Please don’t tell Mom or Nonny or anyone else about this letter or about me going on a secret mission. I already wrote to Magee to tell her. Since I’m sharing secrets in this letter I might as well tell you that I’ve asked Magee to marry me. I sent her Gramps’s Harvard class ring to stand in for a diamond. We will have a big wedding, if I make it out of here alive.

I hope I do, Messie. I hope I do.

Love, your brother, Tiger

Nineteenth Nervous Breakdown

No one has said so out loud, but on July 7, when Blair is less than four weeks from her due date, it becomes clear that she won’t be returning to Boston for the delivery. She will give birth to the twins here, on Nantucket. Buried deep beneath the many layers of emotion that Blair feels on any given day is a fluttery pride, and even joy, about this. Her children will be native Nantucketers. They will have the same claim to the island as the Coffins and the Starbucks and (this is what really thrills Blair) an even greater connection to it than the summer residents who have been coming to the island for decades—people like Exalta.

Blair announces over breakfast toast with her mother (for when Kate is around, Blair is offered only dry toast in an attempt to keep her from gaining any more weight) that they should probably go see Dr. Van de Berg, who delivers all of the island’s babies.

“I suppose you’re right,” Kate says with a heavy sigh. “I’ll set something up for today.”

The appointment is scheduled for twelve thirty, and despite the heat, Blair is grateful to get out of the house. She has watched day after glorious day slide by while she lies about in bed or watches soap operas in the den.

“Could we possibly go to lunch after?” Blair asks.

Kate shocks Blair by saying, “Where should we go?”

“The Galley,” Blair says. She wants a lobster roll with French fries and a tall glass of iced tea with lots of lemon and sugar. Even a few days ago, lunch at the Galley would have been too upsetting to contemplate because that was the spot Blair favored for lunch the summer before, back when she was married but not pregnant, back when she was thin, back when she was herself. But with her due date in sight, she realizes that pregnancy isn’t a life sentence. It will end. She will give birth to the babies and her present misery will become a distant memory.

Kate nods in approval. “Wonderful,” she says. “They make the best gimlets.”

The Nantucket Cottage Hospital is country medicine but what it lacks in big-city sophistication, it makes up for in personal attention. Dr. Van de Berg is a wonderful, welcome change from the smug condescension of Dr. Sayer at the Boston Hospital for Women. Dr. Van de Berg is a short man who has the countenance of a cheerful elf. He’s tanned and healthy; he looks as if delivering babies is something he does between sailing in regattas and playing rounds of golf. He’s wearing a white lab coat over a baby-blue polo and a pair of snappy madras pants. Blair loves everything about Dr. Van de Berg; he is the apotheosis of a summer doctor. She doesn’t even mind when he asks her to lie back on the metal table so he can check her.

Being “checked” in this instance means Dr. Van de Berg reaching up inside of Blair, which makes Blair think of Julia Child’s instructions about removing the gizzards from a raw chicken. That leads her to remember her three failed attempts to make poulet au porto the previous autumn. She wonders if Trixie is an accomplished French cook whose pan sauces never break. Blair is so consumed with envy over Trixie’s imagined skills in the kitchen that she isn’t listening when Dr. Van de Berg says something from his post between her legs.

“I’m sorry, what?”

“You’re a hundred percent effaced and two centimeters dilated. The babies should be here in a week, maybe two. Maybe sooner.”

Blair sits up on her elbows. “What?”

When Blair returns to the waiting room and Kate asks how everything went, Blair says, “Just fine. Let’s go to lunch, I’m starving.”

As they drive to the Galley, Blair practices her breathing. She needs to calm down. On the one hand, the news is exhilarating—a week, maybe two, maybe sooner. On the other hand, Blair is forced to consider her circumstances. If she gives birth tomorrow or next week or in two weeks, she will be doing it alone. There has been no word from Angus and no word from Joey. The situation is enough to send Blair back to the solace of her bed, but she doesn’t want to miss what might be her last chance to get out of the house.

The Galley offers simple lunch fare, but it’s right on Cliffside Beach, a mere forty yards from the lapping waves of Nantucket Sound. Kate and Blair are seated at a coveted two-top on the outer edge of the restaurant, along the rope railing. Blair positions her arm so it’s resting in the sun. The maître d’ is the same man as the year before, though he doesn’t recognize Blair. When he saw her approaching, he cleared the way for her as though she were a Mack Truck about to barrel through the restaurant. Blair is so happy to be here that she doesn’t even feel self-conscious about her yellow dress. The Galley isn’t a formal place; nearly all the diners are in bathing suits and cover-ups.

If Blair’s motivation for being here is to get out of the house and dig into a lobster roll and French fries, Kate’s is to start drinking.

“I’d like a gimlet,” Kate tells the waitress, a girl of about seventeen who has her hair in pigtails. “And another one in ten minutes.”

Behind her sunglasses, Blair raises her eyebrows but doesn’t comment. She orders an iced tea and studies her mother—Katharine Nichols Foley Levin, the summertime version. Kate seems to have aged ten years since Tiger was deployed. Kate’s skin is lightly tanned and her hair is loose, held off her face by a grosgrain headband, but there are tense lines around her mouth and etched into her forehead, and Blair knows that if Kate removes her sunglasses, her eyes will be bleary. She wears her pearls with a crisp white short-sleeved blouse, so she’s still recognizable as herself, but she drains the first gimlet in under a minute. Three long sips. Blair counts as she drinks her iced tea.

“Mother,” Blair says.

Kate gazes at the sea until her second gimlet arrives and once that, too, is gone, she turns to Blair and says, “I have some things to tell you that might be difficult for you to hear.”