As she waded back to shore, she once again did the unthinkable and called Grant. He answered on the third ring in his middle-of-the-night voice, a voice that sounded alert and awake but that was, in fact, buried.
“Hello?” he said.
“Grant?”
“Bird?” he said. She was grateful that he knew it was her. The day might come, she realized, when that would not be the case. “Are you okay?”
“Hank doesn’t love me,” she said.
“Hank?” he said. “Who’s Hank?”
“My boyfriend,” she said. “The man I’ve been seeing.”
“Oh,” Grant said. “Where are you?”
“Tuckernuck,” she said. “Bigelow Point.”
“It’s the middle of the night,” he said.
“I know,” Birdie said. “Hank doesn’t love me.”
There was a long pause. Long enough that Birdie wondered if Grant had fallen back to sleep.
“Grant?” she said.
He started. Yes, she’d caught him trying to sneak back to sleep. He had done this often in their life together. “What do you want me to do?” Grant said. “Beat the guy up? Call him and tell him he’s an idiot?”
Birdie reached the shore. She found the flashlight in the sand and poked the beam into the dark sky. “Would you?” she said.
TATE
She had nothing to wear. She hadn’t, in her wildest dreams, been expecting to attend a fancy dinner party at some flashy house on Nantucket. She had running clothes, bathing suits, shorts, and T-shirts. But Chess, thankfully, had carted along her entire closet.
Tate said, “Is it okay if I borrow something? If you say no, I don’t know what I’ll do.”
Chess said, “Take whatever you want.”
Tate said, “Will you help me?”
Chess huffed, but Tate wasn’t fooled. Chess considered herself to be too depressed to help with something as frivolous as outfit selection, but Tate knew that secretly she was flattered and welcomed the distraction. And in this case, outfit selection was everything. If Tate wore the right outfit, she would feel sexy and confident, and if she felt sexy and confident, Barrett Lee would fall in love with her. Tate had been worried that perhaps Chess harbored feelings for Barrett herself, but that didn’t seem to be the case. Barrett Lee fell into the same category with everyone else: Chess was too self-absorbed to give him a second thought.
Chess’s dresses hung from a wooden pole in the makeshift attic closet. Tate selected a white sundress with blue flowers. She slipped it on. Pretty, but maybe a little prim? Chess lay on the bed.
She said, “I wore that dress the first time I met Michael’s parents. Family dinner at the house. Nick was there, and Cy and Evelyn, of course.”
Tate’s arms hung at her sides. Was this how it was going to be? Tate shucked off the dress. She reached for an orange halter dress with white polka dots.
“I bought that for the rehearsal dinner,” Chess said. “Try it on.”
Tate hesitated. Chess had bought this one for the rehearsal dinner? Tate tried it on. It was adorable, cute and flirty, and Tate loved the idea of wearing orange. What a statement; she would liven up the party with a juicy sunburst. But something about the dress screamed, Chess! It was the polka dots, maybe, or the ruffle across the top. Chess had bought this dress for her rehearsal dinner. It was off-limits.
“I don’t think so,” Tate said.
Chess said, “I’ll never wear it.”
“You’ll wear it,” Tate said. She regarded the riches in the closet. There were so many dresses! Chess’s life with Michael Morgan had been… what? One cocktail party after another?
“I will never get dressed up and go out again,” Chess said.
“You will so,” Tate said. “Your hair will grow back.” Already a blond fuzz was coming in; Chess’s head looked like a peach.
“I’m not saying that to evoke pity,” Chess said. “I just want you to know you can borrow whatever you want.”
“Okay,” Tate said. Even at home in her own closet, Tate didn’t have one single appropriate outfit for an evening like tonight. She didn’t own summer dresses meant for dinner parties because she didn’t get invited to dinner parties. She didn’t have dinner with her boyfriends’ parents. She was, she realized at that second, socially retarded. All she did was work, and occasionally she spent a whoop-de-do night performing karaoke in a hotel bar with clients and their much more spirited secretaries. Just as Tate was about to wallow in self-pity over this and move from there into panic-would she know how to act at this dinner party?-Chess said, “Try on the red one.”
Tate pulled a red dress out of the closet. It was a simple silk sheath. “This doesn’t come with some devastating memory attached?”
“Well, sort of,” Chess said. “That was what I wore to Bungalow Eight the night I broke up with Michael.”
“Jesus, Chess,” Tate said. This was the dumping dress?
“Try it on,” Chess said. “For a while there, I considered that my lucky dress. And I have killer red Jimmy Choo heels to match.”
Tate tried the red dress on. It was a stunner. She tried on the killer heels. They were red suede peep toes with red snakeskin uppers. Tate felt like a woman, perhaps for the first time ever. What did that say about her? She didn’t want to think about it. She just wanted to stay in this dress forever, despite the fact that it had a backstory even more lurid than the orange polka-dot dress. “This is it,” Tate said. “This is the one.”
“That’s it,” Chess agreed. “Your lucky dress. Your break-somebody’s-heart dress.”
Tate had the dress and the shoes, and she had her tan. She worked on the rest, but it was tricky. She filed and polished her nails-perfect except for the sand scattered across the polish. She washed and conditioned her hair in the bracing shower, then brushed it out. A hair dryer would have been nice; as it was, she had to hope for the best. She allowed India to apply makeup to her eyes and lips. Tate never wore anything more than Chap Stick, but India insisted on mascara, eyeliner, a little lip gloss. Birdie lent Tate a silver clutch that she claimed had belonged to Tate’s great-grandmother in the 1930s and was a denizen of the top drawer of the dresser in Birdie’s room. (Was she making this up?) India lent her a gold wrap (pedigree: Wanamaker’s, 1994). Why India had brought a gold wrap to Tuckernuck was beyond Tate, but she didn’t question. She was Cinderella today; it was okay if things just appeared.
“How do I look?” Tate asked. There wasn’t a mirror in the house where she could get a fair read. She was worried about her hair.
“Oh, honey,” Birdie said, “you look just beautiful.”
“I’m going to take your picture,” India said. She had brought one of those disposable cameras that came in a cardboard box. This was, to Tate’s knowledge, the first time she’d used it. It had been an uneventful trip.
Tate was embarrassed as she mugged for the camera. She felt guilty getting all dressed up and going out for a dinner party on the big island-the real world, with electricity and hot water and other people engaging her in conversation. Shouldn’t she stay home and eat corn on the cob and blueberry pie and play solitaire while everyone else read or needlepointed or sunk deeper into their interior lives? No, that was silly. She was going.
This was, in so many ways, all she’d ever wanted.
She was standing on the beach in her red silk dress with India’s wrap and her great-grandmother’s clutch purse and Chess’s shoes in her hand when Barrett pulled the boat in at six o’clock. There was also a backpack at her feet, containing a nightgown (borrowed from Chess), her toothbrush, and her running clothes. Up on the bluff, Tate had kissed and hugged everyone good-bye as though she were leaving on a long journey.