11. Provisions
Molly Beardsley, devoted fan of the Hungry with Hollis website, is so invested in Hollis’s Five-Star Weekend going well that she wakes up at six a.m. in Twain Harte, California, and checks the weather 3,107 miles away on Nantucket Island. Friday is going to be clear and sunny with a high of seventy-six degrees. Molly is overjoyed for Hollis! All her fans wish they could somehow watch Hollis prepare for the weekend. How is she handling the details? Does she have one master list or several sublists?
Long before Molly Beardsley is awake in California, Hollis is driving past a field of lilies, zinnias, cosmos, and snapdragons in rainbow-hued rows at Bartlett’s Farm. It’s a vista worthy of Monet, of Renoir, and Hollis considers stopping to take a picture, but she’s on a mission. She pulls into the parking lot of the farm market at 7:55.
She did end up reading some of the debate on her website. Is it too soon for Hollis to be hosting a girls’ weekend?
Oh, probably, she thinks. But it has lifted her spirits and given her something to look forward to. And since she’s throwing it, she’ll do it her way. End of discussion.
At eight o’clock sharp, market manager Lily Callahan (who happens to be a frequent visitor to the Hungry with Hollis website; she knows what Hollis is doing here!) flips the sign to OPEN.
Just inside the front door, Hollis stops at the display of fresh flowers.
There are galvanized-metal buckets of lilies in white, yellow, peach, and something called “double pink.” Hollis selects five stems, then chooses four mixed bouquets that were picked earlier that morning, their petals still damp from the sprinklers. Then it’s on to the corn. The ears are snugged into the crib side by side and end to end like a neat puzzle. (Lily Callahan loves to look at the corncrib first thing in the morning. By late afternoon, the corn will be ravaged by people stopping by after the beach, ears flung willy-nilly and half stripped despite the sign that says PLEASE DO NOT SHUCK THE CORN!) Next,
Hollis selects hothouse tomatoes, organic butter lettuce, cucumbers, zucchini, and summer squash. She moves on to the herbs: fresh dill, fresh basil, a bunch of chives, and what Lily and the rest of the staff refer to as “porn-star mint” (it’s very well endowed). Hollis glides her cart over to the cheese case, where she chooses Taleggio and a clothbound cheddar (five-star cheese; Lily approves!), fancy crackers, a couple sticks of Italian salami, Marcona almonds, a can of salt-and-pepper Virginia peanuts (they’re ridiculously addictive), and Alfonso olives.
She holds the olives out to Lily (who has been trying to keep her distance but who is obviously stalking Hollis) and says, “No one ever eats olives, but I love this purple color.”
“Oh!” Lily says, feeling caught. “Me too!”
A short hop from Bartlett’s is Hollis’s favorite fish market, 167 Raw. Maria, who manages the counter at 167, worships Hollis Shaw, but she won’t do the obvious thing and ask for a picture. She fills Hollis’s order—four pounds of harpooned swordfish—and throws in a container of 167’s legendary
guacamole “on the house.”
“Aren’t you sweet?” Hollis says.
Maria nearly suggests that Hollis serve the guacamole as an appetizer on Sunday evening before the pizza party, but she won’t be that person. Will she? She opens her mouth to speak but all she ends up saying is “Have fun this weekend!”
Hollis’s expression is inscrutable. “I’m going to try!” she says.
Hollis’s final and, she would argue, most important stop is Hatch’s, the liquor store. There’s no way Hollis can host this weekend without wine. Lots of wine.
Store owner Ethan Falcone isn’t a follower of the Hungry with Hollis website but he recognizes Hollis the second she walks in because she went to high school with his wife, Terri (Prentiss) Falcone. They were on the same softball team; they won the state championship their junior year, then lost it in their senior year in a game so heartbreaking that Terri still gets upset about it. And hasn’t Terri recently brought up Hollis’s name for some reason?
Ethan could swear the answer is yes but he can’t remember why. Terri runs a
small haircut place on Old South Road and she tells Ethan so much gossip about so many people that he can’t keep track of it all.
Ethan watches Hollis choose midrange bottles of pinot grigio, sauvignon blanc, chardonnay, and rosé. She also picks up two bottles of Casa Dragones tequila (Ethan approves), two bottles of Triple 8 vodka, and a bottle each of Hendrick’s gin and Mount Gay rum. She gets in line, then swings her cart around and heads for the champagne aisle. She plucks two bottles of Veuve Clicquot off the shelf and goes back to the register.
When she reaches the counter, Ethan says, “Hey there, Hollis.”
“Hey…” Hollis says in a way that reveals she’s forgotten his name. That’s okay; Ethan doesn’t mind. He really only knows Hollis because of Terri’s (unnatural?) obsession with her high-school softball team. Still, Ethan likes to chat; it’s his favorite part of the job. People come into the liquor store in both good times and bad—job security!—and from the looks of it, Hollis is
hosting a big party.
