The Art of Saying Goodbye - Ellyn Bache [2]
In the third house on Dogwood Terrace, Julianne Havelock paces back and forth in her kitchen for such a long time that her seventeen-year-old son, Toby—the only one of her three sons who still lives at home—turns off the TV and comes in to ask if she’s all right.
“I’m fine. Just upset,” she says, though she hasn’t been fine for days. More than anyone, Julianne knows what’s going on. She knew how things would turn out even while Paisley and Mason were waiting for the definitive word. She knew from the beginning. And this . . . this foreknowledge . . . is eerie. She might as well be a palm reader or a gypsy with a crystal ball. Moving into the front hallway, she squints out the window toward her maple tree with its bow. She doesn’t see it. She is like everyone else. It is not invisible just because of the fog.
As they put up the bows today, Julianne thinks, everyone in Brightwood Trace must have acted by rote. None of them could possibly have thought about what they were doing. The situation is, in the most literal sense, unthinkable. They are in shock. At the beginning of this unknowable journey, they sense—especially Julianne, Andrea, Ginger, and Iona—that this is happening not just to Paisley, but to them all.
Chapter 2
Ten Years Earlier
They were drunk. Some of them really, truly drunk for the first time in years. Sitting around the hot tub in Paisley’s backyard on Dogwood Terrace, they marveled at the way everything looked soft edged and wobbly in the twilight, like something seen through beveled glass. They marveled at the way their skin tingled as if it were being massaged from within. Why didn’t they drink more often?
It was the dead-hot end of summer, everyone back from vacation, the weather relentlessly sunny. The children in the neighborhood were restless. The mothers, too. The march of long, oppressive days before preschool began again spread out before the young women of Brightwood Trace like a trek along the Great Wall of China. Much as they all loved their children, devoted as they were to their husbands, right then their good fortune felt like a constricting band of silk, binding them into such a narrow routine that they could hardly breathe. For the past week Ginger had dreamed every night about flying the coop, hitting the road, riding off, solo, into the sunset. What did that say about a person, when she could think only in clichés? Andrea had imagined herself walking down a runway in a glamorous, bright-yellow suit, a color she never wore. Iona, who knew perfectly well she was older and ought to be wiser, kept thinking, Another month of this damned heat and I’m going to move to Alaska. As for Julianne—well, she had pretty much stopped eating.
And then—yes! Paisley had rescued them. Up and down Brightwood Circle and into the culs-de-sac she’d marched, delivering invitations despite the heat and the laments of her four-year-old, Brynne. “Remember The Little Engine That Could,” she reminded the girl. “ ‘I think I can, I think I can, I know I can!’ ” Paisley chanted with such enthusiasm that soon little Brynne was chanting, too. The invitations Paisley dropped off were a perfect summer yellow, decorated with bubbly champagne glasses and printed in bold pink type, Happy Hour for Hot Moms in the Hood . . . We deserve it!
Oh, they certainly did!
Then there they were, a gaggle of hot moms in the hood, tipsy as fools, trying to keep their balance on the edge of Paisley and Mason’s hot tub as they dangled their legs into the swirling water.
For Ginger, the only imperfect note in the chorus of the evening was that the hot tub had been