by Nancy Thayer
* * *
—
Isabelle and Tommy got back to the island the same day the weekly issue of the town newspaper came out. Keely read it as she sat on the sofa in the late afternoon. Under the heading MARRIAGE INTENTIONS was a write-up of Isabelle and Tommy’s engagement with another spectacular photo.
“Mom,” Keely said, “I feel like I’m going mad.”
“I don’t blame you one bit,” Eloise said. “This is a turbulent time for you.” She sat on the sofa next to Keely and hugged her tightly. “You’ve been in spots like this before. When you had to quit college your junior year and come home to help me. When Isabelle got sent to that writers’ colony…remember your distress? But you sucked it up and moved on and now look at you. You wrote a novel. You sold it! You paid off your ancient mother’s mortgage. You have a wonderful life ahead of you.”
Keely sniffed. “Thanks, Mom. You’re right. I know that. I just don’t know what to do. I wanted to throw a big party to celebrate my book contract. But Isabelle’s parents are throwing a huge engagement announcement party at the White Elephant for Isabelle and Tommy. I can’t compete with that, and I don’t want to try.”
“Why don’t you do what you always do when you’re upset?” Eloise asked.
“What’s that?”
“Go in your room and work on a novel.”
Keely burst out laughing. She dried her tears. She went into her room. She wrote.
* * *
—
Working on her second book, Poor Girl, kept her sane. She rearranged her room to make more space for her piles of paper and discarded pages and Post-it notes. She went for a long run every morning, wrote for most of the day, and collapsed with a book in the evening. Autumn arrived, with cooler, dryer air, and puffy clouds rolling across the sky. Keely took her mother with her for several days to New York when Keely had her author photo taken. Juan sent her the edited manuscript of Rich Girl, and as Keely read it, she was relieved and grateful for the opportunity to change and improve the book. Write what you know, everyone said. She had done that, using the emotions from her life to sharpen her writing.
She thought of Isabelle every day. She considered calling Isabelle, but decided Isabelle should call her. After all, Keely hadn’t done anything wrong by having a book accepted for publication. Keely thought—hoped—they’d run into each other in the grocery store or the library, but that didn’t happen.
Keely stalked her on Facebook, where Isabelle posted daily some adorable photo of her and Tommy. Apparently Isabelle was busy decorating their apartment, too busy to call Keely, or to text, or to send an email congratulating Keely on her book contract. Just as Keely was too busy to send an email congratulating Isabelle on her engagement.
But she missed Isabelle so much. Janine told her that she’d gotten an invitation card. Isabelle and Tommy would be married on December 2. Keely didn’t get one.
Christmas came. Isabelle posted on Facebook a picture of a new Sea Hunt fishing boat tied up to the pier in Madaket. The caption read, “Thanks, Dad!” The boat had to cost over fifty thousand dollars. Tommy had christened it Isabelle. In the photo, Tommy was at the console of the boat, and Isabelle stood behind him, arms around him, head resting against his broad back, smiling like a child on Christmas.
“Well, well. Look at that,” Keely said aloud in her room. “So Isabelle’s father gave them a place to live and the boat of Tommy’s dreams. Mr. Maxwell just about wrapped Tommy up in tissue, tied him with a big red bow, and presented him to Isabelle, a present for his darling daughter.”
She thought she kind of hated Isabelle’s father, how he could choose to buy his daughter the man she wanted, not caring or even noticing that Keely had been going with him for two years.
But her heart lifted to see Isabelle’s smile. Really, she was glad Isabelle was happy. Her sorrow was how much she missed her friend. If she and Isabelle were together, they’d be jumping up and down and screaming with happiness about Keely’s book, Isabelle’s marriage.
New Year’s Eve arrived. Eloise was working, as usual, so the younger nurses could have the time to be with their families. Keely didn’t mind. The two of them didn’t need to toast with champagne—they’d already been doing that. Keely was glad to spend New Year’s Eve alone. She didn’t want to attend any party where she might run into Isabelle and Tommy. She was a coward, she knew, but she was a coward with a book contract, and that made all the difference.
