5. Errands
It’s eight thirty on Thursday morning when Tatum McKenzie spots her oldest friend, Hollis Shaw, by the deli counter at the mid-island Stop and Shop.
Hollis has a pair of sunglasses perched on her blond-gray head, and she’s wearing a pair of Lululemon running shorts and a Cisco Brewers T-shirt.
She’s checking things off a list. Tatum smiles. Hollis has always loved a good list.
Without breaking stride, Tatum swings her cart around and heads in the opposite direction, her heart flip-flopping like a freshly caught fish. Quick, quick, quick! She races to the line closest to the exit and loads her bleach and paper towels onto the conveyor belt. Kathy Culbert, who was a year ahead of Tatum and Hollis in school, is behind the register, and as always, Kathy wants to chat. “How’s the little guy?” she asks. Kathy’s sister, Melanie, runs the day care that Tatum’s grandson, Orion, attends.
“Good, good,” Tatum says, cursing her lost opportunity to grab a rotisserie chicken. She wants Kyle to have something to eat while she spends the weekend in Squam with the very woman she’s running away from.
“I don’t understand why you agreed to go,” Kyle said to Tatum that morning. “You avoid Hollis every summer like she’s poison ivy, and now you’re spending the weekend at her house?” Kyle kissed Tatum’s nose and goosed her. “After all these years, I still can’t figure you out. It’s sexy.” They ended up having a quickie standing in front of the mirror, Kyle carefully avoiding the spot on Tatum’s right breast where she’d been stabbed by the biopsy needle.
The sex put Tatum behind for the morning. Dylan was still asleep—he hadn’t gotten home from work until two or three—so Tatum had to drop Orion off at Melanie’s before she came here for cleaning supplies, and now she has to go to Holdgate’s to pick up Mr. Albright’s shirts and still somehow get to the Albrights’ house by nine. Tatum is jonesing for a cigarette. Since discovering the lump, she’s been smoking twice as many as usual, which she
understands is bad, but how is she supposed to handle the stress of possibly having breast cancer without smoking? Some women might be able to do it, but not Tatum.
When Tatum leaves the store, it’s a quarter to nine; she knows she has to seriously hustle and prays to the Virgin Mary that there isn’t a line at the dry cleaner. But even so, she can’t help messing with Hollis. She scans the parking lot until she sees the strawberry-red Bronco. Tatum quickly glances behind her, then hurries over. The driver’s-side window is open and there are the keys sitting in the console, just as Tatum knew they would be. Hollis leaves them right out in the open like a local, even though Hollis is a summer person now in every other way. Tatum grabs the keys and hides them under the driver’s seat.
Five people are waiting in line at Holdgate’s Island Laundry, and Amy, the manager, is nowhere to be found. Tatum checks her phone, sees it’s 8:51.
Tatum’s boss, Irina, is a stickler; she fired a girl the week before last for showing up hungover. Tatum texts Irina: I’m at Holdgate’s, there’s a line, do you want me to come now or get the shirts?
Irina texts back: Get shirts. Then she writes: Cleaner opens at 8:30.
You should have gone earlier.
Tatum’s fingers hover over the screen. What she wants to say is I quit.
What she does say is Sorry! Irina is young enough to be Tatum’s child; she’s only a year older than Dylan. She arrived on Nantucket from Lithuania in 2015 and went from cleaning houses herself to owning a cleaning-and- concierge company, the best on the island, called simply Irina Services. The company does more than just clean; staffers run errands like picking up dry cleaning, taking packages to UPS, provisioning (their clients don’t deign to eat anything from the Stop and Shop—for them, it’s Bartlett’s or Nantucket Meat and Fish), filling the house with bouquets from Flowers on Chestnut, and even taking the family dogs to be groomed at Geronimo’s. Irina has filled a niche; she has thirty-seven clients and a staff of sixteen, among whom Tatum is (a) the oldest by twenty years and (b) the only local. Irina gives Tatum the cushier jobs, like picking up the dry cleaning and buying supplies; the younger girls, Tatum knows, will be elbow-deep in the Albrights’ toilets by the time she arrives. This is one reason Tatum doesn’t quit; the other is the salary. After splitting gratuities with the other girls, Tatum is making something like fifty bucks an hour. It’s a lot of money for a daytime job,
though it’s peanuts compared to what she made waiting tables. Tatum worked at the Lobster Trap for over twenty years, but she quit when Orion was born. She’d missed too many baths, stories, and bedtimes when Dylan was young—she didn’t want to miss them with her grandson.
