“You’re probably right.”

“You should do it.”

“I should.”

“I mean it, Bren. It’s two free hours. Come back and get me at eleven.”

Brenda bit her bottom lip and said nothing further on the topic, but Vicki knew her sister. There was no chance that Brenda, after so many years devoted to quiet work—graduate school, dissertation, lecture prep, research—would be able to turn down this offer. Vicki’s heart gal oped at the thought of sweet escape. It would be just this once, like a single day of school skipped. There would be no needles, no poison, no Ben or Amelia or Mamie, no ESPN, no antiseptic hospital smel , and—for one summer weekend—no side effects. By next Tuesday, Vicki’s resolve would return; she would store up strength and courage and she would walk back into the Oncology Unit, cheerful y even—if only she could get away with today.

Brenda pul ed into the parking lot. She was stil gnawing her lower lip, debating maybe, if it would seem selfish to . . .

“Just drop me off,” Vicki said.

Brenda sighed. “Oh, Vick, are you sure? ”

“Sure I’m sure. Go write. I’l be fine.”

“I don’t know . . .”

“You’re worried about missing your update on Britney Spears?”

Brenda laughed. “No.”

“Come back at eleven,” Vicki said.

Brenda pul ed up to the hospital entrance and Vicki hopped out. She caught a glimpse of Brenda’s face as she drove away; Brenda looked like she felt as happy and as free as Vicki now did.

Vicki had spent her two stolen hours lounging in the shade of the Old Mil . Although it was a short walk from the hospital—a good arm could hit it with a basebal —it was as far as Vicki could get, and by the time she made it to the top of the hil , she was close to hyperventilating. She lay in the grass, hidden from passing traffic, and stared up at the sky, at the arms of the windmil slicing the sky into pieces of pie. For two hours she did nothing—and how long had it been since she did nothing? Even the hours spent in bed in the cottage felt like work; she was busy recovering, wil ing her body to fight, and she always kept one eye on the activity in the house—Brenda and Melanie, Josh and the kids. She was always trying to summon the energy to read a page of her book or a section of the newspaper so that her day wasn’t a complete waste. But here, on Prospect Hil , in the shadow of what was stil a functioning windmil , Vicki was set free from the rigors of recovery. No one knew where she was, and hence, it was as if she had ceased to exist. This was hooky, plain and simple. She harbored the singular delight of getting away with something. Mamie might cal the house, but no one would be home to answer the phone. On Tuesday, Vicki would say she forgot (forgot chemotherapy?) or the car broke down or one of the kids got sick. Or maybe she would admit that she just didn’t want to come. She needed a break. A personal day. You know what they say about hitting yourself over the head with a hammer, she would tel Mamie. It feels good when you stop.

It was only when Brenda swung back by to pick her up—Brenda getting out of the car to hold Vicki’s arm and help her into the passenger seat because this was what Vicki normal y required—that the guilt set in.

“How was it?” Brenda asked. “How are you feeling?”

These were the standard questions, but Vicki was at a loss for how to respond. What to say? What did she normal y say?

She shrugged.

“The team had a game last night, right?” Brenda asked. “Did they win or lose?”

Again, Vicki shrugged. Did a shrug count as a lie?

On the way back to ’Sconset, Vicki opened her window and hung her elbow out; she tried to absorb the sunshine and the summer air. The bike path was crowded with people walking and cycling, people with dogs and children in strol ers. I skipped chemo, Vicki thought. Suddenly, she felt monstrous. She recal ed Dr. Garcia’s words about the value of neoadjuvant chemo, hitting the cel s hard, in succession. Kil them, clean them out of there, make it that much harder for the cel s to metastasize. The tumor was impinging on her chest wal ; it had to recede in order for the surgeons to operate. Chemo was a cumulative process. The most important thing was consistency. So . . . what was going on here? Did she not want to get better? Could she not endure the pain, the hair loss, and the confusion for the sake of her children?

And what about Dr. Alcott? How had she managed to fly in the face of his reaction? He would be al ready with his usual pep talk— How do you feel? Are you hanging in there? You’re a trouper, a star patient. . . . He would wonder where Vicki was, he would cal the house himself, maybe, and what if Melanie was home, what if she rushed in from the garden to answer the phone? She went to chemo, Melanie would say. I saw her leave. There would be no reason for any further pep talks because Vicki was not a trouper. She was not a star patient at al .

By the time they reached Shel Street, Vicki’s guilt was paralyzing. She could barely breathe—but maybe this was a result of the missed chemo, maybe the cancer cel s were strengthening, multiplying. She was no better than Josh’s mother, hanging herself while Josh was at school. Vicki was committing her own murder.

Now, there was a knock on the front door, and Vicki sat bolt upright. She fingered the wig on her nightstand. It rested on a Styrofoam head that Blaine had named Daphne after the character in Scooby-Doo. Blaine had gone so far as to draw Daphne a face with his markers—two blue circles for eyes, two black dots meant to be nostrils, and a crooked red mouth. The Styrofoam head made Ted uncomfortable—last weekend he’d said he couldn’t make love while the head was on the nightstand because he felt like someone was watching them—and the wig, as badly as she needed it, made Vicki shiver. She had tried to put both the wig and the head on the top shelf of the bedroom closet, out of sight, but Blaine had cried over this. Daphne! So on the nightstand Daphne now sat, like some twisted excuse for a pet. The wig was made from real hair. Vicki had gotten it from a shop in the city that Dr. Garcia recommended, a place that made wigs solely for cancer patients. The wig was blond, approximately the same color as Vicki’s own hair. It didn’t look bad on, but it gave Vicki the wil ies—another person’s hair on her head. She was reminded of her sixth-grade science teacher, Mr. Upjohn, and his toupee. And so when the knock came at the door—meaning Josh had arrived—Vicki cal ed out for Brenda. Brenda came right away, holding Porter, who was dressed in a diaper and bathing trunks.

