Elin Hilderbrand - The Love Season

They found a saleswoman. GLENDA, her name tag said, like the good witch from The Wizard of Oz . She took one look at Dan and Renata-embarrassed father and skinny eleven-year-old daughter who bleated like a lamb, “Bra?”-and whisked Renata into the dressing room while she discreetly snuck over to Juniors to fetch an assortment of training bras. Renata emerged, twenty minutes later, with three bras that fit; she wanted to wear one home. Her father, in the meantime, sat slumped in a folding chair until it was time to pay. On the way out, he started to cry. Renata didn’t ask what was wrong; she couldn’t bear to hear the answer. His little girl was growing up, and where was Candace?

Where was Candace?

When Renata and Cade started dating, Renata told him the story of bra shopping. That , she said, sums up the way things are between me and my father. He loves me too much. He feels too responsible. He is weighing me down. I am weighing him down. I have been his daughter and his wife, you know what I mean?

But you don’t mean…? Cade said.

No , Renata had said; then she wondered if her relationship with her father was too nuanced to explain to another human being or simply too nuanced to explain to Cade. She was pretty sure that Cade’s relationship with his parents was cut-and-dried; it was normal. They took care of him; it was a one-way street. Cade didn’t feel the need to escape them. What Cade wanted, more than anything in the world, was to be just like them.

Renata gazed out across Nantucket Sound. Her guilt was eating her for breakfast. She blew the Beach Club a kiss, then turned and ran for home.

10:40 A.M.

She was out again, on foot. It was unheard of: Marguerite Beale out of her house, twice in one day. And that was just a start; later she would have to go to the Herb Farm. She would have to drive .

But for now, the meat. Picked up, directly, from the butcher at the A &P. And while Marguerite was in the store, she bought olive oil, Dijon mustard, peppercorns, silver polish, toilet paper. It all fit in one bag, and then it was back out into the August sun. Marguerite was wearing a straw hat with a pink satin ribbon that tied under her chin. She felt like Mother Goose. The liquor store was next.

She went to the liquor store on Main Street, steeling herself for interaction; she had known the couple who owned the store for decades. But when she entered, she found a teenager behind the cash register and the rest of the store was deserted.

Marguerite wandered up and down the aisles of wine, murmuring the names under her breath. Chateauneuf-du-Pape, Chassagne-Montrachet, Semillion, Sauvignon, Viognier, Vouvray. She closed her eyes and tried to remember what each wine had tasted like. Wine in the glass, buttery yellow, garnet red, jewel tones. Candace across the table, her shoulders bare, her hair loose from its elastic.

“Can I help you?” the teenager said. He moved right into Marguerite’s personal space. He stood close enough that she could see the white tips of his acne; she could smell his chewing gum. Instinctively she backed away. She was browsing the wine the way she browsed for books; she wanted to be left to do so in peace.

“Do you know what you’re looking for?” the teenager asked. “Red or white? If it’s red, you could go with this one,” He held up a bottle of something called ZD. Marguerite had never heard of it, which meant it was from California-or, worse still, from one of the “new” wine regions: Chile, Australia, Oregon, upstate New York. Even fifteen years ago, she had been accused of being a wine snob because she would only serve and only drink wines from France. Burgundy, Bordeaux, the Loire Valley, Champagne. Regal grapes. Meanwhile, here was a child trying to peddle a bottle of…merlot.

Marguerite smiled and shook her head. “No, thank you.”

“It’s good,” he said. “I’ve tried it.”

Marguerite raised her eyebrows. The boy might have been seventeen. He sounded quite proud of himself, and he had an eager expression that led Marguerite to believe she would not be able to shake him. Which was too bad. Though maybe, in the interest of time, a good thing.

“I’ve come for champagne,” Marguerite said. “I’d like two bottles of Veuve Clicquot, La grande Dame. I hope you still carry it.”

