Good as Gold (The Salt Sisters #4)

Chapter 1

Chapter One

N antucket had a way of pulling Gale back into its orbit. No matter how far she flew away for work—to India, Greece, or the southernmost reaches of Australia—she dreamed of that fresh salty air, the East Coast accent with its elongated vowels, the fish, and the long walks on sun-dappled beaches. Perhaps this call brought Gale back to Nantucket the year she turned forty-six. She was looking to simplify her life after heartache. But she couldn’t have known that moving to Nantucket would destroy her once-quaint understanding of her existence—and replace it with something far more complicated.

Gale had come to Nantucket every summer as a child. For as long as she could remember, her mother had packed their suitcases, driven from their little house in Providence, and set them up in the family beach house. The family beach house had been on her mother’s side for four generations, but Evelyn and Gale were the only ones left by then. They’d usually arrived two days after Gale’s final day of school and left the island a day or two before school started again. Gale and her mother had clung to the Nantucket season as hard as they could. Usually on the top of the ferry, leaving for good, Gale could smell the crisp coming of autumn in the air. Usually, her mother would cry.

Why can’t we stay all year long? Gale had so often wondered. But she knew better than to ask her mother questions like that. Her mother was secretive and apt to say, “That’s just the way it is.”

The spring Gale turned forty-six was a whirlwind, but not the good kind. Later on, Gale would refer to it as her own personal hurricane season. It was the hurricane that swept her to Nantucket and into a new dimension. She left the old Gale behind.

The spring before Gale went to Nantucket, Gale was living with her husband in Providence, the city where she’d been raised and eventually gone to university and met her husband and raised their two children. Peter was her husband’s name. He was in advertising and had recently brought in a surprise twenty thousand dollars for writing a single sentence for a commercial about potato chips. It was often hard for Gale to comprehend that a single sentence in advertising could cost twenty thousand dollars. The sentence wasn’t even particularly clever. But she would never have told Peter that. Instead, she said, You’re the cleverest husband. You’re the very best at what you do. Because she was in love with him, and because she was a fool.

Gale and Peter were at home, waiting for their twin daughters and their boyfriends to arrive. The plan was to have a beautiful dinner together for Gale’s forty-sixth. Gale was hard at work in the kitchen, putting together an Italian meal of eggplant parmesan, fresh bread, antipasti with fresh olives and cheeses, plus Aperol spritzes for everyone. Peter was in the living room, spinning a Chicago record. “Saturday In the Park” was playing. It was his job to put together the Aperol spritzes when the girls arrived, although, in Gale’s opinion, he always got the ratios wrong. This was another thing she would never tell him.

Gale raised her sharp knife over a slab of cheese and thought this wa s it. This is the happiness I’ve fought so hard to build.

It wasn’t always easy.

But that was when the phone rang.

Gale dried her hands and turned to fetch the landline. She was the last among her friends to maintain a landline, telling them it was her last link to the old world, the romance of chatting on the phone in your kitchen and twirling the cord around your finger. It reminded her of her mother, Evelyn, watching her in their kitchen in Nantucket as she twirled the phone line and spoke to people Gale would never know. Lovers? Friends? Her mother usually waved Gale out of the kitchen before she could get a hint.

“Hello? This is the Ratherses’ residence,” Gale answered now.

There was silence on the other end save for the sound of soft breathing. Gale inhaled sharply. It reminded her of a horror film she’d accidentally watched part of on television the other week. “Hello?” she asked again. “I can hear you.”

Next came a girlish giggle. A shiver ran down Gale’s spine. How do I know this laugh?

“I’m terribly sorry, Mrs. Rathers,” a young woman said. She slurred her words together as though she were drunk. “My friend here didn’t believe that you really still had a landline. We looked up your phone number in the phone book and everything. It was like going back in time.”

Gale’s heart seized. She spread her hand across the wall and studied her thick fingernails, which were painted soft pink. She’d wanted to look pretty for her birthday. She’d wanted to feel beautiful to the tips of her fingers. Who is this? Why are they bothering me?

But Gale was beginning to understand. She was beginning to realize she already knew.

It was funny, Gale thought then, how easy it was to hide the truth from yourself. You could carry it around with you like a dark mole or a slight cough and shove the worries to the side in pursuit of other things. Groceries had to be bought. The bathroom was always in a state of needing to be cleaned. Until recently, the girls needed new jeans, sweaters, and bedsheets. All of a sudden, you were forty-six, and the metaphorical ceiling of your life was crashing in on you.

“Can I help you with something?” Gale asked tersely.

The woman giggled again. “Can I help you with something?” she imitated her, using a high-pitched and false accent. “You really are the last of all the sensible women. So old-fashioned, Mrs. Rathers !”

