Sugar & Storm (Sugarberry Island #2)

Chapter 1

Chapter

One

Whit left me on a Tuesday, which I took personally, because Tuesday is when I do the household order. A man who has eaten food he never once watched arrive in a refrigerator, for eighteen years, ought to know better than to detonate his marriage on a day with no margin in it.

“Brooke,” he said. “We need to talk.”

No one in the history of marriage has ever needed to talk.

They have needed to announce. I know the difference the way some people know weather.

So I set down the basting brush. I gave him the face — the good one, the one I keep for the principal, the HOA board, and my mother. And I let him announce.

Her name was Kendall. She taught the 9:15 reformer class at the club, she had the shoulders of a person who has never once been talked over, and she said “honor your body” in a way I had personally found motivating right up until approximately 4:41 that afternoon.

Because I was the one who recommended her.

To Whit. For his back. I had written her name on a Post-it in my own steady hand and stuck it to the key hook by the garage door, because that is precisely the kind of wife I was: the kind who solves your lower-back problem so thoroughly that she arranges your entire next marriage.

He had reasons. Whit always had reasons; he was a man who read one business book a year and quoted from it for the following twelve months.

He’d been “unhappy for a long time” — which was news, given that he ate my pot roast every Sunday with the contentment of a well-fed Labrador.

We had “grown apart,” the phrase people reach for when what they mean is that one of them grew, personally, in a direction that turned out to involve a reformer machine.

And I “deserved to be happy too,” which was generous of him, folding my happiness into the renovation of his own, like a man holding the door for you on his way out of a building he has personally set alight.

I would like to tell you I threw the chicken. I did not throw the chicken. You don’t, after you’ve brined it.

The least flattering true thing about me is that I am extraordinary in a crisis.

Not good. Extraordinary. When the youth soccer concession stand caught fire during the spring tournament, I was the one who evacuated the bleachers, located three fire extinguishers nobody knew the club owned, and had a revised snack schedule emailed to four hundred families before the trucks left.

People still bring it up. I would prefer they didn’t.

The point is that I do not come apart in the moment.

I come apart later, privately, on a schedule, after the thank-you notes are out.

That was not, I’ll admit, an isolated incident.

In a certain three-mile radius of well-kept lawns, I was a public utility.

If the silent auction was hemorrhaging money, you called me.

If the new family on Marling Court needed a pediatrician, a plumber, and a tactful word about their leaf situation, you called me.

I had chaired committees you have never heard of and would not believe were real.

I had a label maker and a reputation, and somewhere along the line, I had mistaken the second for a personality.

So while Whit was still going — and it had clearly been rehearsed, possibly on the reformer — I did the only thing I have ever truly known how to do under fire.

I made a list.

I did it behind my own eyes, where I do most of my best work.

Call Marian Petty, who handled Caroline Esposito’s divorce and is, by every account, a Doberman in good shoes.

Move the appraisal up. Do not, under any circumstances, tell my mother by phone.

Sophie — last, underlined twice, the only item on that list with a pulse.

By the time Whit got to the part where he hoped we could “do this with grace,” which is what people say when they have behaved without any, I had already mentally reassigned his side of the closet and was wondering, with a calm that frightened me a little, whether the guest room mattress was the better one.

Whit, for his part, did not know what to do with me.

He’d braced for a scene. I watched him do it — the weight back on the heels, the way he stands before a hard conversation with a contractor.

The scene didn’t come. He was left holding a confession with no place to set it down.

I think, on some level, he will never have the vocabulary for, he had wanted me to fight for him.

It is a humbling thing to leave a woman and watch her reach, on reflex, for a legal pad.

“You’re not even—” he started.

“I’m processing,” I said.

This was a lie. I had finished processing. What I had processed, standing in my own kitchen over a cooling bird, was the thing I had been waiting the entire conversation to feel, the thing that was supposed to arrive and didn’t.

It didn’t hurt.

I waited for it. I am not a monster; I gave it every chance.

Eighteen years, a daughter, a wedding my mother still describes as “correct,” a man whose snoring I’d been managing with three separate pillows since before Sophie could walk.

The floor was supposed to go. It goes for other women.

It goes in the movies, with a hand pressed to the mouth and a slow slide down the cabinetry.

The floor did not go. What I felt instead, God help me, was the specific clean lift of a meeting getting cancelled.

