The Guest Cottage (33 page)

One Year Later

“M
om.” Jonah hulked into the bedroom, trying not to look pleased with himself in his tux. Today he was going to walk his grandmother down the aisle to give her away in marriage to Connor, the man who had changed her life.

“Jonah, sweetheart, you look so handsome! Grandmother will be thrilled.” Sophie crossed the room to inspect her son. She was wearing high heels, and still she had to look up. “Let me straighten your tie. You did an excellent job of tying it.”

“Yeah, at this rate I’ll be a great butler.”

“I think I see you more as a soccer star, sweetie,” Sophie told him, reaching up to ruffle his hair.

Jonah jerked his head back. “Don’t touch my hair.” He had obviously spent some time gelling and arranging it into its ridiculous startled porcupine appearance.

“Mommy, Mommy,” cried Lacey, running into the room. “Look at me!” She wore a lavender dress with a full skirt that twirled out all around her when she spun.

“Beautiful,” Sophie said. “Come let me put the circlet of flowers in your hair.”

Jonah plopped down on the bed, putting his feet in their handsome black shoes right up on the duvet. Sophie didn’t scold him. She was pleased that he was remaining in the room to talk to her and Lacey. Obviously he was becoming comfortable with the entire formal, dressy fussiness of wedding preparations. It would be the third wedding he’d taken part in this year.

First, and most extravagant, had been Zack’s marriage to Lila. The ceremony itself was held in Trinity Church in Boston, with no fewer than five bridesmaids for Lila, who was resplendent in a personally designed Vera Wang gown and tiara so covered with sparkling stones and pearls Sophie was amazed the woman could stand. Lacey had been Lila’s flower girl, and both excited and nervous about her performance, but
totally
enthralled by her own outfit, a black (Lila was nothing if not edgy) sheath, low black heels, and a wide rhinestone headband. The roses Lacey sprinkled on the carpet were blood red.

Jonah had been his father’s best man. At first, he had balked, complaining that it didn’t even
make sense
for a guy to be best man at his father’s wedding to someone else. It was Trevor who calmed the boy down, by saying simply, “Yeah, well, Jonah, I want you to be best man at my wedding ceremony when I marry your mother.”

“Dude,” Jonah had sighed. “Life is so complicated.”

“Dude,” Trevor had replied, “you have no idea.”

So Jonah had bit the bullet and been his father’s best man. Later, he confided to Sophie that he’d found the scale of the wedding and the reception at the Boston Harbor Hotel both overwhelming and boring. “Dad’s such a phony,” he grumbled, “and Lila is, too.”

Lacey, however, idolized Lila, with her fabulous clothes, her coiffed hair and plucked eyebrows, her scarlet lips and heavy gold jewelry. “I want to be just like Lila when I grow up,” Lacey told her mother.

“Lovely, sweetie,” Sophie responded. “You should try to spend as much time with Lila as possible, don’t you think? To pick up clues on how to dress and wear your hair?”

Lacey had eyed her mother skeptically. At eleven, she was beginning to achieve a sense of independence and a brewing need to break away from her closeness to Sophie. Sophie understood this. She’d read a lot of books on child rearing lately. Her sadness at Lacey’s changing attitudes was balanced by the surprising knowledge that Lila was nice, and more than nice, caring and willing to be involved with the children. Now when Zack had his children for the weekend, as decreed in the divorce settlement, he actually spent time with them, because of Lila. Zack didn’t claim many of those weekends—he often had important business. But Sophie was grateful for Lila’s willingness to help Zack build a sturdy relationship with his children. She knew it could have been otherwise.

Sophie, Trevor, and Leo, too, attended Zack and Lila’s zillion-dollar wedding extravaganza so they could see Jonah and Lacey in their finery. But Zack and Lila weren’t invited to Sophie and Trevor’s wedding. That was a much more modest affair, attended by family and a few close friends: Bess and her husband and Cash and Betsy; Angie; River and his wife, Nestra, and their baby, Plum; and Anne, Kyle, and Gabe Manchester. Jonah was Trevor’s best man, Lacey was Sophie’s bridesmaid, and Leo was the ring bearer. Hester and Connor flew up for the wedding and hosted the wedding celebration—a private dinner cruise on a posh yacht that slowly glided around all the islands in Boston Harbor.

Today Hester was marrying Connor. She had finally accepted a long-deserved sabbatical from the hospital in order to take a honeymoon with him in Hawaii, where, Sophie hoped, Hester would not spend the time trying to find and cure an obscure disease among rare parrots. Connor’s softening influence on her mother was amazing, but no one could change the woman completely.

Even so, Hester was going to have a wedding, a real, romantic, sentimental
wedding,
on Nantucket, in St. Paul’s Episcopal Church at eleven o’clock. Susie Swenson had happily given the guest cottage to Sophie and her family for the weekend, and the house was nearly explosive with excited people—not only Lacey, Jonah, Leo, Trevor, and Sophie, but in the other wing, Hester and her friends (Sophie had been startled to learn that her mother had
friends
), who were now in the process of arraying the bride. In the family room, Connor’s old friends Curt and Marjorie Luber and Sylvia and Donald English were staying. They had flown in from Iowa for the week, and Sophie had been delighted to see how much fun they all had together.
Well,
she thought,
they don’t have to worry about how their children do on their school exams or the future economy.
They seemed to have reached the age of
freedom—perhaps
it wasn’t golden, but it certainly seemed like a lot of fun.