Tears sprang to Gale’s eyes. I recognize that voice. I know her.

It was so clear.

Gale had met this young woman at a dinner for Peter’s advertising firm last year but couldn’t remember her name for the life of her. Ashley? Brittany? Crystal? Danica? She was an up-and-coming intern in the Providence advertising world. She’d had one too many cocktails at the work dinner and told Gale that Peter was a genius. Gale had seen a little girl who was just a year or two older than the twins. Gale had seen a little girl who desperately wanted to succeed and impress her boss’s wife. What a fool I was .

Now, Gale pressed the phone to her chest, wondering if the other woman could hear the thudding of her heart. And then, loud enough to be heard over the record Peter played, she cried, “Peter! It’s for you.”

Peter appeared a moment later. At forty-seven, he was handsome as ever, with tufts of gray around his ears that swept to a full head of curls, a broad and muscular chest, which he’d sculpted at the gym every morning of the previous five years (when did this start? Is that when the affairs began?). His teeth were terrifically white, bleached every six months by a dentist who, Gale realized now, was also quite good-looking. Gale had been married to Peter for twenty-four years. How many others were there?

It was startlingly clear to Gale that this wasn’t the only one.

“I think it’s for you,” Gale said. “I have to finish the antipasti.”

Peter took the phone and pressed his lips to her cheek. Gale’s face felt inflamed.

“Thanks, birthday girl,” he said to Gale.

Gale wanted to scream. She turned on her heel and pressed a knife into the cheese to produce a long, thin strand. Peter put the phone to his ear and said, “Ratherses’ residence!”

Gale fought the urge to turn around and watch him. But she didn’t have to. She could imagine the way his face fell. She could hear the ominous shift in tone as he rasped, “Why did you call this number?”

Gale sliced more cheese and lined them up on a platter. She felt dutiful. She felt like the musicians onboard the Titanic who’d decided to play until the end. I will act the part until the frigid water swallows me up. One night left.

Have I always been waiting for this moment? Did I always assume this would happen? She was suddenly not sure.

A split second later, Peter changed his tone once more. It was jovial. Snappy. He really was a brilliant advertiser! “That’s a great idea,” he said, clearly faking a conversation. “Why don’t I give you a call back on my cell? We can swap ideas; we can brainstorm. Does that work for you?”

Gale poured fifteen green olives onto the platter and arranged them alongside the cheese. She remembered the big birthday present Peter had lovingly placed on the table by the door that afternoon. He’d said, Don’t you dare peek. What could a cheating husband possibly buy for the wife he was deceiving? Maybe it was a new vacuum to clean up the messes he stomped in on the shoes he refused to take off at the door. (He always forgot, and Gale had stopped asking.) Maybe it was a sweater that didn’t fit her quite right. Maybe it was still more proof that the world they’d built together was a pathetic imitation of a partnership.

Does the other woman know it’s my birthday? And then she thought, of course she does. That’s why she called now. She wants to ruin it.

Peter hung up the phone. Gale could still feel him behind her, watching her as she casually put together the final antipasti plate they would ever share as a couple with their girls. What will the girls say? How will they take it? Oh, but they’re adults. Or they’re trying to be adults, which is all we’re all trying to be.

“That was a client,” Peter said firmly. “They want me to write another commercial for the potato chips.” He paused. “That’s great, right?”

Gale swallowed the lump in her throat. This was worst of all—the fact that Peter wanted to lie to her face, in her kitchen, on her birthday, when she’d been the one who’d answered the phone. Did he think she was stupid? Maybe he did. Perhaps that was the whole point of this. He doesn’t think I’m worthy of respect.

“Gale?” Peter’s voice was pleading.

But suddenly, the doorbell rang. Gale put the knife down and swept out of the kitchen and to the mango light of the foyer. She felt as though she floated like the earth's gravitational pull no longer bothered her. Her husband was having an affair. Her husband was having an affair on her birthday. And he planned to lie about it as long as he could.

Mercifully, her twin daughters were out on the front porch—with boyfriends who couldn’t have looked or acted more differently. Anna and Piper. Anna and Piper with Brendan and Andy. Gale opened the door and spread her arms to her darling daughters, who leaped forward and hugged her and dotted her cheeks with kisses.

“Happy birthday, Mom!” they cried. “You look so beautiful.”

Gale fought every instinct to crumple to their feet and weep.

But instead, she clenched her jaw and led her daughters inside. She would be the one to mix the Aperol spritzes. She would fall into the glossy evening with a big smile and happy stories. She would open the presents they’d brought, feast on her eggplant parmesan, and eat two slices of the cake she’d baked herself. Peter would be forced to get in line. A final performance for the girls. The only difference between this performance and the one he’d been doing for months or years was that, finally, Gale was in on it. She was the star of the show.