The Sixth Wedding

by Elin Hilderbrand

  “You…what?” Jake says. He feels a surge of energy course through him. “Did you know my friend Mallory Blessing?”

  Brooke’s face drops. “I only knew of her,” she says. “Dr. Major hired me to replace Mallory.”

  Before Jake can react—this is Mallory’s replacement?—Cooper appears, sweaty and grinning.

  “Why’d you leave?” he asks Brooke. “Band’s just getting started.”

  “I was thirsty,” Brooke says. She looks between Cooper and Jake. “Do you guys know each other?”

  “Best friends,” Coop says. He lifts one of the unclaimed Coronas off the bar and takes a swallow. Coop looks at Jake. “Brooke is here with Mallory’s friend Apple. It’s Apple’s birthday.”

  Whoa, Jake thinks. It’s a small island. He listened to Mallory talk about Apple for years and years—her best friend, the guidance counselor at the high school, married to Hugo, mother of twin boys who might be in high school or even college by now. But Jake never met Apple and Apple doesn’t know Jake exists.

  “I’m sure Apple is wondering where I’ve gotten to,” Brooke says. She offers Jake a tentative smile. “Want to join us on the dance floor?”

  Jake knows the fun, good-sport answer is Sure, why not? But dancing up front at the Chicken Box is too far out of his comfort zone.

  “You kids go have fun,” he says, and he feels only the slightest pinch of regret when Cooper takes Brooke by the hand and leads her away.

  When the lights come on and the bell rings for last call, Jake wanders through the bar, weaving around couples making out, taking selfies, drunkenly debating where to go next, until he finds Coop standing with Brooke near the exit. The three of them step out into the warm, dark night.

  “We closed the Box!” Coop says.

  “A dubious distinction,” Brooke says. “Especially if one of my students finds out.”

  “Brooke is a high school English teacher,” Cooper says. “She was hired to—”

  “Yes,” Jake says. “She told me.”

  “That’s crazy, right?” Coop says. “So should we go get pizza?”

  Brooke laughs. “I’m afraid I have to call it a night.” She twirls her braid and looks up at Jake in a way that seems meaningful. “It was nice to meet you guys. I hope to see you both on Sunday.”

  “What’s Sunday?” Jake says.

  “Apple is hosting a beach picnic at Fortieth Pole,” Brooke says. “She invited you both.”

  “We’ll be there,” Coop says. “Let me walk you to your car.”

  “I’ll be fine,” she says. “I’m just across the street.” She looks at Jake again. “It was nice meeting you guys.” With that, she slips across the street and both Coop and Jake watch her until she disappears.

  “Is it Sunday yet?” Coop says.

  In the morning, Jake tiptoes out of his room so as not to disturb Coop, who is sprawled across the big white sofa that Mallory had nicknamed Big Hugs. Jake pours himself a cup of coffee—it’s the Frayed Edge Platinum that Fray brought as a gift, which was an excellent surprise because it retails for $45 a pound—and steps out the back door to tie up his running shoes. Thanks to the wine, the beers, and the late night, Jake’s head feels like it’s stuffed with cotton batting, but the morning is clear, with just a hint of coolness in the air—autumn is coming—and Jake doesn’t want to waste another second sleeping. Back when he used to visit Mallory, he would only sleep a few hours per night. The rest of the time he would spend watching Mal, memorizing her face, drinking her in—and yet he was never tired. He always left the island with his emotional batteries recharged. Perfect love existed, he would think. It existed here on Nantucket.

  He sets his cup of coffee on the porch railing and listens to his joints pop as he touches his toes. Then he sets off running down the no-name road, which meanders along Miacomet Pond.

  He heads all the way out to Surfside Road, then loops around to the other side of the pond and only then, when he’s hot and sweaty and parched dry, does he realize he’s come too far. He can’t get back to Mallory’s cottage this way without a significant beach walk. This, however, will be shorter than retracing his steps, so he sits on a rock to take off his shoes. He becomes mesmerized by the clear green water lapping at the muddy shore. Is he thirsty enough to drink a handful of pond water? No, but close.

