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  To my parents, Paul and Beth Woodson, who always told me I could.

  PROLOGUE

  seagulls

  ansley

  I still have dreams about that yellow-and-white-striped bikini, the one I was wearing the night I met Jack, my first bona fide summer love. I was fifteen going on sixteen, the perfect age, when your hair tints that summer blond that hairstylists become superstars for emulating. You have filled out enough not to be gangly but not so much that you can imagine a one-piece being in your future.

  We spent those bikini summers in Peachtree Bluff, my family and I, at my grandmother’s waterfront home, the one that I didn’t realize until years later was truly something special. It was always blissful, always enchanted, but that summer, Sandra and Emily, my two best friends, and I spent nearly every day at Starlite Island across from Grandmother’s house. It was only a few boat lengths across the sound, but you couldn’t swim there and needed at least a kayak to go. It felt like freedom.

  Those summers were all about seeing how close we could get to the wild horses on our favorite island and gauging if any of us could tame the wild boys who seemed as native to the beach as the crabs scurrying about. Skin tanned dark and hair sun-bleached, they sipped Pabst Blue Ribbon all afternoon, throwing footballs and telling (mostly false) stories about how cool they were back home, wherever they had come from.

  I imagined then that no matter where my life took me, Peachtree Bluff would always be a part of my story. But it never crossed my mind that one day things would change so quickly and so fiercely that I would end up moving to my childhood paradise, my sanctuary from the real world, full time.

  Wherever it may be, you always tell your kids that they can come home again. It’s the thing that, as a parent, you’re supposed to say. But maybe this is why so many people downsize when their children go off to college. Maybe this is why they move to condos on the lake, not the sweeping clapboard home that their grandmother left them in a harbor town in Georgia. If you don’t have five bedrooms and a three-bedroom guesthouse, there is no way that all of your children—families in tow—can descend on you like seagulls on the day-old bread the grandkids throw out on the dock.

  But change is the only thing I’ve ever been able to count on in this life, the only thing that hasn’t let me down. And I am quite proud to say that although I may not always have done the right thing, I have survived it all. Hit after hit, storm after storm, I have weathered, I have protected. Like that dock across the narrow street from my house, I have withstood hurricanes, tornadoes, and even the occasional hailstorm.

  When I was too scared to go on, too shaken to stand, too rattled to know which way was up, I carried on for the three best parts of me, for the girls who almost ruined my life yet somehow ended up saving it.

  As I hear the voices upstairs, some happy, some mad—they are sisters, after all—I open the refrigerator door and wonder, not for the first time, how I got here. How is it possible that a couple of months ago, I was in my grandmother’s house on the sound, enjoying the splendor of the silence? I would open my fridge to find exactly three Smartwaters, one canister of coffee, two yogurts, and some old ketchup.

  Now I open that same fridge in that same house to find it nearly spilling over, each item a reminder of one of my girls. The bottles of breast milk are the biggest surprise, the choice to nurse at all an unlikely one for my beautiful, smart, but somewhat selfish Caroline. But it is these very bottles that helped her gain back her trim, toned figure nearly instantly, the prenatal vitamins making her long dark hair even silkier and shinier.

  The chocolate milk that you would think was for Sloane’s young sons, but actually is for her, comes next. That middle daughter, doe-eyed like her older sister, her hair a light brown, as though the dark hair gene got lighter with each girl until it eventually gave up and allowed Emerson, the youngest, to be fully blond, has loved chocolate milk since her first taste. Sloane is the least concerned with appearances and has adapted to the role of mother easily, as the hot dogs, grapes, string cheese, and Capri Suns will attest.

  The fresh-squeezed green juice beside those bottles, stored in an unusually narrow yet still shapely carafe, reminds me of its blond-haired, blue-eyed owner, Emerson, with her high, sculpted cheekbones that still manage to make her look soft and feminine. Her looks and talent have combined to put her on her way to the acting career she’s always dreamed of. She is the one that, finally, looked like me. Though my hair is now clipped to right at my shoulders, the way hers runs long and free down her back reminds me of my younger days.

  The takeout containers and the wine? Well, those could be for any one of my girls. The rows and the list go on and on.

  But this is how it is, I’ve come to see. Sometimes you don’t know how empty your fridge—or your heart—can be. You don’t realize it, that is, until at long last, you find them full again.

  civilization

  caroline

  I was the only one who wasn’t really into the whole Peachtree Bluff thing. It’s kind of like being the Grinch at Christmas. My sisters would be beside themselves about riding on the boat, shrimp boils on the beach, and roasting marshmallows all summer long, but I was more in a severe depression because I had to leave my friends in Manhattan and the subway and the lights and, well, you know, civilization. There were no museums—unless you count that pitiful excuse for a boat warehouse they call a museum. There was no theater—unless you count the high school’s horrific performance of Fiddler on the Roof or the annual drag queen fashion show. I’ll admit, that one was fairly Manhattan. But Rent on Broadway it was not.

