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Vineyard Haven Ferry, Martha’s Vineyard

Virgie couldn’t believe they’d made it to the ferry dock.

Following the instructions of two cranky attendants, she’d crept her butter-yellow Ford station wagon onto the Islander , the beloved boat that had been transporting her family to the island for a generation.

Even with an ache in her lower back from driving, Virgie had to admit that the ferry’s gleaming white facade and the futuristic way it invited you to drive onto the ferry and drive off going in the same direction still filled her with promise.

Here was this twenty-three-mile island (a mere nine miles in width) floating in Vineyard Sound that had drawn her since childhood, instilling in her everything she believed about her family: that this island was their anchor, these shores a place to reconnect, relax, and run amok with the tides.

In thirty minutes, they would dock in Vineyard Haven, and she’d drive her long, lumbering car into an early summer evening, the busy streets of the sweet little village bustling with tourists.

By tomorrow, Virgie wouldn’t even remember the nine-hour (and rather awful) drive from Washington.

All of it will be worth it when you wake up in your summer bedroom with the breeze ruffling the curtains , Virgie reminded herself.

She imagined the anger Charlie would feel when he arrived home from the Senate and discovered an empty house and foil-wrapped plate of chicken à la King.

She knew he would be beside himself, and yet she’d been beside herself too.

That Virgie wanted to leave early for the Vineyard had been an ongoing argument; his irritation at the popularity of her newspaper column Dear Virgie had been the wedge.

A big fat slice of the tartest key lime pie sitting right between them, and both refusing a bite.

“I need to get out of this car.” Louisa used her fifteen-year-old might to push open the door, straightening the pleats of her shorts around her new curves as she stood; her blond hair was cut with glamorous short bangs and a wavy chin-length bob that matched her shapely eyebrows.

“Aggie has been farting since we passed Providence.”

“Have not,” hollered Aggie, kicking at her sister in her enormous bare feet through the open door. She sat up and clasped shut her rubber-soled sandals. “I’m sorry, Louisa, if you’re smelling your own breath.”

Lovely , Virgie thought. We’ve been reduced to animals in a pen.

At some point on the drive, Betsy had crawled onto the floor—she’d been annoying the older ones the entire drive by begging them to play cat’s cradle with her beloved elastics.

To get her away, Aggie had encouraged Betsy onto the foot mats, so she could stretch out her legs across two seats while Louisa, in her short shorts, squished against the door and buried her nose in a Patricia Highsmith novel.

Betsy popped her head out the back window.

“Wait! I’m coming.” Virgie’s youngest daughter, always in a red-and-white polka-dot headband, tripped in her rush to get out of the car.

Much to Virgie’s dismay, her ten-year-old had insisted on wearing her scuffed black-and-white saddle shoes, refusing the pale pink sandals she’d bought her for summer.

Motherhood could be maddening in ways big and small.

Waving a five-dollar bill out the window, Virgie called after her girls. “Louisa, take your sisters to get chowder.”

“Why do I always have to take care of them?” Louisa snapped back, becoming aware then that there were other vacationers staring, her pimpled cheeks turning the color of watermelon.

“It’s one time, not every time.” Virgie grimaced.

Virgie’s own mother had never driven alone—she wouldn’t dare to drive, even in their New York suburb, instead waiting on her husband to shuttle her about.

Her mother wore smocking necklines and was nothing like Virgie, who could cook a soufflé, paint peeling trim, hammer a nail into the wall, and write a newspaper column.

Virgie’s was an adulthood formed in opposition to her mother’s propriety.

Even choosing Charlie had been a form of resistance.

Louisa groaned, snatching the money and storming off, Betsy right at her heels and Agatha—with those long awkward legs, bony at the knee and muscular in the thigh—following closely behind like a hunched giraffe.

Virgie hated to admit that she wished Charlie were here.

Then again, he probably would have just turned up the Yankees game on the radio and expected Virgie to break up any arguments between the girls anyway.

If she pulled her small notepad out of her purse to scribble down an idea for the column, he’d frown; but what he didn’t understand was that writing the column had been a lifeline when it was offered to her last year.

