Belonging by Nancy Thayer

Author:Nancy Thayer [Thayer, Nancy]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-553-39102-2
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2014-04-28T16:00:00+00:00

The next night she and Tory went to a Neil Simon play at Bennett Hall, a small theater in a modest building attached to the grand old white Congregational Church. The theater was small, seating only about a hundred people, and theatergoers had to be seated off the main central aisle, so that those being escorted to their seats became a kind of preshow entertainment.

Joanna took an aisle seat because of her bulk. She and Tory had just settled into their chairs and were opening their programs when Tory nudged Joanna’s arm.

“Would you look at that!” Tory whispered sotto voce.

Joanna swept her eyes around the room and saw Gardner Adams enter with a woman who clung to him with long magenta fingernails.

“She doesn’t seem his type at all,” Joanna told Tory.

She sensed someone’s gaze on her and, looking up, saw Pat Hoover, who sat with Bob on the other side of the aisle and a few rows up. Their eyes met, they smiled, their eyebrows raised, very slightly they shook their heads in mutual wonder. Of all the women in the world whom the handsome physician could have chosen, this was the one?

Gardner and his date sat down, or rather Gardner sat, and his date arranged herself ostentatiously around him, encompassing as much of his body as she could while at the same time positioning her hand so that she could enjoy the flashes of her brilliant engagement ring.

“I just can’t believe it,” Tory whispered, pretending to study her program. “I’ve met him at a few parties and functions, and he’s adorable, a real sweetie. How in the world did he get hooked up with her?”

Gardner’s date—his fiancée, it seemed—could not have been any less an island type if she’d landed directly from the moon. Her bleached blond hair was styled and sprayed and backcombed; her dress dripped great clots of rhinestone, and her earrings were as big as teacups.

The theater filled. Murmurs rose in the air like a kind of humming, the lights dimmed, and the curtain was raised. The show on the stage began.

At intermission most of the crowd strolled out for the light refreshments sold in the lobby or into the mild misty night for fresh air. Tory and Joanna joined the throng.

“Oh!” Tory exclaimed. “That’s it!”

“That’s what?” Joanna asked.

“Sssh. Don’t look. Come over here under the tree.”

Puzzled, Joanna followed Tory out onto the brick walk and across the lawn so that they stood in shadow looking back at the people illuminated by the light from the lobby windows.

“Don’t look now,” Tory whispered, “but the reason Gardner is with that horror has just become crystal clear. She must be Dr. Sandler’s daughter.”

“Dr. Sandler?”

“Horatio Sandler, our old obstetrician and gynecologist. He’s practiced on the island for about a hundred years. Everyone loves him. Worships him. That one, the tall one with the white hair.”

As Tory spoke, Joanna scanned the crowd until her eyes caught on the figure of a stunningly attractive man standing with Gardner Adams and the blonde.

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