Winter Solstice Read online

  “We won’t,” Potter says.

  “… but we can aspire to be civil. To be friendly, even. It’ll make things better for PJ. Don’t you want to make things better for PJ?”

  “Yes,” Potter says. “Of course I do.”

  Ava lets her head fall onto Potter’s shoulder. “Tomorrow we’ll look for your plane ticket.”

  KELLEY

  Lara downloads Danielle Steel’s Dangerous Games for Kelley because he can no longer see the screen of his phone well enough to download books himself.

  “I understand this is her best one yet,” Lara says. “A political thriller.”

  Kelley feels a pulse of excitement, but it’s fleeting. He won’t be able to follow the twists and turns of a political thriller; the main appeal now is the comforting sound of the narrator’s voice.

  Kelley says, “Did you see my wife last night on TV?”

  “Your wife?” Lara says. “Mitzi?”

  “Margaret,” Kelley says. “Margaret Quinn, my wife.”

  Lara offers Kelley a sip of ice water. “Mitzi is your wife,” she says. “Margaret Quinn is a TV news anchor. And yes, I did see her. She was wonderful, as always. She has such elegance, such grace.”

  “She’s my wife,” Kelley says. “No, wait, that’s not right. She’s my ex-wife. Margaret was my wife before Mitzi.”

  “That’s very nice,” Lara says. She places the earbuds in Kelley’s ears and starts the book. It’s the same narrator as The Mistress—Alexander Cendese—and the effect is immediate. Kelley relaxes. His eyes fall closed.

  He has a hard time discerning between what’s reality and what’s a dream. He has dreams that are actual memories, or nearly. He dreams about the first time he came to Nantucket. It had been Margaret’s idea. When Margaret was eight years old, she spent the summer with her wealthy grandmother, Josephine Brach, in one of the summer mansions on Baxter Lane in Sconset. She had wanted to re-create that summer for their children—Patrick was eight, Kevin seven, Ava just a baby and nursing.

  Kelley had said, “I hate to tell you this, Maggie, but we can’t afford any of the houses on Baxter Lane.” Instead they had rented an upside-down house facing Nobadeer Beach, but the waves at Nobadeer scared the kids, so they had to drive each day to Steps Beach, so named because it featured a flight of forty-one steps down to the dunes covered with Rosa rugosa. It was picturesque but also quite a haul with two kids, a baby, and the amount of paraphernalia that those kids and baby required. The next summer they realized they could buy a beach sticker for a hundred dollars and drive the kids and all the gear right onto the beach at Fortieth Pole. That year they rented a cottage on Madaket Road that had a smell, and the summer after that they rented a soulless time-share condo until they found a house on Quince Street that Margaret really loved.

  Kelley has lived at the inn for twenty-two years. The man who stayed in those other houses feels like someone else entirely.

  There used to be a restaurant called the Second Story that he loved, but Margaret found the food too spicy. There was a place called the India House, where Kelley took Margaret? No, Mitzi—he took Mitzi to the India House every Saturday night of her final trimester with Bart because she had an insatiable craving for their Indonesian peanut noodles with duck. The Second Story is now Oran Mor, although Kelley hasn’t been in there since two owners ago—and the India House is just gone.

  Mitzi is at Kelley’s bedside. Her hair is piled on top of her head.

  She says, “I’m putting the inn on the market, Kelley. I’m going to sell it.”

  Kelley nods. It’s the right thing to do.

  “I told Eddie Pancik I wanted to sell it only to someone who would keep it an inn,” Mitzi says. “I couldn’t stand to think of some millionaire knocking down walls to create master suites. But I’ve come around on that now. If we’re going to sell it, we sell it and wash our hands of it and let the new owner create memories of his own here.”

  Kelley thinks, People will walk by the house and think, ‘I remember when this was an inn. They had a party every Christmas Eve. It was the best party of the year. Kelley Quinn, the owner, used to saber the top off a bottle of champagne. Santa Claus came to that party driving a 1931 Model A fire engine.

  Mitzi is holding Kelley’s hand, and he applies pressure. He wants her to know he thinks she’s doing the right thing. Whatever happens next with this house won’t affect or diminish what they have had here.

