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Lola parked her car on the southern edge of Martha’s Vineyard in a little clearing between trees, where a boardwalk bucked down from the parking lot and down to the whipping sands below. It was a strangely windy day, drawing the winds from the Caribbean all the way up to Martha’s Vineyard and warming her cheeks and her forearms. Whatever surprise Audrey had planned, Lola was ready to welcome it with open arms— grateful for all she had and all she could build.
When Lola appeared at the bottom of the boardwalk, she found Audrey peering out across the waters, her arms outstretched so that the wind flapped at her sleeves and tore at her dark curls. From a distance, she could have been Lola herself— or Anna Sheridan from the distant past. Lola stretched out her legs to run toward her, the heels of her boots digging into the sands. Audrey screeched out just before their impact, where they turned and turned in circles, laughing like much younger girls.
My daughter. My everything.
When their hug broke, Lola stepped back, ruffled her hair, and said, “Why did you drag me all the way across the island, girl?”
“You’ll just have to see,” Audrey shot back. “You’re always so impatient, aren’t you?”
Audrey directed them westward along the beach, stringing her fingers through Lola’s and chatting about their days. Max, apparently, had a newfound love for blueberries, which made his tongue look perpetually blue. Lola laughed and described the incident of the meeting between Aunt Beatrice and Grandpa Wes.
“You’re kidding,” Audrey demanded, her eyes illuminated. “Grandpa was flirting?”
“I know. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him flirt with anyone except my mother in my entire life. But dammit, that tears me up inside. He deserves love just as much as the rest of us. Maybe more, after what Mom put him through...”
Lola and Audrey held the silence for a moment as the waves crashed across the sands. There was nothing left to say. After a moment more, Audrey lifted her finger to point at a cabin in the distance.
“That’s where we’re headed.”
Lola stopped short, eyeing a cabin that she’d never seen before in her life— a windswept place on the edge of the woods with a beautiful view of the southern Atlantic Ocean. It was a strange thing to have been raised on such a small island and not know the ins and outs of every single area.
“Is it haunted?” Lola teased.
“Probably,” Audrey shot back. “But that’s what you wanted, right?”
“You know me too well.”
When they appeared at the front steps of the cabin, the door erupted open to allow music from large speakers to swallow them whole.
“HERE COMES THE BRIDE,” bellowed out, an R&B version that Lola had never heard. On cue, Amanda jumped out of the door and started to dance as she placed a large white hat on Lola’s head. The door opened wider to reveal Susan, Christine, Charlotte, Claire— and then, in the back of the group, two surprising faces.
Jenny and Valerie, her best friends from Boston.
“Oh my God!” Lola cried, overwhelmed with emotion. She’d thought that Valerie had written her off as “boring and basically married” since she’d told her about Tommy. Jenny had been so busy with work lately that she’d hardly reached out.
One after another, Lola hugged her family members and shrieked with joy at the surprise. “You’re kidding me. This is beautiful,” she whispered at the decorations: the handmade sign that announced her party, the bubble letter balloons, the beautiful flowers from Claire’s flower shop, and the long table of desserts and champagne.
When she reached Jenny, she closed her eyes and whispered, “Thank you for coming all this way.” Jenny eased a hand across Lola’s back and muttered back, “You know we wouldn’t miss this for the world.”
Valerie seemed bleary-eyed and sharp-tongued already, the way she was when she was particularly unhappy with her life. Lola had always known to keep a wide berth from Valerie when she got in one of her moods. Susan eyed her as though she was a bomb about to go off.
“Hi, Val.” Lola hugged Valerie a bit tighter than the others, trying to translate that she cared for her deeply and also that she needed to behave. “How have you been?”
Valerie shrugged. “Not bad. Got to the island two nights ago and had a wild time with this guy in downtown Edgartown.”
Behind Valerie, Susan rolled her eyes into the back of her head. She could practically hear Susan’s inner monologue: Honey. You’re in your forties now. It’s time to grow up.
“I think I want to hear that story!” Audrey chimed in, trying to ease the divide between the Sheridans and Lola’s out-of-town friends. She passed Lola a glass of champagne and cozied up on one of the three white couches in the living room. “Come on, Valerie. The next two days are all about girl talk. Let’s dig into it.”
