No Wedding Like Nantucket

by Grace Palmer

  “Oh … okay,” Holly said. “Thanks. Thank you, I mean.”

  It felt like an unspoken truce was being formed between them. They might not ever be friends, but they had shared a powerful and utterly strange moment at this dining room table, under the light of this magnificent, absurd chandelier. Holly knew that it would take her quite a long time to chew through everything that had happened.

  All things considered, it was as satisfying a victory as she was going to get. She said her goodbyes to Cecilia, half wondering if they were going to hug.

  But they didn’t. Cecilia walked her to the door and Holly went out to her car in a daze.

  A year’s worth of enmity, swept away without a trace under something so wildly unexpected. She’d gotten what she came for, in a manner of speaking. But it didn’t look anything like she once thought she wanted, not so long ago.

  14

  Eliza

  Wednesday night.

  It was supposed to be a happy week. It really, really did not feel that way.

  Eliza had learned more about weather in the past twenty-four hours than she had in the previous thirty-six years. Pressure, temperature. Wind shear, projection models. Seasonal shifts in the flow of the ocean. She felt dumb for admitting this, but she didn’t even know that the ocean flowed at all. Didn’t it just kind of … sit there? Not quite, as it turned out. It flowed, and in the case of Hurricane Brenda, it flowed in such a way as to bring a vicious storm right to Nantucket’s doorstep.

  Oliver was doing his best to calm her down. He brought her a cup of hot tea with honey when he found her hunched over the computer first thing Wednesday morning with about forty internet browser tabs open. She’d looked up at him, hair and eyes wild, and said, “Did you know that a hurricane can dump more than 2.4 trillion gallons of rain in a day?”

  “Liza,” he’d replied, “take a deep breath. Everything is going to be fine.”

  “The statistical models don’t agree with you.” She waved a hand dismissively and turned back to the screen to refresh again and again until the hourly update from the National Weather Service popped up.

  The rest of the day was similarly unproductive. Every time she closed her eyes, she saw driving rains, lashing winds, trees being uprooted. She saw her wedding dress being torn to shreds and ripped out to sea by hurricane-force gales.

  This was a nightmare in the making.

  But by the time sunset came around, she was forced to take a break from hurricane hunting and hop into the shower. Oliver’s adoptive parents, Neal and Marcy, were due to arrive in town shortly for the wedding festivities. She and Oliver were going to go meet them for dinner to welcome them in.

  Eliza’s mind was still on the storm as she blow-dried and straightened her hair, then pulled on a slim-fitting gray dress and black ballet flats. That was the main reason she felt so wound up. There was also the usual pressure of interacting with the parents of your significant other, no matter how many times they’d gotten together before. Even at thirty-six years old, it still held a little bit of trepidation for her.

  Mom arrived around 7:30 to babysit Winter while she and Oliver were out to eat. “Thanks, Mae,” Oliver said, kissing Mae on the cheek after they’d gotten her all settled in. “We shouldn’t be much later than 9:30 or 10.”

  Eliza was tapping her foot nervously by the door. “What’s up with you, hon?” Mom asked, casting a concerned glance in her direction.

  Oliver rolled his eyes. “Don’t even start,” he warned her. “That’s a can of worms you do not want to open, trust me.”

  “I’m right here, you know,” Eliza snapped. “With functioning ears and everything.”

  Mom’s eyes widened. “Well, you all have a lovely dinner!” she said with a bright smile that said Never mind, I don’t want to know. She ushered them to the door. “And Oliver, darling, tell your parents that I am so excited to see them again.”

  “Will do. Don’t be afraid to give us a call if Winter starts throwing a fit. She’s had a couple doozies lately.”

  “We’ll be all smiles over here, I assure you. Bye-bye!”

  The door shut firmly behind them.

  Oliver chuckled. “Smart lady,” he muttered.

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Not a thing at all. Let’s go eat!” He rubbed his hands together as they walked towards the car and headed off to dinner.