  They have had so much.

  Bart comes in the middle of the night and sits by Kelley’s bed. Maybe it’s not the middle of the night. Maybe it’s late afternoon or early evening. It’s November, and the sun sets at four o’clock. It feels late, though. The rest of the house is quiet. Mitzi often falls asleep on the sofa in the living room in front of the fire, and Kelley can’t blame her. Jocelyn is the night hospice nurse. Very little gets past Jocelyn, so she must have given Bart the okay to come in.

  “Dad,” Bart says. “I think I’m in love.”

  In love. Kelley has lived nearly all of his adult life in love—first with Margaret and then with Mitzi. He has been very lucky in that respect.

  Kelley feels like he already knew this about Bart. “The ghee. The ghee.”

  “The geisha from the party,” Bart says. “Yes. Allegra Pancik. I’ve been seeing her for a couple of weeks. We went to New York together. She’s… well, she’s the best thing that’s happened to me… I don’t know, recently? Or ever, maybe? She’s lots of fun and she’s a good listener. She’s patient. She gets me, I think. You know, when I was growing up, I thought the most important thing about my future wife would be how she looked. But it turns out, that’s the least important thing. I mean, Allegra is really pretty, don’t get me wrong, but that doesn’t matter. I like talking to her, I like the sound of her voice; it calms me. I like surprising her, making her happy, seeing her smile when I walk through the door. I like it that she sings off-key and is a rabid Patriots fan, the kind where she screams at the TV. I like that she has insecurities and sees things in herself that she wants to improve. She knows she’s not perfect, just like I know that I’m not perfect.”

  “You’re perfect,” Kelley says, though his words are unintelligible.

  “You’re going to meet her on Thursday,” Bart says. “She’s coming for Thanksgiving.”

  Kelley thinks, Thursday is Thanksgiving?

  He reaches out for Bart’s hand and tries to squeeze. This is torture! Kelley is here, he’s listening, he’s present, he has things to say, blessings to bestow, but he isn’t having any luck communicating. Or maybe he is. He can’t tell.

  Bart seems to understand. “I love you, too, Dad,” he says.

  As Bart stands to leave the room, Kelley thinks eagerly about Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving means Mitzi’s corn pudding and her fiesta cranberry sauce. He will have a bite of each, he thinks, and he drifts off to sleep.

  EDDIE

  The Christys are caught in a stalemate. Raja wants to make an offer on the Medouie Creek Road house in Wauwinet—and Masha wants the inn. Eddie checks in with Raja once a week to see if there has been any movement one way or the other.

  “No,” Raja says. “She’s not backing down.”

  “Well, neither are you,” Eddie says. “Right?”

  “Right,” Raja says. “I tell Masha again and again: We know nothing about the hospitality business. And I don’t want to know anything about it. The point of buying a second home is having a sanctuary. A place to relax. But Masha is dead set on it. She’s like Jack with his squeaky giraffe. You can’t get that giraffe away from him when he’s in a certain frame of mind.”

  Eddie has long joked that the two most useful backgrounds for a real estate broker are psychology and elementary education. Eddie has basically taken on the role of Raja’s therapist. He would like to see Raja get his way—and not only because Eddie’s commission will be bigger. Eddie wants Raja to win on behalf of all the henpecked husbands in the world. He realizes that the only reason Masha hasn�
�t steamrolled Raja is because the inn isn’t technically on the market yet.

  But Mitzi has asked Eddie to put it on right after Thanksgiving. She says it will be ready to show—all but the master suite, where Kelley is living—on Christmas Stroll weekend.

  The situation with the Christys is so confounding that Eddie is relieved things on his own home front are, for the most part, cheerful. Allegra is exclusively dating Bart Quinn now, and the relationship has completely transformed her. She is always in a good mood, always sweet and solicitous. She offers to help with the laundry and keep the cottage neat and tidy. She smiles, she hums to herself, she sings off-key in the shower.

  Eddie says, “It’s like she’s had a personality transplant.”

  Grace says, “She’s in love.”

