“He does?”

“I told him accidental y. Did you know Josh gave me a ride home that first Sunday, when I tried to fly back to Connecticut?”

“He did?”

“Yeah. Isn’t that weird? I told him then, on the ride.”

Vicki stared at Melanie in an inscrutable way. Melanie felt like she had just confessed that she and Josh had a secret history. Did Vicki disapprove? It was just a ride from the airport, nothing more, but how to explain the bizarre, nascent feelings she now harbored for Josh? She should keep them to herself. It was probably just her hormones.

“I don’t know what to do about the baby, Vick.”

“You’re going to keep it, though, right?”

“Keep it, yes. But then what?”

Vicki was silent, sipping her iced tea. “There wil be people to help you. Ted and I wil help you.”

“The baby needs a father.”

“Peter wil come around.”

“You sound pretty sure about that.”

“He must miss you.”

Melanie scoffed. “He hasn’t cal ed once. Not once.”

“And you haven’t cal ed him. I’m proud of you.”

“I’m proud of myself,” Melanie said. She hadn’t cal ed Peter; she hadn’t tipped her hand. She was being patient, waiting things out. Along the back fence, the roses bloomed and the bumblebees were fat and happy. Ted had cut the grass over the weekend and it smel ed wonderful and fresh. The sun was warm on Melanie’s legs. Josh would return with the kids at one o’clock; this thought alone was enough to make Melanie glad she was here and not back in Connecticut. “Thank you for letting me come,” Melanie said.

“I’m happy you’re here,” Vicki said.

“Are you?” Melanie said. Before the tumultuous events of the spring, Vicki and Melanie had talked on the phone three or four times a day; there were no taboo subjects. They excavated everything, leaving no stone unturned. Now, here they were, living under the same smal roof, but they were each alone with their misery. Melanie worried that Vicki was angry at her for the things that happened the first week. Was she mad that Melanie had al owed Blaine to wander down the beach unnoticed, or that Melanie had fal en off the airplane steps with Porter? Was she pissed that Melanie had tried to leave Nantucket without saying good-bye? Did she resent having to hire a babysitter to take care of the children when her best friend should have been perfectly capable of doing so? Did she begrudge Melanie her pregnancy? Compared to Vicki’s, Melanie’s body was a piece of ripe fruit. And Melanie had done nothing to help Vicki with her chemo. Brenda had her role: She was the driver, the facilitator, the sister. Melanie was, and had been from the beginning, extra baggage. “Are you sure I’m not the worst friend you ever had?”

Vicki put her hand—which shook a little, like an old person’s hand—over Melanie’s, and instantly, the negative feelings receded. That was Vicki’s gift. Kiss it and make it better. She was everybody’s mother.

“Not even close,” she said.

Every Tuesday and Friday when she took Vicki to chemo, Brenda sat in the waiting room pretending to read magazines and she prayed for her sister. This was secret, and strange, because Brenda had never been particularly religious. Buzz and El en Lyndon had raised the girls as lazy Protestants. Over the years, they’d attended church sporadical y, in fits and bursts, every week for three months around Easter and then not again until Christmas. They’d always said grace before dinner, and for a while El en Lyndon attended early morning Bible study and would try to tel the girls about it as she drove them to school. Both girls had been baptized at St. David’s Episcopal, then confirmed; it was their church, they considered themselves Christians, their pastor performed Vicki and Ted’s wedding, a ful service where everyone took Communion. And yet, religion had not played a central role in family life, not real y, not the way it did for the Catholics or the Baptists or the Jewish people Brenda knew.

There were no crucifixes in the Lyndon house, no open Bibles, no yarmulkes or prayer shawls. They were so privileged, so lucky, that they had never needed religion, maybe that was it. Buzz Lyndon was an attorney in Philadelphia, he made plenty of money but not enough to cause trouble; El en Lyndon was a gifted housewife and mother. The Lyndon kitchen was, quite possibly, the happiest room in southeastern Pennsylvania—there was always classical music, fresh flowers, a bowl of ripe fruit, and something delicious about to come out of the oven. There was a blackboard in the kitchen where El en Lyndon wrote a quote each day, or a scrap of poem. Food for thought, she cal ed it. Everything had been so lovely in the Lyndon household, so cultivated, so right, that God had been easy to overlook, to take for granted.

