Love Anthony (6 page)

“Oh, Beth,” says Georgia after reading the card and passing it along to Courtney. “This is from the hostess at Salt? Who is she?”

“Angela Melo,” says Beth.

“I don’t know her,” says Jill, skeptical of there being anyone on Nantucket whom she doesn’t know.

“She’s only been here a couple of years. She’s from Brazil. Came over with her sister as summer help,” says Petra. “They applied for jobs at Dish, but I couldn’t use them.”

“I don’t know her either,” says Courtney. “How long has this been going on?”

“Since July,” says Beth.

“Oh my God, Beth,” says Jill.

“I know,” says Beth.

She takes a big gulp of vodka from her wineglass. It’s warm, it doesn’t have enough cranberry juice, and it scorches the back of her throat. The sake would’ve been better. Talking about the book would’ve been better. She tips down another big gulp.

“I told you not to let him work at Salt,” says Georgia. “That place is too sexy. The music, those martinis. Even I want to have sex with someone after I’ve spent an hour in that place.”

Jimmy used to scallop from October to March and bartend a few shifts here and there over the summers when scalloping is prohibited. But he never actually needed to bartend. Nantucket scallopers used to make great money. He bartended mostly to stay busy, not because he had to. Jimmy made a proud and reliable living over the years, and Beth enjoyed having him around for summer vacations with the kids.

But the scallops started disappearing from the harbor a few years ago. Then, in a frighteningly short amount of time, they were essentially gone, and Jimmy was essentially out of a job. He blames the McMansion owners with their lush, green carpet lawns laced with fertilizers that leach into the harbor,
poisoning the aquatic infrastructure, killing the scallops and God knows what else.

He continued to bartend part-time in the summer, but he had no work in the winter, and for a while they had a hard time paying their bills. Jimmy moped around the house, frustrated and in denial, still hoping for the scallops to make an unlikely comeback. Then, a little over two years ago, Salt asked him to work there full-time, year-round. Year-round work of any kind is a rare and precious gem on Nantucket, and they desperately needed the money, so Jimmy the scalloper became a bartender at Salt.

“How long have you known?” asks Georgia.

“About a month,” says Beth.

The longest month of her life. She’s seen Jimmy three times since he’d moved out, all unannounced visits. He came by once in the morning, after the girls were already in school but before she’d had a chance to shower, to retrieve a pair of work shoes. The other two times, he came over in the evening. He milled around in the kitchen, talked to the girls, never sat down, asked if he had any phone messages. He never has any phone messages.

Each time he showed up, her heart lifted, hoping, almost assuming that he was there to tell her that he was sorry, that he’d been crazy, that he didn’t want to live without her and the girls, that he wanted to come home. But he never said any of this, so her heart felt stupid and betrayed all over again. She faked indifference toward him, acting nonchalant as she peeled potatoes at the sink while he chatted with Jessica, pretending to be absorbed in a book while he bumped around the house searching for his shoes (not a chance in hell that she was going to fetch them for him, and she knew exactly where they were).

Whenever she’s home now, she finds herself glancing out the windows, listening for noise in the driveway, straining her vision and her hearing, holding her breath, even checking herself out in the mirrors, making sure she looks okay, just in case.
She hates not knowing when he’s going to show up next. Even more, she hates that he assumes he can simply walk through the front door whenever he wants, day or night. What if she’s busy? What if it’s not a good time? What if she starts having an affair, too? He can’t just waltz in anymore. He moved out. She hates him for moving out. But what undoes her the most, when she allows an unguarded and honest moment to settle over her while she’s peeling potatoes or looking out the window, is the thought that at some point he might never walk through the front door again.

“Do you know her?” asks Jill.

“No,” says Beth.

“You haven’t been to Salt yet to check her out?” asks Georgia.

“God no!” says Beth.

“I’d be dying to know who she is. You don’t want to be in line with her at the bank and not know it. We should all go together and give her the evil eye. Petra, you and your witch doctor should put some kind of curse on her,” says Georgia.

