Chapter 26
By the beginning of September, Candice, Lindsey, and Henry were out of the Harbor House.
They’d packed their things and their mother’s memorabilia and scattered to the four winds: Henry off to Los Angeles for a work thing, Lindsey somewhere to meet up with an old fling, and Candice back to New York City for the time being, where she planned to move out of the apartment she’d shared with Nathan and her kids for years.
Slowly, she’d move some things into her newly purchased house on Martha’s Vineyard—but Frank had a few things he wanted to fix up inside before she fully settled in. He was handy like that.
Goodness, she was already head over heels for him.
When Candice first spotted the NYC skyline, her heart skipped a beat.
It felt like ages since she’d felt like the version of herself who lived and worked and mothered in NYC.
She’d left the city at the beginning of June—three months ago—and she’d transformed completely.
When she glanced in the mirror, she barely recognized herself.
But maybe that was just because she was so tan.
Just as soon as Candice’s key went into the lock, she heard Sarah and Peter hurrying from the living room to greet her.
She opened the door and fell into their arms. Sarah had come home especially to see her mother, but she was already wanted back at NYU tomorrow.
Peter had just returned from soccer practice, and his cheeks were red and lined with salt.
Minus another brief trip in August, when they’d come to the Vineyard to hang with their mother, Candice hadn’t seen them.
“Tell me everything,” she said now, sitting on the sofa like old times.
“I want to know all about college, Sarah. And I want to know all about eleventh grade, Peter.”
Nathan was in his study, as ever. But even he came out to say hello and give Candice a tender hug.
He knew all about Candice’s bizarre summer, about the quest to discover her mother’s past, and he’d been the first to tell Candice it was a beautiful idea for a novel.
“I know,” Candice had said. “I’m already writing it. ” And she was.
The once-nuclear and now-separated family decided to go out for pizza that night.
Peter showered, and they all walked the three blocks to their favorite pizza place, which had been run for about a thousand years by an Italian American named Tony.
Tony laughed and joked with all of them, and when Candice confessed to him that they were getting divorced, Tony said, “Welcome to the club! I’m on my fourth marriage. Life begins after the third, I think.”
Candice and Nathan laughed heartily. Anyone who could joke about such dark and painful things was okay in their books. Already, they’d decided to be more open and honest with one another in divorce than they’d ever been in marriage. It was off to a pretty good start.
Over dinner, Candice showed her kids and Nathan the plan for the Harbor House’s transitional home for women. “We have women applying to come from all over,” she said. “Gwen’s doing her best to sift through everything, but I told her that I can help out when she needs me.”
“You’ll be close,” Nathan said. “Part-time, I mean.”
Candice smiled. “Yes, I will be.”
It all felt beyond her wildest dreams. It was a new chapter.
That night, over wine while the kids did their own thing, Candice sat at her old kitchen table and told Nathan that she’d finally researched Billy Long, her birth father. “It took me ages to get up the nerve to do it,” she said.
“But you need to know as much as you can for the book,” Nathan said.
“It’s not just about the book,” she said, laughing. “But, sure. Yes. For the book, too.”
She explained what she’d read: that after Billy Long had abandoned Stella McGee and gone to Los Angeles to seek his fortune, he’d had several mid- and top-tier clients, some musicians and some actors.
“He worked with Emilio Estevez and Linda Ronstadt and Billy Crystal,” she said, listing them on her fingers.
Nathan looked impressed.
“But then, something happened,” Candice said. “It was the late eighties, and he lost a ton of money in a stock market scam. According to a few sources I read, he had to give up his house, his wife left him, and his clients abandoned him. He lost his cache in Hollywood almost overnight.”
Nathan’s eyes widened. “Wow.”
Candice grimaced. “It’s not that I think he deserved that.”
“No. But he did treat your mother terribly,” Nathan said. “He left her when she needed him the most.”
Candice let her eyes flutter down to the table. She didn’t want to dig into what Nathan meant with that. She didn’t want her mother and father’s story to echo her own.
“He ended up opening a tour boat company in Florida,” she said, laughing.
“He toured families through swamplands, showing off alligators and snakes.” She pulled up old photographs she’d found on the internet of her once-spectacular father, Billy Long.
In one, he held an alligator by the snout, dangling it over the side of a boat.
He grinned beautifully, in a way that made Candice understand why her mother had fallen for him.
“Did he get eaten by an alligator?” Nathan asked.
“No. Not a single alligator-related injury during his tenure,” she said.
“But he did pass away last year. Heart disease. Here.” She pulled up his obituary, which showed a photograph of Billy Long in his fifties or sixties, wearing thick glasses and a beard.
The obituary mentioned his “elite work in the world of entertainment, including music and movie-making.” It also said that he got his start in Nashville, where he was still beloved.
“I don’t think he’s still beloved in Nashville,” Nathan said. “Not after what he did to your mom.”
“They don’t talk about him very nicely,” Candice agreed, remembering the calls she’d made in the previous weeks and the dismissive way people had talked about Billy Long.
“Are you sad you never got to meet him?” Nathan asked.
Candice shrugged. For about the thousandth time, she considered how Ben Winthrop worked into this story. It was impossible to know how he’d come into Stella’s life, but it wasn’t impossible to see how much he’d changed it.
“I think things worked out the way they were meant to,” Candice said.
“What about Sally?” Nathan asked. “Where is she?”
But Candice hadn’t been able to find any information about her Aunt Sally. She’d even searched for her under her maiden and unchanged name of Carrie Kimpel. It was as though Sally McGee and Carrie Kimpel had disappeared off the face of the earth. It was strange.
“Maybe I’ll figure it out one day.” Candice sighed.
“I hate that she abandoned your mom,” Nathan said.
“I have a feeling that she did what she had to do,” Candice offered. “They both did.” Although when she thought of her mother, aching for her sister, tears filled her eyes.
She prayed that her mother had had enough love in her life. She prayed that Stella had felt it from each of her children, regardless of how difficult their relationships had sometimes been.