“How’s everything?” Ethan asks.
“Oh, just fine, thanks,” Hollis says.
“How’s the good doctor? I haven’t seen him once all summer.”
The smile falls off Hollis’s face so quickly, it should have a sound effect, and in that instant, Ethan remembers why Terri brought up Hollis’s name.
Her husband, the big-shot doc at Mass General, died.
Hollis regards Ethan and says, frankly, “Matthew died in December.”
I’m such a squid, Ethan thinks. But he’s always been good with people, so he will salvage the moment. “I’m so sorry to hear that,” he says. “He was a very personable guy and I always enjoyed chatting with him. I’m sorry for
your loss.”
“Thank you,” Hollis whispers.
Ethan starts ringing up her purchases, sliding the bottles into the cardboard slots of a large box. He wants to tell Hollis her purchases are on the house but… she’s bought a lot of stuff, and he’s trying to run a business.
“That’ll be five hundred and eleven dollars.”
While Hollis inserts her card into the machine, Ethan tries to think what else he can do. “Let me help you get this out to the car.”
Hollis leads Ethan to her vintage Bronco, and after Ethan loads the box, he opens his arms for a hug. She quickly embraces him and says, “Thank you, Evan.”
“It’s Ethan,” he says and they both laugh. Then Ethan remembers something else. “You know what Terri used to call your husband?”
Hollis blinks.
“Your husband would go to Terri for a haircut every once in a while.”
“Oh, yes, of course,” Hollis says. “What did she call him?”
“Mr. Wonderful,” Ethan says. “She called him Mr. Wonderful.” He raps on the tailgate of the Bronco, proud of himself for remembering this. “Enjoy your weekend.”
Once Ethan is back inside the store, Hollis presses her forehead to the steering wheel. Mr. Wonderful, she thinks—and one of her favorite memories plays in her mind with such clarity she could be watching it on a movie screen.
Hollis and Matthew have moved out of the city to a center-entrance Colonial on a wooded lot on Livingston Road in Wellesley. Hollis has left Boston magazine, and now she’s a stay-at-home mom to Caroline, age three.
However, Hollis needs “something else,” so she agrees to chair the gala benefit for the hospital’s heart center. The development office has never seen a chair as organized and capable as Hollis Shaw. The tickets sell out immediately; they have corporate sponsors, and they book a musical guest who may or may not be Boston’s own Peter Wolf of the J. Geils Band—and rumor has it, Steven Tyler will join him onstage.
The night of the benefit, Hollis gets ready, then sits down at her dressing table to put in her diamond stud earrings. Her hair is in a chignon, and she’s wearing a slinky purple dress (it’s the first slinky thing she’s been able to fit into since she got pregnant, and it required a lot of hours at the gym and three months without dessert).
Matthew walks in wearing his tux and holding two flutes of champagne.
He hands one to Hollis and smiles at her reflection in the mirror. “To my beautiful wife,” he says. “Everyone at work is talking about what a wonder you are. I’m so proud of you.”
They touch glasses and drink. Matthew bends down to kiss the back of Hollis’s neck. Down the hall, Hollis hears Caroline chattering with the babysitter about what book she wants to read. Hollis closes her eyes and
thinks, I am so lucky. She thinks, This is what I’ve wanted my entire life. A moment just like this.
Back at the house, Hollis moves at double speed; her Fitbit can barely keep up.
She wants each bed to be as luscious as a bakery confection. She stuffs the duvet covers with two down inserts for extra fluffiness. She arranges an assortment of pillows—some feather, some firm—at the head of each bed and places a farm bouquet on each nightstand next to a water carafe and a stack of new magazines. Hollis uses a TikTok hack to arrange the flowers: She crosshatches tape across the top of the vase so the flowers stand up straight, and she adds vinegar, sugar, and ice to the water to keep the flowers fresh. She recognizes this absurd attention to detail for what it is: a way to control the few things she can control. She can’t believe she had to tell poor Ethan at Hatch’s that Matthew was dead. For a second, she’d considered pretending that Matthew was at home working in the garden, tending their tomato plants. He used to prune them back, his surgeon’s hands confident and adept in the cutting.
She folds pristine white Turkish cotton towels in every bathroom, then unwraps bars of wildflower soap from Nantucket Looms.
In the kitchen, she marinates the swordfish (she’ll post the recipe when the weekend is over), softens the cheeses, and prepares her famous bacon and rosemary pecans (she’ll post this recipe as well; she can practically hear her members clamoring for it, then asking if they can substitute almonds for pecans).
She sets the table on the deck—two overlapping tablecloths in a blue toile print, wicker chargers, linen napkins, beeswax candles in Simon Pearce holders, a bouquet of hydrangeas cut from the bushes that line the driveway.