They all laugh, including Beth, despite her self-conscious misery. She imagines a cloth voodoo doll dressed in a miniature, black Salt T-shirt with sewing pins stuck in its eyes. She can feel the vodka now, warm in her stomach, buzzing in her head. Normally, she’d say she’d had enough. She doesn’t want to feel wrecked in the morning. But she hasn’t been sleeping well, and she feels wrecked most mornings anyway, so what the hell. And Petra’s driving her home. She refills her wineglass with vodka.

“I don’t know if I could. Maybe.”

“Have you guys gone to counseling?” asks Courtney.

“No.”

“Maybe you should go,” says Georgia. “Phil and I used Dr. Campbell. He was good. Well, not that good, I guess, he didn’t fix us. But we were beyond fixing.”

Phil was Georgia’s second husband, the one she loved the most. She’s been married four times. Her friends will say that
she’s “in between husbands” now, but Georgia insists she’s “divorced.” End of story. She keeps a Post-it note under a refrigerator magnet at eye level:
DO NOT GET MARRIED EVER AGAIN.
But they all know that she will. She can’t help it. She’s a hopeless romantic.

As the wedding coordinator for the Blue Oyster, twice a week for at least twelve weeks a year she’s surrounded by brides looking like Disney princesses in Vera Wang, grooms looking like James Bond in Armani, “Ave Maria” playing on the harp (sung or played at all four of her own ceremonies), weddings that are stunningly perfect down to the most microscopic detail. Every week each summer, she gushes about the most beautiful wedding cake she’s ever seen, the most elegant bridal bouquet ever carried down the aisle, the most moving toast she’s ever heard, as sincere, wide-eyed, and excited as she was for her very first bride and groom. Those weddings never get old hat to her. For Georgia, each wedding has its own real magic, a belief in true love and destiny and God that permeates her soul. Then she transfers all of that over-the-top fairy-tale romance onto whatever unsuspecting guy she’s dating. Next thing they know, the Post-it note is gone from her fridge, and she’s got another new last name.

“I don’t know if he’d even want to,” says Beth.

“Do
you
want to go to counseling?” asks Petra.

“I don’t know.”

“Do you want a divorce?” asks Courtney.

“I don’t know.”

Beth doesn’t know what she wants. She wants this to be a regular book club night. She wants to drink sake and talk about Japan. She doesn’t want it to be the Thursday night that everything officially and publicly changed. Her marriage, her picture-perfect life as wife and mother of three on Nantucket, is gone now. Her marriage is broken.

I’m broken,
she thinks.

Tears spring from her eyes and roll down her face. Georgia
scooches her chair over toward Beth and puts her arm around her.

“I can’t believe this is happening,” says Beth, embarrassed to be crying in front of everyone, to have a cheating husband in front of everyone.

“You’re going to be okay,” says Georgia, rubbing circles with her hand on Beth’s back.

“I’d divorce the bastard,” says Jill.

“Jill!” scolds Petra.

“Well, he is, and I would,” says Jill, looking to Georgia for support.

“You know I’d get rid of him. Already been there and done that. But I was probably too quick to end things, especially with Phil. It’s something I should work on,
if
I were getting married ever again, which I’m not.” Georgia lifts her wineglass in a gesture of cheers and drinks the rest of her vodka in a toast to her own proclamation.

“You have to figure out what you want,” says Petra. “You and Jimmy can recover from this if you both want to. Or this is the way out. But you should decide what
you
want. Don’t let him or anyone else decide for you.”

Petra’s right. She’s always right. But Beth’s head is swimming in vodka, and the only thing she can think of that she wants right now is for Georgia to keep rubbing her back.

“And we love you, no matter what you decide,” says Petra.

Georgia squeezes Beth’s shoulders, and everyone nods, everyone except for Courtney, who looks lost in thought, her eyebrows knotted. Beth feels drunk and embarrassed, broken and uncertain, but suddenly, surprisingly grateful.