Don’t forget sweatshirts for the kids! Vicki almost said—but no, there wasn’t time for that, she could remind Brenda later.

“Scarf!” she barked.

“Right,” Brenda said. “Sorry.” She set Porter down and plucked a scarf out of Vicki’s top dresser drawer. Red, gold, gauzy: a very chic Louis Vuitton scarf that El en Lyndon had given Vicki for Christmas two years earlier. Brenda wound it deftly around Vicki’s half-bald head until it was tied tight with two tails flowing down Vicki’s back.

“Thank you,” Vicki said. She climbed out of bed and peeked into the living room. She didn’t give a hoot about the picnic but she was anxious about the moment that Josh met Ted. She wanted Josh to like Ted, to admire him; she wanted Josh to think that she, Vicki, had chosen wel .

Because Vicki and Brenda were in the bedroom dealing with the scarf, however, Melanie had been left to do the introduction. Melanie knew Vicki was nervous about it. It will be fine, Melanie assured her. Who wouldn’t like Josh?

It’s not Josh I’m worried about, Vicki said.

Oh, Melanie said. Well, who wouldn’t like Ted? Ted is a great guy.

He can be, Vicki said.

Now Melanie sounded as perky and confident as a talk show host on amphetamines.

“Hi, Josh! How are you? Come in, come in! Ted, this is the kids’ babysitter, Josh Flynn. Josh, this is Vicki’s husband, Ted Stowe.”

Blaine locked his arms around Josh’s legs in a way that seemed more possessive than usual. Ted would notice this, Vicki thought, and not like it.

Josh extended an arm as far as he could and gave Ted one of his gorgeous smiles. “Hey, Mr. Stowe. It’s nice to meet . . . heard a lot about . . .

yeah.”

Ted regarded Josh’s outstretched hand and took a prolonged swil of his Stel a. Vicki could almost hear Josh thinking, Rude bastard, Wall Street asshole. Vicki watched her husband’s face. Josh was clearly not a pedophile, that would be a relief to Ted; Josh was not so different from the kid that Ted had been fifteen years ago, when he played lacrosse at Dartmouth. But Ted might also be thinking Josh was too much like Ted himself at that age—and what would Ted have done, working al week for three beautiful women who lived alone? He would have tried to . . . He would have done his best to . . .

Oh, come on! Vicki thought. The scarf tickled the back of her neck. It seemed like Josh’s hand was just hanging there; Ted was torturing him. But then Ted set his beer down with a definitive thunk and he stepped forward and shook Josh’s hand with such force that Josh rattled.

“Same here, buddy,” Ted said. “Same here. This guy especial y”—Ted pointed to Blaine—“has nothing but great things to say about you. And my wife! Wel , I real y appreciate the way you’ve stepped in for me in my absence.”

Ted’s voice straddled the line of sarcasm. Was he being sincere? Vicki was suddenly glad that she’d skipped chemo; she felt stronger now than she had in weeks. She marched into the living room.

“That’s right,” Vicki said. “We’d be lost without Josh.”

“I got lost,” Blaine said. “At the beach, remember?”

Vicki glanced at Melanie, who reddened and looked at the ground. “Right,” Vicki said. She was alarmed to see that Ted was stil scrutinizing Josh. “Did anyone remember sweatshirts for the kids?”

Twenty minutes later, squished in the third row of seating between Porter and Blaine in their respective car seats and feeling distinctly like one of the children, Josh chastised himself for not asking to be paid. This was, most definitely, work—as in not something he would ever have chosen to do on his own, for fun. And it was weird, too, driving out to Madaket and then stopping by the ranger station at the entrance of Smith’s Point in the Stowes’ car. The kid working the ranger station had graduated from high school a year behind Josh—his name was Aaron Henry—and under other circumstances Josh would have said hel o, asked how Aaron liked the job, and teased him about his uniform. But tonight Josh was grateful for the tinted windows in the back of the Yukon; he didn’t want Aaron to see him, because how would he ever explain who these people were or what he was doing with them?

Ted and Vicki sat up front. Ted Stowe came across as the type of guy who could be charming as hel when he wanted to be, but that depended on whom he was talking to and whether or not he was getting his way. Josh far preferred the kind of man his father was—Tom Flynn wasn’t easy by any means, but at least you always knew what to expect.

In the middle seat, Brenda stared out the window while Melanie sat sideways so that she could chitchat with Josh. Melanie’s breasts had swel ed, and she had taken to wearing halter tops that cupped her breasts and flowed loosely over her stomach, which was stil flat as a pancake.

“Since you grew up here,” Melanie was now saying, “you must do this kind of thing al the time. Eat lobster on the beach.”