Silver Girl (49 page)

These were her crimes.

Dan would be gone for three days. Four, really, because he was coming back on the late boat on Monday, so Connie wouldn’t see him until Tuesday. When she said good-bye to him, she felt a sick kind of desperation, which she tried to hide.

It was Dan who said, “I can’t believe how much I’m going to miss you.”

“And it’s only three days,” Connie said. What she meant was:
Think how bad it will be a week from now when I go back to Maryland.

But then, too, Dan was excited about his camping trip with the boys. Connie had taken a gander at all their equipment: the three-season tent, the Coleman stove, the sleeping bags and air mattresses, the fishing poles and tackle box overflowing with flies, the generator and heavy-duty flashlights, the grocery bags of ramen noodles and peanut butter and instant oatmeal.

“We’re going to catch fish and fry it up,” Dan said. “We’re going to hike and swim in waterfalls. We are going to
survive.
”

Connie pretended to be excited for him. He would be consumed with the wilderness, leaving little time to pine for Connie.

She kissed him good-bye in his driveway—self-consciously, because the boys were in the house—and then she drove away.

She needed something to keep her mind occupied. But what? And then it came to her. She would teach Meredith to cook.

“You’re going to teach me to cook?” Meredith said. “Me?”

“I’m going to teach you the basics,” Connie said. “So when you’re…”

“Living alone…”

“You can feed yourself,” Connie said.

“Cheaply,” Meredith said.

“Right,” Connie said. She smiled uneasily. She wanted to ask Meredith what her plans were once Labor Day arrived, but she didn’t want to cause Meredith any additional anxiety. But really, what was she planning on doing? Where would she go? To Connecticut, to live near her boys? Before the most recent development with Freddy, Connie had feared that Meredith would move to North Carolina. That wouldn’t happen now, thank God. Meredith needed to
cut bait—
Dan’s term—and set herself free from that man. It was Connie’s opinion that, in refusing to see her or talk to her on the phone, Freddy was doing Meredith a favor. He was giving her a chance to liberate herself. Really, Freddy was acting out of kindness—either that, or he was too much of a coward to answer for his actions.

“You can stay here, you know,” Connie said. The house had heat. Connie had toyed with the idea of staying here herself. What reason did she have to go back to Bethesda? The powers that be had asked her to serve on the board of directors at the VA, so she could look forward to a lifetime of meetings in the building that had been more important to Wolf than his own life. She would go back to Bethesda because that was where her life was—her friends, her Whole Foods, her
UPS
man. She would go back to Bethesda because that house was where Ashlyn had grown up, and Connie would keep it for her, in case she ever decided to come back. Pointless? Probably.

“I can’t stay here,” Meredith said. “I’ve imposed on you long enough.”

“You know better than to say that.”

“I still have time to think about it,” Meredith said. “I don’t have to decide today. And there’s still a chance that I’ll be…”

Connie held up a hand. She couldn’t stand to hear Meredith say it. She turned to her cutting board. “The first thing I’m going to teach you is how to chop an onion.”

They chopped onion, shallot, garlic. They sautéed the shallot in butter. Connie showed Meredith how to move the shallot around the sauté pan with a wooden spoon. They added white wine and reduced it. They added Dijon mustard. They added heavy cream, salt and pepper, and a handful of fresh herbs.

“There,” Connie said. “We have just made a mustard and herb cream sauce. You can add grilled sausage and serve this over pasta. You can substitute lemon juice for the Dijon and add shrimp.”

Meredith was taking notes. It was so elementary, who needed notes? But Meredith had always been that kind of student.

Connie poached some chicken breasts in water, white wine, and celery leaves. She let the chicken cool, then shredded it with two forks.

“You don’t even need a food processor,” Connie said.

“That’s good,” Meredith said. “Because I can’t afford one.”

“You can probably buy one on eBay for cheap,” Connie said.

“And which computer will I be using when I bid on eBay?” Meredith said, “And which credit card will I use?” She smiled. “I’m only kidding. I still have some money. Very little, but some. All I need is the guts to apply for a new credit card. All I need is the courage to walk into the public library and ask to use the Internet.”

“Correct,” Connie said. “You’re a free citizen. You can do these things, and no one—
no one,
Meredith—can stop you.”

They did eggs next. Eggs were cheap. Connie mixed three eggs with a little milk and some salt and pepper. She threw some butter in the frying pan.