“I love you, too,” says Beth, smiling through tears, because even if Jimmy doesn’t love her anymore, she feels lucky to have a handful of girlfriends who will love her no matter what.

CHAPTER 6

M
ourning doves whistle back and forth in plaintive conversation while sunlight eases its way into Olivia’s bedroom through the unshaded windows, bathing her in a soft and gentle glow. This is generally how she begins each day now, in synchrony with the birds and the sun. And if it’s a cloudy or stormy morning and the doves aren’t feeling chatty, she sleeps and sleeps, probably until at least noon. Maybe much later. She doesn’t know. She’s lost all track of real time. The power went out for a day last month, the first of too many times to count now, and she never bothered to reset any of the clocks. She also stopped wearing a watch. This hasn’t been a problem as she has nowhere that she needs to be. She’s existing outside of time.

She looks over at the other side of the bed, the comforter and the pillow unbothered, and remembers all over again that David isn’t here. He’s in Hingham. She’s on Nantucket. Separated. She still sleeps curled on her side with one arm hugging the edge of the mattress, leaving room for him. She shimmies over to the middle of the bed and lies flat on her back, arms and legs spread wide, taking up as much space as possible. It feels strange.

She stretches and yawns, in no hurry to leave her bed, enjoying the extravagance of emerging slowly from a full night’s sleep. It seems like only yesterday that she woke too early every morning to David’s alarm clock or to Anthony’s
eeya-eeya-eeya,
shocked into consciousness, still exhausted. More than exhausted. Eroded. A little more of her missing each day. Those mornings were just yesterday, and yet they were a million years ago. Time’s a funny thing, bending, warping, stretching, and compressing, all depending on perspective.

It’s April, but she only knows this because the letter she received from her lawyer the other day was dated April fourteenth. Without that letter, she would’ve guessed that it was still March, still winter given how cold it’s been and how nothing has changed.

The springs she spent in the Boston area were unrecognizable compared to the lush, warm, green springs in Athens, Georgia, where she grew up. Spring in Boston is just another word for winter, the second half. Right about when the magnolia trees are blooming in Athens, it snows in Hingham. And not just a dusting. Snowfall in March in Hingham is school-canceling, street-plowing, where-are-we-going-to-put-it-all snow. Olivia made no secret of her hatred for March snow, but she had to admit, the white at least brightened up the barren, grim, preblossom landscape.

It doesn’t snow on Nantucket the way it does near Boston. Surrounded by ocean, the air is usually too wet to support the structure of a delicate flake, and it rains instead. A couple of times here, she noticed the ground was slushy, but she never saw any actual snowfall this year and hasn’t had to shovel once. She’s not sure she even owns a real snow shovel here. The only shovel she can think of is in the backseat of her Jeep, kept there to dig herself out of sand, not snow, if (when) the Jeep gets stuck.

But even though it doesn’t snow here like it does on the
mainland, it still doesn’t feel like spring. Even on sunny days, the cold is unrelenting. And somehow everything seems tinged gray, the way the world looks through sunglasses. It’s been the same cold and gray winter day for months. Time feels literally frozen here.

According to the letter from her attorney, her divorce proceedings are frozen as well. The agreement is uncontested and no-fault, their divorce being one of the few things she and David haven’t fought over in a long time. She’s read through the entire document three times now. She likes to linger on the words
no-fault,
typed in black and white right there on the official, legal page, as if the state of Massachusetts is acknowledging them personally, exonerating them both of any blame. The failure of their marriage wasn’t really his fault or hers.

Within a few breaths of the word
autism,
Anthony’s pediatric neurologist actually asked them,
How’s your marriage?
Olivia remembers bristling, thinking,
What business is that of yours?
And,
We’re talking about Anthony here, not me and David
. But the neurologist knew their future. He’d seen it too many times before, the comorbidity of autism and divorce.