by Grace Palmer
“So,” Dr. Silver continued, “the homework I would recommend to you is to pick up the prescription your doctor prescribed.”
Eliza had rambled on and on to poor Dr. Geiger at her six-week postpartum appointment. But that was just a fluke. He caught her on a bad day. Summer was still so small and only slept for an hour at a time before she’d wake up and want another bottle. Bottles, bottles, bottles—it was all Eliza seemed to do. Make a bottle, feed Summer, change her diaper, sleep for fifty minutes, and then wake up to do it all over again. Exhaustion had won over, and Eliza had blurted to Dr. Geiger that she was miserable. That she looked at Summer some nights and didn’t recognize her. Crazy things.
He’d recommended an antidepressant, and Eliza knew immediately she didn’t need it. When she got home and told Oliver about the appointment, she’d left that part out. It was nothing. Not even worth mentioning.
“If you truly feel fine, then I suspect I won’t see you again and I’ll never know if you did what I suggested,” Dr. Silver continued. “But if there is a possibility that you felt more freedom to write out your feelings than to speak them aloud, then I’d double down on your OB’s recommendation. A low-dose antidepressant could be a great place to start in resolving some of the things you mentioned in the questionnaire.”
Pressure. Pressure. Eliza’s chest was caving in. Her head was filling with air. She was going to pop. She needed to get out.
All at once, she leapt out of the chair, her feet stamping a bit too heavily on the floor, shaking the leaves of the peace lily sitting on the coffee table between them.
“I should let you get to your next appointment. Sorry I was late. And sorry for all of the rescheduling. I’m sure you’ve heard every excuse, but—”
“There are no excuses necessary in my office,” Dr. Silver said evenly. She stood up out of her chair slowly, with control. Like someone who had all the time in the world. “So many things can keep people from sitting down in that chair. All of them valid. My goal is simply to be here, ready to listen and help once they arrive.”
Hokey nonsense. So why did it make Eliza want to sit back down?
To resist the urge, she leaned across the table and held out her hand, gripping Dr. Silver’s with confidence, shaking it twice. “Lovely to meet you, Dr. Silver.”
“You too, Eliza.”
As she left, Eliza didn’t look around the waiting room. Didn’t check to see if the woman was still next to the fig tree or if the foot-tapping man had moved on to another magazine.
She didn’t care. These weren’t her people. She didn’t belong here. She belonged at home, with her family, where she felt fulfilled and competent.
She didn’t need a doctor.
She didn’t need to be here.
She didn’t need anything from anyone.
9
Holly
Holly’s House
Morning sun had given way to midday heat. Holly wiped the sheen of sweat from her upper lip.
The hard plastic deck chair cut sharply into the back of her thighs and the mosquitos seemed solely focused on feasting on her, leaving Lindsay and Diana to their graceful positions of repose.
One especially pesky mosquito had been buzzing around Holly’s head for several minutes and she’d had enough. The next time it appeared in the edge of her vision, Holly twisted in her chair and swatted at it, trying to take it out mid-flight.
But instead of hitting the target, Holly hit the rim of her mimosa glass. It wobbled for a second like maybe, just maybe, it would settle back in place and behave. Then it changed its mind and went tumbling off the wicker end table.
With a strangled groan, Holly lunged out of her chair, scraping her knee on the deck, and caught the glass before it could shatter. She breathed a pained sigh of relief and let her chin droop onto her chest.
“Don’t tell me you are already tipsy!”
Holly turned around, still knelt on the floor between her two friends. Lindsay’s mouth was quirked into an amused smirk, the rim of her own goblet only centimeters from her lips. Her brows were raised, too, but there were no wrinkles on her forehead.
Each night in her bathroom, Holly waged war against the deepening creases on her face with retinol creams and globs of thick moisturizer. All to little avail. Lindsay’s battle was clearly going better than Holly’s. Did she get Botox? She must. Lindsay had always been the least image-conscious of their group. Through high school, she preferred to loaf around in cutoff denim shorts and loose thrift shop t-shirts so long it looked like she didn’t have shorts on at all. Her blonde hair was perpetually uncombed and sun-bleached.
