“Which sounds to me like a secret. Spill it.”
Daisy laughed, but the sound was more like a cough than a laugh and she again looked away. “I was just thinking that you might have noticed things were changing at Dani’s memorial.”
“Why would you say that?”
“Because Tom was so drunk and . . . distant at the event. And he flirted with everyone there like he was still in college and . . .”
Beatrice saw it in her mind’s eye: a flash of the memorial at Dani’s parents’ house after the funeral. It had been a gathering of hundreds of people who had loved their fragile oystercatcher. She tried to remember Tom being there. After a heartbeat or two she recalled him in the far corner of the crowded living room talking to Daisy, his head bent low.
“Holy shit.” Beatrice took a step toward Daisy. “He hit on you.”
Daisy looked up, her face flaming. “Yes.”
Victoria and Rose caught their breath in a quick inhale, and Beatrice drew closer. “You never told me.”
“No. Because he was drunk, and I didn’t think it was a big deal, and I told him to get lost and—”
The other two women made guttural noises and Rose shot up from the couch. “By hit on, what exactly do you mean?”
“He kissed me.” Daisy cringed. “Or tried to anyway. And I pushed him away and told him to f off. Except I said the word.” Again she tried to laugh and again nothing came out.
Beatrice felt outrage—not at Daisy but at Tom—pulsing through her body. “I hate to repeat myself—but you never told me?”
“There was no reason to tell you,” said Daisy. “Things seemed fine and you were happy, and he was drunk.”
“But see? That’s the thing!” Beatrice clapped her hands together. “We weren’t fine. And I wasn’t happy. And he was about to leave me. Maybe if someone had told me, maybe it wouldn’t have been such a shock.”
“Yes, it would have been.” Rose walked to Beatrice. “It would have been a shock whether Daisy told you about his drunken attempted kiss or not.”
Victoria fluffed her bluebird caftan and spread out on the couch. “I think we might have nailed it here, Beatrice. I think you’re scared of being blindsided. But if you’ve kept your eyes open with Lachlan, you won’t be blindsided. There are never guarantees; sometimes you have to take a chance, but you kept your eyes shut with Tom, or at least you looked away. You didn’t want to know.”
Beatrice let that idea sink in. Maybe Victoria was right. “But I still don’t understand the logic behind this. The fear is illogical. It grabs me exactly when I want to say yes. It sends my mind to static. But when I’m not with Lachlan, or think I’ve lost us, I miss him so badly I feel almost ill.”
Rose made a small noise in the back of her throat. “I know that feeling.”
“Even all these years later, you miss Chip like that?” Victoria asked.
Rose whirled her wine in her glass. “I don’t know if that’s it. It’s more like . . . fear. Like if I’m not with him, it will all fall apart.”
“Well, that’s screwed up,” Victoria said with a laugh. “Like you have to be there to keep it together?”
“Sort of . . . I don’t know.” Rose sat back. “This isn’t about me. This is about Beatrice.”
Daisy stood up and joined Beatrice at the window. “If you want my opinion. Which might not be worth a damn. I think that it’s Sam, Jonah, and Annie’s fault that we’re all screwed up.” She paused. “You know, Sleepless in Seattle.”
“We know,” the women chimed in unison.
Rose held up her hand. “Whoa! I’m not one bit screwed up.”
The other three women laughed.
“What? You think I’m screwed up?” Rose pouted.
“We all are. Don’t worry,” Daisy said. “It’s not just movies like You’ve Got Mail. And My Fair Lady and the movie with the guy playing the radio outside her window. It’s Cinderella and it’s Snow White. It’s all the stories that show us that the man will save us and then life is grand, for good and all. Not one of those stories—not a one—showed what happens after Richard Gere marries Julia Roberts. Not one clued us in about what happens when the kids get the flu and the money is low and the husband asks the wife not to pursue her dreams or the best friend’s husband tries to kiss you or the husband dies and leaves unpaid bills. Did they show us that? Oh, hell, no.”
Her words seemed to have come in one long breath, in a single sentence, and the other women just stared at their quiet starling until she rubbed at her face. “Sorry ’bout that.”
“Don’t be sorry,” Rose said. “It’s true. Let’s add Jerry McGuire where Tom Cruise says ‘You complete me.’ It goes on and on. Every Hallmark movie. Every romance novel. Life is so much different than that; it was always meant to be different than the stories and books, but we got confused. We thought our love stories were supposed to be just like the fairy tale.”
Rose nodded. “As a creative writing major, every story I told was a love story. Everything . . . is a love story. It just depends how we want to tell it. I still believe that.”
“Or we want to believe it,” Victoria said.
“Whoa.” Beatrice lifted her hands. “Can we back up about ten sentences? What do you mean the husband who didn’t pay the bills?”
“Forget it.” Daisy waved her hand and wine sloshed over the edges of the glass and onto Red’s pine floors; she didn’t notice.
“Oh, hell no,” said Victoria. “We will not forget it. What . . .” and she paused, looked at each of the best friends as if they were huddled at two in the morning in the living room of their decrepit house at college, the ragged furniture covered in shared clothes and CDs and schoolbooks. “What happened?”
Daisy exhaled and slumped in on herself, her head bowed before she looked up and told them the truth. “It’s been five years. I’ve paid them off. But yes, he left loads of debt. I went back to work teaching, and the girls went to in-state colleges and we’ve dug our way out. But I just meant . . . the happily ever after is rarely ever after. It’s happy for the moment. Then life. Then some more happiness and then . . . you know . . . life. But that doesn’t mean it was a bad marriage or I didn’t love him. It’s just never a storybook.”
“Yes.” Beatrice looked up to see that twilight had turned to dark; night had fallen on their conversation. Nature’s sounds had changed from birdsong to frogs; the hum of boats rushing by had turned to the slap of water against the dock and the tinkle of oyster shells disturbed by the tide.
Beatrice looked to each woman. “I am so glad you’re all here. I don’t mean for this to turn into a love inquest. I just want to understand why I resisted Lachlan for so long. I mean, that has had serious consequences, and I don’t get it. You three know me better than anyone in the world. Sometimes it takes someone else to show us who we are.”
4
The Moon
The moon spread a wide swath of light across the water, a pathway so vivid it looked as if they could walk across it, find themselves on the far side of the earth on moonlight. Dinner of tomato soup and Beatrice’s toasted homemade sourdough bread was over, and they’d made their way outside to the beach. A pale slip of sand was sandwiched between the wild grasses and the estuary’s waves. The gray-brown sand of the Lowcountry with its rough feel beneath their bare feet was as familiar and comforting as their best memory. Victoria spread a striped blanket and they sat; the four of them sat side by side in silence as a sweet acrid smell floated by on a breeze, an aroma coming from the shack where Red resided.