  The drive downtown was short. Oliver found a primo parking spot, right out front of the restaurant, and pulled in. He killed the ignition, but just before he got out, Eliza grabbed his forearm.

  “Wait a second.” She looked at him. She was stunned to realize that she had tears brimming in the corners of her eyes. Jeez, she had been so emotional lately! Obviously, no bride wants their wedding day ruined by a hurricane. But this felt like an overreaction, even to her. There was still plenty of time for the storm to change course and miss Nantucket entirely. It was looking less and less likely with every passing hour, but it wasn’t yet out of the question.

  Oliver looked back at her, eyes flashing in the headlights of passing cars. He said nothing, just waited patiently for Eliza to find the words.

  “Everything is going to be okay, right?” She wasn’t an idiot—she knew very well that Oliver hadn’t the faintest idea about what the hurricane was going to do, if their wedding would be messed up, any of that. But right here, right now, she very badly needed some reassurance.

  He laid his hand gently over the top of hers. He didn’t blink as he said, “Eliza, baby, I promise you this: everything is going to be absolutely perfect.”

  She nodded and sniffled, then dabbed at the tears threatening to spill over the corners of her eyes. “You mean it?”

  “I mean it,” he said. “Trust me.”

  “Okay.” He meant it, she could tell. He wasn’t just lying to make her feel better. He genuinely, actually, one-hundred-percent meant what he said.

  That was good. That made one of them who still believed things were going to work out. Better than none, she supposed.

  Now was the time to pull herself together, though. Neal and Marcy were waiting.

  She’d met them last year around Christmas, when she and Oliver took Winter down to Connecticut for a long weekend, and they’d chitchatted via FaceTime sporadically over the last year. But she still felt a little nervous around them. There was no real reason to feel that way. Both of them were perfectly nice, perfectly friendly, pretty much exactly what she’d expected from suburban Connecticuters who both worked at a dentist’s office. She took a deep breath and blinked the tears away.

  “Ready?” Oliver asked, smiling.

  “Ready,” she confirmed. They got out of the car. Eliza twined her fingers through Oliver’s and held him close as they walked up to the restaurant.

  Neal and Marcy were seated in the waiting area when they stepped inside. “There’s our rock star!” Neal said. He turned to Eliza. “And his muse!” The four of them all swapped hugs around and said the usual things about how good each of them looked.

  Neal was balding on top and graying on the sides, with enough of a middle-aged-man potbelly to test the limits of the belt looped through his dark blue slacks. He had glasses that barely hung onto the edge of his nose and a smile that was infectiously warm. He’d recently started growing out his beard—“it’s what the kids are doing these days” was his reasoning, apparently. Marcy always made fun of him, but she’d admitted privately to Eliza that she was starting to like it a little bit.

  Marcy was wearing a black three-quarter-sleeve blazer over jeans and some sparkly high heels. She was a snappy dresser, though Eliza always thought that she wore an awful lot of jewelry. Oliver had mentioned more than once that going through airport security with her was headache-inducing. Tonight, Eliza counted five and six bracelets on each wrist, respectively, a blinding gold necklace, and two earrings per ear.

  “Patterson, party of four?” the hostess called over from the check-in desk with a smile and a wave. “Your table is
ready, if you’ll follow me right this way.”

  They filed over to their table and settled in.

  “So!” Neal said, rubbing his hands together just like Oliver had when they were leaving the house. “Tell me what’s good here.”

  “Dad, you’ve been here before,” Oliver groaned.

  “Have I?”

  “Yes, honey!” Marcy said. “Don’t you remember? Two Thanksgivings ago! That was pre-Eliza, though. I think Amanda was still in the picture back then.”

  “Mom!” Oliver cut in sharply.

  Eliza blushed and laughed. “It’s okay.”

  “No, it’s not okay,” Oliver corrected. “Anyway, moving on. I’d get the lobster or the mussels, Dad.”

  “I did like Amanda …” Neal muttered under his breath absentmindedly.

  Marcy whacked him in the arm. “He just asked us not to talk about her! Clean out your ears, Neal.”

