The Sixth Wedding

by Elin Hilderbrand

  Before Coop leaves on Friday morning, he hands Link three hundred bucks—because that’s the kind of awesome uncle he is. Link spends his entire walk to work reminding himself that he has to be a responsible adult and not act like a kid in a movie whose parents are away for the weekend. He’ll cut the party off at fifty people, sixty max.

  But when Link gets to the office and starts firing off texts—Party at my house tonight, 8pm—he gets a rude awakening. It’s a holiday weekend, the last before people go back to college, graduate school, etc., and everyone is leaving town. Woj is going to Fenwick Island, the other interns are heading to Dewey, Ocean City, Cape May.

  His buddy, Oliver, is going home to his parents’ house on the Eastern Shore of Maryland and asks if Link wants to go with him. “My dad has a sailboat,” Oliver says. “And my parents are having a cocktail party on Sunday with a tent and a Dixieland band. It’ll be fun.”

  Sailing, cocktails, a Dixieland band. It does sound kind of fun, but it’s not what Link had in mind. If he wanted to be on the water, at the beach, he would have gone with his uncle. He wants city life.

  “I think I’ll stay put, thanks, man,” Link says.

  His idea for the weekend instantly changes. He’ll just hang out at the house, playing loud music on Coop’s state-of-the-art sound system, he’ll watch movies in the home theater, he’ll sip the whiskey and cognac alone. He was raised an only child; he can entertain himself.

  But once Link gets home from work and takes a shower—the city is a smoking griddle, why did he not go to the beach?—he can’t settle down. He feels like a friendless loser, sitting home alone. He should go out. He will go out. He remembers his mother’s story about going to Nantucket when she was his age without knowing a soul.

  Honestly? she said. It was liberating. I was in control of my future.

  He heads to a place he and Woj sometimes went called Roofers Union in Adams Morgan, and he finds it pumping—there are people his age drinking and laughing at the tables on the street and there’s a line of young, beautiful people snaking out the door. He waits his turn, presents his ID to the bouncer, and heads inside. He goes to the upstairs bar; it’s normally a little less crazy than the one downstairs.

  There are three free seats at the far end and beyond those sits a girl with dark hair and glasses, absorbed in her phone. She has a glass of wine in front of her. Is she alone? Link gives her a couple seats as a buffer, orders a Stoli tonic with a twist of lemon, and after his drink arrives and he’s had a sip, he glances over. At the same time, she looks up at him.

  He knows her. It’s…

  “Oh my God,” she says. “You’re…”

  “Yeah!” he says. “Wait, this is weird. I was just thinking about you.” It’s Bess McCloud. This is surreal—although Link has just learned that this phenomenon has a name, where you think about someone and then, out of the blue, they appear.

  “My dad went to Nantucket with your uncle and your dad,” Bess said. “He just texted to say he landed.”

  “That’s crazy,” Link says. He drinks in the sight of Bess McCloud; she’s just as pretty as he remembers. Nerdy-pretty, with glasses and hair that hangs in her face a little.

  “Are you…waiting for someone?” Link asks.

  Bess rolls her eyes. “I’m supposed to be on a Bumble date, but the guy is stuck on the Metro.” She holds up her phone. “It says he’s sixteen minutes away.”

  Link slides down the bar next to her. “I can hang with you for sixteen minutes,” he says. “Then when your boyfriend gets here, I’ll leave quietly.”

  Bess laughs. “He’s not my boyfriend,” she says. “I don’t even know him. He’s a lobbyist for the alcohol industry.”

  “A lobbyist?” Link says. “Legal bribery.”

  “Exactly,” Bess sighs. “I normally stay away, but…”

  But the dude is probably good-looking and rolling in cash, Link thinks. “Looks like I have sixteen minutes to try and lure you away from the dark side,” he says. “I’m working for Brookings. Domestic policy. I analyze the impact of policy decisions on the least served among us and suggest ways to make them more effective.”

  “I work in nonprofits,” Bess says.

  “Sexy!” Link says.

  “Yeah, as sexy as being a producer for public television,” Bess says.

  “Hey, do you still have that shell?” Link asks. “That quahog shell that you found on the beach on Nantucket?”

  Bess sips her wine and nods. “It’s on my dresser, actually.”