Amy appears from the back and the line moves faster. It’s 8:54. The racks clickety-clack as they spin, Amy runs the credit card of a woman who must have sixty items hanging on the hook, bright party dresses from the looks of it, lots of Lilly Pulitzer. Normally, this would make Tatum roll her eyes—she wants to declare wearing Lilly Pulitzer to any Nantucket social function an official cliché—but today, Tatum’s mind wanders to the weekend ahead.
Hollis sent an itinerary (with a note that she would be paying for everything, thank God), and there was some dress-up stuff on the list—Saturday-night dinner at Nautilus, Sunday lunch at the Galley—along with “suggested colors” for each event. Saturday night: black or white. Sunday: orange or hot pink. Tatum would have rebelled against wearing the “suggested colors,” but she has both black and white outfits as well as a cute orange Lilly Pulitzer shift dress hanging in her closet (she bought it on sale when Dylan was a baby, over twenty years ago, but it will still fit). Should Tatum wear it? It
would be perfect for the lunch.
Should she be a cliché?
When Kyle asked why Tatum wanted to go to the girls’ weekend, Tatum said, “I feel like I should. She lost her husband, Ky. Can you imagine?”
Kyle’s face darkened. Since the discovery of the lump, the bad mammogram, and the biopsy, both of them could only too easily imagine.
A more frivolous reason why Tatum is going to Hollis’s little weekend is that she wants to live like a summer person for a couple of days. Tatum enjoys her summers. She loves the cottage roses and the hydrangeas; she swings by Sandbar to grab an ice cream cone at the end of her shift, then goes for a swim on the strip of public way between Cliffside and the Galley; she spends weekend afternoons with Kyle out at their secret beach, and once a week they get a sitter for Orion and go out for a nice dinner (this normally means Cru because Dylan works there and gets them 30 percent off the check). But Tatum knows there’s a whole sparkling social life going on that she has no access to—benefits with pricey tickets, cocktail parties held in private gardens, dinners on the decks of yachts—and, although it’s slightly embarrassing to admit this, she wants to be a part of it.
Standing in the line at Holdgate’s, she feels a tap on her shoulder and
hears, “Hey, sis.”
Tatum turns around. It’s Hollis.
Tatum blinks. What is Hollis doing here? Did she follow Tatum? Does she know that Tatum hid her keys? Tatum imagines Hollis searching frantically through the Bronco and nearly grins, but the Hey, sis stops her.
Hollis is using the old nickname as though no time has passed, as though they’re still meeting up in the school hallway, Hollis straight from honors English, Tatum from phys ed.
But that’s not fair. Every interaction of the past fifteen years—since Hollis moved back and built the huge house in Squam—has been awkward. Hollis is always overly dramatic, using a fake, high-pitched, singsongy voice—Tatum McKenzie, you never age a day, how are things, how’s Kyle, how’s Dylan, show me pictures—and Tatum stonewalls her, answering in monosyllables and ending the interaction as soon as she can. Because it feels lousy, bumping into a person who used to be as close as a sister, closer than a sister! (The girls Tatum and Hollis knew growing up all hated their sisters.) Best friends didn’t begin to describe their relationship. They were each other’s everything.
Despite all the pains of growing up, Tatum never felt alone. She always,
always had Hollis.
And then, one day, she didn’t.