She’d been drowning in boredom while the girls were at school each day, and the column gave her a new kind of purpose.

Angling the rearview mirror to see her reflection, Virgie grimaced, using her fingers to comb her wind-blown hair and tie a sheer black headscarf around her crown.

Better , she thought. Then she pulled out her compact and reapplied a thick round of peach lipstick.

The last thing she needed was to run into someone from Washington who reported back to Charlie that his wife looked as though she were falling apart.

Because she wasn’t falling apart. Virgie had come to the island on her own to give her daughters a real summer and to give herself time to figure out why she and Charlie were bickering so much.

“Honestly, the drive was nothing,” she would tell Charlie on the phone later that night.

“I don’t know why you’re making such a big deal out of it. ”

Virgie found her girls spooning creamy soup and salty crackers into their mouths on the upper deck where crowds of visitors crammed into the limited shade.

Dropping her raffia drawstring purse in her lap, Virgie sat between Betsy and Louisa, smiling at them when they acknowledged her.

It had been a stressful ride, with Betsy crying when they got stuck in traffic on the George Washington Bridge, and Aggie complaining endlessly about not going to Birch Lark.

“Shut up,” Louisa had snapped as one highway exit blurred into the next, after Aggie complained she’d never try archery. “Birch Lark isn’t all that great. My friend says the food is mush and the cabins have bugs.”

At that, Aggie had heaved her back into the seat. “Well at least I could play basketball there.”

“Not if Daddy can help it,” Betsy had snickered.

The plan all along was that they’d visit the island as a family in August when the Senate was in recess; in the meantime, since it was an election year, Virgie would attend campaign events with Charlie in New York in June and July, while the girls were shipped off to Birch Lark Camp for Girls.

Yet, when it came time for them to leave, Virgie didn’t want her girls attending some snobby sleepaway camp with the children of diplomats and government royalty.

She wanted them on the Vineyard, running barefoot and swimming and having the same kind of summer she’d always had.

Plus, there was the matter of getting Louisa away from Brandon Millerton.

She’d found out only last week that Brandon would be at the Birch Lark boys camp, just a mile down the road.

Her daughter didn’t need any more trouble.

The horn of the steamship blared, announcing the boat’s departure.

Virgie looked at Louisa. It gave her the curious sense that she was looking in the mirror: They had the same golden hair, the same straight nose and light freckles.

They were fair to a fault, both in skin tone and in life.

“We’re off to the island.” Louisa grinned, craning her neck to see over the railing as they left the mainland.

The velvet quality of the sea swept away the stress she’d had pinned between her shoulders, and Virgie decided she’d call Charlie tonight and apologize for leaving without saying goodbye.

She couldn’t think of a single time she hadn’t gone along with his plans, down to the timing of their second child.

But she knew he wouldn’t stay mad forever.

Once he heard the light in her voice, he would see that the island was exactly what she’d needed.

The ferry slowed as they approached Vineyard Haven, Virgie’s eyes crinkling at the sight of familiar houses lining the cliffs.

How far she’d traveled this year, and how reassuring it was to return to this comforting place.

Last month, she’d been part of a delegation of political wives who were sent to England to lunch with the queen.

They’d nibbled chicken and mushroom pie in a formal room at Buckingham Palace, and the young queen had given a speech about a woman’s responsibility as a voter, a mother, and citizen.

“Always ask questions, even as women,” the queen had said, the diamonds in her crown sparking a million little gasps in Virgie’s mind.

It had made her question everything she knew.

Small things, like: Why did she wash her face every night and apply cold cream—was there actual proof this did anything?

And bigger things, like: Why did she smile politely at people at cocktail parties who said offensive things rather than respond curtly?

The ferry bumped into the pilings of the dock, and then came an announcement on the crackly speaker welcoming passengers to Martha’s Vineyard.

She and the girls gathered their things and moved with other vacationers toward the painted-steel stairwell leading down to the car park.

Virgie watched the back of her daughters’ heads as they walked down the steps, each one a couple of inches shorter than the other.

A line of growing women who would one day watch their own daughters descend into the dim, cavernous belly of the ferry, driving out minutes later into blinding sunshine.