But clearly, things had changed.
“There was a mosquito,” Holly explained, gripping the deck railing to lift herself to her feet. As she stood, it felt like wet sand was sloshing around in her head. This is what being tipsy felt like, wasn’t it? It hit Holly all at once that she hadn’t had more than one glass of wine in… well, in a long time.
“Good.” Lindsay grabbed the glass out of Holly’s hand and filled it from the nearly empty pitcher. “Because we’ve barely gotten started.”
Diana lifted her glass and let out a woo. “Cheers to that!”
“No more cheers,” Lindsay griped. “I feel like I’m at a bachelorette party.”
“How would you even know, Miss Independent?”
Lindsay narrowed her eyes at Diana. “I’ve attended bachelorette parties for other people. Just because I’m not married doesn’t mean I don’t have friends.”
There was a little bit of a venomous edge in Lindsay’s voice that caught Holly by surprise. Honestly, how could the two of them spend years on opposite ends of the country only to come together and immediately be at each other’s throats? Holly had spent most of their teenage years playing peacemaker between Lindsay and Diana and she didn’t want to do it anymore. But, old habits died hard.
“I haven’t been to a bachelorette party since Georgia Tomlin’s. Remember that?” Holly intervened, shaking her head. “I think I’m still hungover.”
Diana slapped her hand on the arm of her chair with a cackle. “She was the last one from the original group to get married. But I think she was also the first to get divorced.”
“Really?” Holly hadn’t heard about that. Which wasn’t that surprising, she supposed. The “original group” was made up of eight different girls, five of which were Diana and Lindsay’s friends from the volleyball team. Holly was only part of the group because she, Diana, and Lindsay were paired up for a group presentation in Spanish 1 their freshman year. Embarrassing yourself in a foreign language was good bonding, apparently. The three of them became inseparable after that.
“Of course she’s divorced. She married Scott Weaver.” Lindsay wrinkled her nose. “Gross.”
“Says the woman who dated him for two years.” Diana teased. “Deny it if you want, but I have the junior homecoming pictures to prove it.”
“I do not deny that which made me stronger. He’s the reason I swore off men.”
“Weren’t you on a date just last night? Doesn’t sound like swearing off men to me,” Diana said.
Lindsay waved her hand dismissively. “I’ve sworn off serious relationships. Men are for fun only. Not cohabitating with.” Lindsay lifted her glass. “So, one last toast to Scott Weaver. For all you taught me.”
“To Scott Weaver, for turning Lindsay into a heartless man-eater,” Diana joked.
All three women clinked glasses and drank deeply.
Holly needed some water. She was a lightweight now. The alcohol sat in her stomach like a boulder and her mouth felt cottony.
In the midst of getting Pete and the kids out of the house, she’d only had time to eat one of the kids’ fruit bars in the car. To make up for it now, she grabbed a handful of cut strawberries and shoved them in her mouth.
“I wonder if Georgia will be at the reunion,” Diana mused. “Or Scott.”
“Let’s pray not,” Lindsay said.
“W
hat, you don’t want to rub your success in his face?” Diana asked. “That’s the best part of a reunion. Going back to see who aged horribly and who never amounted to their full potential. You get to compare yourself against everyone else. It’s a hoot.”
“Unless you’re on the losing end of the comparison game.” The words slipped out of Holly’s mouth before she could stop them, and Lindsay and Diana both turned to her. Were their brows furrowed? Holly genuinely couldn’t tell. She really should look into whether her dermatologist offered Botox.
“Yeah, but none of us will be,” Diana said. “I mean, look at us!”
Holly was looking at them. She had been for the last hour. And the comparison game had stopped being fun fifty-seven minutes earlier.
If Diana was also “living that mom life,” why were her hips just as slim as when they were seventeen?
