One Good Thing Read online

  PRAISE FOR THE NOVELS OF WENDY WAX

  “[A] sparkling, deeply satisfying tale.”

  —Karen White, New York Times bestselling author

  “Wax offers her trademark form of fiction, the beach read with substance.”

  —Booklist

  “Wax really knows how to make a cast of characters come alive . . . [She] infuses each chapter with enough drama, laughter, family angst, and friendship to keep readers greedily turning pages until the end.”

  —RT Book Reviews

  “This season’s perfect beach read!”

  —Single Titles

  “A tribute to the transformative power of female friendship . . . Reading Wendy Wax is like discovering a witty, wise, and wonderful new friend.”

  —Claire Cook, New York Times bestselling author of

  Must Love Dogs and Time Flies

  “If you’re a sucker for plucky women who rise to the occasion, this is for you.”

  —USA Today

  “Just the right amount of suspense and drama for a beach read.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “[A] loving tribute to friendship and the power of the female spirit.”

  —Las Vegas Review-Journal

  “Beautifully written and constructed by an author who evidently knows what she is doing . . . One fantastic read.”

  —Book Binge

  “[A] lovely story that recognizes the power of the female spirit, while being fun, emotional, and a little romantic.”

  —Fresh Fiction

  “Funny, heartbreaking, romantic, and so much more . . . Just delightful!”

  —The Best Reviews

  “Wax’s Florida titles . . . are terrific for lovers of women’s fiction and family drama, especially if you enjoy a touch of suspense and romance.”

  —Library Journal Express

  Titles by Wendy Wax

  A WEEK AT THE LAKE

  WHILE WE WERE WATCHING DOWNTON ABBEY

  MAGNOLIA WEDNESDAYS

  THE ACCIDENTAL BESTSELLER

  SINGLE IN SUBURBIA

  HOSTILE MAKEOVER

  LEAVE IT TO CLEAVAGE

  7 DAYS AND 7 NIGHTS

  Ten Beach Road Novels

  TEN BEACH ROAD

  OCEAN BEACH

  CHRISTMAS AT THE BEACH

  (eNovella)

  THE HOUSE ON MERMAID POINT

  SUNSHINE BEACH

  ONE GOOD THING

  BERKLEY

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014

  Copyright © 2017 by Wendy Wax

  “Readers Guide” copyright © 2017 by Penguin Random House LLC

  Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader.

  BERKLEY is a registered trademark and the B colophon is a trademark of

  Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Wax, Wendy, author.

  Title: One good thing / Wendy Wax.

  Description: First Edition. | New York : Berkley, 2017.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016048899 (print) | LCCN 2016056299 (ebook) | ISBN

  9780451488619 (paperback) | ISBN 9780451488626 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Female friendship—Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Contemporary

  Women. | FICTION / Romance / Contemporary. | FICTION / Humorous.

  Classification: LCC PS3623.A893 O54 2017 (print) | LCC PS3623.A893 (ebook) |

  DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016048899

  First Edition: April 2017

  Cover art: Close up of mojito © by Anton Eine/EyeEm/Getty Images;

  Tropical leaf pattern © by Kseniav/Shutterstock Images

  Cover design by Rita Frangie

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or

  dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  Contents

  Titles by Wendy Wax

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Epilogue

  Readers Guide

  About the Author

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  E. L. Doctorow famously said, “Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”

  Given the truth of this observation, I’d like to once again thank intrepid critique partners and extremely good friends Karen White and Susan Crandall for being in the car with me and for giving new meaning to the term “road trip.”

  Thanks also go to agent Stephanie Rostan for her continued efforts on my behalf and to the team at Berkley for all they do to bring my books into the world.

  Most importantly, thank you for choosing this book and for getting in the car. I hope you enjoy the ride.

  Prologue

  Midlife crises come in all shapes and sizes. They can manifest in the form of a shiny red sports car, a distant mountain peak demanding to be scaled, a new head of hair, or a plastic bottle of little blue pills. Bertrand Baynard’s starred an exotic dancer named Delilah with whom he fell in love, fathered a child, and ran away.

  His wife, Bitsy, discovered this late one January afternoon when their private banker called to confirm that Bertie had transferred the last of their holdings to an offshore account in the Cayman Islands. And to let her know that the mortgage Bertie had taken out on their Palm Beach estate was seriously in arrears. Which was when she realized that Bertie was not actually in Aruba fishing as he’d claimed, but on his way to a shiny new life that did not include her.