  Grace has also been in a good mood recently. Eddie told her he saw her biking when he was driving the Christys out to Wauwinet, and she said, “Yes, that was me. I’ve been either biking or walking every day. Trying to lose these last ten pounds.”

  Eddie says, “Well, I think you look great.” And she does! Her skin has a healthy glow; she’s trim and fit, and it seems like she’s been sleeping better at night. She also went to RJ Miller and had the gray taken out of her part. Eddie didn’t notice this per se, but he did see the charge come in on the credit card—two hundred sixty dollars!—and when he asked Grace what it was for, she pointed to her hair and said, “Isn’t it obvious?” And Eddie was so chagrined he hadn’t noticed that he decided not to give her any grief about the expense.

  Grace stays even-keeled when Allegra announces that she’s eating Thanksgiving at the Winter Street Inn with the Quinns, and she even remains sanguine when Hope calls from Bucknell to say that she isn’t coming home for Thanksgiving either. Instead she’s going to one of her pledge sisters’ houses in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, because it’s closer to school and Hope needs to get back to campus Saturday; her jazz ensemble has been invited to play at a local coffeehouse.

  “Wait a minute,” Eddie says. “Neither of them will be home?”

  “They’re growing up,” Grace says.

  “What are we going to do?” Eddie asks. “Eat by ourselves?” The idea seems small and sad, especially considering they don’t have a proper dining room. When Eddie considers how little space they have, he thinks it’s no wonder the girls want to celebrate elsewhere. Eddie needs to sell the Christys a house, take his commission, and buy his family a decent-size place to live.

  Grace shrugs. “We can either eat with Glenn and Barbie—”

  “They’re going to Napa,” Eddie says, but even if they were staying on Nantucket, Eddie wouldn’t want to eat with them. He has to see them every day at the office. He could use a break.

  “Okay, then, we’ll go out,” Grace says. “I’ll make a reservation at American Seasons.”

  “American Seasons?” Eddie says. It’s a romantic restaurant and the food is dynamite, but… it’s not cheap.

  “Yes,” Grace says, leaving no further room for discussion.

  It’s only that night as Eddie is trying to fall asleep instead of obsessing about money ($260 for a haircut and color, Thanksgiving dinner at American Seasons, which will necessarily include champagne and nice wine, and Hope’s second-semester bill at Bucknell), the Christys, the Winter Street Inn, the ways his life would be easier if he could manage to sell the Wauwinet house to the Christys and the inn to someone else, that Eddie wonders about Grace’s new exercise routine and her newly colored hair and, most puzzlingly, her easy acceptance of the news that neither twin will be home for Thanksgiving, historically the most sacred of Pancik family holidays.

  It’s almost like she doesn’t care, he thinks. Like her mind is somewhere else.

  On Thanksgiving morning Grace announces that she’s going to walk to Children’s Beach to watch the Turkey Plunge. The Turkey Plunge is where hundreds of crazy people race into the water to benefit the public library, known as the Nantucket Atheneum. Grace and Eddie have never attended the Turkey Plunge, because when they lived in Wauwinet, it was simply too far out of the way; it started early and the girls wanted to sleep in. Grace always used to cook an elaborate meal—not just turkey, stuffing, and mashed potatoes, but also a crab cake appetizer, caramelized Brussels sprouts, Parker House rolls from scratch, and, instead of pie, a gingerbread and poached pear trifle, served in her grandmother Harper’s etched-crystal trifle dish. Madeline, Trevor, and Brick Llewellyn used to join them, as well as Barbie, back when Barbie was single. Eddie carved the turkey and broke out his best vintages of zinfandel, which is the only wine that pairs acceptably with turkey, in his opinion. Between dinner and dessert, Eddie and Trevor used to smoke Cuban cigars out in Grace’s garden.

  Eddie’s heart aches for his old life.

  Now that they live in town, they can stroll over to Children’s Beach in a matter of minutes, so why wouldn’t they go? It makes perfect sense, Eddie tells himself.

  At the plunge he sees people he knows, of course. There are land mines—Eloise Coffin is present with her doltish husband, Clarence, and Eddie steers clear of them, pulling Grace along by the hand. He isn’t sure how Grace managed in the aftermath of his indictment. How did she survive both the news of her affair with Benton Coe and a husband convicted of running a prostitution ring? How did she hold her head up?

