23. Rye Toast
Hollis trails Tatum down Centre Street like someone who has read Espionage for Dummies. She stays five or six paces behind, and when Tatum turns onto India Street, Hollis turns onto India Street. When Tatum weaves through the crowd of people waiting outside Black-Eyed Susan’s, Hollis follows—but people are annoyed only at Hollis. “We’ve been waiting!”
Tatum scans the restaurant—it’s bustling as always and smells richly of coffee, butter, vanilla, and bacon—until she sees Kyle and Jack at a four-top with two empty seats next to them. She grabs Kyle by the hair at the back of his head and plants a juicy kiss on his cheek, then slides down next to him.
“I think I was being followed,” she says.
“Really?” Kyle says. “By whom?”
A second later, Hollis plops down in the seat across from Tatum.
“Surprise!”
“No surprise here,” Tatum says. “I saw your reflection in the window of Don Freedman’s gallery.”
“No surprise here,” Jack says with a wink. “I always knew you’d come
back to me.”
“Oho!” Kyle says. “He went there!”
Hollis laughs. The headache she’s had all morning is suddenly gone. “It’s just breakfast,” she says.
Kyle raises his mug. “The band is back together.”
It’s good, it’s fine, it’s innocent, Hollis thinks. This is the perfect time to catch up with Jack. Kyle and Tatum make this seem normal—she’s visiting with old friends. But does she feel normal? No, she does not. Jack Finigan is here, and Hollis can’t ignore the fizzing inside of her.
Tatum wants to tell Jack to run for the hills. Kyle wants to tell Jack (and possibly did the night before) to get some action and then run for the hills.
Hollis flags their server for coffee. She was so hungover at home that all
she could manage was ice water, and now she’s starving. Jack hands her the menu and says, “I know what you’re going to order.”
“Oh, please,” Tatum says. “We all know what Hollis is going to order.”
“Two scrambled eggs, crispy bacon, rye toast, and hash browns—as long as they’re actual hash browns and not home fries,” Kyle says.
“Well, now you stole my thunder,” Jack says.
“And mine,” Tatum says.
What no one eating or working at Black-Eyed Susan’s that morning could know is that, back in high school, these same four people ate breakfast at the Downyflake every Saturday morning after the Friday-night Whalers football game, and whereas Jack, Tatum, and Kyle mixed it up with French toast, omelets, and the Downyflake’s famous doughnuts, Hollis always ordered the same thing. She had been the predictable one.
How do they know I haven’t grown into other tastes? she wonders. Maybe she’d get the huevos rancheros or the spicy Thai scramble.
But she doesn’t want those things.
“That is what I’m getting,” she says, slapping her menu down.
“These boys went out hard last night,” Tatum says. “They went to the Straight Wharf. Then they went to the Gaslight.”
Kyle holds his palms up. “I was just trying to be a good wingman. Jack was searching for some nocturnal companionship.”
Hollis studies her diamond engagement ring, her wedding band. “Did you have any luck?” she asks lightly.
When Tatum hears the phrase nocturnal companionship, the tender spot in her breast starts to throb. “I leave you alone for one night and you go out on the prowl?”
“I’m innocent,” Kyle says. “I stood by while Jack worked his magic with your boss and her sidekick.”
It takes Tatum a minute to figure out what Kyle is telling her. Your boss and her sidekick. Tatum’s boss.
“You saw Irina?” Tatum says. “With Veda?” She grips the sides of the table. She was expecting to hear that Jack chatted up some tourists from Menasha, Wisconsin, named Melissa and Debbie who had ended up at the Gaslight because the line at the Club Car piano bar was too long. It’s far, far worse that Jack talked to Irina and Veda. Yes, they wear too much makeup and their perfume makes your eyes water, but they have sexual confidence—
and doesn’t Kyle remember Tatum’s hideous nightmare, the one where Irina and Kyle end up in bed together? “Why didn’t you tell me this earlier?”
“I wasn’t talking to them,” Kyle says. He looks at Jack across the table.
“Back me up here, bud.”
“They were the only two ladies in the place who weren’t vaping or filming TikToks,” Jack says.
“Did Irina see you?” Tatum asks Kyle. “Did she say anything?” To her knowledge, Kyle and Irina have met only in passing. This past winter when the Pilot was at the mechanic, Kyle would drop Tatum off at work and pick her up, so there had been an introduction—Irina was far more charming with Kyle than she’d ever been with Tatum; no surprise there.
A sweetheart, Irina had commented then. Your sweetheart husband.
What did Irina think about seeing Kyle out alone while Jack chatted them up?
Tatum isn’t sure what to do with her anger. Kyle squeezes her knee and Tatum swats his hand away with so much force that she jostles the table and everyone’s coffee splashes over the rims of their mugs.
Hollis tries to change the subject. “Do you still own a bar?” she asks Jack.
But her question is lost in the static coming from across the table. Kyle assures Tatum that he was minding his own business, trying to listen to the band, and Jack was the one who talked to Irina, Jack was the one who danced with Irina and her friend. Hollis feels a strange pang at hearing this, which is completely absurd; Hollis and Jack broke up while Ronald Reagan was still president.