  Stunned and silent, she wandered the huge house and its lush grounds trying not to remember that it was Bertie who’d fallen in
love with the aging Palladian villa and then overseen every detail of its three-year restoration. At night she lay awake in the bed they’d shared, staring up into the high shadowed ceiling, her cheeks and pillow damp with tears. Bertie. Whom Nicole Grant of Heart Inc. had found for her. Whom she had married and loved. And who had genuinely seemed to love her back, was gone. And he’d taken her money with him.

  As a child, Bitsy had been slightly embarrassed by the size of her fortune and the fact that neither she nor her parents had had a hand in making it. In her teens she’d felt twinges of guilt that there were so many who had so little when she had so much. But while she had been an earnestly philanthropic adult, the millions she’d donated had been but droplets from the Amazonian-size river of money on which she’d floated. That river had lubricated all wheels, opened any door she’d chosen to walk through. Like a soft focus lens, it had tempered the adjectives used to describe her. Turned her horsey face “long,” her too narrow nose “aristocratic,” her scrawny body “fashionably slim.”

  She’d been so certain of Bertie’s affection that she’d refused to let him sign the prenup he’d suggested. In their decade and a half of marriage, he had validated her faith in him and had even protected their financial reservoir from Malcolm Dyer’s Ponzi scheme. When others had lost everything, her fortune had remained intact, free-flowing, and bottomless. She had never imagined that it could dry up or disappear. Or that the very person who had safeguarded it might simply walk away with it.

  The sun was painfully bright and the sky a too cheery blue as she watched her possessions inventoried, tagged, and carried away by the auction company. She kept her chin up, her face carefully blank, and her eyes dry as the Lalique chandelier that had belonged to her grandmother and the Louis IX chairs that had been her mother’s were loaded into the van.

  It took two days to empty the house. When it was done, she felt the hollow ache of loss; a cessation of who she’d always been. Despite her philanthropy, her attempts to see herself as more than just a rich woman, it had always been her money that defined her.

  Who was she without it? Where would she go? How would she live? She had an Ivy League education, a million volunteer hours, and no actual work experience. She knew how to throw a party, how to hire good help, how to make conversation, how to have a good time. She did not know how to be poor. And she had a sinking feeling she was not going to be good at it.

  One

  “Are we there yet?” Madeline Singer turned from a mango-streaked sky to look at the man beside her.

  “Almost.” William Hightower’s eyes were dark, his tone mischievous, as he drove the Jeep south on US 1, which snaked through the Florida Keys and separated the Florida Bay from the Atlantic Ocean.

  In her former life it had been Maddie’s children, strapped into the backseat of her minivan, who’d asked if they were “there” yet. Somehow, and she still wasn’t sure how, her life had rearranged itself. One minute she’d been a suburban housewife and mother facing the end of a quarter-century marriage and the world as she’d known it. The next she’d landed on Fantasy Island, aka Mermaid Point, a small private island in Islamorada that belonged to the recently rehabbed rock icon known as “William the Wild.”

  “That is so not an answer.”

  Will took one hand off the wheel to mime the zipping of his lips. Just shy of the 7 Mile Bridge, he took a right onto a sand-strewn road that led toward the bay. She laughed when she realized where they were. Another turn and the Jeep jounced across a rutted parking lot filled with cars. Music and light seeped out of a thatched-roof building built atop a series of docks.

  “Bless you,” she said as he parked facing the Keys Fisheries Market and Marina. “How did you know I needed a stone crab fix?”

  “The entire population of the Florida Keys and everyone on Mermaid Point know about your addiction. I’m thinking there should be a seven-step program to help you get over it.” Although Lifetime had sent Maddie, Avery Lawford, Nicole Grant, and the crew of their renovation-turned-reality TV show Do Over to turn Will’s private island into a B and B, he’d managed to turn it into a sober living facility.

  “I have no interest in getting over stone crabs. And it’s not my fault the season’s so short.” Though she’d had an occasional stone crab claw in her lifetime, it wasn’t until she’d come to the Keys and tasted her first that had been pulled from one of Will’s own traps that she’d understood what the fuss was about.

  A low building hugged the dock that stretched out into the bay, but Will led her up a narrow set of stairs to a large square of a room packed with people. The atmosphere was roadhouse honky-tonk. The material of choice was wood. A life-size tarpon hung on one wall. Another fish she could not identify dangled from a wooden rafter that spanned the pitched thatch ceiling. In keeping with the fish theme, people were packed in like sardines. The lucky ones sat at high tops; others hovered, drinks in hand, chatting while they waited for a table or chairs to open up.

