Chapters (47)
- Title Page
- Copyright Notice
- Dedication
- Epigraphs
- Prologue
- Part One
- ONE
- TWO
- THREE
- FOUR
- FIVE
- SIX
- SEVEN
- EIGHT
- NINE
- TEN
- ELEVEN
- TWELVE
- THIRTEEN
- FOURTEEN
- FIFTEEN
- SIXTEEN
- SEVENTEEN
- Part Two
- EIGHTEEN
- NINETEEN
- TWENTY
- TWENTY-ONE
- TWENTY-TWO
- TWENTY-THREE
- TWENTY-FOUR
- TWENTY-FIVE
- TWENTY-SIX
- TWENTY-SEVEN
- TWENTY-EIGHT
- TWENTY-NINE
- THIRTY
- THIRTY-ONE
- THIRTY-TWO
- THIRTY-THREE
- THIRTY-FOUR
- THIRTY-FIVE
- THIRTY-SIX
- THIRTY-SEVEN
- Acknowledgments
- About the Author
- Newsletter Sign-up
She wasn’t at all fine. Poppy was afraid to enter the home she’d left all those years ago, afraid of all the emotion she’d feel, all the regret and recrimination she was in for. Good thing this Brad guy had decided to make himself scarce; she needed to be alone to face her parents’ absence and the grief she’d been wrestling like a wild animal since she’d first heard the news the previous September. Even if there had been nothing for Poppy to do, as Ann had insisted once Poppy finally connected with her, and no point in coming home earlier, it might have been better to have faced everything head-on. In the months since the news of her parents’ deaths, she felt like she’d been pulled under and gotten caught in the current. She didn’t know if she’d ever surface again.
POPPY SETTLED INTO THE QUIET HOUSE in a void of stunned sadness. It was like a dream: one minute she was bartending at a small hotel, sleeping near an orange-sand beach in the town of Bocas del Toro, and the next she was in Milwaukee in February.
How could her parents be dead? Their closets were filled with clothes waiting to be worn again. They still got calls from telemarketers. The mail kept showing up addressed to Edward and Connie Gordon: reminders for six-month dental checkups, letters from former students, and envelopes from prisons throughout the country with the inmates’ next moves in the chess games they played with her dad.
There were also letters addressed to Brad: a vintage guitar magazine, a catalog selling nothing but industrial floor mats, and lots of credit card offers. The refrigerator was filled with cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon and dozens of tortilla packages. The kitchen cabinets were stocked with protein-powder shake mix and cans of refried beans and diced tomatoes. She poked around the medicine cabinet: nasal spray, floss picks, multivitamins, and a compact multi-tool Leatherman with hooks, saws, scissors, and wire strippers.
Who was this guy?
TWENTY-TWO
Michael
It was another cold day. The sky was so heavy it felt like it was sitting on Michael as he drove Route 6 from Provincetown to his office in Eastham. Still, he preferred the cold to the impending summer heat and the migration of all the tourists, who drove slow and made it hard to get a seat at the Wicked Oyster for breakfast, and impossible to find a parking spot at the Beachcomber. “String bean eaters” was what Ed called them, a phrase passed down to him from his grandfather, who told him that the tourists arrived on the Cape when string beans were in season.