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for “Get Me Out of Here.” Later, they would collapse with laughter and clever Maud would do an eerily perfect impersonation.
    Maud was petite and Audrey Hepburn pretty. Carley was lanky, brown-haired, and athletic. Vanessa was tall, voluptuous, and raven-haired. So they weren’t like peas in a pod. They weren’t like anything, really. They weren’t rebels, they were just young wives and mothers who shared a sense of humor, and that got them through some pretty hard times. And through some funny times, too.
    Six years ago in January, the town was hit with a flu epidemic at the same time a gale force wind blasted a blizzard across the island, dropping mountains of snow, toppling trees across driveways, tossing the huge ferries in the harbor around like toys in a bathtub. This was the side of Nantucket life the tourists never knew about and it wasn’t pretty. The DPW wasn’t prepared for snow removal of this magnitude because it so seldom snowed with such fury on the island. Roads were blocked. Shops were closed. Schools were closed. Worse, the ferries carrying the necessities of life—fresh milk, bread, orange juice, cough medicine—couldn’t make it over from the Cape because of the wind. People shared their baby aspirin and ginger ale as if it were gold.
    When the front finally passed and the sun came out, life returned to normal. The children, over their flu, went skipping energetically back to school and the husbands shaved off their caveman bristles, took much-needed showers, and went back to work.
    Carley could never remember who it was who made the first phone call. Probably Maud; she was the most imaginative. She suggested they fly to the Cape for the day, to shop, see a movie, have a girls’-night-out dinner, and fly home on the last plane. Carley asked her mother-in-law to have her daughters and Gus over for dinner, and Annabel was delighted. Margaret was only a little over one then, but she’d spent a lot of time with her grandparents and loved being in their home. Everyone would be fine for one day without Carley.
    It was a brilliant escape from reality. They shopped like women just set free from a sensory-deprivation tank, shrieking with joy over the January sales and discovering the pretty young women they still were under all their practical L.L. Bean fleece. When they finally settled around the table at the Mexican restaurant, their arms, necks, and ears jangling with new, totally unnecessary jewelry, they ordered the most extravagantly unusual margaritas on the menu.
    “Oh my gosh!” Maud stretched her arms above her head. “I feel like I’ve just been let out of prison. Carley, you have two kids, too, but you have
girls
. Believe me, little boys are different. Manic. Little animals. Sometimes I watch them run through the house bellowing and the entire history of the world comes clear before me.”
    Carley snorted. “Cisco and Margaret were easy, I guess, even though they were both so sick. It was Gus who was driving me crazy. We
all
had the flu, but with Gus it was like the last act of
Romeo and Juliet.
”
    For years, Vanessa had been trying to get pregnant, and it hadn’t happened—or as Vanessa always insisted optimistically, it hadn’t happened
yet
. Still, she waved her hand. “No, no, you haven’t seen sick until you’ve seen
the doctor
sick. True, Toby worked at his office all day, and true, he did have the flu, but he so seldom gets sick, he acted as if he had cholera. The coughing, the sneezing, the whining—I’d bet good money he didn’t do that at the office. And could he ever ask for two things at the same time? No. First, could I bring him tissues. Then a blanket, because he had to languish on the sofa, watching TV. Then a whiskey, mixed with the scientificallyprecise amount of soda water. Then some crackers. No, not the wheat thins. Just plain saltines. Then—”
    Carley and Maud were laughing with Vanessa, sipping their drinks, eyeing their jewelry, when they suddenly