  They stood for a moment in the narrow entrance. To the left, mounds of stone crab claws sat in bins of ice while a young man precracked shells and filled cardboard baskets a dozen at a time. To the right, a lone guitar player perched on a stool, his bearded face grizzled, his fingers gnarled yet agile on the strings. A bar ran along the wall beyond him. The signage was belligerently instructive. One read simply, Claws and Straws. Another listed rules for stone crab claw ordering and eating that ended with, No kids. No TV. No butter. No exceptions.

  “Hey, Will.” The musician nodded at Will then smiled at Maddie as they passed. Eyes noted and followed their progress, but no one yelled or aimed a phone at them. “Looks like a mostly local crowd,” he said quietly. “I doubt anyone will bother us.”

  Maddie didn’t ask how he knew this, but her shoulders began to relax. She had never aspired to being the center of attention and had already experienced far more than her fifteen minutes of fame.

  A skyscraper of a man leaning on the bar shook Will’s hand. “Good to see you, man.”

  “Likewise.” Will placed an order for a dozen claws and a Coke. “Wine, Maddie?”

  “Thanks.” She still marveled at his strength; the way he’d come out of rehab two years ago then reclaimed his life and rejoined the world. Their gazes got tangled up in each other’s and she had to force herself to look away. At sixty-two, William Hightower was, as her daughter, Kyra, had pointed out more than once, “hot as hell.” The black hair that brushed his broad shoulders was threaded with gray, but his features were still sharp and angled. His dark eyes missed little. Exactly why he was in a relationship with her—well, she’d promised she would stop asking herself this question—but even roughhewn fish-themed honky-tonks had shiny surfaces.

  He found a half-empty table in a corner and asked the couple if they could join them. The man, a retired New York policeman, nodded amiably and introduced himself as Jake. His wife, Ingrid, stuttered hello in almost exactly the same way Maddie had when she’d first arrived on Mermaid Point and discovered it belonged to the Southern rocker whose poster had once hung on her bedroom wall. Only Maddie’s stutters had been captured by a Do Over cameraman and broadcast to a television audience.

  Will talked fishing with Jake for a few minutes then shifted slightly so that his back was to their tablemates. Maddie sipped her wine and did her best not to notice the number of women who watched Will as he went to retrieve their order. He returned with a container of claws, which he placed between them. Despite the precracking, a certain amount of effort and skill was required to get every last centimeter of crab. The process was messy but worth it. Maddie wiggled the joints, extracted a good-size bite, dipped it in the mustard sauce, and placed it in her mouth. She closed her eyes in unfeigned ecstasy. “God, that’s good.” She finished the claw then reached for another, making quick work of each one and celebrating whenever she pried free a large, intact piece. The claws gave up their sweet meat under their determine
d assault. Will was a far more experienced claw cracker and eater. The mound of shells grew. She looked up to find him watching her in amusement. “What?”

  “It’s nice to see a woman who isn’t afraid to have an appetite.”

  She met his eyes as heat spread across her cheeks. William Hightower had brought out all kinds of things in her that would have been downright shocking if she hadn’t been so busy enjoying them.

  “You up for another dozen?”

  She considered the offer as she inserted a tiny fork into a crevice to get the last bit of crabmeat. “I’d say yes except then I might not have room for key lime pie.”

  “Now that would be a tragedy.” He watched her set down the fork and lick her fingers. His eyes darkened the way they did when he was taking off her clothes, pulling her into bed. He handed her a wet nap. “You have about two seconds to wipe that sauce off your mouth. Or I’m likely to kiss it off.”

  This time the heat spread a lot farther than Maddie’s cheeks. Ingrid whimpered then looked Maddie up and down, clearly searching for some explanation of what William Hightower saw in her. Maddie, who understood her confusion, took the wet nap and dabbed at the corners of her mouth. She and Will said their good-byes and carried their trash to the container. Moments later they were out on the docks. The music and noise fell away. Boats bobbed gently at their moorings. Light glittered on the dark surface of the water. They ordered a piece of pie to share and carried it outside to a favorite picnic table overlooking the water. She leaned on the dock railing to look down at the spotlit water. The dark shapes of fish moved beneath the surface.

  They sat side by side and dawdled over the pie—an everyday activity heightened by his nearness and made perfect by the soft breeze off the water, the occasional splash of a fish, the soft clank of lines against a mast.

  “They’re sending us out on a bigger tour to help support the album.”

  “Oh.”

  When they’d met, he’d been virtually hiding out on Mermaid Point, his career in tatters, unable to make music. Then he’d written “Free Fall,” put together a band, and begun playing local gigs. His old record label had come calling. They’d thrown enough money at him to fund the sober living facility he’d named in honor of the younger brother who’d lost his life to the same excesses that had almost claimed Will.