Tatum can’t bring herself to echo Hey, sis, though she does say, “I’m sorry about Matthew.” She shoves her phone in her back pocket and gives Hollis a real hug, squeezing her with both arms. Tatum had read Matthew’s obituary in the Nantucket Standard, but she and Kyle opted not to attend the funeral in Wellesley. Now, of course, Tatum feels bad about that. She’s been meaning to send a card but she isn’t good with words like Hollis is, and she told herself that anything she sent would just get lost in the outpouring of love from Hollis’s crazed social media followers.
This now seems like a terrible misjudgment. If Kyle died (Tatum shudders even thinking about it, she loves the man so much) and Hollis didn’t acknowledge the loss in any way, Tatum would never forgive her. “And I’m sorry I didn’t call or write or come to the service. I did absolutely nothing.”
“But you’re coming this weekend,” Hollis says.
Tatum wipes at her eyes. She can run away from Hollis all she wants, but the fact remains that Hollis is the first person, other than her family, that
Tatum ever loved.
“I’ll be there.” It’s now Tatum’s turn at the counter; she gives Amy the ticket, and a moment later, Amy hangs the pastel array of Mr. Albright’s shirts on the hook.
“Are those Kyle’s?” Hollis says. “I can’t imagine him wearing pink… or peach.”
Tatum checks her phone: 8:58. “These are for a client.”
“Client?”
“I clean and run errands for…” She doesn’t have time to catch Hollis up.
“I have to go. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Everyone’s getting in around four,” Hollis says.
Four works, Tatum thinks. She finishes work at three, then she’ll pick up Orion from day care and go home to pack. Or maybe she’ll pack tonight, and tomorrow afternoon she’ll treat herself to a blowout at RJ Miller. “See you then.” She leaves with a wave. She has approximately sixty seconds to make it to the Albrights’ house.
She opens the back door of her elderly Honda Pilot, sweeps Cheez-It crumbs off Orion’s booster seat, and carefully lays down Mr. Albright’s shirts. She has to go—but she can’t stop herself from heading back inside.
“Holly?” she says. “Who else is coming to this thing?”
Hollis smiles. “I didn’t tell you?”
“No,” Tatum says. She didn’t ask because she didn’t really care. Hollis’s friends are all interchangeable—all wealthy, watching their weight, debating plastic surgery, trying to get their children into Ivy League schools.
Hollis folds the list she’s still holding and reinforces the creases with her nails. “It’s a thing called the Five-Star Weekend,” she says. “So I invited one best friend from each phase of my life.”
Each phase of her life? Tatum thinks. What does that even mean?
“My friend Brooke from Wellesley is coming. Dru-Ann is coming. And the fourth is Gigi, a woman I met on my website. I’ve actually… never met her in real life, but she seems cool.”
Tatum nods briskly. She realizes the hook is that Hollis has invited someone she’s never even met to her house (who does that?), but Tatum’s attention is snagged by the second name.
Dru-Ann. Ugh.
Tatum opens her mouth to say, After your wedding, I hoped never to see
Dru-Ann again.
But at that moment, Hollis steps up to the counter and says to Amy, “I’m here to pick up shirts for Matthew Shaw?”
The words are a bucket of cold water on Tatum’s indignation. If Hollis can be brave enough to pick up her dead husband’s dry cleaning, then Tatum can deal with Dru-Ann Jones for a weekend.
When she gets back in the car, her phone rings. The display says Nantucket Cottage Hospital.
Tatum flounders for a second. Should she answer it or not? Yes! she thinks. Then: No, no—she isn’t prepared, and she doesn’t have time. She hits Decline.
When she left the biopsy appointment the day before, the doctor said the results would be in “early next week,” which Tatum assumed meant Monday or Tuesday. Today is only Thursday. Why are they calling so soon? Does she definitely have cancer? Or does she definitely not? An alert sounds—voice mail. Her phone is now radioactive; Tatum is afraid to touch it. She lights a cigarette and inhales deeply. She wants to call Kyle but he’s got a big AC- install job at a new build out in Sconset where there’s no cell service.
