Chapter 22
MARY HAD ASKED to meet up for dinner, just the two of them.
Usually, it was a trio—Mary, Anna, and Di—but Mary had texted early in the week to see about a one-on-one dinner.
Anna didn’t mind. In fact, she did better one-on-one, she always thought.
It was an opportunity to really sink into whatever the other person was saying.
We should go to Newburyport. You always say you’re going to show me around and you never do.
That was true. Mary had asked again and again for an insider’s tour, and they had simply never made the time.
There’s a place I love called Vera, Anna wrote back.
The restaurant was loud, so she and Denny almost never took the kids, because they had to yell across the table to hear anything.
And they hardly ever had date nights anymore.
But Vera served good pastas and chewy-crusted pizzas and it was a warm little place right off Market Square that people knew about but that always miraculously seemed to have enough space for a party of two.
Sounds perfect. Pick me up at 6, Mary said. Now Anna just had to clear it with Denny.
Which turned out to be no issue at all, because there was some miniseries on that he had been dying to watch, so he didn’t even blink when she told him she was heading out for dinner with friends, and would he please remember to give the kids vegetables and fruit with their macaroni and cheese this time?
(Yes, yes, fine, he promised, though she knew better than to expect it.)
Mary wore a pair of pale blue slacks that cut right to the ankle, along with heeled black boots and a camel-colored wool coat, all clothing that Anna had never seen before.
“Look at you,” she said, as her friend got into the car.
“Well, you know, any opportunity not to wear sweatpants in public.”
In Newburyport, the giant Christmas tree still hadn’t been removed from Market Square.
This year, the city had used LED lights instead of traditional bulbs, and the glow cast from them tinged everything blue.
When Anna moved to the area in the late 1980s, the city had just started to recover from a period of economic regression.
In the 1970s, a city-wide restoration, focused on the area’s brick-paved downtown, had been initiated to help drive business owners and tourists.
But most of the people she knew were middle-class kids, with parents who worked in the public sector or who deep-sea fished on the weekends.
The town had been a bit down on its luck until a commuter rail nosed in somewhere in the late ’90s, connecting the area with Boston and bringing better jobs with it.
Now you wouldn’t even recognize the place.
If Newbury-port had once been a place for cheap beers and wayward fishermen, it was now a tony bedroom community, a mirror to Hamilton: UPPAbaby strollers, upscale boutiques, small restaurants that operated with a reservations-only model.
Anna still knew plenty of people around town, but she found that the faces looked less and less familiar now, a place stretching beyond its own measure of comfort.
Vera still reminded her of the way Newburyport had been when she was a kid, even though it had been the home of an old ice cream parlor, Bergson’s. Inside, she and Mary were shown to a table in a corner.
When a server came over—one she recognized—Anna held up two fingers. Sangiovese, two glasses. The server nodded and disappeared toward the bar.
“Everything is good here, but I can also list my favorites, if that’s helpful,” Anna said. She didn’t need a menu. Even though she never came with Denny, she had been to Vera plenty with Di, and even a few times alone, enough to know the menu, enough to know the wine.
“Order for me,” Mary said. “I honestly don’t care. I’m so happy to be out of Hamilton, I’ll eat anything.”
“Even pizza?”
“I’m from South Hamilton. I’ll eat pizza.”
Anna laughed. She thought of Mimi with a slice. Never in a million years.
She ordered enough food for twice as many people. Prosciutto with burrata. Two Neapolitan-style pizzas. Linguine with clams. A salad that went untouched. They had to send back the share plates; there was no room for anything else.
“I obviously overdid it,” she said.
“I’m okay with it, honestly,” Mary said.
Mary, Anna noticed, had been drinking quickly. She was already moving toward the third wine by the time they made it to the pizza. Her face had flushed, and she seemed hesitant to make eye contact.
“I have a feeling we’re not here to talk about the pizza, though,” Anna said.
Mary looked up and put down her fork. Sitting back, she laced her hands in her lap. She went to say something, but nothing came out.
Anna waited.
“I’m sorry, I’m trying to think of the right way to have this conversation,” Mary said. She was quiet again. This time, she began to chew on the inside of her cheek, meditatively, in the same way that Denny sometimes did, former tobacco chewer that he was.