  He’s just about to head up over the dunes to the beach when he sees a woman walking a Bernese mountain dog, holding the dog’s leash in one hand and a bottle of water in the other. She looks like a goddess from a Greek myth.

  “Hey!” the woman calls out. Jake wonders if he’s trespassing.

  When she gets a few steps closer, Jake sees that it’s Brooke. Her hair has been let out of its braid and it’s long and wavy under a navy-blue Nantucket Whalers baseball cap.

  “Oh, hey,” Jake says. This is like magic, he thinks. He would be lying if he said he hadn’t thought about Brooke the night before and again during his run. He had been looking forward to seeing her on Sunday and had even toyed with inviting her to the CFRF gala in Boston at the end of October as his guest. He’s not sure what he’s thinking; he lives in South Bend, Indiana, and has no plans to move to Nantucket. No, if he’d wanted to do that, he would have done it thirty years ago. He waves at Brooke and pushes himself to his feet. He’s so overheated, he’s seeing stars.

  “This is Walter Cronkite,” Brooke says, and Jake laughs. “You can call him Walt.”

  Jake spends a minute rubbing Walt’s head. He’s always wanted a Bernese mountain dog, but Ursula pointed out that they didn’t have time to take care of a pet. Jake thinks it’s telling that Brooke has the exact kind of dog that Jake wants. Cool woman, cool dog.

  “Would you like some water?” Brooke asks. She hands him the unopened bottle that she’s holding. It’s seductively frosted with condensation.

  “Yes, please,” Jake says, and he downs half the bottle in one gulp. “Thank you. You just saved my life.”

  “I’m glad I bumped into you, actually,” Brooke says. Her expression grows a little shy. “I had a question.”

  “Oh yeah, what’s that?” Jake says. The water has revived him like a plant. He’s sturdy, upright, ready to get to know this woman better. After all, the connection is uncanny—she said she had a celebrity crush on him, she lost a nephew to CF just as he lost a sister, and she took Mallory’s job at the high school. For all Jake knows, Mallory has, somehow, sent this woman to him. Because what are the chances that he would meet her in a crowded bar last night and then see her again this morning?

  “I was hoping you would give me Coop’s cell phone number,” Brooke says. “He was really great.”

  Fray

  He wakes up on Saturday to two missed calls and three text message alerts from DEAD TO ME, who is Anna, his ex-wife. Fray won’t take the bait. He sets his phone down on the nightstand, rolls over, and gathers Leland up in his arms.

  She stirs as he kisses her shoulder. “Good morning,” she whispers. “I’m happy to see this wasn’t all just a dream.”

  “Not a dream,” Fray says, and he moves his mouth from her shoulder to the curve of her neck. “I’m real.”

  They make love again, quietly, because the cottage is small and despite the grand renovation, you can still hear people thinking in the next room. Fray hasn’t felt this kind of unbridled desire in four decades; it’s like he’s back in high school. In the summer of 1985, Fray and Leland used to sneak out in the middle of the night to skinny dip in the country club pool, then have sex on the tennis courts. The difference between now and then is that Fray knows what he’s doing, and so does Leland. She spent over ten years in a relationship with a woman, an idea that Fray finds sexy.

  When Cooper told Fray that Leland would be coming on this reunion weekend, Fray never imagined they would end up in bed together. He’d been too wrapped up in the drama and pain surrounding his split from Anna. Getting involved with another woman, even his long-ago first love, was the furthest thing from his mind. />
  But chemistry is chemistry—and Fray and Leland have always had it.

  Things had started to seem promising the night before, after Jake and Coop left for the Chicken Box. Fray didn’t have many rules when it came to his sobriety, but no bars was one, and Leland said she didn’t want to go either. Fray thought maybe she was just tired—they were older now; at home, Fray liked to be in bed by nine, something Anna found maddening— but as soon as they heard the Jeep rumble off down the no-name road, Leland grabbed a blanket from a basket by the sofa and said, “Come with me.”

  She spread the blanket out on the beach. She lay down and patted the spot next to her.

  The second Fray opened his eyes to the starry sky above and listened to the crash and roll of the waves, he decided to share a realization he’d had earlier but had seemed too private to talk about at dinner.