And while Holly spent her days helping Alice pin butterfly corpses to display boards and tripping over Grady’s sweaty sneakers, Lindsay lived in a multi-level Brooklyn loft with exposed brick walls and furniture noticeably lacking in jelly stains.
Holly had never been to Lindsay’s loft, but some fancy interior design magazine had done a write-up on her. A quick internet search of her friend’s name found Holly looking at professionally-edited photos of Lindsay perched on a sun-soaked leather sofa in front of floor-to-ceiling windows.
An internet search of her own name revealed how many other women had put the name “Holly Benson” to much better use. Holly scrolled through five pages of search results before she found the newspaper article where she was named Employee of the Month at the bank. That was before Grady was born.
Searching for “Holly Goodwin” was even more bleak. Apparently, she hadn’t done anything of note since getting married.
Lindsay set down her glass and clapped her hands once. “Okay, here we go. Practice your spiel.”
“My spiel?” Holly asked. Her instinct was to let her brows pull together in confusion, but she caught herself and tried to keep her face smooth and wrinkle-free. “What does that mean?”
“You know, your spiel. What you’ve been up to the last fifteen years,” Lindsay explained. “For instance, I’ll tell everyone about setting out on my own after eleven awful months at an interior design firm. I didn’t like my creative flow being overseen by a stodgy old man who could tell every female employee apart based on their chest but couldn’t tell the difference between quartz and marble even if they were labeled.”
“Ouch,” Diana laughed.
“You have no idea.” Lindsay rolled her eyes and then continued. “I started with small clients and projects at first, working part-time at a coffee shop to cover my rent. But after two years of busting my hump, I got my first A-list client. Now, eight years later, I’m the stodgy old man in charge. Minus the stodgy part. And the man part. And the old,” Lindsay laughed. “Basically, I’m the head honcho, and I’m damn good at what I do. Here’s my card. Look me up.”
She mimed handing out a business card, but Holly didn’t need it. She’d already looked Lindsay up. Plenty of times.
Diana clapped. “Bravo! I’m swooning. Okay, Holly. Your turn!”
Holly groaned. “I don’t want to make a spiel. I just want to stand by the snack table and judge people.”
“There will be plenty of time for that after you impress everyone.” Lindsay snapped her fingers. “Come on, let’s hear it.”
“Ugh.” Holly sat up, as if taking a more professional posture would somehow help. “Well, after graduation, I worked at a bank for a while. Then, I got married—to Pete, obviously. Moved to Plymouth and I have two kids—Grady and Alice. Grady is wild about all things monstrous and gross, which I don’t love, but he sculpts and paints his own creatures. They are really cool. And Alice wants to be a lep-id-op-ter-ist,” Holly said, annunciating each syllable. “That’s someone who studies butterflies. She has a whole collection of specimens on display in her room and—”
“Hold on!” Diana waved her arms in the air to stop Holly mid-sentence.
“What?”
“Lindsay asked for your spiel. Not your kids’.”
She opened her mouth to argue, but Diana’s raised brow was intimidating. And correct. Holly had been raving about the kids and their successes. Not her own.
“Try again,” Lindsay said gently, tossing Holly an encouraging—if slightly patronizing—wink.
“Okay.” Holly took a deep breath and started over. “Well, I became a stay-at-home mom after my kids were born, but all those years of homemaking gave me a decent eye for interior design. Not as good as Lindsay’s, but—”
“Don’t speak that way about my friend,” Lindsay said with a playful scowl. “Your spiel can’t have any negatives. Only the positives.”
Holly shook out her shoulders and started again. “The years of homemaking gave me an appreciation for interior design, and when Pete started his own law firm in a refurbished fire house a few years ago, I was put in charge of decorating the entire space,” Holly said, picking up steam. “He and his friend, Billy, started the business. They focus on maritime and property law. I don’t pretend to understand the ins and outs of it, but they’ve been very busy and have taken on a lot of cases and employees. In fact, they may outgrow the firehouse soon, so—”
“Holly.” Diana leaned forward, head in her hand. “Holly, Holly, Holly.”
