The Sweetest Days

John Hough

• Publisher: Gallery Books
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781982159573
• eBook ISBN: 9781982159580
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Women in Fiction
• Index: Literature

A riveting and poignant portrait of marriage—lauded by New York Times bestselling author Elin Hilderbrand as “gorgeous and heartbreaking”—that explores the long union of a middle-aged couple grappling with secrets, illness, and loyalty.

Pete and Jackie Hatch have been together for decades; they were high school sweethearts, although they didn’t marry until years after an explosive incident at the end of senior year broke them apart. Now in their sixties, with their only daughter grown and facing scary news about Jackie’s health, they travel to their Cape Cod hometown for Pete’s first book signing. But a disastrous encounter with an old schoolmate brings their long marriage to the breaking point and forces them to revisit the long-ago event that changed the trajectory of their lives.

Exceptionally moving and heralded by New York Times bestselling author Mary Beth Keane as “brutally honest and true,” The Sweetest Days is an insightful portrait of a couple in it for the long haul, and of the deepest feelings, both tender and fierce, that are held in the wake of an enduring marriage.

part one

one

We were waiting at the light by Bagel Heaven and the Shell self-serve when Jackie told me to stop at the liquor store up ahead, PJ’s Wine & Spirits. There was a good bar in the motel and I didn’t think we needed a bottle in our room, but then I wasn’t the one who had cancer.

“Maker’s,” she said, “or Jim Beam Black.”

“Which?” I said.

“Either. No: Maker’s.”

A Ford Bronco was parked in front of PJ’s, its owner inside the store, a big swart guy in a Bruins hat. He’d lifted a case of Sam Adams onto the counter and was digging out his wallet. Saturday, midday, July still young. A radio in the back room was broadcasting the Red Sox pregame show. A kid in an apron was loading six-packs of beer into the cooler at the other end of the room. I pulled down a fifth of Maker’s Mark. The customer lugged his beer out, shouldering through the glass double door, and the man at the register watched me come toward him with the Maker’s. He was smiling.

“Pete Hatch,” he said.

I stopped. It took a moment. “Well, damn,” I said.

“You don’t change, star,” Walter Cummings said.

It happens every time I run into someone from high school: my heart catches, and I look for curiosity in back of the smile, a certain tilt of the head, a question forming. It’s a reason I don’t often go home, maybe the reason. But Walt Cummings’s smile was unmitigated, his day merely brightened by my arrival, and I relaxed.

“You don’t change, either,” I said untruthfully.

“Like hell I don’t. Too much beer. I shouldn’t be working in a liquor store.”

I set the bottle down, and we shook hands. Walt had been on the jayvee when I was a senior, a happy-go-lucky kid, skinny for football. But he hit hard and Coach Maguire had put him on the varsity kickoff team because he could fly downfield nearly as fast as the football, agile and slippery when they tried to block him. He’d also played some defense when the situation warranted a fleet safety. He’d gotten heavy—who would have thought?—but the bucktoothed grin was the old Walt, the bullet head and tight curls, gone gray now. He scanned the bottle of Maker’s.

“I heard you were down in Washington,” he said. “Working for Powell, I heard.”

“I was,” I said. “I’m out in western Mass now. Northampton.”

A woman in dark glasses and a black two-piece bathing suit came in. A placard on the door said Shoes and proper attire required, and she could not have missed it. She was sun-browned and fleshy, scraping along in flip-flops. She looked pretty good, but ten or fifteen years ago she’d have caused traffic accidents in that bathing suit. She’d come from the beach, and her chestnut hair was damp and tangled, giving her a look of wantonness and abandon. You could imagine licking the salt off her skin.

She granted us a smile, appreciating the attention we were paying her, and went slowly down the nearest aisle with her purse hanging off her smooth bronze shoulder. The kid crouching in front of the cooler watched her as she stood pondering the vodkas. We all did.

Walt finally tore his gaze from her, gave me a wink and a smile, and reached below the counter for a paper bag.

“Why’d you leave Washington?” he said.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Tired of the life. I guess. What about you?”

“Never left town after the service. Dunstable’s home, you know?”

I swiped my credit card and signed the slip. The woman had come back with a quart bottle of Absolut. She set the bottle on the counter. She looked at Walt, looked at me.

“What is this, old home week?” she said.

“High school buddies,” Walt said. “We’re catching up.”

“How sweet.”

“We were teammates,” I said. “Football. Walt once intercepted a pass in the end zone, ran it back a hundred yards for a touchdown.”

“I’m yawning,” the woman said. “Tell me something interesting.”

“I just did,” I said.

“Tell her who you used to work for,” Walt said.