  “It’s the thirtieth anniversary of my sobriety,” he said.

  “Tonight?”

  “The Friday of Labor Day weekend thirty years ago, yes,” he said. “Do you remember that night? You and I and Mal and Jake went to the Box, and Coop stayed home to talk to Krystel. I went to the bar to get you a chardonnay. You very specifically asked for one from the Russian River Valley, I’ll never forget that, and they didn’t have it, of course, they didn’t have any white wine, only wine coolers, so I got you a beer instead, but then I couldn’t find you. So I checked outside and you were with that preppy kid from the city. You left with him.”

  “That was Kip Sudbury,” Leland said.

  Kip Sudbury: The name rang a bell, one more recent than that night thirty years ago. Was he a Wall Street guy? A hedge fund guy?

  “He was involved in that bond scandal back in…”

  “Oh, right,” Fray said.

  “He took me to 21 Federal to meet his friends and the next day we went sailing on his father’s yacht.”

  “Well, I sat in the back of Mal’s Blazer and drank by myself until the bar closed,” Fray said. Memory was a slippery thing. Fray couldn’t remember what he’d been served for lunch on his plane earlier that day but he could vividly picture himself in his Nirvana T-shirt, smoldering like a red-hot coal in the back of Mal’s car. He remembered being tempted to go with Leland and her New York friends because he’d thought he read some apprehension in her expression—but then Fray realized that what Leland feared was him coming along. She didn’t want him to embarrass her, and expose her for the regular Baltimore girl she was. “And then when we got back to the cottage, we realized Coop had left the island and I snatched a bottle of Jim Beam and headed down the beach.”

  Leland turned on her side toward him and laid her fingers across his biceps. He inhaled her scent. She had always smelled spicy—like sandalwood and ginger—rather than sweet or floral. That was one of the many things he loved about her.

  “I stripped down to go for a swim,” Fray said. “At least, I think that was my intention because when the paramedics found me, I was buck naked, passed out in the sand.”

  Leland moved her hand down to Fray’s thigh and leaned in so that her chin rested on his shoulder and her words breathed straight into his ear. “I’m glad nothing happened to you.”

  “I wouldn’t say nothing happened. The next morning when I woke up, I realized I had a problem.” Fray often wondered why that had been his aha moment. It wasn’t the drunkest he’d ever been. He used to black out all the time at the University of Vermont. And there had been one fateful night during a summer home from college when he bumped into Leland and Mallory at Bohager’s downtown. Leland had spent the whole evening talking to Penn Porter, who had been a classmate of Fray’s at Calvert Hall, and Fray was jealous. He’d done at least six shots of Jägermeister at the bar—and the next thing he knew, he was waking up in Latrobe Park robbed blind with bruises all over his body and two teeth knocked loose. “I decided I would take a break from drinking.” That was all Fray had intended: a break. He certainly hadn’t meant to go the rest of his life without tasting the first sip of an ice-cold beer or the velvety warmth of a good red wine on his tongue. But once the alcohol had cleared from his system, he liked how he felt. Powerful. In control. The control was its own high, and—if you listened to Anna—he was addicted to it. “The break has lasted thirty years.”

  Leland kissed his cheek. Her hand remained on his thigh, which could only be interpreted one way. Fray felt himself stiffen beneath his jeans. Anna had convinced him he was washed-up sexually, but that had been an excuse she invented so she could justify sleeping with Tyler.

  “I’m sorry for my part in it,” Leland whispered.

  Fray shook his head. “I blamed you initially because you were the easy target. My first love, the one I couldn’t get out of my system.”

  “When I landed here this afternoon, I was thinking about our first date in the hot tub.”

  Fray was so hard he had to adjust himself, subtly—the last thing he wanted was for Leland to move her hand. “You’d probably be uncomfortable to know how many times I’ve played back that scene in my head when I’m alone.”

  “Fray! Seriously?” Leland Gladstone the feminist might have been offended to know that she was the subject of his sexual fantasies, but Leland Gladstone the woman lying next to him sounded…flattered.

  “It was a horny teenager’s wet dream,” Fray said. “Coming back out to the hot tub to find you topless?”