  “No…seriously?”

  “Swear to God.”

  “And did you…?”

  “Did I what?”

  The thing that Link wants to ask might take another drink, but the clock is ticking. The lobbyist will probably show up with his American Express obsidian card in eleven minutes. “Did you ever ask your dad what was going on between him and my mom?”

  Bess’s green eyes find Link’s from behind her glasses. Her eyebrows raise. “I did.” She swivels her head to take in the raucous bar scene beyond them. “Do you maybe want to go someplace quieter and I can tell you about it?”

  Link laughs. “What about your date?”

  Bess checks her phone. “The pin hasn’t moved. He’s stuck on the Metro. I’ll cancel him and we can go over to Lapis for Afghan food. Does that sound okay?”

  Link doesn’t care if they go to McDonald’s. There’s no way he’s going to miss a chance to sit across the table from this beautiful nerdy girl and learn something new about his mother. “Sounds great,” he says.

  Leland

  When Leland’s JetBlue flight from JFK touches down on Nantucket, she looks out the window and takes note of the rows and rows of private planes, including an impressive jet with the Frayed Edge coffee logo on the side. She experiences a childish burst of excitement: Fray is here!

  She pulls down the front of her denim cloche hat and puts on oversized sunglasses. There are some young women farther back on the plane who recognized Leland at the gate in New York; they asked for a selfie with her, which she indulged even though she’s more than over it. But Leland’s brand and Leland’s Letter are all about women lifting up other women—so she can hardly refuse anyone.

  She hurries down the plane’s stairway and practically runs across the tarmac. Nantucket Island—the name speaks of wealth and entitlement, though to Leland the idea of Nantucket is inextricably tied to memories of the best friend she has ever had in her life, Mallory Blessing. The first time Leland set foot on this island was Labor Day weekend, 1993. She had been so young, only twenty-four years old. In those days, she lived on the Upper East Side and worked as an editorial assistant at Bard & Scribe. Leland had thought she was special. She emulated the lockjaw of the Vassar girls she worked with, she dyed her hair pink, she bought all her clothes from thrift shops in the Village, except for a stiff leather jacket from Trash and Vaudeville that she spent a whopping nine hundred dollars on because Ray Goodman himself said that Leland reminded him of a young Patti Smith.

  When Leland came to Nantucket on that first trip, she had behaved…atrociously. She kissed Fray—Frazier Dooley, her first love—in the back seat of Mallory’s car, but then once they got to the bar, she bumped into an acquaintance from New York—Kip Sudbury, whose father was in commercial real estate and who had a yacht at his disposal—and Leland left Mallory and Fray and Cooper without a word of explanation. She’d ditched them; it made her cringe to remember it now. The only excuse she had was youth.

  She returned to Nantucket a few years later with her girlfriend, the novelist Fiella Roget, Fifi, but things hadn’t gone much better. That was early on in Leland and Fifi’s relationship, back when Leland was still threatened by Fifi’s fame and was alternately possessive and bitter. It didn’t help that Fifi shamelessly flirted with Mallory, maybe as a way of reminding her who in the couple had the allure, the power. Leland should have laughed off Fifi’s behavior—Mallory was so hopelessly straight that she would only have
seen the sexual overtures as Fifi being “friendly”—but instead, Leland had lashed out by tearing Mallory down. Mallory had overheard Leland insulting her, and the weekend had been ruined.

  Leland had once read an interview with Toni Morrison where the author said she regretted a third of her life. Leland’s percentage was running a bit higher than that.

  The last time Leland had been on Nantucket was four years earlier, when Mallory was dying. She had skin cancer that she thought she’d successfully treated, but it metastasized to her brain. It wasn’t fair—Mallory was a good person, a mom and a teacher, a reader and a thinker, the most generous friend in what she was willing to accept and forgive. It should have been Leland in the bed. Leland deserved little in the way of mercy from the universe. Her life had been a cakewalk by comparison. She had always been free to be self-absorbed.

  She gets a text. It’s Coop: I’m out front in Mal’s Jeep.

  Leland’s fellow New Yorkers are all looking very self-consciously “Nantuckety” in their faded red pants and straw hats. Leland has made a concession to the season by wearing Eileen Fisher, the Queen of Black Linen. Unlike these weekend warriors, Leland feels she belongs here because while they all check their Ubers, she has someone waiting for her out front in a seen-better-days Jeep.