When Tatum pulls up in front of the Albrights’ house at 9:02, Irina is waiting on the front porch. Irina is six feet tall with dyed yellow hair yanked into a ponytail; her upright posture—shoulders back, breasts thrust forward— reminds Tatum of an Olympic javelinist. Irina likes to go out on the town with a similarly built friend, Veda, who’s brunette to Irina’s “blond.” The two of them wear full makeup and sharp perfumes, and there’s nothing subtle about them or their mission—hunting rich men.
Tatum stubs out the cigarette and grabs the bags from the Stop and Shop and Mr. Albright’s shirts, which slid off the back seat into the footwell because Tatum was driving like a bat out of hell. Tatum couldn’t care less about Mr. Albright’s shirts. Tatum has serious beef with Mr. Albright, to be
honest.
Do I have cancer?
When Tatum was a senior in high school, her mother, Laura Leigh—one of the coolest, most beautiful women ever to grace the planet, in Tatum’s opinion—was diagnosed with aggressive metastatic breast cancer (back then, the doctors didn’t say much about stages, but Tatum figured that Laura Leigh had probably been at stage eleven). She underwent the kind of chemo that left
her curled around the base of the toilet twenty-three hours a day—Tatum remembers the moaning, the dramatic weight loss, Laura Leigh’s long cinnamon-colored hair falling out by the handful, leaving her as bald as a cue ball. She was dead nine weeks after the diagnosis; the line “You have six months to live” ended up being a pipe dream.
Tatum knows all about the BRCA gene, though she’s never been tested because she and Kyle pay for their own health insurance, and besides, Tatum has always been the picture of health. Now, of course, she feels like she’s run out of luck, that the Grim Reaper is lurking outside the door. Tatum thinks about her dark hair swirling around the shower drain, about nurses inserting IVs, about the chemo they call the Red Devil coursing through her bloodstream. She thinks about sweating, puking, shivering, about lying on the operating table like a roast on a platter, her very existence in the hands of a surgeon who is, like her, a mere mortal. She thinks about no longer having sensation in her breasts; she thinks about tattooed-on nipples; she thinks about being unable to lift a gallon of milk. There are plenty of scenarios where she’ll have to quit her job and Kyle will have to take a leave of absence from his business because who else is going to take care of her? How are they going to afford all the trips back and forth to the hospital in Boston?
For the past thirty years, she and Kyle have joked about winning ten million dollars in the lottery—they play Powerball every single week—but even without any windfalls, they’ve nearly paid off their house. Tatum is supposed to work only another two years, then she and Kyle are going to take some real vacations. Now she thinks about not being around to watch Orion grow up or see Dylan get married. She had a horrifying dream where she was dead and Irina came over to their house on Hooper Farm Road to clean out all of Tatum’s things—and Irina ended up in bed with Kyle.
“Ridiculous!” Kyle cried when Tatum told him about the dream. “I will never sleep with Irina. I will never sleep with anyone else, baby. My life begins and ends with you. Why are we even having this conversation? You’re going to be fine, you have to believe that.”
But the dream haunts Tatum, and their client Mr. Albright is to blame.
When Irina took on this account two summers ago, the first Mrs. Albright was dying of lymphoma, and Tatum and the other girls had to maneuver around the hospice workers. Meanwhile, Mr. Albright had already taken up with the woman who would become the second Mrs. Albright. He claimed
this was with the first Mrs. Albright’s blessing. She wanted him to be happy.
Tatum was absolutely verklempt. Mr. Albright didn’t bring the girlfriend to the house, but he brought her to Nantucket—they stayed together in a suite at the Wauwinet. Appalling! Could he not just wait until his poor wife passed before he screwed somebody else?
Tatum wipes crumbs from the plastic bags covering the shirts. She’s late; she didn’t get to finish her cigarette; Irina radiates impatience. If Irina yells at her, Tatum is afraid she’ll start to cry.
The best thing about Hollis’s girls’ weekend is that it’s given Tatum something else to think about. She’ll have to dream up a little payback for Dru-Ann. That alone will make it worthwhile.