The 4:40 you’d budgeted ninety minutes and a good attitude for, the one you’d been quietly dreading without admitting you were dreading anything — gone.

The whole evening suddenly, indecently yours.

And then, hard behind the relief, came the part that actually scared me, which was the arithmetic.

Because if I was relieved — if my husband of eighteen years had just walked out the side door toward a Pilates instructor I had personally vetted, and my chief sensation was that I’d gotten my Tuesday back — then what, precisely, had I been doing in this house all this time?

What, exactly, had I built and run so well that I could lose it standing up and feel like the dentist had called to reschedule?

That was the question. That is the whole question, in fact, and it sat down at my kitchen island like it paid rent, and in all the months since, it has not once gotten up.

Whit moved to a hotel that night. He offered to stay “until things were sorted,” as though our marriage were a delayed flight and we might still make the connection.

I declined. I did, however, pack his bag for him, because I could not bear to watch him do it badly, and because folding is a thing my hands do when the rest of me has questions.

Then the house went quiet in the particular way a house goes quiet when it has, without telling you, stopped needing you.

Sophie was three weeks from a dorm in Athens, already half gone behind her own eyes, as eighteen-year-olds are.

The dog had died in February, which I had handled.

My calendar — I keep a real one, paper, color-coded, a system my family has mocked and depended on in roughly equal measure — sat open on the counter.

I looked at it, at all those careful little blocks of other people’s needs, and understood that a great many of them had quietly expired without my noticing.

Sophie found me there an hour later. My daughter communicates with me primarily by text, from elsewhere in the same house, the way you’d run a hostage negotiation, so it was a measure of the night that she came down the stairs in person, in my old college sweatshirt, and took in the scene from the doorway: the chicken, the legal pad, her mother, in roughly that order of concern.

“Did Dad leave?” she asked. It wasn’t really a question. Sophie has her grandmother’s gift for reaching the verdict before the trial’s been scheduled.

“He did.”

She nodded, slowly, absorbing it — eighteen, merciless, and kind, in the sequence of her age. Then she asked the thing nobody else would ask me for the rest of that year, the question that walked straight past the casseroles, the lawyer, and the optics and laid one finger on the actual bruise.

“Okay,” she said. “But were you, like, even happy?”

I opened my mouth to manage the question.

Managing questions is what I do. I found I did not have one single thing to put in it.

So I told her to go finish packing, which she correctly graded as a non-answer, and she let me have it anyway, because under the sweatshirt and the verdicts she is a generous person — and because some questions you leave out on the counter overnight, to see whether they’re still there in the morning.

So I did the only thing that has never failed me. I sat down at the island with a legal pad and a good pen. I made a list. At the top of it, in the hand my whole family would recognize, I wrote: WHAT NOW.

And then I sat there.

For the first time in eighteen years, possibly in my entire life, I did not have the next ten items. I did not have the next one.

I had a blank page. I had a cooling house, a brined chicken I was not, on reflection, going to be able to eat by myself, and the most disorienting sensation of my entire managed existence — which was the precise, weightless, terrifying feeling of nobody, anywhere, needing me to do a single thing.

I looked at the blank page for a long time.

For eighteen years, the four of us — me, Greer, Cam, and Dani — had taken the same week every summer on the same unfashionable little island off the Georgia coast, a place we’d washed up on broke and carless at twenty and never quite managed to leave for good.

Sugarberry in July was the one block on my color-coded calendar I had never once moved for anybody.

And Greer was down there year-round now, because last summer she had gone to sell off a dead woman’s ice cream stand and had instead, in a fit of margarita-fueled spite I will admire until I die, bought the thing — then spent a season turning her tidy, ruined corporate life into a falling-down parlor with a fourteen-foot leaning cone on the roof, a teenager who bossed her, and a man who didn’t.

If a single person on earth knew what to do with a woman standing in the wreckage of a life she’d built too well, it was Greer.

She had been the wreckage. And the last time I’d seen her, she had looked happier than I have ever once been, which was a fact I’d been declining to examine for the better part of a year.

So I picked up the phone and called her.

She answered on the second ring, over what sounded like a great deal of cheerful chaos.

“Whit left me for the Pilates girl,” I said. “I recommended her. I’m completely fine, which is the problem. I’m coming for the week early.”

There was a pause, the warm kind, the kind that has known you since you were eighteen and broke and certain of nothing.

“Brooke,” Greer said. “Bring nothing you can’t get chocolate on.”