Meredith knows her tendency to match. Half, no, three-quarters of the people she has ever dated she didn’t even like that much. She only dated them because they liked her. Meredith, the ultimate people pleaser, felt she had to say yes, even when she wasn’t the slightest bit interested.
Just as she feels she ought to carry on this conversation with the cute bookstore clerk, just because he instigated it. Not that he’s interested in her. Absolutely not. Still. She casts a surreptitious glance and sees him walking to the other end of the store.
I wonder what’s at the other end of the store, she thinks. Maybe I should just go in there and find out. Stop it! Go and get a coffee instead. There was a coffee shop just around the corner. And there were some delicious-looking coconut pastries in a case near the window.
• • •
In the coffee shop, she finds a quiet table in the corner. A couple of women sit two tables over, one with a voice that is particularly loud and piercing. Meredith fishes in her bag for her headphones, plugs them in, and pulls up a classical music playlist, grabbing the first book from the top of her pile and opening it to the first page.
She doesn’t hear anything, isn’t aware of anything, until she feels a tap on her arm and looks up to see the cute bookseller, now squeezing in next to her, a coffee and sandwich in front of him.
“I didn’t mean to disturb you,” he says. “How’s the book?”
“Heavy. And slow. But I’m trusting you. Is this your coffee break?”
“What?”
“They let you leave and take breaks here. That’s so nice.”
He laughs. “Oh, I don’t work there. I was just browsing, same as you.”
A deep flush colors Meredith’s cheeks. “I’m so sorry.”
“Why? If I didn’t do what I did, I’d kill to work in a place like that. It’s exactly where I would be happiest.”
The flush fades, to Meredith’s gratitude. “Go on, then. Now you have to tell me what you do.”
“I’m a writer,” he says, with an embarrassed laugh. “Unsurprising that I love a good bookstore.”
“Me too,” she says, hoping there is no stray desiccated coconut from her pastry on her lips as she smiles. “I mean, I’m not a writer, but there’s nothing I love more than a good bookstore.”
twenty-two
Lizzy is not happy. Today they were supposed to be filming at an organic orchard in upstate New York, owned by an eccentric former banker. She was supposed to taste the apples, interview him, then make an apple coconut chutney and a spiced-apple-stuffed pork loin in his kitchen, before sitting down with a selection of his friends around a table set up in the orchard, with all the plates, china, candles, and natural linens from her upcoming line.
She had to cancel everything, which will cost a fortune, not to mention God only knows when they will be able to organize all the people again. Her mother called and demanded she come out with her sisters to hear some kind of news. Normally Lizzy would have ignored it, or insisted her mother tell her over the phone, but apparently Meredith was flying over from London, so whatever it was it had to be big enough that it warranted Lizzy being there.
Lizzy sits on a Metro-North train as it shoots through Westchester and into Connecticut. Staring out the window at the coastline, at the boats bobbing in Greenwich Harbor, she wishes she felt more attached to the place where she grew up, that she felt a sense of homecoming. But she has no feeling of roots in this place, any more than she does anywhere else.
She was the daughter who stayed the longest, who seemed to have the easiest time of it, who was allowed to get away with the most. But once she left, she left. She stayed in touch with no one from home, never gave them a second thought. When people asked her where she was from, she said she was a New Yorker. It didn’t seem untrue; she felt like a New Yorker, and surely that was what mattered.
“I hope this is something big,” she mutters to herself as she looks out the window. But the truth is, there is a part of her that is relieved to have canceled today. Sean was booked to be the head chef, which normally would have filled her with excitement, but it’s all getting too much—the secrecy, the lies, the roller coaster of highs and lows. She needs a break from all of it, needs to figure out just what she’s going to do.
And so while she was never one to give in to her mother’s demands, on some level she realized this summons could be just what the doctor ordered. She packed a bag and told James her mother needed her and she would be gone for a few days. Maybe just the weekend, maybe slightly longer.
They were barely talking, the resentment an invisible force field between them, their smiles and laughter, their conversation, forced and false, for the benefit of their son. Before leaving, she held Connor close and told him to be good for Daddy. Then she made her way to Grand Central Station to catch the train. She hadn’t touched James. Just stood in the doorway before she left, with a small shrug and a good-bye, saying that she would be in touch. He glanced up from his laptop and said okay. And she had left.
She leans her head on the glass and watches the changing scenery, aware that a couple of people on the train have recognized her. She can feel their eyes constantly coming back to rest on her. Her celebrity—and, oh, how she has come to hate being a celebrity—pulling their attention back over and over, even when all she is doing is resting her head on a window and losing herself in thoughts.
At the Westport train station, she pulls her bag off the shelf and moves through the compartment. Sometimes she flashes a big smile at the people who clearly recognize her, but today she ignores them. Fuck it. They are used to seeing her lose her shit on TV—she is, in fact, famous for losing her shit on TV, but only when things aren’t as perfect as she needs them to be, when people aren’t pulling their weight, when the sous-chefs fuck up, all of which happens on a regular basis. Usually in the real world she tries to be polite and charming, the perfect celebrity. Today she just can’t be bothered.