Trevor stuck his head in the bedroom door. “Time to head out for the church, everyone.”

Lacey, the flower girl, shrieked, sprinting to the stairs and down to the car. Jonah was going to give his grandmother away and Leo was going to be the ring bearer once again, a position he bore with extreme earnestness.

“Come on, Leo,” Jonah said, holding out his hand to his stepbrother. “Let’s go on down.”

Leo was playing with Legos between the bed and the window, but he rose quickly, allowed Sophie to straighten his little blue blazer, and ran to take Jonah’s hand.

When the room emptied of children, Trevor stepped inside and shut the door behind him.

“What a crew,” he said. “If the kids get any more excited, they’ll levitate.”

Sophie laughed. She rose from the chair and walked over to her husband. “You look stunningly handsome.” Wrapping her arms around him, she leaned against him, allowing them both to share a peaceful moment in their own private world. Her mother had asked her to play the piano for the wedding, and Sophie had happily agreed. She had also made the wedding cake and much of the food for her mother’s reception, which would be held back here at the guest cottage. But for now, for a moment, she pressed against Trevor, indulging her senses in the pleasure of his love.

Trevor kissed her forehead and held her away. “Stop that. We’d better catch up with the others.” He cocked his head, scrutinizing Sophie. “You look beautiful, Sophie. I mean it. I don’t mean you look nice—you look
triumphant.
”

Sophie laughed smugly as she opened the door and stepped out into the hall, where her mother’s friends were gathering like a flock of twittering doves.

“Thanks, Trevor,” she said over her shoulder. “It must be that pregnant glow.”

Trevor’s jaw dropped.
“What?”

Sophie nodded, smiling brilliantly. She held out her hand. “Shall we go?”

For Sofiya Popova,
С любов
.
One day I will read your books.
Nazdrave!

I
lift a glass of champagne—not just my beloved Prosecco, but real champagne, let’s say Perrier-Jouët—to people I will call “the connectors,” the people whose hard work and special joie de vivre make the connections that make a book possible.

I send enormous thanks to Hristo, Zarko, Ivan, and Valentina of the
River Beatrice
on the Uniworld Danube Cruise of August 4, 2013. You truly make it a Uniworld. Thanks also to Deborah Beale, who helped me learn a few words of Bulgarian, and who also helps me remember what a universal language music can be, not to mention how quickly she responded when I asked her for the first five notes of
“Greensleeves.”

Many thanks to Tharon Dunne of the Literacy Volunteers of Nantucket, for all her good work and for her genius instincts in introducing me to a female Bulgarian journalist.

Thanks to my Facebook friends, who have opened up the world to me, made me laugh, and kept me sane. Okay, as sane as they are. Really, I love you all.

Thanks to my extremely talkative family—talk about connectors!—my grandchildren, Ellias, Adeline, Emmett, and Anathea Forbes, who attach me to constant joy, and to their parents, Sam and Neil Forbes, who inform me of fascinating spiritual and scientific worlds, and to Josh Thayer and David Gillum, who share their mesmerizing, if occasionally
incomprehensible,
work with me.

Thanks to my ebullient and literate friends Jill Hunter Burrill, Jean Mallinson, Charlotte Kastner, Julie Hensler, Toni Massie, Tricia Patterson, Jan Dougherty, and my sister Martha Foshee. Great thanks to Dr. John West, who knows everything—and connects everything—and his wife, Mary West, who cooks the best dinners in the world.

A deep curtsey of thanks to my agent, Meg Ruley, who has connected me with so much great pleasure through the past decade. Thanks to all at the Jane Rotrosen Agency, especially the invaluable Christina Hogrebe.

And a forehead-to-the-floor full bow of gratitude to my editor, Linda Marrow, who can connect so well she knows what I meant to say even when I’ve said it incorrectly.

It takes so much work to put out a beautiful book. I send a bouquet of gratitude to Libby McGuire (I hope you and your husband make many trips to the island!), Gina Centrello, Dana Isaacson, Kim Hovey, Elana Seplow-Jolley, Christine Mitkityshyn, Maggie Oberrender, and Penelope Haynes.

And thank you again and again, Charley.

The Guest Cottage

An Island Christmas

Nantucket Sisters

A Nantucket Christmas

Island Girls

Summer Breeze

Heat Wave

Beachcombers

Summer House

Moon Shell Beach

The Hot Flash Club Chills Out

Hot Flash Holidays

The Hot Flash Club Strikes Again

The Hot Flash Club

Custody

Between Husbands and Friends

An Act of Love

Belonging

Family Secrets

Everlasting

My Dearest Friend

Spirit Lost

Morning

Nell

Bodies and Souls

Three Women at the Water’s Edge

Stepping

N
ANCY
T
HAYER
is the
New York Times
bestselling author of
The Guest Cottage, An Island Christmas, Nantucket Sisters, A Nantucket Christmas, Island Girls, Summer Breeze, Heat Wave, Beachcombers, Summer House, Moon Shell Beach,
and
The Hot Flash Club.
She lives on Nantucket Island.

nancythayer.com

Facebook.com/NancyThayerAuthor