Chapter 26 #2
“We all end up in the same place in the end,” she said.
Then she let go and tipped her head back in an uproarious laugh, clocking herself hard on the headrest. She shouldn’t have been driving, Anna realized.
Anyway, what did it matter what people said when they were fucked up?
Just a bunch of words with no meaning. No one ever remembered it in the morning.
Anna had, of course, remembered it in the morning, but the hard edges of that night had been softened with the length and roundness of their friendship.
She went back to New York, Di went back to western Mass, and it was just another dumb thing that one had said to another, part of a catalogue of sins.
All long relationships have them. If there had been festering resentment, Anna hadn’t thought of it much, or at all—not the fact that Di hadn’t done the things she wanted, because Di had ended up in a fortunate position.
She was beautiful, with those emerald eyes, and well-liked by everyone.
She had carved out a position for herself in Hamilton.
When Anna talked about moving back to Massachusetts, it had been Di who suggested Hamilton in the first place.
“It’s not as stuffy as you think,” she said.
“Even with all those horse-loving rich people?” Anna asked. She had been scrolling through countless houses on Zillow, and the ones that came up first were outrageous: multimillion-dollar homes with acres to keep up, facades that were sure to chip away at any reasonable person’s bank account.
“There are plenty of normal people here. Newburyport isn’t like it was when we were kids, either, you know.
” That was true. She didn’t know anyone who hung out at the North End Boat Club anymore.
After Kaitlin died, the Connorses moved up to New Hampshire, way into the mountains, to get away.
All the locals complained about the rising costs in town, the newly expensive restaurants, the skyrocketing real estate.
Everything was more desirable now, even their diminutive little hometown, where nothing important had ever really happened.
“Is it hard to make friends?” Anna had asked.
“I’ve met some people through the schools,” Di told her. “The PTO, actually. I know it’s probably not your scene.” Even back then, Anna had wondered, privately, how she would adapt in a town where the main social interactions revolved around moms and the engines of their drama.
But Anna had taken the bait and convinced Denny, even, that Hamilton was worth sinking their teeth into.
They drove up on weekends from New York with the kids, looping around the back roads, trying to figure out where they could envision themselves.
Hamilton. Wenham. Ipswich. Merrimac. West Newbury.
Even Essex and Gloucester. Di met them at showings, pointed out how lovely Hamilton was in spring, had them over for dinner at her sprawling estate on Bridge Street—the right side of South Hamilton.
The good side of the tracks, if you were keeping score.
“You were right. It isn’t half bad,” Anna told Di.
She found the town charming. There was an actual polo club, and a store where you could get your initials monogrammed on a beach bag.
She could envision the kids growing up there, an idyllic northern Massachusetts life for them all, close enough to see her mother on the weekends, not too far from the beach, setting down roots in a new enough town where she still had at least one old friend.
“I told you,” Di said. “And there are nice people here, I promise.” Di had a group of friends, she said, women that she met sometimes on the weekend for wine at the Black Cow. “You just have to get to know them a little.”
All of that sounded convincing, and Anna had been convinced.
Hamilton seemed like a dream, and it was a dream: Di in her sprawling house, the other women in their equestrian estates, Nancy’s Corner or the nicest parts of South Hamilton, even, with riding lessons for the kids and memberships at the nicest clubs and husbands who went foxhunting or played golf at Myopia Hunt Club (members only, of course).
Even when she moved into her perfect little house, though, she could never fit in at Di’s parties.
Mimi Mar looked disapprovingly at her outfits.
They weren’t nice enough. Karen Pistoulia brushed something off of the shoulder of her dress.
“Just a little . . . dust,” she said, implying that Anna was unkempt, that she couldn’t get herself together, not even for one evening among women.
Ellen Wilson always smiled and waved at parties or out at Patton Park, but Anna knew better than to call her for dinner plans. She had her own friends.
All of that eventually left Di, who had become a centerpiece, too, the main character in this small town, even if Mimi Mar had been parading around like a peacock pretending to be the most important person in all of Hamilton.
Diane Maguire was not president of the PTO, of course, but she was a swirling brand of energy, fiery and interesting and surrounded by Hamilton’s most important people.
Queen Bee? Maybe not. But a person of influence.
A person with friends. A person who knew how to conduct the orchestra.
“They do seem to love you here,” Anna said to Di at one of her friend’s parties. It was spring. They were sitting on the veranda, taking stock of the newly sprung daffodils.
“Big fish, small pond,” Di said, raising a glass of rosé. The sky was the same color, fading salmon.
In that moment, Anna remembered the drive up to UNH.
You’re not so great, she thought, looking around at the giant house with all its trappings.
None of this is so great. The friends seemed vapid.
The party was dull. The parties were all pretty dull.
She preferred Di when it was only the two of them at Anna’s house, gorging on chips and terrible reality TV.
She did not say this, though; instead, she raised her own glass of onionskin-pink wine and toasted to the party, to her friend’s good fortune, to the emergence of spring, and to their luck in having survived the winding and long path of friendship.
“To the big fish,” Anna said.
“To the small pond,” Di said.
And for a minute, they were right back in Kaitlin Connors’s backyard, a black bag of Smartfood between them, just a young girl in a Laura Ashley dress and a much taller girl in cutoffs, the one with the emerald eyes, the one no one could take their eyes off, especially Anna Denton.