Most of the cold winter evenings she spent with her mother. On weekends, she went out to dinner with girlfriends or to a movie at the Dreamland or a lecture at the library. She didn’t look for Tommy or Isabelle, and when she saw them in the distance driving down a street, she held her head high and acted as if she didn’t know them. But she seldom saw them. The island was changing. Super wealthy people were snapping up land and houses. Islanders were selling their homes for fortunes and moving to the mainland. It was easy to avoid Isabelle and Tommy because the town, shops, and restaurants were packed with new people.
The flurry of activities surrounding her book’s upcoming publication began to mount up. Excitement was building. The pre-orders were tumbling in. It was time for her to get involved in social media, so she worked with a website manager from New York. She took photos of the island to use on her website—a task that made her see the island with fresh eyes. She networked, connecting with other new writers in faraway states and book lovers and bookstore owners and fun bloggers. She put out a daily blog, counting down to her publication date, talking about what inspired the book, life on the island, the posh galas the girl in Rich Girl attended.
She could have this, Keely thought. She could have an island life. She could live here and take her runs through the charming streets of the town, swim in the ocean, have fun at parties and maybe even find a guy to flirt with. She didn’t have to center her life on the loss of her best friend and her boyfriend. She was free. She was home.
In March, Keely drove out to Bartlett’s Farm. She loved strolling through the farm store, feasting her eyes on the island-grown vegetables. She pushed her cart around a corner, heading for the arugula, when something flashed in the corner of her eye, as bright and restricting as a red traffic stop sign.
She pulled her cart back into her aisle. She craned her neck to see around the corner.
Isabelle and Tommy. Really, she thought, it was surprising that she hadn’t run into them before now. She took a deep breath, her inner cheerleader telling her she had this, she could do it.
Isabelle and Tommy moved more into her view. They stood before a pile of apples and pears. Tommy was smiling down at Isabelle with such tenderness Keely’s eyes stung with tears. Isabelle turned toward Tommy, and tilted her head in that winsome way she had.
And Keely saw clearly the baby bump swelling from Isabelle’s waist.
Isabelle was going to have a baby. She was at least six months pregnant.
“Oh, Isabelle,” Keely whispered. Unconsciously, she put her hands over her heart, as if protecting it. All the moments of her life when she and Isabelle had discussed how many babies they would have, and what they would name them, and if they were going to have natural childbirth and how could they manage to get pregnant at the same time so they could have their babies grow up as friends—all of that flooded back around Keely, submerging her in such sweet memories that tears filled her eyes. How had it happened that they were so far apart, that their real grown-up lives were so different from their dreams?
As she watched the couple, another married pair, Rosaline and Warren, approached Isabelle and Tommy with hugs and kisses. Rosaline was pregnant, too, Keely saw, and the two women stood side by side, comparing bellies and laughing smugly.
Keely left her cart in the aisle and fled. As she wound her way through the aisles, keeping as far away from Isabelle and Tommy as possible, she dug her sunglasses out of her bag and pu
t them on, so that no one would see her tears.
She made it out the door, across the parking lot, and into the safety of her car without seeing anyone she knew. She didn’t pause to put on her seatbelt. She fired up the engine and drove away, down the narrow farm lane to the wider road. The seatbelt alert blinked rapidly and shrilly, keeping time, it seemed, to the pounding of her heart. At an intersection, she paused and clicked on the seatbelt to silence it.
She drove home with great care, afraid to get pulled over by a policeman—she knew so many of them personally—desperately wanting to avoid being seen as she was, with tears streaming down her face. She pulled into her driveway and rushed into the house, and while she caught her breath, she saw herself reflected in the mirror above the table that held their mail and keys.