“Yeah!” Amanda chimed in, sitting next to Audrey. “I think all of us have boyfriends or husbands or fiancés. Tell us about your adventures.”
Valerie’s face lit up the slightest bit. She tipped the rest of her champagne flute back to sip another large gulp. Christine hustled over with a fresh bottle and topped several of the women off, her smile nervous yet endearing.
“I worked in restaurants too long not to jump when someone’s glass is empty,” Christine explained.
The rest of the Sheridan and Montgomery women gathered around Valerie as she told the story of two nights before when she’d sat at a wine bar, and a handsome stranger had approached her.
“I told myself this year that I was so done with dating,” Valerie continued as the rest of the women leaned toward her, their eyes shimmering. “I was done with Boston guys and their stupid sports and their stupid emotional baggage. It was like you had to chase after them to get a second date.”
“Ugh. Terrible,” Christine said with a sigh. “I have a feeling I dated a lot of the New York City versions of those guys.”
“Then you know what I’m talking about,” Valerie affirmed, slowly loosening up. “It’s enough to really destroy a woman’s opinion of herself. But this guy the other night in Edgartown? He just came up to me, complimented me, and asked if he could buy me a drink. It seemed so easy and so genuine. We ended up talking all night long.”
“That’s romantic!” Audrey cried.
“Valerie...” Lola breathed. “That’s an incredible story.”
“Who is this guy?” Susan asked, her voice still slightly hard-edged.
“His name is Harry,” Valerie said. “He’s not an original islander. He came here from the Midwest a few years ago and fell in love with the ocean. He works odd jobs, mostly, which is something I can relate to. Music is my passion, but it doesn’t pay the bills.”
“It’s too bad,” Lola offered. “You’re so talented, Val. I remember coming to see you all the way back in the early 2000s. You killed it with your band back then.”
“The Joan Didions,” Valerie said wistfully. “I loved that band. All-women. We got buzz around the Boston area but never really found traction, you know?”
Lola tilted her head, eyeing her sisters and her cousins alongside her dearest old friends. Her heart swelled with compassion for each of them. She was terribly grateful that they’d gathered to celebrate her love for Tommy, especially now as they tried their hardest to open their arms to Valerie.
After a brief silence, Lola lifted her champagne glass to toast the women she loved most in the world.
“I can’t really translate how strange the past couple of years of my life have been,” Lola said. “If you’d told me two years ago that I would move back to Martha’s Vineyard, rekindle my relationships with my sisters and father, work as a journalist between here and Boston, and fall in love with a handsome sailor, I’d have said you were insane. If you’d then told me that I would eventually go on to direct a musical for the thespians of Martha’s Vineyard, I would have laughed in your face.”
Audrey cackled good-naturedly, lifting her glass higher as she said, “You were a brilliant one-time director, Mom.”
Lola giggled, drawing her eyes from one woman to the next. “It’s an honor to have unique relationships with each of you. I feel so much love in this room. I can only imagine how much eating, drinking, laughing, and conversation we’ll enjoy over the next two days. Here’s to all of you!”
Together, the group sipped their champagne flutes as Audrey hopped up to dance to the next song that came out of the speakers, “Torn” by Natalie Imbruglia. The others sang out joyously, already tipsy from their first flutes of champagne and open-hearted for the night ahead.
“I’m all out of faith. This is how I feel. I’m cold and I am chained, lying naked on the floor!” they sang out, all mostly out of key but fully emotional.
As the late afternoon drifted into evening, Audrey announced the dinner plans: pizza from their favorite Edgartown pizza joint, plenty of wine, and an after-dinner “game.”
“A game?” Lola asked, arching her brow.
Audrey rubbed her palms together mischievously. “Let’s just say that Amanda and I put some real work into this one.”
The pizzas were glistening with heaps of cheese, round pepperonis, bright green peppers, and black olives, some of Lola’s favorite toppings. As she ate, Susan scrunched her nose and removed each black olive, saying, “I don’t know how we have the same genes, Lola.”
“Lola’s always had the wildest taste in food,” Jenny chimed in. “Remember when we were ridiculously poor in our twenties? What was it you always ate?”