  Eddie sees Addison and Phoebe Wheeler talking to Chief Kapenash. The chief waves, and Eddie thinks about joining them for a chat, even though he doesn’t much care for Addison.

  Grace says, “We can just stand here and be observers, Eddie. This isn’t a networking thing.”

  “Oh, I know,” Eddie says. He lets Grace lead him over to a tree where they have a good view of people lining up, preparing to charge the water. Eddie sees Rachel McMann dressed in a black tank suit and a bathing cap decorated to look like a Pilgrim hat. Of course. He sees Blond Sharon and Jean Burton and Susan Prendergast and Monica Delray and Jody Rouisse, Grace’s former garden club cronies. Does Grace still talk to them? he wonders. He should ask her. Whom is she friends with now? Whom does she confide in?

  The whistle blows. The swimmers race into the water, shrieking and laughing.

  “That looks like fun,” Grace says. “Maybe we should do it next year.”

  Eddie would rather eat glass. “Maybe,” he says.

  After the plungers have dried off and are enjoying hot cider and doughnuts, Eddie sees a man heading toward them. He’s wearing a black Speedo, the kind that competitive swimmers wear, and has a towel hanging off his shoulders like a cape. Because he’s dripping wet and more than half naked, it takes Eddie a moment to realize it’s Benton Coe.

  “Eddie,” Benton says. He offers Eddie a hand, which Eddie shakes as firmly as he can. “Grace.” He bends over to kiss Grace on the cheek.

  “How was it?” Grace asks. “Cold?”

  Eddie doesn’t bother listening to Benton’s response; he doesn’t care if it was cold or not. All Eddie cares about is Grace’s tone of voice and her facial expression. She sounds calm, normal. At first Eddie feels gratified by this; Benton’s presence doesn’t seem to fluster Grace one bit. But then Eddie realizes that the only way Grace could nonchalantly converse with the man she had a red-hot affair with, who has returned to the island after an absence of two and a half years, is if…

  Grace has seen Benton before, Eddie thinks. She has talked to him before.

  “It wasn’t as bad as I thought,” Benton says. He wraps the towel around his waist, shielding his lower half, thank God, but giving both Grace and Eddie a wonderful view of his broad shoulders and rippling abdominal muscles. “So anyway, how are you guys? Happy Thanksgiving.”

  JENNIFER

  Usually, Jennifer loves Thanksgiving at the Winter Street Inn. For starters, Nantucket is easy to get to. Last year was their year to be with Jennifer’s mother in San Francisco, which involved cross-country flights and, by obvious necessity, also involved Jennifer’s mother, Beverly, who is trying on her best day. Secondly, the i
nn is cozy and Nantucket is both festive and charming at the holidays. Mitzi is an uneven cook, but she does a pretty good job with this meal and she isn’t afraid to delegate. Jennifer has been assigned two salads.

  But Jennifer can’t think about the salads, or about Thanksgiving at all, until she gives Danko an answer about Real-Life Rehab. She promised him an answer by Friday the seventeenth. When Jennifer asks for an extension, he gives her through the weekend, but he says he needs an answer by end of business on Monday or the network will hire their second choice.

  Jennifer has told no one about the offer or about the fact that she has lost the penthouse project. She did pick up one small job designing and decorating side-by-side nurseries for a fantastically wealthy couple in Back Bay named the Printers, who just found out they’re pregnant with boy-girl twins after twelve years of in vitro. When Jennifer goes to meet with Paige Printer for the first time, she brings along her file of playroom ideas, and Paige loves them so much that Jennifer scores herself a third room to decorate in the Printer home.

  The Printer project will take only sixty or seventy hours, sum total, to order for and install. It’s a snack, not a meal, but at least when Jennifer tells Patrick that she’s “off to work,” she’s not lying.

  She needs to talk to Patrick! But she wants to think the decision through herself first, and giving real consideration to all the factors involved takes time. She bounces back and forth between Yes, I’ll do the show and No, I won’t with the regularity of a championship tennis rally.