Free Island Girls by Nancy Thayer Page A

lightheartedness. “We’re going to finish our lunch and go our separate ways. You’ll start buying your perfume elsewhere.”
    They were married a year later, after Rory’s no-fault divorce from Meg’s mother, during which he agreed to let Cyndi have the Boston house, her Lexus, and a whopping pile of money. He kept the Nantucket house, the house he’d first bought with Cyndi.
    They introduced the three girls to one another gradually, starting off on fun social occasions where their attention was sidetracked and they could perceive the reality in a kind of sideways fashion. Movies, theme parks, museums, aquariums were all visited before they brought the three girls into their Nantucket house for the first sleepover.
    Although, of course, Jenny was already in the house.
    A quiet, shy little girl, Jenny was considered something of a puzzle by her caregivers and teachers. At day care, she ignored the other children, finding a corner for herself where she built tiny intricate worlds out of all the broken bits of toys the other children ignored. When she started kindergarten, she was assessed and deemed to be quite intelligent. She could talk; she just didn’t. She learned to read and do math early. She colored between the lines. She never acted out. She wasn’t a problem, so she was overlooked at school. While Justine didn’t ignore her daughter, by the time she returned home from standing on her feet behind a counter all day, she was too exhausted to do much more than microwave Kraft mac and cheese for Jenny and collapse on the sofa with a glass of wine.
    Rory Randall was like the sun shining on a plant that had lived struggling in the shade. With his booming voice, easy laugh, and entertaining manner, he lit up their lives. He was a generous, loving, intuitive man. The first year of their marriage, he took much of the summer off so he could stay at his Nantucket house and help Jenny learn to swim and sail. Jenny blossomed like a rose in June.
    Justine had never known that people could be so happy. Jenny was smiling, laughing, making friends at school, getting invited to birthday parties, bringing girls home! Justine realized her own heart had been trapped in a cage of anxiety and caution: She had hardly done anything for fear of doing something wrong. Justine
adored
Rory. He was her hero, her champion, her prince.
    In her happiness, Justine secretly vowed to be loving to Rory’s other two daughters, even if Arden, the older, bratty one, was a challenge. The first summer on Nantucket, they invited Arden and Meg to come stay for most of the summer. This length of time would give them a chance to know one another, Rory decided, and Justine wanted to make Rory happy.
    The first year wasn’t so bad. Rory kept them on a madcap schedule of swimming, sailing, and tennis lessons. He enrolled them in art and science courses. He set up jigsaw puzzles on the dining room table. He brought home videos and took them to movies at the Gaslight. The girls squabbled sometimes, but they laughed together, too. Rory was happy, and Justine was happy for him even though she was overwhelmed with buying groceries at the crowded stores and feeding all five of them three meals a day.
    Then it all changed. During the school year, Arden transformed from a sullen girl into a rebellious slut.
    Every time Arden came over to spend the night with Meg and Jenny, who still played with their American Girl dolls and took riding lessons, the difference increased. Arden’s skirts got shorter.Her shirts plunged lower. Suddenly her auburn hair had purple streaks in it. She tossed around curse words like confetti in spite of Justine’s admonitions. She made jokes about condoms and blow jobs.
    Justine was horrified. She’d been a rather racy little teenager herself, back in the day, but nothing like this, and she hadn’t even had sex until she was nineteen, at which point she got herself knocked up. She tried having private counseling sessions with Arden,