“I’ll call him when I take a break for lunch,” Amy repeats, and Brandi throws her hands up.
There isn’t a break, not even a minute to think or sit down. Amy’s lower back starts talking to her and she needs to pee. The flower girl is allergic to the lilies of the valley that Amy weaves into her French braid crown; the girl’s neck splotches with hives. Amy tosses the flowers and sends the girl’s mother to Dan’s Pharmacy to buy Benadryl.
She’s standing at the sinks washing the hair of a bridesmaid for the big Wauwinet hotel wedding—rumor has it, the whole do cost well over a million bucks—when her best friend at the salon, Lorna (a recent arrival from Ireland), says, “God bless you, Pigeon, I can’t believe you’re still here.”
Amy laughs. “Where else would I be?”
“You haven’t heard, then? Did JP not ring you?”
“He called, yes, but I haven’t spoken to him.” Amy makes an ill-advised quarter turn toward Lorna and accidentally sprays the bridesmaid in the face as she’s rinsing; the girl sputters. She’s very nice about it, but Amy is flustered. She doesn’t have time for gossip! “Whatever it is can wait.”
“Oh, Pigeon,” Lorna says in the maternal voice she normally reserves for her Weimaraner, Cupid. “Promise me you’ll ring him back as soon as you’re finished here. Promise me.”
“Yes, yes, I’ll try, I promise I’ll try,” Amy says. She leads the bridesmaid—her name sifted in with the Chelseas and Madisons that Amy has seen already today—to her chair. She catches Brandi watching her. Jarred, working at the next chair, glances over at her. And Amy sees Molly the manicurist staring at her through the interior glass door of the nail sanctuary. Out of the blue, a woman two chairs down who is being blown out by Toni gasps and says, “Vivian Howe? The writer?”
Amy’s good mood is about to be torpedoed right into the toilet. She doesn’t want to hear about Vivi today. Plenty of times women come in here babbling about how it was reading The Dune Daughters that inspired them to visit Nantucket in the first place.
Just yesterday, a woman asked Amy if Vivi ever came into the salon to get her hair done. Amy had nearly answered, No, she does it herself at home with clippers. Instead she said, “She used to a long time ago but she switched to Darya’s downtown.” Amy didn’t add that Vivi stopped patronizing RJ Miller the same week that Amy started working as a stylist there.
Amy knew JP was married when she’d met him ten years earlier. That was back when JP was running a wineshop called the Cork out of the cottage on Old South Wharf that now houses the Cone. Amy had been unable to find a job when she graduated from Auburn and so she’d decided to spend a summer on Nantucket, a place she had become obsessed with after watching umpteen episodes of Wings. The second Amy stepped off the ferry, she saw JP’s Help Wanted sign. She marched right into the shop and introduced herself to JP. He was tall with thick dark hair, arresting green eyes, and a dimple when he smiled. He’d asked Amy what she knew about wine and Amy winked at him and said, “You drink it, right?” JP said, “Your accent alone will sell cases. You’re hired.”
It was impossible not to work close together in the tight quarters of the wineshop. The cottage was only two hundred and fifty square feet, and much of this space was taken up with wine crates and casks and bottles artfully displayed in racks. There was a wrought-iron tower of champagne. JP sold cutting boards from Napa and French corkscrews and Caspari cocktail napkins. He bought an antique trestle table where they opened the bottles for that day’s wine tasting. Sometimes (many times) nobody showed up, so Amy and JP would drink the wines themselves and describe them with sensuous words like body and legs. They would end up buzzed and giddy, and Amy would complain about her love life. It was easy to meet guys at the Chicken Box but they were all so immature, no more sophisticated than the frat boys she’d dated at Auburn.
“I’m looking for someone more seasoned,” she said one day. “Someone like you.”
She couldn’t believe the words had popped out of her mouth. She was afraid JP would reprimand (or even fire) her, but he laughed it off. JP was married to the novelist Vivian Howe and they had three children. Amy reminded herself that these were more than just words—JP had taken a vow. He wore a ring and went home every night to Vivi, Willa, Carson, and Leo. Amy had been raised in a Southern Baptist family; she knew full well that it was a sin to covet her neighbor’s husband. Even so, her romantic feelings for JP intensified by the day. He was so handsome and funny and knowledgeable about wine, and he was generous with his time and attention. He was eager to teach Amy what he knew about terroir, the vintners, the varietals; he watched her as she tasted, was interested to know what she thought, which wines she liked, which she didn’t. Her opinion mattered to him.
As the summer wore on, they grew closer. Amy told JP when she had a quarrel with her mother over the phone or when she went on an awkward date. JP admitted to Amy that he was unhappy in his marriage. Vivi was either on deadline or traveling or signing ten thousand tip-in sheets or running or going to the farm to buy fresh mint for the iced tea she insisted on brewing herself or driving the kids to one of their seven thousand activities and playdates (and making him feel guilty because he rarely had time to pitch in) or inviting four other couples over for an evening of lobsters and rock anthems.
“Everyone else sees Superwoman,” JP said. “I see someone who will do anything to avoid having sex with me.”
One rainy day when there had been no customers, JP taught Amy to waltz, a skill left over from his finishing-school days, he told her. Amy had always been a good dancer. She took to it naturally and she could tell JP was impressed.
“Vivi has no rhythm,” he said. “And no interest in touching me.”
A couple of days before Amy was due to leave Nantucket—her job search had turned up nothing, so she was heading back to Alabama to enroll in cosmetology school at her mother’s urging—JP insisted they pop a bottle of Cristal. This was a lavish gesture, but all summer Amy had watched JP spend money in careless ways (ordering this rare vintage, that crystal decanter, none of which ever sold), so what was one more bottle of bubbly? Amy had never tasted Cristal.
One bottle led to another and then to half of a third. Amy stood in the doorway that opened onto Nantucket Harbor. The sun was low in the sky; it looked like honey dripping off a spoon. There were fewer boats in slips, and the murmur across the way at Cru was subdued. Summer was ending. The view was heartbreakingly beautiful—seagulls standing on the wooden bollards, a glimpse of Brant Point Light in the distance.
“How can I go back to Alabama?” she said.
Suddenly, JP was beside her. When Amy turned, JP cupped her face and kissed her, softly, deeply, expertly. The kiss seemed to contain an entire summer of flirting, discovery, barely sublimated sexual energy. Amy thought of the kiss as a sweet goodbye to a relationship that could never be. She wanted to thank him; in many ways, JP had been her finishing school.
When they finally pulled apart, JP said, his voice husky, “I want you to stay here. With me.”
It wasn’t just lip service, and apparently it wasn’t the Cristal talking either. JP was serious. He wanted Amy to stay on Nantucket; he wanted to be with her. The very next day, JP told Vivi that he had fallen for Amy Van Pelt, his employee.