Ann didn’t know how to explain it to Olivia, or to Jim or to anyone. When she was sitting on her sunporch the previous summer, composing a list of people to invite to the wedding, she had simply added the name Helen Oppenheimer, and it had felt… right. It had felt Christian—but if she told Olivia or Jim this, they would cry bullshit. Jim had cried bullshit anyway. When he saw Helen’s name, he said, “No way. No fucking way.”
“But Chance is in the wedding party,” Ann said.
“I don’t care,” Jim said. “Doesn’t matter.”
“She won’t come anyway,” Ann said. “We can look good for inviting her, we can look like the bigger people, and she’ll decline.”
Jim had stared at Ann for a second. “I’m not quite sure what you’re trying to do here.”
What was Ann trying to do here? When Ann was very young, her mother had explained the reason behind the spelling of her name: Ann was the saint; Anne with an “e” was the queen. Ann had felt the burden of her nomenclature since then. She yearned to be queenly rather than saintly. After all, no one liked a saint. Saints weren’t fun at parties; saints weren’t good in bed. Saints were altar girls, as Ann had been. Saints devoted themselves to a life of service. Ann had spent her entire adult life in service—first to Jim and Stuart and the twins, then to the population of Durham, North Carolina. Her acts of self-sacrifice bugged Jim and Olivia and her sons to no end, and yet she couldn’t help herself. Her spirit yearned to do the selfless thing, the right thing, the worthy, admirable thing.
Was inviting Helen Oppenheimer to the wedding just another example of Ann flaunting her innate goodness?
She didn’t think so. Deep down, it felt like the opposite. Deep down, Ann despised Helen Oppenheimer, hated her with a dense, black force. Helen Oppenheimer had seduced Jim right out of his marriage to Ann, Helen had allowed herself to get pregnant, she had forced Jim’s hand. Jim had divorced Ann and married Helen Oppenheimer. Helen Oppenheimer had massacred Ann’s family as surely as if she’d entered the living room with an AK-47 and gunned them all down. She had turned the Graham family—once a paragon of the community—into a mockery of a family.
And so admit it: the reason why Ann had written Helen Oppenheimer’s name on that list was because she wanted to prove something. Jim had come back to Ann a scant three years later. Jim had married Ann a second time, and this time they were far, far happier. They treated their marriage with care; they were vigilant about guarding its sanctity. Ann wanted Helen to see her renewed, nearly perfect union with Jim firsthand. Ann wanted to force Helen to gaze upon them operating in unison on this happy occasion, the marriage of their eldest son.
Ann wanted to gloat.
Jim had relented. He was powerless to overturn any of Ann’s decisions once she made up her mind. He had said, “She’d better decline. The last person I want to see on Nantucket on July twentieth is Helen Oppenheimer.”
Ann had thought, Well, then, you shouldn’t have climbed into bed with her, buster.
Even more shocking than issuing the invitation was Helen Oppenheimer accepting it. For all of Ann’s big ideas about showing off to Helen, she had never believed for one second that Helen would actually come. But she had responded yes. She was coming to Nantucket for the weekend, all the way from Chattanooga, Tennessee, where she now lived with a man ten years younger than herself. But she was coming alone.
“Shit!” Jim had shouted.
He’d said, “There’s still time to renege.”
“We can’t renege,” Ann had said, although she was tempted. God, just the thought of Helen Oppenheimer among them all weekend long, and alone, was enough to make Ann physically ill. And she had no one to blame but herself.
“I’ll do it,” Jim said. “I’ll call and tell her you were temporarily insane.”
“No,” Ann said. “If she’s comfortable with it, then I’m comfortable with it.”
Jim had shaken his head and paced the room; she could see him doing battle in his mind. He had created this insufferable situation, and in the thousands of times the topic had arisen over the past fifteen years, he had never once denied the blame.
Finally, he’d taken Ann in his arms and said, “You’re amazing, you know that?”
Now here it was: showtime. Neither Ann nor Jim had been in contact with Helen about her arrangements, but she had RSVP’d yes for the rehearsal dinner, the wedding, and the brunch. They would see her tonight.
Ann wished like hell that Helen could see her and Jim right now: propped up against the pillows of the bed, covered by just a white sheet, sipping champagne at eleven o’clock in the morning.