She nodded in return. “Okay.”
Charlotte was grateful Claire didn’t plan to drop off the shirts at a second-hand place here in Oak Bluffs. It would have destroyed her to see one of Jason’s friends around town, wearing his shirts. It would have felt akin to looking at a ghost.
Chapter Two
Rachel, Abby, and Gail decided to head to the center of Oak Bluffs to meet a few of their classmates, run around in the rain, and, probably, wind up at one person’s house or the other for snacks and movies. As Rachel donned her winter coat and hat, she glanced toward her mother and paused. Her face grew stoic, more like an adult’s than a teenager’s.
“Are you going to be okay here by yourself today, Mom?” she asked.
“Of course.” Charlotte feigned her brightest smile, although she could still hear the faintest quiver in her voice. She was still shaken up about the loss of just ten shirts.
Rachel tilted her head as she looked suspiciously at her mother. “Are you sure? No work to do or anything?”
“You know how it is these days,” Charlotte replied. “No weddings till spring. We should appreciate the rest.”
“Right. Well. Let me know if you need anything,” Rachel said. After another pause, she rushed toward her mother and wrapped her arms around her. She held her for a long moment; her eyes clenched tightly closed.
When Abby and Gail appeared in the foyer, Rachel let Charlotte go. Charlotte’s arms ached with the memory of the hug. It took a moment to recover.
“You girls have fun today,” Charlotte said, her hand on her hip. “Be safe, and call me if anything goes wrong.”
“Right. Like anything ever goes wrong on the Vineyard,” Gail said.
You’d be surprised, Charlotte thought.
With Claire gone and the girls off, Charlotte collapsed in a heap near the piano bench and allowed herself to cry for a good five minutes. It was this kind of cleansing cry she started almost every day with, something she had joked with Claire about, since she said it kind of also worked as an ab exercise, as well.
When she returned to the kitchen, she scrubbed the sticky table and checked her email again. Her Facebook revealed that Lola had tagged a photo of her from way back in 1996 when she and Lola had palled around together frequently, sometimes with Christine and Claire and sometimes not. In the photo, the girls wore bikinis, and Lola drank one of those bright blue ice drinks. Lola stuck her tongue out to reveal just how blue it was. Charlotte looked sheepish beside her, still in her clothes, and her cheeks bright red from the sun.
Charlotte remembered the summer so well. The summer she had finally kissed Jason—the summer she had officially fallen in love.
Instead of writing anything too dramatic or emotional, however, Charlotte commented on the photo with: You were obsessed with those blue drinks.
Lola commented back seconds later: Now, a much different drink does the job for me. Meet up later? PJ’s Wine Bar?
Charlotte considered this. Her schedule for the afternoon had involved a lot of crying, remembering, thinking, and crying again, on repeat.
Maybe drinks with the girls weren’t such a bad idea.
That moment, her phone buzzed to reveal a number she didn’t recognize. This wasn’t such a strange thing, especially given the business she worked in. People referred her all the time to their friends and associates. Well, not all the time, but enough to allow her a decent living.
“Hello, this is Charlotte Hamner.”
“Charlotte. Hello! It’s so wonderful to hear your voice.”
Charlotte had zero idea who the man on the other end of the line was.
“Who may I ask is speaking?”
“Oh, I’m sorry. Terribly sorry. I suppose you don’t know me. I tend to do that sometimes after I’ve researched someone so specifically. I feel like I know all about you; but you, you don’t know the first thing about me. Not that you ever have to. My name is Tobias, and I’m the personal assistant for the acclaimed film actress, Ursula Pennington. I suppose you must have heard of her.”
Charlotte furrowed her brow. Ursula Pennington was one of the more famous twenty-something actresses working in cinema at the moment. No matter how much she wanted to move there, she didn’t live in a cave.
“Of course,” Charlotte replied brightly. “Lovely to hear from you, Tobias. How can I help you today?”
“Well, the news is about to hit the stands and the blogs and the tabloids. My Ursula just got engaged to the world-famous basketball player, Orion Thompson.”
This was a name Charlotte hadn’t heard, but she decided to pretend she had.
“Wow. I didn’t even know they were dating,” she breathed.
“Nobody did! That’s what makes it so exciting. It’s kind of a last-minute thing, you know, but my Ursula is quite the drama queen. When she gets something in her head, she has to make it happen, you know? That said, when she called me this morning and said she wants to get married on a snow-capped Martha’s Vineyard over Thanksgiving weekend, I was like... I don’t know how to make that happen! But Ursula said it’s this or nothing. So, it has to be this.”
Charlotte’s jaw dropped. “Thanksgiving is in like, three weeks?”
“It’s true. It is. I am staring at a calendar right now as we speak,” he continued.
“I’ve never planned a wedding so quickly,” Charlotte confessed.
“Of course. Who would? It’s absolutely crazy,” he said.
“I just. I mean.” Charlotte’s thoughts ran in circles. “There’s no way to say if it will even snow on Thanksgiving weekend. Sometimes it doesn’t. No matter what I do in terms of planning, it’s not like I can change the weather.”
Tobias seemed at a loss with her.
“I don’t know what you want me to tell you,” he said. “All I know is this. If you’re hired, you’ll be working for one of the biggest and most celebrated actresses of her generation. You’ll be recorded as the wedding planner