  The girls who approached Leland at the gate in JFK are right behind her. She can hear them checking the address of their Airbnb and then one of them says, “Oh my God, look—I think that’s Frazier Dooley.”

  Leland raises her eyes. Sure enough, Fray is walking out of the private jet terminal wearing his usual uniform of white T-shirt, jeans, Ray-Ban Wayfarers, and a messenger bag strapped across his chest. His blondish-gray hair is long and unkempt; the hair is his signature, it’s what makes him the most recognizable CEO in the country. When he raises his arm and calls out “Lee!” it’s all she can do to stop herself from running into his arms.

  “I’m jealous AF right now,” one of the girls stage-whispers. “He knows Leland Gladstone.”

  Leland is tempted to turn around and say, He was my boyfriend in high school. That would have given them something to talk about—but Leland is well beyond defining herself by any relationship she’s had with a man.

  “Hey, Fray,” she says with a coy smile. They embrace and kiss, gestures of fondness that Leland missed during the pandemic years. Fray smells like some kind of heavenly, expensive aftershave. He’s so delicious that Leland would like to take a bite of him, a reaction that thoroughly surprises her.

  Cooper honks the horn. “Let’s go, kids!” he says.

  Fray gallantly takes Leland’s bag and tosses it into the back of the Jeep, then he opens the passenger door so Leland can hitch her skirt and climb in. She sees her fans gawking from the sidewalk and she can’t help herself: She gives a four-finger wave.

  “Woo-hoo!” Coop shouts. He turns up the radio, which is playing the top 500 rock songs of all time in honor of the holiday weekend, and number 426 is Van Halen’s “I’ll Wait.” It has been a very long time since Leland has listened to Van Halen (she sticks with female artists—Alison Krauss, Norah Jones, Lizzo) and the song delivers her right back to Deepdene Road in 1984.

  She and Mallory are freshmen in high school and Cooper and Fray are juniors. Even though Leland has been around both boys all her life, they attain a new mystique that year because they get their driver’s licenses. Cooper is the good boy—clean-cut, preppy—and Fray is the bad boy. Fray’s hair is long, he wears red parachute pants and walks around with a permanent scowl, flipping his bangs out of his eyes. Leland finds him mesmerizing (but she doesn’t tell Mallory, because Fray is like a brother to her, and…ew). Fray is the arbiter of everyone’s musical tastes. He listens to Van Halen, Twisted Sister, Honeymoon Suite. Fray lives with his grandparents around the corner on Edgevale but he’s always at the Blessing house with Coop and because of this, Leland and Mallory start spending all their time there as well.

  Leland and Mallory ask Coop and Fray for rides, even though there’s nowhere to go. Downtown–Inner Harbor is a destination but the shopping is touristy and expensive, and Fells Point is one bar after another that they can’t get into. Still, they beg to be allowed to ride around in the back seat—anything to get them out of the house. They’re sick of watching movies in Leland’s basement rec room and listening to records. They both know there’s life out there somewhere and they’re ready for it.

  “Sorry,” Coop says. “Riding around with my little sister and her best friend isn’t my idea of a good time. It’s babysitting.”

  At the end of October, Coop starts dating a girl named Alana Bratton who goes to Bryn Mawr. Alana is beautiful, she’s a senior, and when she snaps her fingers, Coop does her bidding. The person who is left out is Fray; his buddy has ditched him for a girl.

  At the beginning of November, Mallory gets the flu. Leland is under strict orders from her parents, Geri and Steve, as well as from the Blessings, to stay away from the Blessing house until the contagious period is over. Leland’s parents are leaving for the weekend on a leaf-peeping trip through the horse country of Virginia and Leland thinks how unfair it is that she will now have the house to herself but nobody to enjoy the freedom with.

  It’s as she’s watching Coop pull out of the driveway from her bedroom window—he’s probably off to pick up Alana—that Leland gets the idea to call Fray.

  “Mal is sick and my parents are away,” Leland says. “Want to come over and use the hot tub? My dad has a fridge full of beer in the garage.”