She hangs citronella lanterns and stacks cashmere blankets on a nearby ottoman in case anyone gets chilly. (The blankets make her feel as though she’s thought of everything. Has she thought of everything?) She ices the wine and champagne in the large hammered-silver bucket, polishes her wineglasses, gently pulls the stamens off the lilies using a damp paper towel. She goes out to the shed and wipes the cobwebs from the beach umbrellas. As she’s cleaning the inside of the cooler, two cases of sparkling
water at her feet, her phone dings with a text.
It’s from Caroline. I’m here. Where r u?
Here? Hollis thinks. What does that mean—here on Nantucket? It’s only 11:30. Did Caroline take an earlier flight? Hollis could have sworn the flight she booked for Caroline landed at 1:30. Hollis quickly finishes rinsing the cooler with the hose and leaves it in the sun to dry. She strips off her rubber gloves and hurries inside to her laptop. She clicks on the confirmation e-mail she sent Caroline the night before and gasps.
Departing JFK 10:13 a.m.
Arriving ACK 11:27 a.m.
Oh no. No, no, no, no, no! Hollis thinks. She needs to call Caroline, but her phone—where is her phone? Back outside with the cooler? No. She finds it on the shelf in the shed, then hurries back through the house thinking, I blew it. I seriously blew it. She climbs into the Bronco and is halfway down the driveway, white shells spraying all over the place she’s peeled out so fast, when another text comes in.
Also from Caroline: Nvm. I found a ride.
Hollis hits the brakes and releases a breath. She found a ride. Okay, that’s good, right? But Hollis knows it’s not good. Hollis should have double- checked the flight time.
She remembered the cashmere blankets but she forgot her own daughter.
It takes all of Hollis’s willpower not to lurk in the doorway until Caroline arrives. She goes to the kitchen counter and assembles a BLT on toasted Portuguese bread, Caroline’s favorite summer lunch, and arranges it on a plate with a handful of Cape Cod chips and a ripe peach. She hears a car and peeks out to see Caroline climbing down from an enormous black truck.
Hollis squints; she can’t make out who the driver is, but Caroline waves at him (or her). She’s smiling. Maybe things aren’t as bad as Hollis thinks.
“Darling,” Hollis says when Caroline storms in, the screen door slamming behind her. “Welcome home.”
“You’re kidding, right?” Caroline says. She gives Hollis a death stare before crouching down to pet and kiss Henny, who is shimmying with excitement and love.
“I’m so sorry, darling. I thought the flight landed at one thirty. That’s
what I had written on my list.”
“On your list,” Caroline says and she gives a breathy laugh. “Classic.”
“You’re obviously more than an item on my list, Caroline,” Hollis says.
“But I had one thirty in my mind, I was planning on—”
“No thank you to lunch,” Caroline says, and she sweeps past Hollis and down the hall to her bedroom. Hollis hears the door slam.
Leave her be, Hollis thinks. The big hurdle has been cleared; she’s back under Hollis’s roof. Hollis will save her lunch for later. She probably just needs a nap.
She taps on Caroline’s door an hour later. No response.
Fine, she thinks. She has forgotten how people Caroline’s age can sleep.
At three o’clock, Hollis changes into what she thinks of as her “welcome outfit”—white drawstring pants and her signature blouse in pale pink, both forgiving, because although she has lost some weight since Matthew died, she’s nobody’s idea of thin. She won’t be winning any fashion awards this weekend, but she’s comfortable with the way she looks. Her hair is still more blond than gray, her eyes are a clear slate blue, her breasts have yet to sag, and her bottom, although plump and round, is firm. She has a light tan, and earlier this week she braved the salon for a manicure, pedicure, and eyebrow tint and wax. She has always had excellent eyebrows, but as fifty-three years have taught her, good eyebrows don’t guarantee one a smooth journey through life.
She knocks on Caroline’s door again. “Darling?”
Nothing.
At quarter past four, no one has arrived or even texted about arriving. Not even Brooke. Hollis wonders if everyone has had a change of heart.
She wanders through her house, trying to see it for the first time. It looks good, smells good—but something is missing. It’s too quiet; she needs music.
Hollis has followed Moira Sullivan’s lead and made not one playlist, but four —one for Tatum (’80s music), one for Dru-Ann (’90s music), one for Brooke (songs they played when the kids were growing up), and one for Gigi, though they have never once talked about music. Hollis tried to imagine what Gigi would like based on their text conversations, and she came up with something
she thinks of as “smart-woman music”—Alison Krauss, Lauryn Hill, Norah Jones. She added vintage Billie Holiday, Nina Simone, Carole King. She rounded it out with some edge: Fiona Apple, Courtney Love, Alanis Morissette. Gigi’s playlist is the best one to welcome people; Hollis presses Shuffle.