  Oliver buried his face in his hands. Eliza’s blush deepened.

  Things were off to a great start.

  Fortunately, they stabilized after that. They got a lot of conversational mileage out of picking over every single item on the menu, and then the usual chatter about Winter: what new tricks she was learning, what things she could do, as if she was a dog. That phrasing always slightly bothered Eliza—“what can she do now?”—but she didn’t intend on making a fuss.

  Appetizers, wine, and main courses came and went. Eliza was hungry and the food was good, though she still didn’t feel like drinking too much. When they were all almost done eating, Oliver started poking his dad about a story he loved bringing up—the time when Neal had tried to clean the chimney at their house in Connecticut by himself, without consulting anyone on proper chimney-cleaning protocol.

  “And then he came down with his face covered—I mean, absolutely freaking covered—in soot. I have never laughed harder,” Oliver finished. Marcy, too, was laughing, and Neal was chuckling at his own expense, though Eliza saw that he maybe wasn’t as fond of this story as his adoptive son was.

  Marcy had been a little harsh on Neal throughout the meal, in Eliza’s opinion. Not anything malicious, just the normal picking and poking of a couple who had been together for a very long time. But Eliza thought that Neal was getting a little flustered and irritated with her chirping at him so incessantly. Marcy leaned back in her chair at the conclusion of Oliver’s retelling of the chimney story and said, “I swear, Neal, you used to be the laziest man on this planet. And then somehow you got lazier!” Eliza saw a switch flip in Neal’s head.

  His face got red and splotchy as he blurted out, “At least I’m not as lazy as his father!” His finger jabbed towards Oliver. “That son of a gun still won’t get a job!”

  Everyone froze.

  Silence. It felt like the whole restaurant was holding its breath. Eliza wasn’t sure how much time passed. Ten seconds? Ten minutes? Ten hours?

  Neal’s finger was still hovering over the tabletop in Oliver’s direction when Marcy’s furious, hissed, “NEAL!” broke the spell of silence.

  Eliza’s gaze flew to Oliver. He was frozen stiff, all the color gone from his face. She didn’t move a muscle. She just watched him process what Neal had said and the implication of his phrasing.

  Finally, Oliver said what everyone was thinking: “My father is alive?”

  Silence.

  Neal was still red, but no longer with anger. It was the face of a man who knew he had just said something very, very wrong. Marcy’s bracelets were jangling under the table—Eliza could hear them. The jangling of gold bracelets and the tap-tap-tap of her high heels on the hardwood floor and, in the background, the clatter and tinkle of plates being set down and drinks being poured at the table behind them.

  But at their table, no one said a word.

  Not until Oliver repeated what he’d said. “My father is alive?”

  Neal’s lips were quivering. “Well …”

  Oliver shook his head. “You told me he was dead. You said he and my mom were both dead.”

  “Oliver, honey …” Marcy said.

  He immediately held up a hand to cut her off. “No. I want to hear him answer my question. You told me my father was dead. My whole life, you said he was dead. Is he dead or not?”

  “He’s alive,” Neal whispered. His gaze was aimed straight down in his lap. His face was still red and sweat had begun to roll down his temple. Eliza was starting to worry that the collar of his shirt was too tight. He looked like he was suffering immensely.

  “He’s alive,” Oliver echoed numbly. He nodded like he was taking this in, adding a new puzzle piece to his worldview. “My father is alive. Okay. Where is he?”

  “Darling, we don’t know—”

  “Liar.” Oliver’s harsh tone was a brutal knife swipe cutting through Marcy’s pleas. She reeled back like he’d hurt her physically.

  Silence again.

  Eliza didn’t know what to do or say. She didn’t know if anyone knew what to do or so. They were all watching Oliver and waiting.

  “Where is he?” he asked again. He was using a quiet, venomous voice Eliza had never heard from him before. It frightened her to the core. His thigh was close enough to hers that she could sense his leg bouncing violently.

  “He’s in Philadelphia,” Neal answered. He had yet to look up.

  “I want an address.”

  Marcy began, “We don’t have—”

  “Liar.”