  Leland propped herself on her elbow and gazed down at him. He could see that she was older—there were lines at her eyes and around her mouth—but she was still the same smart, sassy, complicated person he fell in love with another lifetime ago.

  Fray’s upbringing, seen through the lens of 2023, might be described as compromised, meager, possibly even traumatic. His mother, Sloane, was wild and rebellious. She got pregnant with Fray when she was twenty-one and couldn’t identify the father; there had simply been too many men, many of them sailors in port in Baltimore for a few days before shipping out. Fray’s grandparents, Walt and Ida, took on the job of raising Fray. They were kind, but their household was abstemious. Walt and Ida didn’t drink, didn’t smoke, didn’t swear. They didn’t allow Fray to eat potato chips or Cap’n Crunch, or drink Coke or chew bubble gum. His bedtime was nine o’clock sharp; he had never once been allowed to stay up to watch Taxi, Barney Miller, or Magnum P.I. If Ida could hear his music playing through his bedroom door, it was too loud. Sloane would live with them periodically when she was between boyfriends and had nowhere else to go, and she acted more like an older sister than a mom. It was Sloane who had offered Fray his first cigarette at fourteen, his first drink at fifteen, his first toke of marijuana at sixteen. She did these things only when Walt and Ida were away or out of the house. “Your grandparents,” Sloane would say—she always referred to Walt and Ida as “your grandparents,” as though they were of no relation to her—”think I’m a bad influence on you.”

  She was, of course. His own mother was a bad influence.

  In the face of that, Leland’s love had been a life raft. As soon as Fray and Leland started dating, Fray stopped spending so much time at the Blessing house. Senior and Kitty had always been welcoming and inclusive, though Fray suspected they pitied him. He’d once overheard Kitty refer to Sloane as a “perennial party girl,” a term he knew was unflattering but also not the worst thing she could have said. Fray found he felt more comfortable across the street with the Gladstones. Steve Gladstone took Fray under his wing, often taking Fray along on errands to the hardware or auto parts store, saying he was grateful to have “another man around.” Steve and Geri came to every single one of Fray’s lacrosse games junior and senior year, cheering for him as loudly as real parents might have.

  When Fray left for college in Burlington, he and Leland broke up for the first time. She was still only a junior in high school and they both agreed the mature decision was to split up and see what happened. What happened was that they spent a small fortune on long-distance calls, and there were plenty of conversations that
ended with one or the other of them slamming down the phone. But every time Fray returned to Baltimore, his first stop would be the Gladstones, even before his own house.

  Frazier Dooley had loved Leland Gladstone. She was a key part of his personal history. Last night on the beach there had been nothing to stop them from making out on the blanket like the crazy kids they once were before standing up and going back inside to lock themselves in Mallory’s bedroom.

  Fray’s phone rings again when he’s underneath the covers gently nibbling on Leland’s hipbone, a sex move he feels he invented because Leland says, “God, nobody has done that to me in decades. Please don’t stop.” He hears the vibrating of his phone on the nightstand and when Leland says, “Who’s ‘Dead to Me’?” Fray tells her to ignore it.

  After making love, they decide to go out for breakfast. Leland scurries into the bathroom to freshen up and Fray checks his phone. Anna didn’t leave a message. It’s nine thirty in the morning on Nantucket, six thirty in Seattle. He clicks on her texts, in case there’s an emergency with Cassie, their ten-year-old daughter.

  You’re unbelievable.

  Talk about a HYPOCRITE.

  Check Page Six.

  Whaaaa? Fray thinks.

  Leland comes out of the bathroom. She’s glowing—as luminous as he’s ever seen her. “Everything okay?”

  “Yeah,” Fray says. He plucks his underwear from the floor.

  “Let’s not bother showering,” Leland says, tousling his hair. “We’re just going to swim when we get back, anyway, and I’m starving.”

  “Me too,” Fray says. “I just need to stop and get a copy of the New York Post on our way.”

  Leland laughs. “I thought I was the only person I knew who read the Post,” she says. “Fifi used to give me so much jazz about it.”

  “Everyone reads the Post,” Fray says. “But only the brave admit it.”