But now, this summer, in the pearl-gray waiting room of the Oncology Unit of Nantucket Cottage Hospital, Brenda Lyndon prayed her sister would live. The irony of this did not escape her. When Brenda had prayed at al growing up in the Lyndon household—if she had prayed secretly, fervently

—then it was, without exception, that Vicki would die.

For years, Brenda and Vicki fought. There was screaming, scratching, spitting, and slamming doors. The girls fought about clothes, eyeliner, a Rick Springfield tape of Brenda’s that Vicki lent to her friend Amy, who mangled it. They fought over who sat where in the car, who got to watch which TV program, who used the telephone for how many cal s, for how many minutes. They fought over who col ected the most beach glass from their walks around the Jetties, who had more bacon on her BLT, who looked better in her hockey skirt. They fought because Brenda borrowed Vicki’s pink Fair Isle sweater without asking, and in retribution, Vicki ripped Brenda’s paper about The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—

painstakingly typed on their father’s Smith Corona—in half. Brenda smacked Vicki, Vicki pul ed out a hank of Brenda’s hair. They were separated by their father, Vicki cal ed Brenda the c word from behind her bedroom door. El en Lyndon threatened boarding school. Honestly, she said, I don’t know where you girls learned such language.

They fought over grades, teachers, test scores, and boys—or, Brenda corrected herself, boy—because the only boy who had mattered to Brenda for the first thirty years of her life (until she met Walsh, real y) was Erik vanCott. Erik vanCott had been not only Brenda’s best friend, but her secret, unrequited love. However, he had always nurtured a thing for Vicki. The pain of this alone was enough to fuel Brenda’s fantasies of Vicki, dead. Car accident, botulism, heart attack, choking, stabbed in the heart on South Street by a man with a purple Mohawk.

Al through high school the girls openly claimed they hated each other, though Brenda suspected it was she who had said the words more often, because what reason would Vicki have had to hate Brenda? Brenda was, in Vicki’s opinion, pathetic. Lowly Worm, she cal ed her to be mean, a name cruel y borrowed from their favorite Richard Scarry book growing up. Lowly Worm, bookworm, nose always in a book, gobbling it up like a rotten apple.

Can I invite a friend? Vicki always asked their parents, no matter where they were going. I don’t want to be stuck with Lowly Worm.

I hate you, Brenda had thought. Then she wrote the words in her journal. Then she whispered them, then shouted them at the top of her lungs, I hate you! I wish you were dead!

Brenda shivered with guilt to think of it now. Cancer. Their relationship hadn’t been al bad. El en Lyndon, distraught by the girls’ open hostility, was constantly reminding them of how close they’d been when they were little. You two used to be such good friends. You used to fall asleep holding hands. Brenda cried the day Vicki left for kindergarten, and Vicki made Brenda a paper plate covered with foil stars. There had even been a moment or two of solidarity in high school, primarily against their parents, and, in one instance, against Erik vanCott.

When Brenda and Erik vanCott were juniors in high school, and Vicki was a senior, Erik asked Vicki to the junior prom. Vicki was entangled in an on-again / off-again relationship with her boyfriend Simon, who was a freshman at the University of Delaware. Vicki asked Simon for

“permission” to go to the junior prom with Erik “as a friend,” and Simon’s response was, Whatever floats your boat. Fine. Vicki and Erik were going to the junior prom together.

To say that Brenda was destroyed by this news would be an understatement. She had been asked to the junior prom by two boys, one decent-looking and moronic and the other just moronic. Brenda had said no to both, hoping that Erik would ask her out of pity, or a sense of duty, or for fun.

But now Brenda would be staying home while Vicki went to Brenda’s prom with Erik. Into this drama stepped El en, with her belief that al aches and pains—even romantic, sister-related ones—could be cured by a little Nantucket sand between the toes. When she got wind of the predicament and confirmed it with the sight of Brenda’s long face, she took the bottle of Nantucket sand that she kept on the windowsil and poured some into Brenda’s Bean Blucher moccasins.

“Put these on,” El en ordered. “You’l feel better.”

Brenda did as she was told, but this time, she swore to herself, she would not pretend that the sand treatment worked. She would not pretend that it was August and she was seven years old again, climbing the dunes of Great Point. Back then, the most important thing in her life had been her sea glass col ection and her Frances Hodgson Burnett books— A Little Princess, The Secret Garden.