The Identicals(29)

Ainsley picks up her phone to call Emma. But Emma isn’t good at commiseration; she doesn’t know how to be comforting or supportive. Neither do BC and Maggie and Anna. Ainsley has chosen friends who are too cool for any kind of genuine human emotion.

Should she call her father? Ask him if maybe she can spend the summer on the Cape? She could work as a nanny for her half brothers. Right now she’s supposed to put in forty hours a week at the ERF boutique, but Ainsley would love to tell her mother she’s found a better job. Tabitha probably doesn’t want Ainsley to work at the boutique anyway. If Ainsley goes to the Cape, Tabitha will be able to hire someone reliable and competent, someone she will be able to trust rather than doubt.

What does it say when your own mother doesn’t believe in you?

Ainsley dials her father’s number, but after six rings it goes to his voice mail. Ainsley hangs up. She’s not sure whether Tabitha has told Wyatt about Ainsley stealing the car and throwing the party, but if she has then it’s safe to say a summer on the Cape is out of the question. Becky, Ainsley’s stepmother—or, more accurately, Wyatt’s wife—hates Ainsley. She doesn’t allow Ainsley within five feet of the boys.

Ainsley’s phone rings. It’s her mother.

“Grammie broke her hip,” Tabitha says.

Ainsley exhales. “But she’s okay otherwise? She’s alive?”

“She’s alive, but the break is bad, and they’re flying her to Boston on the MedFlight helicopter. I have to fly to Boston, too. I would have you come with me, but I don’t want you to miss any more school. So… what do you think? Can you stay home by yourself tonight? There’s cash in the tea tin if you want to order a pizza for dinner, or there’s a hunk of low-fat Gouda in the deli drawer. No rice crackers, though. We finished those up last night.”

“Will you be home tomorrow?” Ainsley asks.

“I’m not sure, sweetheart, but I have to go with your grandmother. She doesn’t have anyone else. Please, please just be good until I get back. Do your homework, take the bus to school. No smoking, no drinking, no parties—okay?”

“Okay,” Ainsley says. “I promise.”



She hangs up. Broken hip: not the worst news, but still serious; Ainsley gets that. Why do old people always break their hips? It’s like a thing.

So now Ainsley has the house to herself—overnight and maybe longer. Three hours ago, this was exactly what Ainsley dreamed of, but right now… well, she feels more miserable than she has in all her life.





HARPER


When she wakes up the morning after Billy’s memorial reception, the answer is clear: she has to leave the Vineyard.

Harper’s phone continued to blow up the night before, to the point where she wished her phone would actually blow up. There were texts from Drew and from an unfamiliar number, which turned out to be Drew’s cousin Jethro, the son of Wanda, the aunt who made the stew. Harper deletes these texts without reading them. She feels anew the shame of three years earlier. What had she learned then? The Vineyard is a great place to live… until you screw up. Being part of a community means you have a responsibility to behave, to obey the laws, to act like a decent human being. And when you don’t, you let everyone else in the community down.

There was a text from the other Rooster Express driver, a former addict named Adele, that said, Is it true???? There was, most frighteningly, a text from Jude, Harper’s former employer. Harper wasn’t sure why she even kept Jude’s contact information in her phone; they had agreed never to communicate again. Harper stupidly thought that maybe Jude had heard about Billy’s death and decided to reach out. But the text said: SCUM.

After that, Harper was determined to flush her phone down the toilet, but then a text came in from Rooster, her boss, and Harper thought it might have been a change to her work schedule. The text said: Listen to your voice mail, please, Harper. Or just call me back.

Harper sighed, then played her voice mail. “Hi, Harper. It’s Rooster. Sorry I missed Billy’s reception. I was in the weeds with you taking the day off. I heard some pretty weird shit went down at the golf club, and it sounds like maybe you have some personal issues you need to work out. So anyway, I’m relieving you of your delivery duties for the foreseeable future. Sorry about that, Harper.”

Harper replayed the message because she couldn’t understand what he was trying to tell her. Relieving her of her delivery duties for the foreseeable future? Was he firing her? Yes, it seemed he was.

There was also a voice mail from Tabitha. It had come in at two thirty in the morning. Harper hadn’t listened to it, because how much abuse, really, was she expected to take?

Reed gone.

Drew gone.

Her job gone.

She has to leave. Where she’ll go is less of a concern than the steps she needs to take to wrap up her life here.

She has to go over to Chappy to see Brendan, but that will need to wait.

She has to pay Ken Doll at the golf club, as the reception was far from free, but she’ll deal with Ken Doll by e-mail because by now he’s probably heard the reason for Sadie Zimmer’s outrageous behavior. It was justified: Harper had been sleeping with her husband, the wonderful member in good standing, the island’s favorite doctor, a man as squeaky clean as Marcus Welby, MD—Dr. Reed Zimmer.