  Fray says, “Won’t he notice if some is missing?”

  “No,” Leland says. “I drink it all the time. We just have to be careful with the cans. I normally ditch them in the dumpster behind Eddie’s.” This is a complete lie. Leland has never drunk her father’s beer, she can’t stand the taste, and she has no idea if Steve Gladstone will notice cans missing, though there are at least two cases in the fridge, so she kind of doubts it.

  “Cool,” Fray says. “I’ll be over in a little while.”

  Leland races up to her room to pick an outfit and curl her hair. She puts the Police album Ghost in the Machine on her turntable and dances around. He’s coming! Fray is coming!

  “A little while” ends up being two hours later, nine o’clock, late enough that Leland has already spiraled through self-doubt and convinced herself that Fray won’t show. She’s wearing her red bikini under her Jordache jeans and a velour top, she has cracked open one of her father’s beers—she pulled six out of the back; when you open the fridge, you don’t even notice any missing—and she has poured a bag of Utz chips into a bowl and opened a container of onion dip because her mother, Geri, says people always appreciate a snack. The hot tub is bubbling like a witch’s cauldron under the cover and it’s this that Leland suspects might get her in trouble—the oil bill, her father is energy-conscious—but why even have the hot tub if they can’t use it?

  When the knock finally comes, Leland’s heart leaps. She has finished one beer and feels as light and floaty as a spirit in the material world.

  “Hey,” she says when she opens the door. Fray looks so fine—he has on a gray hooded sweatshirt under his Calvert Hall lacrosse jersey and jeans and his high-top sneakers are, as ever, untied. He’s holding a pair of swim trunks.

  “Hey, Lee,” he says. They lock eyes and Leland wonders why it has taken them so long to shed the Blessings and acknowledge what has been true for a while now: They are meant to be together.

  When Leland looks back on that night, it seems almost painfully romantic in a nostalgic 1980s way. They each crack a beer, Fray changes into his trunks in the powder room, he helps Leland lift the top off the hot tub. They climb in, sitting on the same bench but not touching. Leland has the stereo in the rec room cranked to 98 Rock and the back sliding door is open so they can hear strains of “Radio Ga Ga” and “When Doves Cry.” They tap their cans of Natty Boh together and drink.

  They start kissing during “We Belong,” by Pat Benatar.
It happens naturally, like a magnet is drawing them together. It isn’t Leland’s first kiss or even her first tongue kiss—that was Jay Pitcock after the eighth grade dance back in May—but this is different. Fray is skilled with his tongue, he tastes like beer, he knows to put a hand on the back of her neck and pull her toward him.

  When they finally break apart, Leland is dizzy, dazzled.

  “I’ll grab more beers,” Fray says. He hoists himself out of the tub and Leland watches him leave wet footprints on the rec room floor. When he disappears from view, she gets a crazy idea, then talks herself out of it, then decides to just go for it. Tonight is the night her life changes.

  She takes off her bikini top.

  Fray reappears, holding a six-pack by the plastic rings. Leland raises her bare breasts above the water line. Her nipples are instantly hard.

  “Whoa,” Fray says. He leaves the beer to the side and starts kissing Leland again. One of his hands finds her nipple and he rubs it back and forth, a feeling so exquisite that Leland feels like she’s going to dissolve. Then he lowers his mouth to her nipple and gently sucks. She can see his erection poking up in his trunks. She wants to touch it but doesn’t, because her mother has given her all kinds of instructions about what can happen if you lead a boy along too far. She will hold Fray at second base tonight. Second base with Frazier Dooley. It’s so crazy, Leland can hardly believe it.

  A few weeks after Leland and Fray start dating, Coop and Fray are invited to a high school party thrown by a friend of Alana Bratton’s whose parents are away. It will be mostly Bryn Mawr girls and Calvert Hall boys—Leland and Mallory go to Garrison Forest, so they won’t know anyone—but Leland wheedles them an invite anyway. Once they get to the house—a mansion on Roland Park Drive—Coop and Fray disappear to do beer bongs, leaving Leland and Mallory to fend for themselves in the kitchen. The good news is that Alana spots them and takes them under her beautiful blond wing. She gets the girls glasses of real champagne, Moët et Chandon, that someone has lifted from the wine fridge.