Page 49 of Our Last Vineyard Summer

“She’s okay, James. She’s okay.”

Virgie felt her own eyes well up at the sight of the boy sitting up on his knees, yelling at his mother’s unmoving form, a slight rise and fall in her marigold sweater, thinning at the seams. “I hate you!” he said.

“You don’t mean that.” But she remembered feeling similarly whenever her mother slipped into a drunken state, wishing her dead each time she woke up with a headache so powerful she’d keep the shades drawn the entire day. “James, she’s not out of the woods yet. We must get her help. Did you and Betsy call 911?”

He held his mother’s hand, nodding.

Why hadn’t she called Pamela every morning this week? She knew how lonely she was, and she’d done nothing. Why hadn’t she invited her over for tea?

Virgie peeled her eyes from the child. Outside, she found Betsy in the back seat in Louisa’s arms. She kissed her youngest daughter’s smooth forehead. “She’s okay, Betts. She drank too much and passed out, but she’s going to be okay.”

Betsy sniffled into the blanket. “Do you promise?”

A siren blared, getting louder, tires racing along the dirt road. An officer jumped out of the squad car, and Virgie followed as he pushed open the front door. She told him the woman had drunk too much, andhis face fell when he found the boy, sitting crisscross beside his mother, his face buried in his hands. The officer checked for a pulse, then pulled a small brown bottle out of his pocket and poured some into a cap, waving the smelling salts under her nose.

Pamela coughed and sat up with a start, coughing again and looking about the room like the lights were much too bright.

“Mommy!” James slammed his entire body into his mother, hugging her, and she pressed all one hundred pounds of herself against his small hands, steadying herself.

“Oh, honey,” Pamela managed, her eyes blinking twice, trying to make sense of the police officer crouched by her kitchen table.

The officer stood, addressing Virgie. “She looks okay to me. Will you keep watch over her for a bit? If anything changes, call Doc Stewart.”

Pamela began to cry into her son’s unbrushed hair.

The officer left immediately, and Virgie returned outside to her daughters, leaning into the window where Louisa was sitting in the passenger seat. “She’s conscious now but very sleepy. James is saying good night to her, and then he’ll come with us when I take you girls’ home. Aggie, can you serve the pasta? Betsy, you watch over James, and Louisa, you put Betsy and James to bed at nine. I need to stay with Pamela for a while.”

Betsy began to cry. “Can we make her stop?”

“I’m sorry you had to see that.” Virgie pulled her youngest daughter out of the car and into her arms, her long legs dangling by her side. “She needs to want to stop. No one can make her.”

At the front door, James kicked at an uneven stone, then trudged toward them with his head low. He got in the back seat, his hands wringing at the corner of a small, tattered blanket. “She’s going to be okay, James. That’s good, right?” Betsy tried to sound upbeat, but he didn’t answer.

After taking the ferry back to Edgartown and dropping the children at the cottage on South Water Street, Virgie just wanted to loseherself in a book and allow her thoughts to make sense of what happened. But she needed to save Pamela from herself. Steering the car back onto Chappy, Virgie parked out front of the Sunday house, inhaling the smell of the linden trees.It’s going to be okay, she told herself. Lying on the couch and watching the television on silent, Pamela’s eyes looked glazed over. Virgie covered her with a blanket and pressed a cool compress to her head. Then she cleaned up the broken glass, wiped out the sink, and hunted the house for bottles of wine, tossing them in the trash. It was dark when Pamela roused again, and she blinked her eyes open and closed.

“I’m so embarrassed.” Pamela stared at the television. “You don’t have to stay here, Virgie. I know you need to go home.”

Virgie sat at the end of the sofa, the plastic cover crinkling under her. “I sent James and Betsy over on the boat to invite you to dinner tonight. They thought you were dead.”

The woman grimaced. “Dear god. I’m so sorry.”

“James is at my house and he’s going to stay the night. I didn’t want to leave until you were okay.”

Her voice was hoarse, and Pamela played with the corners of the orange printed blanket. “You know when you stare at a piece of chocolate cake and you swear you’re not going to eat it, and then you breeze into the kitchen and take just one bite, then another, and soon you’ve eaten an entire slice?”

Virgie didn’t want to make a statement and disagree with her, so she nodded. “But you must try, Pamela. For James’s sake. There are meetings.”

She sniffled, lowering her chin in shame. “Sunday afternoons at the church.”

“Yes.”

“I’ve driven there and parked out front, but I never go in.” Pamela frowned. “I didn’t drink these last few weeks, not since you came to meet me. I needed that job, and I wanted to be good, for James and you.”

“What changed?”

Pamela glanced at the counter where the two bottles of wine had been. “And then, when I served dinner to your important husband and that beautiful woman who was so smart, I started to feel useless. Like why was I even in this world when no one seemed to care that I was here?” Pamela pounded the blanket with her fists. “And I’m not trying to sound like a sour sport here, but…”

Virgie couldn’t believe that inviting Pamela into her home and giving her a job had somehow made her feel worse. “But what?” Virgie said.

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