She looked miserable. Well, she felt miserable. It was ridiculous to feel this way, but she did feel so betrayed by Isabelle, so very abandoned. After all the years of their friendship, Isabelle was out in the world, smiling, pregnant, and she should have told Keely the moment she realized she was pregnant, she should have asked Keely to be with her when she took the first pregnancy test. They would have screamed with joy, they would have hugged each other, they would have talked for hours about the baby that Isabelle was carrying.
Isabelle shared all that with Tommy. And with her family, and with her friends.
Keely sank onto the couch as another realization hit. Isabelle had of course shared the news with her friends—and not one of them had called to tell Keely.
Sometimes she feared she was going mad. She spent almost all her time alone, writing, or running, or doing chores for her mother, and her mother was her main source of conversation these days. What would it be like in a few months, when Isabelle would be strolling around town with a baby tucked up against her heart? Would Janine, or anyone, invite Keely to a baby shower for Isabelle? Not likely.
The next day, Sally Hazlitt phoned Keely. “Can you come into New York sometime soon? We’ve got several things to go over.”
“Of course,” Keely said. “Give me a date, and I’ll be there.”
Keely felt as if she were drowning in loneliness, and suddenly a life preserver was tossed to her. She would seize it and hold on to it and let herself be pulled up to the surface and into the glittering world of New York.
Keely and Fiona were having drinks at the Algonquin after a full day of work at the literary agency. Keely was learning about the publishing side of a book—the art department that was charged with creating a compelling cover, the publicist who worked to organize Keely’s events at bookstores, libraries, and book festivals, the proofreading that made Keely’s eyes cross. She was meeting people who were doing that work—artists, librarians, owners of bookstores, sales reps, editors. They were fascinating.
So Keely made the decision. “Fiona, I want to rent an apartment in the city.”
When she spoke the words aloud, a shiver of fear went down her spine, and part of her wanted to crawl back under her bed in her mother’s house, but she was a grown woman, a novelist! She wanted to live in New York.
Fiona helped Keely find a sublet for two years in a brownstone on the Upper West Side rented by a friend going off to Italy. Keely walked through the two small rooms, one with a view of the dumpsters in the alley, one with a view of the brownstones across the street, and liked it all. She signed a contract and wrote a check for security and first and last months’ rent—and she had the keys to her home in the city.
For her first few months in New York, Keely’s life was so full and rushed that she scarcely had time to sleep and no time at all to be lonely. Fiona was super sophisticated, very friendly, and at loose ends because she’d just broken up with her longtime beau. Melissa and Fiona took Keely to fabulous bars and introduced her to their friends, who welcomed Keely with rounds of tequila cocktails. Gradually, Keely felt at home there.
New York was brisk, exhilarating. Keely could feel the energy crackling around her. She walked constantly, everywhere, striding along the sidewalks with her hair tossing in the breeze, loving the sharp, cool surge of change that swept her up in its path. She visited museums, the important well-known ones and the lesser known small ones. She attended plays and concerts with friends. She entered bars by herself and sat alone, drinking a dry martini, people-watching, and sending selfies to her mother: Look at me, alone in a bar! The public library became her second home; taking her laptop, she left her tiny apartment for the generous warm glow of the library’s spacious rooms. On rainy days, she wandered through the grand department stores—Saks Fifth Avenue, Bloomingdale’s, Bergdorf Goodman, Barneys—pausing to study a coat or a dress, soaking in the look, learning how to upgrade her own wardrobe.
And then all at once it was the insanely marvelous month of June when Rich Girl, by Keely Green, hit the bookstands. Ransome & Hawkmore threw a party for her with lots of publishing people and a few minor celebrities and rivers of champagne. Keely signed books in the city and in surrounding suburbs, but she was most nervous about her return to the island in July.
She was invited by Mitchell’s Book Corner, her favorite independent bookstore, to do a signing. Flushed with pride and almost dizzy with amazement that her writing had been transformed into an actual book, a beautiful object in the world, Keely had called her mother and made plans to come for a week’s stay.
