Elin Hilderbrand - The Castaways

“Okay, listen…” he said.

“And for the record, you can’t actually keep me out of the reception.”

“Well, it’s private.”

“Well, I don’t want to go anyway. I never had any intention of going. My mother is sick.” Donna, meanwhile, had made her way unsteadily to the back of the church and was standing in front of the rows of candles as if debating whether or not to light one.

“I’m sorry to hear that-”

“She has cancer!” April said. And since her mother was out of earshot, she added, “The chemo may not work.”

Jeffrey nodded solemnly. The unfortunate truth about April Peck was that she had lost all credibility.

“And one more thing,” April said. She took a step toward Jeffrey. She was officially too close. God, if Delilah saw them, she would have a conniption. Jeffrey didn’t want to know one more thing. He had done his duty; April Peck would not come to the reception. Now all he had to do was get out of the church. But April Peck was not willing to let him go. There was something she was determined to tell him. She was so close to him, he could smell her breath: bubble gum. Her sooty eyes were narrowed. She was going to have the last word. “I was with him the night before he died.”

Delilah hated Andrea Kapenash.

Hated her!

She may have hated Andrea for years but had only now, with the event of Tess and Greg’s death, admitted it to herself. How could she hate someone she was such good friends with? It was all of a sudden obvious: Delilah hated Andrea because they were such good friends. Because for years she had spent hours and days and weeks in Andrea’s infuriating presence. Andrea always had the answer. Tess had been Andrea’s handmaiden, eager to please her, eager for everyone to please her. And so, for the years that they’d been friends, Andrea had controlled everyone’s lives. Andrea was always right, she was the oldest, she had raised her children first, she would tell you how it was done. Andrea was married to the police chief. That gave her power, two feet firmly planted on the Moral High Ground.

But now Tess was dead and certain things were going to change. For starters, Delilah was going to express her true feelings about Andrea.

Or maybe not. The fact of the matter was, Delilah was great at articulating anger in her mind, but in real life she found confrontation difficult and unpleasant. Especially with women. Delilah had never argued with Phoebe or Tess, and she had never overtly argued with Andrea (disagreed strongly, maybe, but Andrea had steamrolled her every time). Delilah had no problem fighting with Jeffrey. All they did was fight! She’d had no problem fighting with Greg, either. They had had a fight the night before he died. A fight that she couldn’t bear to think about.

Delilah was hosting the reception-after-the-reception, which meant the six of them and the four younger kids. She had a bowl of chicken salad, a platter of cold cuts, slices of watermelon, a big bowl of potato chips, and a blender full of stiff daiquiris made from the strawberries she had picked at the farm with the kids. The food was the same as always, the drink was the same, the setting the same-her back deck with the two chaises and the six Adirondack chairs, the croquet wickets set up in the lawn, the mermaid fountain gurgling, the cosmos and snapdragons blooming, butterflies and bumblebees hovering-but of course nothing was the same. Delilah found herself unable to put on music. Music would remind them all of Greg. Would they ever be able to listen to music again? Addison had turned down her offer of a strawberry daiquiri and joined the Chief in drinking Jack Daniels over ice. Addison was already quite drunk. They were all quite drunk, like characters from a Hemingway novel. Andrea was in a chardonnay stupor. Phoebe was nursing a daiquiri, which she had topped off with more rum. Delilah was practically reeling from the daiquiris-in addition, she had had three glasses of pinot gris and (stupidly) a dirty martini at the Westmoor Club. Jeffrey was drinking beer and was probably monitoring how many he’d had over what time period. But upon closer inspection, Addison was the worst of them all. He was muttering nonsense into his drink, his glasses were slipping, his hair-the fringe around the edge of his scalp that he claimed as hair-was mussed. All of his usual Princetonian deportment had flown away like a flock of birds frightened at the sight of him.

“No one’s eating,” Delilah complained. She picked a chip out of the bowl, but couldn’t bring herself to eat it.

“I don’t know why you went to so much trouble,” Andrea said. “We all ate at the reception.”

Or you could say thank you, Delilah thought. But instead she decided to step on Andrea’s shoulder and go over her head. “Chief, would you like a sandwich?”

“Sure,” the Chief said.

The kids were down in the basement, watching Cars for the umpteenth time, despite the fact that it was a beautiful evening and wouldn’t get dark until nine. Delilah had even given them free run of the PlayStation, but they said they didn’t want to play.

“We just want to be quiet, Mom,” said Barney, Delilah’s six-year-old, in a way that killed her.

The usual rules didn’t apply. The world was upside down. Her kids didn’t want to play PlayStation, Addison wasn’t piling Delilah’s chicken salad onto a baguette, there was no music.

Delilah sidled up to Andrea and lowered her voice in a way that indicated intimacy between two women friends. “There’s something I want to talk to you about…”

Andrea was having none of the cuddly stuff. Her eyes, when she turned to Delilah, were bright blue and cutting. Her face was a shiny, impenetrable force field. “What is it?”

“I’d like to take the kids for the summer.”

“The kids?”

“Chloe and Finn.”

“Out of the question.”

Now, see? Who said things like that?

“Hear me out,” Delilah said.

Andrea raised her eyebrows and pursed her lips in a way that made it look like she was whistling. Delilah tried to think back to a time when she had really liked Andrea. Well, when Drew was born, Andrea had come to the house and cleaned and done laundry and roasted a chicken. She had monitored Delilah’s milk flow; she had reached right in and fixed the way Drew was sucking. She had pinched Delilah’s nipple with gentle authority, as if she were a nurse.

Better? she’d said.

Miraculously, it was better. The nursing didn’t hurt anymore. Drew took in long drafts of milk; Delilah felt her breasts thrumming along like a machine. Better!

Andrea had checked in on Delilah for weeks. She offered to baby-sit so that Delilah and Jeffrey could go out to dinner. She had, Delilah realized, filled the space where Delilah’s mother should have been.

Then there was the kiss, South Beach 2005. They had all been at a dance club in the wee hours, Delilah was drunk on champagne and Andrea on vodka; they had both been eating cashews that they later found out were laced with ecstasy. Andrea and Delilah had been dancing on a stage with poles; it was fun and sexy, and although Delilah had very little memory of the details, she did remember that she had kissed Andrea in front of three hundred writhing bodies, and the kiss had been passionate.

But thinking about that now was only puzzling.

Andrea could be fun; she could be kind and reasonable. Phoebe believed that when you had faith in a person, he or she responded by rising up to meet that faith. Okay, fine: Delilah would test out that theory. She would have faith that Andrea was a reasonable woman who would see that Chloe and Finn should spend the summer here. If Andrea wanted them in September, so be it.