“What, what, what?” Holly asked, looking from Diana to Lindsay. “What was wrong with that?”
“It was all about Pete!” Lindsay said with a slight wince. “You talked about yourself for one sentence before you moved on to talking about Pete and his business.”
Holly groaned and slouched down in her chair. “Sorry, but my family is my life. How can I talk about myself without talking about them?”
Diana reached over and patted Holly’s leg. “You can talk about them a little, of course. Everyone will talk about their kids a bit. But you have to make sure to highlight what you’ve been doing. Here, I’ll go.”
Diana sat up tall and put on a large, fake smile that made her look like a beauty pageant contestant. “After graduation, I met a gorgeous man at college who swept me off my feet. It just so turned out he was good with business, too. He invests in biotech start-ups while I stay home with our almost four-year-old. He keeps me busy, but I still find time for me. I took up pottery a few years ago, and now my pieces are displayed in a few art galleries around Miami and the state. I also have a website where people can buy my pieces. My newest collection debuts at the start of next month. But if you want one, you better act fast. They sell out within an hour or two.”
Diana turned and looked to Holly. “See? Like that. Just transition from talking about them to talking about you. It’s easy.”
Holly stared at her friend and blinked.
“Easy,” Lindsay repeated. “Make sure your spiel ends with your accomplishments. People are more likely to remember the last thing you say, so you want to leave them with the good stuff.”
Holly felt like she was being prepped for a job interview she didn’t have a chance of getting. Because, as far as Holly could tell, there wasn’t any “good stuff.” Just the monster-making and the lepidopterology and the finer points of maritime law.
Was the “good stuff” having a calendar reminder to shove ice cubes and lemon peels down the garbage disposal so it wouldn’t start to stink? Maybe if Holly hit everyone at the reunion with her tried-and-true stain remover spray, they’d fall over themselves to congratulate her. It works to remove blood and grass stains. Though nothing will take care of the regret you’ll have once you realize you’ve wasted your potential.
“Don’t worry, we’ll workshop it,” Lindsay said, pouring everyone another round. “We have all day.”
“And night,” Diana cheered. “Mamas’ day out!”
Her friends laughed. Holly tried to join them. But one day wasn’t going to be enough time to put her in the same league as her friends.
No matte
r how she sliced it, Holly had been outdone. Aside from two wonderful children, a loving husband, and a modest house, what did Holly have to show for the last fifteen years? What did she have displayed in a gallery? Where was her write-up in a famous New York magazine?
“Okay, Diana, I’ll allow it.” Lindsay held up a single finger. “One more woo. But you better make it good. It’s the last one you’re going to get.”
Diana’s eyes glimmered and she threw her arm into the air, her drink sloshing over the side of her glass. “Cheers to us! The three hottest, baddest, most successful people from the class of 2006!”
Lindsay grinned and threw her glass up. “Perfect!”
It didn’t seem possible for a toast to apply any less to Holly, but she didn’t want to bring down her friends. So, with as much fake enthusiasm as she could muster, Holly lifted her glass.
“Cheers!” Lindsay and Diana yelled, taking a drink.
“Cheers,” Holly whispered.
She tipped back her drink and didn’t stop until it was gone. So much for tipsy. Holly didn’t want to remember any of this tomorrow.
10
Eliza
The Nantucket Pharmacy
The only reason Eliza went to the pharmacy was that she couldn’t return home empty-handed. Not after telling Oliver she’d forgotten something at the store.
It was more of a convenience store than a pharmacy, anyway. Built-in wooden shelves along the wall, scuffed and scarred from years of browsing hands, held scented candles, stuffed animals, and souvenirs emblazoned with Nantucket imagery for the kind of tourists who liked to commemorate their fondest vacation memories with a dinky plastic keychain.
Maybe Eliza could pick up a container of leave-in conditioner or a tube of mascara. Oliver would never suspect.
She was browsing the offerings when her phone vibrated in her pocket. Oliver again. She should answer. She should say something to comfort him, to ease whatever worry had built up in his chest.