  Most of all, I couldn’t stand the idea of missing out on an entire summer’s worth of fun and gossip, even if it was just sitting around Jenna Franklin’s mom’s house when she was at work, talking about boys and painting our toes. All summer, every summer, I missed everything. And don’t get me started on the year my mom kidnapped us and made me move down there for a whole semester. It was like prison. Well, prison with a good view, I mean.

  Looking back, I realize that most of the reason I didn’t want to leave Manhattan was that I didn’t want people to talk about me when I was gone. I couldn’t deal with feeling left out of the circle that I had worked so hard to insert myself into.

  Because, I’ll admit it, I’ve always cared a hell of a lot about what other people think. I used to believe it was human nature, but now I’ve realized it’s more akin to the nature of a New York City social climber. I call myself that affectionately, now that I’m back in New York, back in my apartment, back in my old life, yet somehow a completely different person. I’ve never felt that it was a bad thing to want to better your station in life. Which is why after my father was killed and my mother moved us to Podunk City, USA, I felt that, geographically and socially, I had moved in the wrong direction in a big way.

  I used to thank God every night that I only had to live in that hick hellhole for six months. Only six months before I could escape back to NYU, aka civilization. I got that my mom was scared and all of that after 9/11. But honestly. The city rebuilt. Why couldn’t she?

  I felt guilty leaving my two sisters to rot there. Emerson especially. She was only a baby, for heaven’s sake. We
ll, I guess ten isn’t a baby. But it’s young enough that you don’t know what you don’t know. And what she didn’t know was that our selfish mother had taken her out of the city of action and opportunity and dropped her into the cultural desert.

  So I made it my life’s mission to encourage her passion for art and acting. And I guess somewhere in there, I forgot to work on my middle sister, Sloane. Bless her heart, as those degenerates say with their slow accents, she stayed in the damn place. Went to college in Georgia with all those peaches and practically no teeth. Married a guy in the military, which, I mean, yeah, is admirable and all that.

  But we’re Murphys. We were destined for greatness.

  Greatness was what I thought I was getting when I met James. His hair was great. His plane was great. His 57th Street apartment was great. Even his mother was great. For thirteen whole blissful years, we were great, too. Just great. Until he decided to come home and tell me, six months pregnant, no less, that he was no longer in love with me. He was no longer in love with me, you see, because he was now in love with a twenty-year-old supermodel who subsisted on squeezy applesauce and whipped cream vodka.

  This is what you should expect when nothing in your life is ever good enough. You should expect that your husband will eventually trade you in for something better. Truth be told, sometimes I’m surprised I hadn’t traded him in, as hard as I was scraping to reach the top. But, well, it’s harder to climb when you’re pregnant in heels.

  And so, when I decided to take a short sabbatical with my sweet, beautiful, fated for a Nobel Peace Prize daughter, Vivi, I figured I’d already fallen about as far as I could. Might as well fall all the way down to “my momma’s house,” as they would say in Peachtree, a town with too many mullets and too few chromosomes.

  Had I known that we’d be Murphy, party of eight, I might have rethought my decision. But there are no people in the world to make you realize what a spoiled, selfish bitch you’ve become and put you right back in your place quite like sisters. All I can say is that for the state I was in, thank God I have two.

  ONE

  the tide rolls in

  ansley

  I love pretty much every quirky thing about my town. The weird people and the weirder traditions, the over-the-top celebrations and beautiful old homes. I love that I can feel like I am completely at the end of the earth but then, two bridges and twenty minutes later, enter an adjacent town large enough to have everything I need. I thrive on the quiet and privacy of the off-season but the summer vacationers who feel free to photograph my home and sometimes even peek in through my windows have never been my favorite thing.

  And Caroline has never been my favorite child. I know that’s not nice to say, but it’s nicer than saying she’s my least favorite child, which is really the truth. I love her to pieces. I’d take a bullet for her. I’d sooner die than see something bad happen to her, and I would never, ever want to live without her. But she is . . . tricky.

  So I guess that’s why I didn’t answer the first time she called. I was in Sloane Emerson, my interior design shop, which, yes, I did name after my other two, more favored children. It’s a bit of a family joke, actually. When we moved to Peachtree Bluff, Caroline kicking and screaming in her designer jeans the whole way, I acted casual about opening my store. I acted like it was something I was doing to take my mind off of my beloved husband dying, like it was something I was doing to assert myself. In actuality, I’d had to go back to work because, while we were told we would be receiving millions of dollars in life insurance, we hadn’t. I thought it would intensify the general panic and nightmares and PTSD around our new, very large, very potentially haunted home if my girls knew that.

  So when I announced that I was getting back into decorating, my darling jewel of a daughter Caroline had said, “Oh, good. I hear the camper-trailer design business is really flourishing right now.”

  And when I enthused that the business was going so well that I thought I would open a storefront, my sweet-tempered, well-adjusted child snapped, “If you name it Caroline’s, I will die.”

  So I didn’t name it Caroline’s. I named it Sloane Emerson. It was the first thing I had done in quite some time that my eldest daughter thought was funny.

  It was quiet around town that January morning, the tourists hiding wherever they had come from, not to return until April, despite it being my favorite time of year. Maybe it was the temperatures in the mid- to high sixties that made me love the winter so much. Maybe it was that only the locals remained. It was hard to tell.

