Page 8 of Our Last Vineyard Summer

It pained her to nod; what did he know of what women needed? “I think I do, yes.”

“Good,” he said, turning back to his squad car. “Now go call your husband.”

CHAPTER FIVE

Virgie felt a biting sensation in the corners of her eyes. This argument was between her and Charlie, and yet there were three young women staring up at her, the smell of the cooling griddle turning the air pungent. She opened a window. “The chief was asking for a donation for some fundraiser. Now let’s everyone go upstairs and get dressed.”

Louisa had the kind of round, curious eyes that felt like they could see right into your head. “Are you sure you’re okay, Mom?”

“Yes, of course,” Virgie said, clearing the water glasses into the sink. “Don’t give it another minute of thought.” Louisa nodded tacitly, disappearing upstairs.

Moving outside to the back patio, Virgie collapsed into one of five picnic table chairs, watching a large yacht make its way into the harbor: a boat finding its way back home. She wished she could vent to a friend, but she and her best friend Melody had lost touch over a decade ago. Virgie didn’t feel like she could reveal her innermost feelings to her Washington friends. Everything was fodder for gossip. Even after all these years, she knew how Melody would counsel her: proceed cautiously. Things could get much worse between her and Charlie if she wasn’t careful; sheneeded to back down. Padding inside, Virgie picked up the wall phone in the kitchen and asked the switchboard to connect her to the Whiting residence in Washington. Charlie was sending her a message, showing her the kind of control that a husband could have over his wife.

It took a few minutes for the switchboard to travel 475 miles south to Washington, but then there was Charlie’s voice on the line, distant and crackling. “Hello,” he said. Charlie always took his calls in the sitting room in the tufted leather telephone chair, a small American flag pinned on his lapel.

She steadied her voice. “Hello, dear. It was a bit theatrical calling the Edgartown police.”

“I’m sorry. I had too much to drink last night and it scared me that I didn’t actually know where you were.”

“Charlie. I left you a letter on the front table. I even called after we arrived. We’ve been bickering over this for weeks. You knew full well where we were.”

He cleared his throat. “This is humiliating, you leaving me like this. You realize that you can’t just do whatever you want.”

“And who is going to stop me?” She smacked her hand over her mouth, tasting salt as she pressed her flattened palm against her lips. Of course, she’d thought of saying something like this a million times to her husband, to every man she knew in Washington who spoke as if they knew better than her. But she’d never been this brazen, this direct.

“Oh, Virginia. You can’t leave me alone for the entire summer.”

She snorted. “You leave me all the time, Charlie. I can’t just wait around for you.”

A clicking sound came through the telephone as the lines crossed, and for a moment, she heard the muted voices of two women talking about an upcoming violin concert.

“Virginia?” he said gently, as though he wasn’t sure she was still there. “I don’t know what’s gotten into you. These columns of yours. I called the editor of the paper.”

There were dried pancake drips on the stove. She soaked a sponge, the cold water stinging her fingertips. “You called my editor?”

“I asked him to cancel Dear Virgie, at the very least put it on hold, since its publication was causing all kinds of marital strife.”

She reached for a Brillo, scrubbing the burners. “Is this a joke?”

Charlie blew his nose into a tissue; he suffered from hay fever every summer. “Listen. They agreed to take a pause.” Her hands moved faster then, her fingers growing raw. “You can maybe go back to it, Virgie, but I need you to stop writing these controversial stories for the next few months. It might affect voters.”

She picked up the griddle to lower it in the sink, forgetting the handle was hot. Her hand stung underneath it and she cursed. “This is your third bid for the Senate. Our votersknowus, Charlie.”

“That last bit of advice about the dinners, it got way too much attention.”

She threw the Brillo pad at the wall, grease splattering on the tin tiles behind the stove. “It got attention because it tapped into a real emotion felt by every single married woman in New York.”

Charlie talked over her. “Even Senator Holliday complained that you’re stirring the pot. A man can occasionally grill, Virgie, but it’s part of the agreement a woman makes in a marriage. That she’ll cook.”

“And here is the problem entirely,” she said, sighing with frustration. She picked Betsy’s red-and-white polka-dot headband off the floor, setting it on the counter. “As for my other columns, they’re simply asking why we still do things the way our parents did. Dr. Spock, for example, believes fathers need to be involved in their children’s lives, so I repeated his advice. It’s not an earth-shattering idea that a father attend a parent-teacher conference.” That had been one of her most widely read columns.

“Oh, dear Jesus,” he said. “We need to move beyond this. I see all of your points, my love, I do, but I need you back at my side these next few months. I can’t run for office with a wife throwing fireworks into the sky over my head.”

Virgie unwrapped her robe, a patch of heat forming up her neck. She grabbed a glass of water and guzzled it down as Charlie kept on about how maybe they could discuss her revisiting the column after November’s election, maybe next spring. When she closed her eyes, all she could see were her girls. How she was raising three young women in a world where a husband could call a newspaper and demand his wife’s column be canceled. How one of her girls might one day be a woman standing in this very kitchen feeling a sense of loss over something she wasn’t sure she ever had: equity. Charlie didn’t care two hoots about the fact that their girls wouldn’t begin on the same starting line as their male peers. He cared only how they presented to the public, if their hair was coiffed, their dresses tailored to perfection—everything that reinforced his image as the great American senator from New York.

“Don’t call me for a while, Charlie.” Virgie was pretending to be brave, but her hands were trembling so much she struggled to seal the pancake mix. She’d loved Charlie since she was twenty. How had they gotten to a place where she resented him so much that she wanted to erase him with Wite-Out secretary paint? Marriage could unravel like a thread in fabric, unspooling so quickly you couldn’t figure out what it used to look like at all.

“Virgie. Come home to me. You know I don’t sleep good without you here.”

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