Her words seemed to frighten the boy. Marguerite found herself wishing for Fergus and Eliza, the proprietors. They used to rub Marguerite the wrong way from time to time-a bit pretentious and very Republican-but they were profoundly competent and knowledgeable wine merchants. And they knew Marguerite-the champagne would have been waiting on the counter before she was fully in the door. But Fergus and Eliza were curiously absent. Marguerite worried for a minute that they had sold the store. It would serve her right to squirrel herself away for so long that when she surfaced there was no longer anyone on Nantucket whom she recognized. It was scary but refreshing, too, to think that she might outlast all the people she was hiding from.

The boy loped over to the wall of champagnes, plucked a bottle from the rack, and squinted at the label. Meanwhile, Marguerite could spy the bottles she wanted without even putting on her bifocals. She sidled up next to the boy and eased the bottles off the shelf.

“Here it is,” she said, and because she was in a beneficent mood she lifted a bottle to show him the label. “When you’re a bit older and you meet a special someone, you will drive her out to Smith’s Point for the sunset with a bottle of this champagne.”

The tips of his ears reddened; she’d embarrassed him. “I will?”

She handed him the bottles. “That’s all for today.”

He met her at the register and scanned the bottles with his little gun. “That will be two hundred and seventy dollars,” he said. He shifted his weight as Marguerite wrote out the check. “Um, I don’t think I’ll be buying that champagne any time soon. It’s expensive .”

Marguerite carefully tore out the check and handed it to him. “Worth every cent, I promise you.”

“Uh, okay. Thanks for coming in.”

“Thank you,” she said. She picked up the brown bag with the bottles in one hand and the groceries in the other. Back out into the sun. The champagne bottles clinked against each other. Should she feel bad that she hadn’t selected a Sancerre to drink with the tart and a lusty red to go with the beef? It was grossly unorthodox to drink champagne all the way through a meal, though Marguerite had done it often enough and she’d noticed any person in the restaurant who was brave enough to do it. But really, what would her readers in Calgary think if they knew? Champagne, she might tell them, was for any night you think you might remember for the rest of your life. It was for nights like tonight.

Her hands were full, true. She had a pile of things to do at home: The aioli, the marinade for the beef, and the entire tart awaited, and Marguerite held out hope for a few pages of Alice Munro and a nap. (All this exercise-she would pay for it tomorrow with sore muscles and stiff joints.) But even so, even so, Marguerite did not head straight home. She was out and about in town, which happened exactly never and she had done so much thinking about…and if she had really wanted to escape her past, she would have moved away. As it was, she still lived on the same island as her former restaurant, and she wanted to see it.

She lumbered down Main Street and took a left on Water Street, where she walked against the flow of traffic. So many people, tourists with ice-cream cones and baby strollers, shopping bags from Nantucket Looms, the Lion’s Paw, Erica Wilson. Across the street, the Dreamland Theater was showing a movie starring Jennifer Lopez. Marguerite harbored a strange, secret fascination with J.Lo, which she nourished during her daily forays into cyberspace. Marguerite surfed the Internet as a way to keep current with the world and to combat the feeling of being a person born into the wrong century; she needed to stay somewhat relevant to life in the new millennium, if only for her Canadian readers. And cyberspace was alluring, as addictive as everyone had promised. Marguerite limited herself to an hour a day, timing herself by the computer’s clock, and always at the end of the hour she felt bloated, overstimulated, as though she’d eaten too many chocolate truffles. She gobbled up the high-profile murders, the war in Iraq, partisan politics on Capitol Hill, the courses offered at Columbia University, the shoes of the season at Neiman Marcus, the movie stars, the scandals-and for whatever reason, Marguerite considered news about J.Lo to be the jackpot. Marguerite was mesmerized by the woman-her Latin fireworks, the way she shamelessly opened herself up to public adoration and scorn. Jennifer Lopez , Marguerite thought, is the person on this planet who is most unlike me . Marguerite had never seen J.Lo in a movie or on TV, and she had no desire to. She was certain she would be disappointed. After a second or two of studying the movie poster (that dazzling smile!) she moved on.