With a scowl on her face she steps off onto the train platform and makes her way down the stairs to the cabs. In the old days, there was a man who would gruffly direct you into the cars, she remembers. He would stand with a cigarette drooping out of the corner of his mouth and a clipboard in hand as he pointed you to a cab that smelled overpoweringly of cigarette smoke and the odor from the fake pine cardboard Christmas tree hanging from the rearview mirror. The cabs are still the same, but the man is gone. She puts the window down to breathe the fresh air as the driver heads out of the parking lot.
It hasn’t changed, she thinks, as they drive down Bridge Street, the old Italianate Victorians on the right still exactly the same. She resists a small smile as she remembers nights of drunken beer pong in one of the garages of one of those houses, many, many years ago.
They turn onto Compo, and she’s surprised at how many new houses there are, large and impressive, spilling onto the edges of their lots, their yards shielded from prying eyes by large, dense fencing. How long has it been since I was here? she thinks. A year? Two? With shock she realizes it has been almost four. She sees her mother a handful of times a year, but in the city, and usually when her mother brings someone she’s trying to impress to one of Lizzy’s supper clubs. That is her concession to their relationship, to always find room for her mother no matter how sold out the supper club may be.
Her mother does come in occasionally to spend time with Connor, but James organizes that now that Lizzy’s schedule is so busy. She has little reason to come back to Westport, as evidenced by the fact that it has been so long since she was here.
The driver turns and drives up the hill, stopping outside the house and turning to Lizzy.
“I thought this was you. You’re Lizzy Sunshine. I wasn’t sure, but I’ve driven your mom. I know the house. You home for a while?”
“I don’t know,” says Lizzy. “Hopefully not too long. Too much going on in New York, you know?”
/> “Nah. I hate New York,” he says, grinning to reveal a couple of missing teeth. “Too much for me. I like the water out here, and look at this neighborhood. Best in town.”
“Keep the change,” she says, handing him a twenty as she gets out, pausing for a minute to look at her mother’s unchanged house, smell the familiar air, as she resists the urge to be swept back to her teenage years. She is not nervous exactly, but things haven’t been good with her sisters for ages, and she isn’t sure how to feel about seeing them. The last time they were all together was for that dinner in New York when Meredith practically stormed out. They haven’t spoken since. Lizzy can forgive and forget, but she isn’t sure about Meredith. Oh, well, she thinks, opening the front door. It’s now or never.
“Hello?” She hears Nell’s voice from the kitchen, drops her bag, and heads in.
twenty-three
It doesn’t matter how many years go by, how grown-up we think we are, how much we presume we have changed or evolved, when we are back in our childhood homes, we become exactly who we have always been, thinks Meredith. I bet we will all just slip back into the roles we have always played, whether we were ever comfortable with them or not. Meredith smooths her dress, tucking her hair behind her ear, inhaling sharply as she prepares to walk up the garden path and into her mother’s house.
They are about to be back together again; the Sunshine girls. And even though they have barely spoken in years, even though they may be married, or getting married, when the three of them are together, they will always be the Sunshine girls, the three daughters of the famous movie star.
Nell is here. There’s her beat-up vintage pickup truck, the same truck she has driven for ten years, taking up the last available parking space. Meredith had to park on the street, two houses away to make sure she wasn’t blocking anyone’s driveway.
But there you see it. She’s always been the Good Girl. Careful not to, heaven forbid, park in what little was left of the driveway with the trunk of her car sticking into the road, getting in someone’s way. Meredith has always looked at people who cut lines, simultaneously hating and envying them. She wants to be the sort of person who cuts lines, rather than the person who waits patiently at the end, silently cursing those who march confidently to the front and board the plane well before her, their bags tucked comfortably in the overhead compartments as Meredith has to shove past all the people to the very back of the plane to find a space for hers, squeezing all the way back again to her seat, often on the verge of tears.
Sometimes she wants to be that selfish. But most of the time Meredith feels affronted when people break the rules, push into lines, are rude to waitstaff. She has broken up with boyfriends because they were demanding or offhand to a waiter in a restaurant. And she would do it again. It is one of the things she really likes about Derek; he is polite to everyone. Except perhaps her, but that doesn’t count. He never cuts in front of lines. He follows the rules as assiduously as she. Perhaps even more so.
Here she is, about to enter the bosom of her family, parking up the street, putting herself out so as not to disturb anyone else. She would never go inside and ask Nell to pull the car up just a little bit so she could squeeze in behind. Meredith will just find a way to make it work and say nothing, ignoring any vestiges of resentment that might be lurking inside her.
After a lifetime of this, she holds so much resentment at her sisters, particularly Lizzy, that she has been relieved not to see them for so long and is not especially eager to do so now. Lizzy once said Meredith hated her from the moment she was born, resented her for being the baby, an unwelcome addition, the child who stole her mother’s attention away. It wasn’t true. Partly true, perhaps. But it was much more the fact that Lizzy was born going to the front of the line, and has never even glanced back.