“It won’t impress her,” I said.

“Probably not,” she said.

“Senator Powell,” Walt said.

The woman removed her dark glasses and considered me, wondering if it was true and deciding it was.

“Good for you,” she said. “Brave new world. Black president, Black women in the House and Senate. Or do I say African American?”

“Senator Powell usually says Black,” I said.

“She’s a smart lady. Might be president herself someday. You should have stuck around, maybe get an office in the West Wing someday.”

“A job came up, teaching,” I said. “Seemed like a nice quiet change.”

“Whereabouts?” Walt said.

“Smith College,” I said.

“Yowza,” said the woman. “My alma mater.”

“Small world,” I said.

“It’s Pauline Powell’s alma mater, come to think of it. She get you the job?”

“More or less.”

The woman broke out a nice smile, my reward for being honest, then swung the smile to Walt. “Now, if you’ll ring this bottle up, I’ve got a cookout to go to.”

“BYOB?” Walt said.

“No, I just like to be prepared.”

“Semper paratus,” I said.

“In vino veritas.” She began digging in her purse. She found her wallet. “What brings the prodigal home?”

Walt reached down for a bag. “Thirty-one eighty-nine,” he said.

“Jesus,” the woman said, “who sets these prices?”

“I’m giving a reading tonight,” I said. “Signing books, I hope.”

“Books?” Walt said.

“He’s an author, apparently,” the woman said.

“No shit,” Walt said.

“A rookie author,” I said. “A beginner.”

“So was Faulkner, once,” the woman said. She gave me another assessment. Nodded at what she saw. “Well, well. Come in to buy liquor, you never know what’ll turn up. What did you say your name was?”

"I didn’t."

“Pete Hatch,” Walt said.

“The Village Bookstore, seven o’clock,” I said. “I need all the help I can get.”

“I’ll try to get someone to cover for me,” Walt said. “They got me scheduled till eleven tonight.”

“I’ll probably be three sheets to the wind by then,” the woman said. “This book, you dishing the dirt on Pauline Powell?”

“There is no dirt on Pauline. It’s a novel.”

“A novel, then you ought to change your name. Or use a pen name. A novelist needs a name with two or three syllables. Updike. Dickens. Salinger. See what I mean?”

“What’s she talking about?” Walt said.

“She’s trying to prove she went to Smith,” I said.

She smirked, fitted on her dark glasses, lifted the bottle in its bag and cradled it against an ample breast. She cast a farewell nod my way and moved with slow voluptuous dignity toward the door. She pushed through it sideways.

James Joyce, I thought, too late.

“She might actually come tonight,” Walt said. “Your wife with you?”

“She’s out in the car,” I said.

“Uh-oh,” Walt said. He looked out, squinting, found Jackie sitting there looking not too happy.

“I better go repair the damage,” I said.

I was at the door when Walt said, “You married Jackie Lawrence, right?”

I stopped, turned, nodded.

“Yeah, I thought that was her. She looks good, Pete.”

“I know,” I said, and got out before Walt could ask any more questions.

---

“What was that all about?”

“You remember Walter Cummings, couple classes behind us? He’s clerking in there.”

“I have trouble remembering my own classmates, never mind sophomores. But that wasn’t my question.”

“I remember Walt from football.”

I’d backed out and turned around and we waited now for a break in the traffic.

“What I was asking about was the sexpot in the bikini. Who can’t read, by the way.”

“Oh?”

“Proper attire? She walks in looking like a slut in a mafia movie.”

“She can read,” I said. “She went to Smith.”

“Yeah, I bet. Majored in Russian literature.”

“She was a character. Walt and I were having fun with her.”

“I could see that.”

A pickup truck stopped to let us out, and I waved thanks and swung out into the slow inbound parade of traffic, people pouring in to salvage what was left of the summer weekend.

“She could stand to lose a few pounds,” Jackie said.

“A few,” I said.

“God, Peter. She was a tramp.”

“I told her and Walt about the reading.”

Jackie was looking out the window. “That’s all we need,” she said, still looking away, quiet, as if to herself.

“We need everyone we can get,” I said.

“I hope she puts some clothes on,” Jackie said.

---

The dining room of the Holiday Inn in Dunstable is a high barnlike space with a mirror behind the bar, a fieldstone fireplace, and fake antique wagon wheels, yokes, branding irons, and spurs mounted on the plank walls. Dodge City on Cape Cod, something Disney would conjure. It was quiet now, the lunch crowd pretty well thinned out. The waitress put us by a window, and Jackie set her elbows on the table and looked out at the pond on the other side of the road. The biopsy had ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Part One
• Part Two
• Part Three
• Part Four
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Copyright