“Scrambled eggs,” Connie said. “Low heat, slow motion. You can add any kind of cheese you want. I like cheddar or Gruyère.”

“Does my future include Gruyère cheese?” Meredith asked.

“Cheddar, then,” Connie said.

“Government cheese,” Meredith said. She laughed. “Do you think the government would even give me cheese? If they don’t indict me, maybe they will give me cheese.”

Connie turned off the burner under the eggs; they were rich and creamy. She threw in a handful of fresh thyme, and the aroma enveloped them. “Do I need to worry about you?” she asked.

“Yes,” Meredith said. She smiled, then she reached out to hug Connie. “This is amazing, Con. You’re helping me.”

“No,” Connie said. “You’re helping me.”

They ate the scrambled eggs right out of the pan, and then they moved on to quiche. Connie used a prepared pie shell—Meredith wasn’t ready to make her own pastry dough—and mixed up a basic custard of eggs, half-and-half, and salt and pepper.

“You can add anything you want,” Connie said. “Bacon, sausage, chopped ham, chopped Spam, government cheese, scallions, chives, wild onions you find on the side of the road, diced tomatoes, diced zucchini, mushrooms, you name it. Then you pour it into the crust like this, and bake it at three fifty for fifty minutes.”

Meredith took notes. Connie shredded some Emmental cheese and added chopped deli salami and some diced tomatoes and snipped chives. She slid the quiche into the oven. They would eat it for lunch.

Dan had been gone for only an hour. Connie wasn’t sure how she was going to make it through the next three days.

“Now,” she said, “I’m going to teach you the most important lesson of all.”

“What’s that?” Meredith said. She seemed genuinely interested, and Connie wondered how Meredith could be so focused—nearly happy—when she was doomed to read about Freddy’s affair in a book written by Samantha Deuce.

Just then, Toby walked into the kitchen and said, “Something smells good.” He kissed Meredith on the back of her neck and grabbed her around the waist. Meredith cast her eyes down, and Connie thought,
All right, what’s going on?

She said, “Did something happen last night?”

Meredith elbowed Toby in the ribs. “Connie was just about to teach me the most important lesson of all.”

Toby said, “Dinner was delicious. When we finally ate it.”

Connie glanced at her brother. He kept a straight face, then broke out into a beautiful smile. Meredith turned around and kissed Toby in a way that evoked 1979, and Connie nearly groaned. This would be a lot easier to stomach if Dan were here.

“Out of the kitchen,” Connie said to Toby. “I’ll call you when lunch is ready.”

“But I want to learn the most important lesson,” Toby said. “What is it?”

Connie felt like she should give a profound answer. What
was
the most important lesson? Was it love? Was it forgiveness? Was it honesty? Was it perseverance?

She wielded her whisk. “Vinaigrette,” she said.

They ate a late lunch of quiche and perfectly dressed salad greens. After lunch, Meredith and Toby wanted to go for a bike ride—probably they wanted to be alone—but if Connie sat around the house by herself she would lose her mind, so she tagged along with them. They biked out to Sconset. The climbing roses were in their second bloom, even more lush and lavish than they had been in July—and then they decided to bike Polpis Road. This was nine miles on top of the two they had already done. Connie was in terrible shape, but the bike ride invigorated her. Her heart was pumping and her legs were warm and tingling, and she filled with a kind of euphoria from the fresh air and the endorphins. It was ideal weather—low seventies with low humidity and mellow sunshine. Autumn was coming. Maybe it was this thought that made Connie suggest that they head into town instead of home to Tom Nevers.

“Town?” Toby said. “You’re sure?”

“We can get ice cream,” Connie said.

They biked an additional two miles into town, at which point Connie was wiped out. She collapsed on a stool at the counter of the Nantucket Pharmacy. Meredith and Toby flanked her and the three of them ordered chocolate frappes. There were lots of other people in the pharmacy—primarily older people who had come to get their prescriptions filled and harried-looking mothers with recalcitrant children demanding jimmies, but none of them seemed to notice Meredith, and more unusual still was the fact that Meredith didn’t seem to mind if she was noticed or not. She interacted with one little girl whose scoop of peppermint-stick ice cream was threatening to topple into the lap of her hand-embroidered sundress. The little girl was about six years old and had a perfect blond bob. The little girl
was
Meredith Martin at age six.

“Let me help you with that,” Meredith said, and she secured the ice cream onto the cone with a spoon.