Lola blushed and glanced down at her grease-laden plate. “I can’t believe you’d bring that up!”
“What was it, Mom?” Audrey asked. “I probably ate it, too.”
“Your mom loved peanut butter and pickle sandwiches,” Jenny continued. “We wouldn’t let her feed them to you, Audrey.”
“We wanted to spare you,” Valerie agreed, her eyes sparkling.
“Mom! Pickles and peanut butter?” Audrey cried.
“Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it.” Lola tossed her head back as laughter rolled over her.
“Wow. Our twenties couldn’t have been more different,” Susan offered, plucking another black olive from her pizza.
“What were yours like?” Jenny asked.
“Oh, gosh. My husband and I had a law firm, two children, and a mortgage. I was busy-busy-busy from the moment I woke up in the morning to the moment I collapsed in bed at night,” Susan explained.
Valerie cast Susan a dark look that only Lola caught. Probably, Valerie was judgemental of anyone who’d had sufficient funds during their twenties. To Valerie, if you weren’t “broke,” then you weren’t really “living.”
“Of course, all that crumbled when my husband had an affair with his secretary,” Susan went on with a crooked smile, one that tried and failed to hide the pain of the situation. “What a cliché.”
“That’s awful!” Jenny cried.
“It all worked out for the best,” Susan said with a shrug. “I was supposed to play live-in grandma for my son’s children, but instead, I came here and started a new life on the Vineyard. A new life that, incidentally, found space for my old high school sweetheart.”
“Awe...” Jenny sighed. “I love those kinds of stories. You found one another again.”
“We really did,” Susan said, dropping her shoulders forward. “We got married last summer. It was beyond my wildest dreams.”
Valerie suddenly turned her eyes toward Amanda. “Was that difficult for you? Watching your mother fall in love with someone who wasn’t your father?”
Amanda’s cheeks burned red at the question.
“I don’t think we need to dig into that,” Lola shot out to Valerie, giving her a dark look.
Valerie shrugged as Amanda waved a hand sheepishly.
“No, no. We’re all friends here,” Amanda began. “To tell you the truth, I’ve never seen Mom so happy. There was a stressful quality to our life in Newark.” She turned to face Susan and gave her a warm smile. “Now, you own your own law office, take your own clients, make your own hours, and create space for yourself and your needs. It’s a remarkable thing to witness.”
Susan’s eyes welled with tears. Valerie rolled her eyes back to the ground, sensing that her decision to make someone else uncomfortable had backfired.
What the heck has gotten into Valerie? Lola wondered. She seems even darker than before, as though the world has poisoned her.
When Valerie got up to refill her champagne flute, Lola followed her and cornered her in the kitchen. In the next room, Audrey turned up the speakers as she collected the plates and stacked the leftover pizza boxes. As the champagne trickled into Valerie’s glass, Valerie’s eyes lifted toward Lola’s.
“What’s up?” Valerie demanded, her shoulders hunched.
“Um.” Lola’s throat tightened. How could she ask her friend why she was acting like a huge B-word around her family? “I was just wondering if everything was okay?”
“It’s all okay,” Valerie shot back. “Why? Are you worried that I’m not married with children? Are you worried that I don’t have stocks or own property? Are you worried that I’m a washed-up musician at the age of forty with nothing to show for it?”
“Valerie. I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Lola murmured. “I love you and everything you stand for. The fact that you’re still pursuing music? It’s a beautiful thing, but it’s also not surprising. You have so much spirit. It has to go somewhere.”
Valerie rolled her eyes back and sipped her champagne as she clunked the half-full bottle back on the counter. “You have to sense that I’m disappointed in you for giving up on your life in Boston.”
“Val, come on. I fell in love with someone. Real love. It’s beyond my wildest dreams.” Lola lowered her voice as she added, “And if you can’t get on board with that...”
For a moment, Lola half-imagined she would tell Valerie to leave the cabin, to allow her and her family a night of fun and games alone. But before she could, Audrey hollered out from the living room.
“It’s time for the Newlywed Game!”
“Come on,” Valerie shot out. “Let’s go play one of these silly games.”