Page 15 of The Five-Star Weekend

Dru-Ann is tempted to say yes just to piss off JB, but the last thing she needs is an inquiry from Accounting. “Personal card, please,” she says. “And arrange for a car service on the other side to take me to a place called Squam Road. Put my e-mail on OOO until further notice.”

When Dru-Ann hangs up, she feels a tiny bit better. She’ll pull her hot-pink Stella McCartney bodycon out of the back of her overflowing closet; she will slurp the oysters and dance on Hollis’s deck in the moonlight.

She willslaythe girls’ weekend. She will be the MVP.

Nantucket,she thinks,here I come.

7. Poet’s Corner

It’s a Thursday afternoon in the Poet’s Corner neighborhood of Wellesley, and Brooke Kirtley is cropping and editing a photo of herself to post on Facebook.

Take that, world!she thinks.

In the picture, she’s wearing a white eyelet LoveShackFancy dress and a straw hat, sitting on the wide, white expanse of her pencil-post bed with the Serena and Lily basket chandelier hanging over her head and her impeccably packed suitcase open next to her. She holds her arms over her head in aVforvacation. She’sbeaming. She posts the photo with the captionPacked and ready for a girls’ weekend on Nantucket!Brooke decides against tagging Hollis because she doesn’t want to name-drop—she was friends with Hollis long before she became Hungry with Hollis. Brooke studies the picture, zooming in on her face (she used a smoothing, illuminating filter, obviously) and then her arms (do they look stringy?), then checks for any stains on the duvet cover (that would be mortifying). Brooke has long wanted to show her Facebook friends a photo of her and Charlie’s bedroom. (She did the decorating herself.) She wonders if she should tag Serena and Lily. They might want to use this photo for promotional purposes—the linens, the scalloped green-linen headboard, and the bone-inlay table lamps in addition to the iconic chandelier. As Brooke is researching how to tag a brand, her phone makes a noise like a raindrop hitting a puddle. She has a comment on her post—already!

It’s from Electra Undergrove.

Well, well,Brooke thinks.

Brooke and Electra are still Facebook friends—whenever Brooke considers posting something, she wonders,Will Electra see this? What will Electra think?—even though they no longer speak in real life. Brooke suspects that Electra is too busy or has too many other friends (basically all of Wellesley) to realize that she and Brooke are still connected in this way.

The comment says,I’ll be on Nantucket too. Let’s grab a drink at Slip 14.

Brooke blinks. Is this some kind of prank? She very carefully clicks on Electra’s profile picture—Electra, Simon, and the kids in the front row at a Kenny Chesney concert—wondering if the comment really came from Electra or from some bot that goes around terrorizing insecure middle-aged women on Facebook. There are pictures of the whole gang at Electra’s house for rock and roll football, then just the moms—Electra, Liesl, Rhonda, and Bets—sitting in the grass at Sprague Fields, then another picture of just the moms in what appears to be Cinque Terre.

They went toItalytogether?Brooke thinks.

She feels a longing so intense it makes her nauseated. But it’s okay, she tells herself. She reads the comment again:I’ll be on Nantucket too. Let’s grab a drink at Slip 14.

Yes!!!!Brooke types.Def!!! Do you still have my cell? It’s…

But as Brooke is typing her number, she makes a complete 180 and deletes her comment altogether. Electra hasn’t spoken to Brooke sincethatSunday five years earlier.Fart off, Electra,Brooke thinks. But she’s feeling a tad smug. After all this time, it’s Electra who reached out—and with a specific invitation. She didn’t just say,Let’s meet for a drink;she picked a place, Slip 14. However, even seeing Electra’s name is a trigger. Brooke remembers all the times afterthatSunday that she drove past Electra’s house, checking the cars out front to see who had been invited over instead of her and Charlie.

Brooke types:I’m not sure I’ll have time. Sorry!But that sounds catty, and Brooke promised herself that she would never sink to Electra’s level. Electra ignores Brooke every time she sees her in line at Quebrada, and Electra iced her out at the Wellesley–Needham football game on Thanksgiving morning. Electra, Liesl, Rhonda, and Bets were in the stands, and when Brooke waved, they huddled together, laughed, then knocked back the traditional nips of Fireball.

Brooke decides not to respond to Electra at all. She heard on one of her self-help podcasts that when you’re not sure what to say, you should say nothing.

And it’s true; Brooke feels powerful withholding a response.

She sits for a few moments, watching the Likes accrue. Brooke’s mother, Doris, comments,Ooooh, I’m jealous!Childishly, Brooke wants to delete this. How mortifying that her seventy-seven-year-old mother is her Facebook friend. But then Milly Soper responds to her mother’s comment withMe too!, so Brooke has to leave it be.

There’s a knock on the front door, which is so unexpected that Brooke jumps to her feet. She throws off the straw hat and wants to change her clothes as well—this is her dress for Saturday night’s dinner out—but then there’s a second knock, more insistent. Definitely a man, Brooke thinks. Maybe the Mormons or Jehovah’s Witnesses? The Terminix guy? Someone running for office? A salesman of some sort? None of these possibilities makes Brooke want to answer the door, but she’s propelled forth by curiosity.

She finds a broad, balding man wearing a dun-colored uniform with a shiny badge. Police? Brooke sways on her feet, thinking something has happened to her son, Will (who is interning at Fidelity this summer), or her daughter, Whitney (who’s driving one of the Boston duck boats, the perfect job for a theater major). Or maybe something has happened to Charlie (though this does not inspire the same kind of unadulterated panic).

“Yes?” she says. She sees an official vehicle, still running, in the driveway. The door saysNORFOLK COUNTY SHERIFF DEPT.

“Is Charlie Kirtley home?” the man asks.

“No,” Brooke says. “He’s at work.”

“Where does he work?” the man asks.

Brooke spies a piece of paper in the man’s hand and she realizes what’s happening. This man is serving Charlie.

Charlie is being sued. Again.

At a quarter to five, Charlie walks in the door, and by this time, Brooke has consumed three Tito’s and sodas and six salted almonds. She’s a bit surprised he’s home so early. On Thursdays and Fridays after work, Charlie and his toxic male colleagues from Landover (which Charlie obnoxiously refers to as the “Land Rover of CPAs”) go for drinks at Abe and Louie’s.

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