“Thank you,” the girl’s mother said.

Meredith smiled. To Connie, she murmured, “She looks like one of these little girls I knew in Palm Beach.” Her expression darkened, the demons were encroaching, and Connie thought,
We have to get out of here while things are still okay.

She eased back off her stool; even that made her legs ache. She said, “I’m never going to make it back home. We have to call a cab.”

“Thank God you said that, Nance Armstrong,” Toby said.

They called a cab that could accommodate the bikes, and rode home in exhausted silence.

It was six o’clock. They took turns in the outdoor shower, with Meredith slated to go last.

“So you can stay in as long as you want,” Connie said.

“You’re so good to me,” Meredith said.

“Who’s the little girl in Palm Beach?” Connie asked.

“Long story,” Meredith said.

Connie wanted to pour a glass of wine—oh, boy, did she—and she had earned it with nearly fifteen miles of biking and Dan away and Meredith and Toby in a state of bliss, but she decided against it. She prepared pasta and served it with the Dijon shallot cream sauce that she and Meredith had made earlier, and a salad with vinaigrette, and some leftover Parker House rolls. It was a good dinner, and the three of them ate outside. After, they cleaned up, and Toby asked if they wanted to watch a movie. Meredith said yes, but Connie said she was tired and thought she would go upstairs to read.

“But reading might not last long,” Connie said. “I’m beat.”

“It was a good day,” Meredith said.

“Dinner was delicious,” Toby said. “Thank you.”

Once in the master suite with the door shut, Connie thought,
I survived the first day without Dan.
But how would she make it through three more days? And how, how,
how
would she leave the island?

She loved him.

She sat on the edge of her bed. Okay, wait. She was unprepared to love anyone but Wolf Flute. So she didn’t love Danforth Flynn. But God, her heart was splintering at the prospect of even three days without him. The clock radio was on the nightstand. Connie reached over to turn it on, and then she got an idea.

No, the idea was stupid. It was so cliché. But before she could stop herself, Connie had her cell phone in her hand and she was dialing. With all those hours of avid listening, she knew the number by heart.

At first, the line was busy. Of course, it was busy; Delilah had millions of listeners who all wanted to send songs out to their loved ones. Connie hit redial.

And on her sixteenth try, someone answered. Not Delilah, but a screener.

“Tell me your story,” the screener said. The screener was male; he sounded as young as Meredith’s attorney. Was this some college kid earning extra money by screening for Delilah? Connie found this amusing.

She thought,
My story? My story will take all night.

She said, “My husband died two years ago of brain cancer, and I never thought I’d find love again.” Here, Connie walked over to her dressing table. She pointed to herself in the mirror and thought,
You, Constance Flute, are made for Delilah!
“But this summer, I’ve met a wonderful man named Dan, and my life has changed. I’ve changed. Dan is away this weekend, on a camping trip with his sons, but I’d like to send out a song to him so he knows I’m thinking of him.”

“What’s the song?” the screener asked.

“ ‘Something in the Way She Moves’ by James Taylor,” Connie said. The song Dan sang in her ear up at Great Point.

“Good stuff,” the screener said. “I’m going to get you on.”

The next day, Connie taught Meredith how to make a cream soup from scratch.

“Once I show you the basics,” Connie said, “you can do this with any vegetable: broccoli, asparagus, carrot, tomato, mushroom.”

“Right,” Meredith said. “But what’s going to keep me from reaching for a can of Campbell’s for a dollar forty-nine instead?”

“You’ll see once you taste it,” Connie said. “First, you sauté an onion in four tablespoons of butter until the onion is soft.” She moved the onion around the stock pot as the butter foamed. Connie had done so well on the radio that now she was thinking TV, she was thinking the Food Network, her own cooking show! “Then, add three tablespoons of flour and cook for one minute. Cooking the flour a little eliminates the starchiness.” If Toby could go to the Naval Academy, why couldn’t Connie do the Food Network? “Add the vegetable next—in this case, four cups of
sliced summer squash.
” Connie enunciated clearly, mugged for an imaginary camera, then dumped the squash into the pot. Meredith didn’t notice the theatrics; she was bent over her little notebook, writing down every step. Would she really make her own soup? Connie wondered. Or was she destined for Campbell’s? “Pour in six cups of chicken broth, a cup of white wine, and a teaspoon of fresh thyme. Put the top on the pot and simmer for twenty minutes.”