“Denny does that.”
“Does what?”
“Chews his cheek when he can’t think of what to say.”
“You know, I’ve still never met him,” Mary said, and then proceeded: “Here’s the thing. I wanted to meet here because I wanted to talk to you about Di.”
Her newest friend coming here, to her hometown, to talk about her oldest one.
A competition for her affection, maybe. Anna couldn’t yet tell.
She studied the face looking back at her: earnest, kind.
Still that gentle spray of gray hair at the temples.
Large chandelier earrings, down nearly as far as her shoulders.
So out of style they were nearly in style.
She should have known that Mary and Di could never really be friends.
Foolish of her to imagine a world where all three of them belonged together.
“What about her? I do know she can be difficult and demanding, but, you know, she’s basically my family,” Anna said.
“That’s the thing,” Mary said. She reached a hand, searching. For Anna’s hand. Anna pulled back. “Is she? Your family?”
“I guess I don’t really know what you’re getting at.” Anna could hear her own voice turn cool. She didn’t care for the implication. To feel jealousy was one thing, but Anna had no patience for women who initiated grievances among women.
“I think—and this is hard to say to you—but I think that she may be friendly with Mimi,” Mary said.
“Oh, that’s what you’re worried about?” Anna leaned back and sipped from the wine.
She had never spent much time thinking about the wine, but it wasn’t very good.
Slippery, a little rust on the palate, a hiccup of acid and then gone.
A short burst on earth, grapes that turned to dust. Wasn’t it all like that, really?
Just a moment and then life extinguished.
All those winemakers, making a fuss, battling the sun and the rain and the snow and the hail, out in the field picking their grapes by hand, and for what?
An average bottle of wine. A bad bottle of wine.
A good bottle of wine. Whichever one you ended up with, it was gone at the end of the night. Finished. Forgotten.
“Di, well, she’s friends with everyone. It’s her thing. I wouldn’t put it past her to work extra hard to get Mimi on her side just so that she doesn’t lose her social status at Life Time,” Anna said.
“I ran into her,” Mary said. “She was having dinner. Not just her. She was with Mimi and Ellen. Two weeks ago.”
“She didn’t tell me about that,” Anna said.
“It was in Beverly. Some new place. I’m sure she was counting on the fact that practically no one we know eats out in Beverly.”
“Or maybe she was counting on the fact that she was just going out to dinner with a few women from Hamilton and that it was no big deal,” Anna countered.
“Also possible.” Mary drained another glass of wine and turned to get the attention of the server. Anna put her hand on her friend’s arm.
“Don’t,” she said. “I think you’ve had enough.”
“I’m just trying to make myself a little nicer,” Mary said. “The mediocre wine helps.”
The Beverly restaurant, Mary told her, was formal. Dark. The women were at a table in the back, and when Mary excused herself to use the bathroom—she was at a dinner for work—she walked past, and they averted their eyes. They did not want to be seen.
Anna listened. Di hadn’t mentioned anything about the dinner, it was true.
But then, it was just as possible that her friend hadn’t wanted to upset her.
Di had a tendency to keep close to the vest information that she felt might be prone to rocking the boat.
As much as she was invested in Anna’s success when it came to the PTO, she was also a society woman in town, and Anna had no doubt that Di was still working the rounds, ensuring her own value in Hamilton.
“Look, when it comes to Di, she may just be trying to smooth things over so that things are easier for her and the kids,” Anna said.
“I don’t exactly blame her, given the kind of shit I’ve put up with.
” Hadn’t it been Di, after all, who had dragged her over to the police station to file the report in the first place?
Di who had backed her decision to run for PTO president, no questions asked?
All these years, Di had calmed her down and walked her off the precarious cliffs and also had been there when Anna needed her most. She couldn’t quite entertain what it was that Mary was implying—that Di was somehow on the other side of all of this, the side that was perpetuating text messages and emails, the side that had pushed her own daughter into the pool. That wasn’t Di.
“I am only telling you what I saw. That’s all,” Mary said.
“I appreciate that, I do. Maybe we should just leave it at that,” Anna said.