Their server, a longtime breakfast veteran named Naz, appears with their plates, but he can’t quite make the drop because the dark-haired woman at the table shoves her chair back and stands up and—whoa!—she’s crying. (Naz sees more people crying at breakfast than one might expect.) Hollis notices Tatum’s crying as well and she tries to catch her eye but Tatum pushes past Naz and heads for the restrooms at the back of the restaurant.
Naz sets their plates down. “Is there anything else I can bring you?”
Kyle is staring after Tatum. Jack says, “Can we have some orange marmalade, please?”
“Sure thing.” Naz beats a hasty retreat.
Hollis looks at her golden-brown rye toast, then at Tatum’s blueberry pancakes, then at Kyle. “I guess it’s nice to know she can still feel jealous.”
“She’s not jealous,” Kyle says. “I mean, she is, but that’s not why she’s upset.” He grinds pepper over his eggs Benedict. “I assume she told you about the biopsy?”
“The biopsy?” Hollis says. “What biopsy?”
“Oh, crap,” Kyle says.
Hollis stares at him.
“Lump in her right breast,” he says. “She missed the doctor’s call with the results on Thursday, and now she has to wait until Monday.”
Hollis exhales. How can Kyle—and Jack, for that matter—be so calm?
They all lived through Laura Leigh’s cancer together. Tatum’s mother, Laura Leigh Grover, wore a knit Nantucket Whalers hat over her bald head to their graduation; three weeks later, she was dead. Kyle and Jack had served as pallbearers; they had lowered the woman they all fiercely loved into the ground.
Tatum! Hollis thinks. How had Tatum kept this news to herself? She is so brave but also such a dummy. Hollis is her best friend—or was. It pains Hollis that Tatum apparently doesn’t trust her enough to confide in her. Laura Leigh’s breast cancer was very aggressive; the end was swift and brutal.
Tatum must be terrified.
But thirty-five years have passed since Laura Leigh was diagnosed. There has been research; there have been breakthroughs and clinical trials. Tatum will be treated in Boston, maybe even at Mass General, where Matthew worked and where Hollis will be able to get her access to the best doctors in the world. And, too, the lump might turn out to be benign.
But this all feels like magical thinking. A possible cancer diagnosis, especially with a family history like Tatum’s, is frightening. Hollis thinks back to the night before: Tatum eating, drinking, smoking a cigarette, dancing. Before she retired to the Fifty Shades of White guest suite, she’d hugged Hollis and said, “Thank you for having me, sis.”
There was a lot to unpack in that one line, not least of which was Tatum using their old nickname. Hollis could have reminded Tatum that she’d invited her for dinner every summer since she’d built the new house and Tatum had never come—but this would lead other places that neither of them wanted to go, and it was late and they’d both been drinking, so Hollis said, “Thank you for coming, sis.” And they’d stumbled off to their respective bedrooms.
“She didn’t tell me,” Hollis says. “She seemed fine last night. She had
fun. We did our dance.”
“Oh, the dance,” Jack says.
Kyle stands up. “I’m going to check on her.”
He leaves the table as Naz drops off a pot of orange marmalade. Jack
slides it over to Hollis.
“You got this for me?” she asks.
“You want it, don’t you?”
Well, yes, of course. Hollis’s buttery rye toast wouldn’t be complete without orange marmalade. “I can’t believe you remember.”
“Oh, Holly,” he says and he sighs. “I haven’t looked at a piece of rye toast in the past four decades without thinking of you slathering it with the most revolting of all condiments, orange marmalade.”
Hollis shakes her head, her eyes misting with tears.
Jack puts his arm around her and gives her a squeeze. “She’s going to be fine,” he says.
While Kyle and Tatum are having a long kiss goodbye outside Black-Eyed Susan’s, Jack insists that Hollis take his cell phone number. “Call me later if you’re not busy.”
“I’ll be busy,” Hollis says. She thinks guiltily of Brooke, Dru-Ann, and poor Gigi, all of whom she left to fend for themselves. But… wild horses couldn’t keep her away from Jack. When she looks at him, she sees a fifty- three-year-old man but also a seventeen-year-old kid. His smile is like sunshine on her face. “Okay, fine.” She takes his number.
“I met your daughter this morning,” Jack says. “I probably shouldn’t tell on her, but she woke up at the McKenzie household and couldn’t find a Lyft, so I gave her a ride to town.”
“The McKenzie household?” Hollis says. “She was… what? With Dylan?” That must have been who dropped Caroline off yesterday, Hollis thinks. Dylan McKenzie!
Jack holds up his palms. “We didn’t discuss it.”
“What did you discuss?” Hollis says. “Caroline isn’t exactly my biggest fan these days.”
“Well, she seemed surprised to learn that you used to hunt and scallop
with the old man.”
“Oh, jeez,” Hollis says. “I haven’t been scalloping in eons.”
“Bet you still remember where your dad’s secret spot is, though,” Jack says.
“I do,” Hollis says. She swats at him. “And no, I’m not telling you.”
Finally, Tatum and Kyle separate; they all say goodbye, and Tatum turns around one last time to wave. Hollis had planned to ask Tatum about the biopsy the second they were alone but she decides she should let Tatum be the one to bring it up.
Tatum stops in the middle of the sidewalk to light a cigarette. “Holly?”
Here it comes, Hollis thinks. “Tay?” she says.
Tatum releases a stream of smoke out of the side of her mouth. “Irina better stay away from my husband,” she says. “Or I’m putting a snake in her bed, and it won’t be rubber.”
