Page 23 of A Nantucket Season
Ella flung her suit, her makeup, her face cream, and a few other essentials into a backpack and hugged and kissed Will goodbye just as the rest of the band were deciding on what to do for their “day off.”
“Good thing you guys have mastered our new songs already,” Ella joked. “Otherwise, I would have to cancel my bachelorette party.”
“Go! Have fun! And don’t think about music for a change!” Henry ordered.
“Yeah, right!” Ella quipped.
Ella jumped into a car with her daughter, Julia, and Alana, who turned up the radio— a horrible song from the nineties that Julia and Alana had loved, and Ella had hated.
“Ella, we won’t torture you for the entire bachelorette party,” Julia joked before adding to Laura, “Your mom is so pretentious. Did she force you to listen to only the most important albums growing up? Did she talk to you about Lou Reed when you were too young to stand up?”
Laura burst out laughing. “Mom and Dad let us listen to whatever we wanted to, but I think it hurt them a lot.”
Julia nodded knowingly.
The first stop on their bachelorette tour was at a beautiful winery along the bluffs, where a handsome winemaker led them through the vineyard and set them up at a table in the sunlight. There, he spoke eloquently about his family’s tradition of winemaking on the island as he allowed them to sample many of their homemade wines.
“Our sister is getting married,” Alana explained as they clinked their first tiny sample glasses together.
“Which one of you?” the winemaker asked, scanning them.
“It’s this one!” Julia grabbed Ella’s left hand and waved it. “They’ve been together for more than twenty years, but they’ve finally decided to tie the knot. Isn’t that romantic?”
“Are you sure you kids are ready for that kind of commitment?” the winemaker joked.
Ella chuckled, her smile so big that it hurt her face. “They say never to get serious with anyone before age fifty. I’m basically a child bride!”
Everyone at her bachelorette party exploded with laughter. Even Anna, who’d lost her fiancé, clutched her pregnant belly and squeezed her eyes shut.
After a glass or two at the winery, the women were off for the next stop on their tour: a three-hour sailboat tour, which dropped its anchor in a gorgeous and secluded cove. The sailor and skipper supplied them with snacks, and they played songs on the speaker as the women of The Copperfield Family sat and laid out, gossiping and occasionally leaping into the water. Once, Ella thought she overheard Laura discussing a fling she was having with a Nantucket boy with Scarlet, and she ached to ask Laura for more details. But when she whispered this desire to Julia, Julia shook her head and winced. “My kids prefer that I stay out of things until they come to me with news. It kills me, of course. I want to know everything! But their secrets are their secrets, and I have to respect that.”
Ella sighed, placing her head on Julia’s shoulder as Laura laughed at something Scarlet said. Her heart felt black and blue at the passage of time, at how old her children were getting— not to mention how old she now felt. It had all happened so quickly.
That night, they had a reservation at a beautiful fish restaurant in the Historic District, where a server led them to an ornate table on the rooftop overlooking the harbor. A fresh breeze pierced through the June heat, and Ella tugged on a jean jacket as her dark hair tumbled around her face.
“Where are we staying tonight?” Ella asked the table.
“That’s the final secret,” Laura said, wagging her eyebrows.
“Now, I’m terrified,” Ella joked.
“You better be,” Alana said.
Of course, the place they’d booked for the night was exquisite— a gorgeous cabin at the edge of a secluded and rocky beach on the other side of the island, far from the demands of The Copperfield House. The cabin had floor-to-ceiling windows, walls lined with wood, a state-of-the-art kitchen with wooden cupboards and a big island, and enough bedrooms to host all of them as long as they shared. Ella was overjoyed to learn she would be sharing a room with her daughter. It was rare that it was just the two of them.
As the bachelorette party gathered on the veranda overlooking the beach, some of the younger generations burst from the house to walk along the sands and dip their feet in the water. Ella poured herself a glass of sparkling rosé and sat next to her mother, sighing. Greta placed her hand on Ella’s knee and shook it gently.
“You look happy, honey.”
Ella nodded. “I don’t know if I’ve ever been this happy. Even back when the band was really big and we were touring, Will and I were a bit all over the place. We had our children to take care of; everything was about logistics. But right now, it’s like we’re allowed to slow down and really think about music again. Of course, that comes with a melancholy feeling, as our children have, unfortunately, grown up.”
Greta nodded, her eyes flickering. “It’s a tragedy, isn’t it? One morning, long after you and Julia had gone, I woke up and realized with a jolt that you would never be children again. That everything that had happened would never happen again. I don’t know why it struck me so hard. By that time, your father had been in prison for years.”
Ella wasn’t sure what to say, as listening to her mother talk about that lonely time made her heart ache. More than anything, she wished she’d taken more time to visit her mother, to remind her that she was still a part of the world in some small way. But everything had been complicated. And Ella had been angry. They all had been.
“By the way,” Greta said, her tone shifting, “I wanted to talk to you about Aurora.”
Ella straightened her posture. “She seemed pretty good the other night at dinner. A bit all over the place, but good.”