  Eliza saw Neal flinch this time when Oliver said that word. As if he had been struck across the face.

  Neal mumbled an address. It was obvious that he’d memorized it a long time ago. This was a secret that had been buried for a very long time.

  Oliver stood up suddenly. His chair screeched. Reaching into his pocket, he withdrew two hundred-dollar bills and threw them down on the table. “Thanks for dinner,” he said in that same deadly quiet voice. “I’m going to go find my father now.”

  He turned and left.

  Eliza looked at Neal and Marcy. Both of them were looking into their laps now. She thought she saw tears mingling with the sweat on Neal’s face, but she wasn’t sure. She hesitated for just one more second before getting up and following Oliver out the door.

  “Oliver!” she called after him into the night. She could see his figure crossing the street in the darkness. He didn’t turn around. Cursing under her breath, she checked for oncoming traffic, then ran across the street.

  She caught up with him as he reached for the car door handle. “Oliver, baby, look at me.” He didn’t do it. Just kept staring down at her hand seizing his forearm. She said it again. “Oliver, please look at me.”

  This time, he looked up at her. He was crying.

  “I have to go find him,” he told her in a voice that was strong despite the tears. The venom that had laced his words just moments before was gone. In its place was a trembling fear she’d never heard from him before, either. In all the time they’d been together, he’d never been this vulnerable.

  A billion thoughts careened through her head at once. They had a wedding in four days, and yet her soon-to-be-husband was about to get in the car and drive to Philadelphia to chase down the father he thought was long dead. She wanted to be mad that he was abandoning her. But she knew that wouldn’t be right. She had his love already. The wedding wasn’t as important as that, surely?

  No, it wasn’t. This thing right here mattered. It mattered as much as anything Oliver had ever done. She could see the thousand-yard stare on his face that told her that explicitly. He needed to go. So she swallowed her sadness, her anger, her bewilderment—how could all this be happening now of all times?—and she nodded. She had tears of her own in her eyes.

  “Okay,” she whispered. “I love you, okay, Oliver?”

  He nodded back. “I love you too, Eliza. I’ll be home soon.”

  She stepped back and let him go. She would call a taxi to get home.

  Oliver needed to go.

  15

 
Holly

  Holly stumbled out of Cecilia’s house like she was drunk. Her head was still reeling with the whiplash suddenness of everything that had just happened. She heard the door click behind her, but she didn’t look back.

  She drove home in a daze. When she pulled into her driveway, she blinked and realized that she didn’t remember a single moment of the journey from the Paynes’ house back to hers. Like someone had snipped the film out of her memory reel. It was unnerving.

  The pain on Cecilia’s face was etched into Holly’s mind’s eye. There was loss in her eyes, loss for something she’d never had and never would have. It shook Holly to her core.

  She forced herself to get out of the car. The silence in there was too stifling. Outside, the night was buzzing with the warm creak of cicadas and the distant wash of the ocean. It was clear, cool, beautiful.

  “Take a step,” she said to herself. It was like she had to manually pick up each leg and place it in front. Things weren’t working, weren’t connecting. Somehow, she made it up the driveway and to the front door. She paused there for a moment and drew in a long, shuddering breath.

  The door opened before she could open it herself. Pete was on the other side, grinning. He waggled his cell phone at her proudly. “Saw you on the cameras …” he began. But his grin fell to a frown when he saw how shell-shocked his wife looked. “Honey, are you okay?”

  She didn’t say anything for one long second. Then, feeling a surge of something new and warm rush into her, she stepped forward and squeezed her husband in the tightest hug she could muster.

  She felt like she could stay in his arms forever. With her ear pressed against his chest, she heard his heartbeat. Ba-boom. Ba-boom. Steady, dependable. He was warm and he smelled like Pete. His two-day beard scratched the top of her head, but she couldn’t care less. Grow it a foot long if you want, she thought of telling him. Just don’t go anywhere, okay? Stay with me here. Don’t let go of this hug. She decided not to say that out loud. She just held him for a long time.