Barefoot Read Free

to—shrinking her tumor to a resectable size—it would be followed by thoracic surgery in which they would remove her left lung and her hilar lymph nodes. Chemotherapy, surgery, survival —these things were too big for any list. And so, the lists had all been thrown away, except for the one Vicki kept in her head: the List of Things That No Longer Matter.
    A brother and sister running across the street, late for their dentist appointments. A pretty skirt worn with the wrong shoes. Peterson’s Shorebirds. (There was a group of retired women in Darien who wandered the beach with this exact volume in hand. Vicki hated these women. She hated them for being so lucky—they didn’t have cancer, thus they had the luxury of spending precious minutes of their lives tracking an oystercatcher or a blue heron.)
    Unfortunately for Brenda and Melanie, there were things about this summer on Nantucket that had initially been placed on Vicki’s List of Things That No Longer Matter—such as whether Brenda and Melanie would get along, or whether all five of them would be comfortable in Aunt Liv’s summer cottage—but now it seemed like they might matter after all. Vicki’s so organized, she never forgets a thing. But the fact was, Vicki had forgotten the physical details of Aunt Liv’s cottage. When Vicki made the radical decision to come to Nantucket for the summer, her only thought had been of the comfort that Aunt Liv’s cottage, and Nantucket, would give her. Every summer growing up she had stayed in the cottage with her parents and Brenda and Aunt Liv. It was her favorite place, it defined summertime, and Vicki’s mother, Ellen Lyndon, had always sworn that any ailment in the world—physical or emotional—could be cured by a little Nantucket sand between your toes. Everyone else thought Vicki was crazy to go away for the summer, endangering herself even, but another thing that Vicki put on her List of Things That No Longer Matter was what everyone else thought.
    Inviting Brenda to come along had been the obvious choice. Vicki needed help with the kids and getting back and forth to chemo, and Brenda, fired from Champion in a blaze of scandal with attendant legal trouble, was desperate to escape the city. It was summer, salvaged for both of them. In the harrowing days following Vicki’s diagnosis, they talked about reliving their memories from childhood: long beach days, catching fireflies, bike rides to Sesachacha Pond, corn on the cob, games of Monopoly and badminton, picking blackberries, twilight walks up to Sankaty Head Lighthouse, which spun its beacon like a cowboy with a wild lasso, picnics of bologna-and-potato-chip sandwiches, spending every day barefoot. It would be just the two of them, creating memories for Vicki’s own kids. It was a chance for Vicki to heal, for Brenda to regroup. They would follow their mother’s advice: Nantucket sand between the toes. It might cure anything: cancer, ruined careers, badly ended love affairs. Just the two of us, they said as they sat under the harsh hospital lights awaiting a second opinion. It would be a sister summer.
    But how, really, could Vicki leave her best friend behind in Darien—especially with the monstrous news of Peter’s affair followed by an even bigger stunner (whispered, frantically, at three in the morning over the telephone). Melanie was—after all this time, after so many costly and invasive procedures—pregnant!
    Come to Nantucket, Vicki had said immediately, and without thinking (and without consulting Ted or Brenda).
    Okay, Melanie had said just as quickly. I will.
    As the taxi pulled up in front of Aunt Liv’s cottage, Vicki feared she’d made a mistake. The house was smaller than Vicki remembered, a lot smaller. It was a shoe box; Blaine had friends with playhouses bigger than this. Had it shrunk? Vicki wondered. Because she remembered whole summers with her parents and Brenda and Aunt Liv, and the house had seemed, if not palatial, then at