The first song that plays is Ingrid Michaelson’s “Maybe.” Hollis takes a seat at the kitchen island, pulls out her phone, and snaps a portrait-mode picture of the cut-glass bowl of bacon-rosemary pecans.
Caroline’s lunch plate remains untouched on the counter. When Hollis checks, she finds the bread is dry, the chips stale, the tomato bleeding its juices onto the plate. Into Henny’s dog bowl it goes.
Hollis walks down the hall and knocks on Caroline’s door, more firmly this time. “Caroline? I’d like you to get up, please. People will be arriving soon.”
There’s no answer. Hollis reminds herself that she’s the mother, that this is her house, that forgetting Caroline was an honest mistake, and that she apologized for it. The old Caroline would have said, Don’t worry about it, Mama, you have a lot on your plate.
“Caroline, may I enter?” Hollis says. Caroline is fanatical about her privacy. She knows nothing of the days when you had to talk to your boyfriend—in Hollis’s case, Jack Finigan—on a landline in the kitchen with your father six feet away on the couch watching Quincy but also probably
listening to every word.
There is, finally, a muffled “What?”
Hollis eases open the door and sees Caroline huddled under her duvet— never mind that it’s seventy-five degrees outside—looking at her phone.
Awake after all, wide awake.
“Caroline, I’m very sorry I wasn’t at the airport to pick you up. I got the time wrong in my head. I apologize.”
Caroline sits up, throwing the comforter to the end of the bed. “You had time to get everything ready, though, I see. The flowers. The fresh-picked corn. Were you the first person at the farm this morning?”
“Caroline.”
“Were you?” Caroline says. “Just tell me.”
“I was, yes—”
“I remember when I used to be a priority.”
“You’re still a priority!” Hollis says. “You’re my number-one priority.”
“Your website is first. Your brand is first. Ahead of me,” Caroline says.
She pauses. “And ahead of Dad.”
Hollis knows Caroline is looking for a reaction, but she won’t engage.
“I’ve missed you so much. I’m so happy you came home. It means a lot to me that you’re here, darling.”
“Don’t flatter yourself,” Caroline says. “I only said yes because I need the money.”
This is Hollis’s cue to leave the room, but instead, she sits on the side of Caroline’s bed, careful not to crowd her. (Motherhood, she has come to realize, requires a lot of math: How much space is enough; how much is too much?) “Do you want to talk about Dad?” Hollis asks. “I’m sure it’s difficult coming this weekend and… he’s not here. It was awful for me too.” But Hollis won’t make this about herself. She remembers how helpful Gigi’s simple words were: I’m here to listen.
“Of course I miss Dad,” Caroline says. “He wouldn’t have abandoned me like an orphan child at the airport.”
Her voice contains the slightest amount of teasing, which is encouraging.
“You’re correct,” Hollis says. “Your father would never have made that mistake. He would have been right out front waiting, so excited to see you and hear all about your summer in New York.” Hollis reaches out and smooths Caroline’s hair away from her face. “How is your summer in New York?”
An alert comes in on Caroline’s phone and she clicks on it. Hollis remembers when she and Matthew bought Caroline her first iPhone, ten years ago. What had Matthew said? That’s right: We will no longer be the most important thing in her life.
“Mom?” Caroline says. Her tone has changed. “Are you ready for this?”
Caroline holds up her phone for her mother to see. “Dru-Ann has been canceled.”
“What?” Hollis says. She peers at the screen, wishing for her reading glasses. She pinches the screen to enlarge it and squints. Dru-Ann Jones Disses Mental-Health Issues. Hollis begins to read, but the print is small.
The article mentions Posey somebody, a golfer, then Hollis defaults to just clicking on the video. She watches her beloved friend shout at some rich- looking white dude, “She’s going to tell everyone it’s a ‘mental-health
issue’”—Dru-Ann makes air quotes—“when she needs to suck it up and play through!”
Ten years ago, maybe even five years ago, Hollis wouldn’t have understood the problem with this, but now, thanks in no small part to her interactions with people on her website, she has been educated in all things mental-health-related.
“Oh, dear,” Hollis says. “That’s not good.”
“It’s worse than ‘not good,’” Caroline says. “It’s terrible. And it’s everywhere. That article is on Refinery Twenty-Nine, but they got it from Vulture.”
Suddenly a voice calls out from the kitchen. Hollis peers through Caroline’s shutters to see a black Lincoln—How did that thing get down Squam Road? she wonders—turning around in the driveway.
Only one of her friends would hire such a car to get out here.
“It’s Dru-Ann,” Hollis says.
“Well, you’d better go, then.”
Hollis feels torn. She should greet her guest, of course, but she doesn’t want Caroline to think she’s not a priority. “Can I make you—”
“Just go, Mother,” Caroline says. She returns her attention to her phone.
“Dru-Ann needs you more than I do.”