Nell wasn’t ever around much during their childhood. She remembers in the distant past, Nell sometimes being an ally to her against the storm of their mother’s moods. But she also remembers a kind of desperate sense of survival of the fittest between them. In the worst moments, they had each looked out for themselves. So Nell and she are not close now as adults either.
And the last time they were all together was the last straw, as far as Meredith is concerned. Meredith became fed up with their snide remarks about Derek. She didn’t want them to point out his deficiencies, sarcastically or otherwise, because it was rude. And because, she could at least admit to herself, then she might have to face them. And what would the point of that be? It’s not as if she can get off this path she is so clearly traveling down at great speed.
Everything is booked now for fall. Which, given that it is now early July, is only three months away. The country church in Somerset is arranged and the village hall has their deposit. Jane Packer is doing the flowers: apricots and peaches, russet reds and creams, perfect for a fall wedding. They tried a tasting menu and decided on shot glasses of creamed parsnip soup, delicate beet crisps balanced on top, and French onion soup, also in a shot glass, with a tiny bite-sized baguette covered in melted cheese. The entrée will be a choice of roasted pork with caramelized apple slices and potatoes dauphinoise or roasted salmon with a crème fraiche ratatouille of winter vegetables. For dessert, lemon curd tarts, with salted chocolate caramel truffles placed on each table. Afterward there will be trays of glasses filled with warm milk, each with a huge homemade chocolate chip cookie balanced on top. Just in case people are still hungry.
The gift registry is under way at Harrods. Not only have gifts already been bought, but they have received some. A distant aunt of Derek’s sent a set of brown china serving platters that apparently was given to her on her own wedding day; she has been waiting for a special occasion to pass them down to another member of the family.
“Because God forbid anyone should ever actually use them,” muttered Meredith on opening the box and physically recoiling at quite the ugliest platters she had ever seen.
“It’s very kind,” said Derek, unpacking them and placing them on the dresser so they could be admired publicly.
After he was asleep Meredith went back downstairs, packed them up again, and put the box in the garage.
“We can’t ruin them,” said Meredith days later when Derek remembered and asked where they were. “We need to preserve them for our own nieces and nephews . . . or children,” she added quickly, seeing his face. “And we need to ensure they are in perfect condition. They’re very delicate,” she pointed out, although they weren’t. The china was as thick as bricks.
She bought a dress, for heaven’s sake, and it is being tailored. She is supposed to be losing weight for her wedding but seems to be gaining instead. It must be the stress. Instead of taking the dress in they have been letting it out, centimeter by centimeter, every time she shows up for a fitting.
Derek’s mother—and was it Meredith’s imagination or was there some reluctance in this gesture?—handed over the pearl and diamond earrings she wore for her own wedding. The pearls were large, the diamonds small. They were quite beautiful, but Meredith felt greedy, somehow, in taking them from her when she so clearly didn’t want to give them up.
Everything is steaming ahead—the wedding, the conversations, the chatter, their future life together, the children they are going to have (even though Meredith has not changed her mind one iota about having children) and all she wants to do is escape, run away, disappear into the night.
When Derek senses her hesitation, he thinks it is because Meredith’s father moved to California years ago, and in doing so, seemed to renounce all parental responsibility. None of the girls have visited or even spoken with him much in recent years—his new wife made sure the girls knew they were unwelcome visitors in his life. Out of a sense of duty, Meredith asked if he wanted to walk her down the aisle. He explained that unfortunately he couldn’t as the date coincided with a vacation he’d been planning with his wife and daughter. She wasn’t surprised. And whil
e Meredith has been pretending that this must be the source of her sadness, it is not. Of course she is sad that her father will not be there, and sadder still that she and her sisters barely had a relationship with him once he remarried and had the dreaded Arianna, but it is not the reason she has been increasingly so depressed by the thought of her wedding that she can’t entirely hide her reluctance from Derek.
Last night, after a lovely day, a perfect day by herself, the cute man in the bookstore, the massage back at the hotel, Meredith ordered room service—a burger and fries—ate both chocolates left on her pillow, and lay on her bed afterward, perfectly content. She watched no television and read no books, although the stack was on the nightstand. But she wore a huge smile on her face. She had no idea she was smiling, and when she did realize it, and wondered why, the only thing she could think was that she was happy to be in a hotel, on lovely sheets, eating lovely food.
She couldn’t possibly admit it was because she was so relieved to be on her own.
• • •
“Meri!” Lizzy comes barreling out of the dining room, flinging her arms around Meredith, who stands rather stiffly, accepting the hug, before her arms automatically creep up and find their way around her sister’s back.
“Big sister!” croons Lizzy, rocking Meredith back and forth until Meredith has no choice but to allow herself to be squeezed, and to rock back and forth in rhythm with Lizzy, until Lizzy decides to release her. But when she does so it is only to pull her back in for another hug, and Meredith knows Lizzy is only doing this because she can tell Meredith is uncomfortable—she recognizes that impish look in her sister’s eye.
Lizzy does feel impish. And happy. Happier than she has been in months, now that she is away from James, away from Sean, away from the terrible stress and strain of keeping secrets, of leading two lives.