  I was pulling some Pine Cone Hill matelassé samples for two regular clients who needed to spruce up their yachts—in a town of three thousand people, boat owners had become my bread and butter—when the bell above the door rang.

  Ah, yes. I would know that beard anywhere. Hippie Hal, reporting for duty.

  “What’s up, Hal?”

  “Oh, not much, Ansley. You know. The tide rolls in, the tide rolls out.”

  “Sure does, Hal.”

  This was a part of the morning. Whether it was forty degrees or 140, Hal wore rumpled jeans and a meticulously pressed white oxford. But depending on the heat, he’d layer a few of the shirts. It was his signature look. Hal, who had sold the three McDonald’s he owned in Tennessee and headed for the shore, lived in a small house two streets over that was always a subject of heated debate at town meetings. You see, Hal refurbished bicycles, saved them from the landfill, as he put it. So there were always a few on his front lawn to entice tourists ready to bike around town.

  And the historical association, Mrs. McClasky in particular, had a fit about it. Every month.

  But it took a lot to ruffle Hal, and until she came over in her crop pants and Keds and made him remove those bikes, they were staying put.

  In the meantime, Hal made his morning rounds, said hello to all the shop owners, and rode one of those front-yard bikes back home. He had a big garage. Biggest in town, in fact. I asked him one time, “Hal, why don’t you put those bikes in the garage, and then we could quit having to talk about them every single town meeting?”

  He got a far-off look in his eye and said, “That’s not a bad idea. But you see, here’s the problem. If I put those bikes in my garage, Mrs. McClasky wouldn’t have anything to do anymore. She’d have no purpose. Then she’d be miserable. And I feel like it’s my job to spread happiness wherever I go.” He grinned then.

  That seemed about right to me.

  I smiled at Hal, and he asked, “Want me to send Coffee Kyle down here?”

  I nodded, samples in hand. “Sure, Hal. That would be great. I could use a little caffeine.” He turned to walk out, and I said, “Hey, Hal. Wait a minute.”

  “What’s that? You need some produce? I can get Kimmy down here, too.”

  “No. I don’t need any produce.” I held up two blue shades of matelassé. “Which one do you like better?”

  He pointed to the lighter shade on the left. Hippie Hal might have worn a piece of rope as a belt, but the man had taste.

  “Boyfriend Sky it is,” I said out loud, even though he had gone.

  I looked down at the sample again, thinking of Caroline and how I needed to return her call. She would love this matelassé. Maybe I would send her one. Things were good between us now that she had forgiven me for stealing a whole half-year of city life from her, now that she had still married one of the most eligible bachelors in town and had Vivi and this new baby on the way and that big life she had always dreamed of.

  I picked up the phone to dial her—my daughters found it hilarious that I still dialed their numbers as often as I searched for their contacts. As I did, I realized that, yet again, my finger joint was sort of sticking when I tried to bend it, like a door swollen from the rain. I had quit doing my Trigger Finger exercises for a couple of days and the annoying condition had come back with a vengeance. I sighed. Aging is not for the faint of heart. Before I could hit the green button, Kimmy walked in. Her hair got weirder and weirder. S
he had a severe spiky haircut that was half black, half blue. It looked like a Smurf gone Goth.

  “Hey, Ansley.”

  “Kimmy.”

  “Hal said you wanted Swiss chard?”

  This was the only problem with Hal. He was really helpful, except that he had smoked away every brain cell he had long, long ago. Kimmy was the owner of a hydroponic farm, but you didn’t have to be part of the Drug Enforcement Administration to put together that vegetables weren’t the only thing she was growing hydroponically. Hence the friendship between Hal and her.

  “That wasn’t me,” I said.

  “Didn’t think so. You hate chard.”

  I do. I thought of my youngest daughter, Emerson, and smiled. She was in LA pursuing her acting dream, like thousands and thousands of other talented, beautiful women and men. I was proud of her for following her heart, but it still bugged me that she hadn’t gone to college. What was she going to do when she got her first wrinkle and lost all job possibilities? She would land on her feet. Probably.

  Emerson loved Swiss chard. She put it in the blender with a handful of grapes and half an orange and some ice and thought it was the most delicious thing ever. But that was LA for you.

  “That’s OK.” I pulled a five-dollar bill out of my wallet. “Can you leave me something I do like to cook for dinner?”

  I knew what she was going to say, and it annoyed me every day. Every single day. But she asked it anyway, like it was a fresh question. “You eating alone tonight, Ansley?”

  I pretended I didn’t hear her and said, very loudly, “Coffee Kyle!”

  Coffee Kyle was smoking hot. I was a fifty-something-year-old woman whose children would taunt her mercilessly if they heard her utter the phrase “smoking hot.” And it was inappropriate for me to think that way about a kid in his mid-twenties. But he was, and there was no way around that. He looked like one of those really versatile actors in the Hallmark movies Emerson had done. He was tall, dark, and handsome and could play the mechanic in one video, the lawyer in the next, and the serial killer in the third without skipping a beat.