When Keely arrived at the airport, Eloise was there, waiting. She’d taken a day off work—an enormous concession for Eloise, given how busy the hospital was this time of year. Rosy-cheeked with excitement, Eloise treated Keely to lunch at Lola 41, where, she told her daughter, she felt like she was with a celebrity. People lunching at Lola spotted her and came over to say hello and congratulate her on her success. Keely drank champagne and dined on sushi. When lunch ended, she told her mother she wanted to walk home through town; she’d see her later.
Town was crowded with July visitors, the Atheneum garden was buzzing with children playing in the sun and shade, and the window boxes in town were vivid with color. Keely had sunglasses on, hoping not to run into anyone she knew. She wanted to have this walk through town all to herself. She wanted to soak in the atmosphere. She wanted to see her book in the window of Mitchell’s Book Corner.
At the Atheneum garden, Keely perched on a bench, smiling at the library where her love of books had started.
Then she took out her cellphone. She was longing to talk with Isabelle. She hadn’t spoken to her since Tommy and Isabelle had called Keely to tell her they were engaged. Now they were married and their baby had just been born. It was time. Keely was brave enough now. Isabelle had Tommy and his baby, but Keely had a book. True, the basic elements of the plot of Rich Girl came from Keely’s envy of the beautiful rich girl who got the handsome man, but Keely had changed so many plot points and details that it wasn’t really about Isabelle and Tommy at all.
“Hello, stranger,” Keely said warmly.
“Keely. I heard you were in town. Congratulations on your book.” Isabelle’s voice wasn’t warm, but neither was it cold.
“Isabelle, let’s get together for coffee.”
“Sorry. I don’t have time.”
“I’m leaving Nantucket tomorrow.”
“I’ve got to go. Brittany’s crying.” Isabelle disconnected.
Keely sat in the small park for a long while, letting her emotions settle. The bad thing about having a best friend is that when you lose her, you have no one else close enough to turn to, no one who understands you like that best friend.
Yet Keely was certain that she couldn’t have a best friend if she didn’t admire and even envy that person, and in return, that person admired and envied her. She didn’t mean the acidic, poisoning envy that was so powerful among stepmothers in Disney movies. She meant the kind of envy that made her feel complimented that such a person would be her best friend, the kind of envy that spurred her on to do h
er best.
She’d never talked with anyone about this. She wished she could talk to Isabelle about it now, about envy. Keely could imagine the two of them with a bottle of wine, talking deep into the night.
But Isabelle didn’t have time for Keely. Maybe that was only a statement of fact. Isabelle had a daughter now. Or maybe Isabelle’s envy of Keely’s published book was still at the burning stage. Keely would need to wait until that envy had cooled. And if she could be honest enough to admit it, Keely was still hurt about Isabelle marrying Tommy, and the truth was Keely didn’t miss Tommy half as much as she missed Isabelle.
People changed. Keely knew that. Keely had to adapt. She was a published author now. Her dream had come true. She gathered that triumph around her like a warm, invisible magic cloak to protect her heart.
Eventually Keely rose and walked home, taking little pleasure from the beauty around her. She stayed one more day, long enough to sign books at the wonderful event at Mitchell’s Book Corner. Rich Girl was high on the bestseller lists. The publicists at Ransome & Hawkmore had arranged an extensive book tour for her. She flew to Boston, Chicago, Milwaukee, San Francisco, Dallas, Houston, Charleston, and Rehoboth Beach and Bethany Beach. She traveled for a month, living out of a suitcase, visiting bookstores and book clubs, signing autographs, and later eating room service salads on her bed as she remembered all the women she’d met. She missed their company.
She was glad to return to her tiny apartment in Manhattan in August. She stayed there during the rest of the hot humid summer with the air conditioner on full blast. She worked on her new novel while downing gallons of iced coffee, venturing out in the early evening when the heat was not quite so brutal to buy something for dinner.
