The Never Never Sisters Read online

  Praise for

  The Never Never Sisters

  “A poignant, powerful story about family, friendship, and the true nature of love.”

  —Beth Kendrick, author of Cure for the Common Breakup

  Praise for

  The Love Wars

  “Every character in this warm, witty contemporary novel felt so refreshingly true to life.”

  —#1 New York Times bestselling author Liane Moriarty

  “Heller writes with the perfect balance of razor-sharp wit, intelligence, and empathy. Briskly paced and entertaining.”

  —Meg Donohue, author of All the Summer Girls

  “Heller’s narrative is a breath of fresh air—fun and quick-witted. Delightful from beginning to end!”

  —Chick Lit Is Not Dead

  “A fantastic summer read.”

  —Teresa’s Reading Corner

  ALSO BY L. ALISON HELLER

  The Love Wars

  New American Library

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) LLC, 375 Hudson Street,

  New York, New York 10014

  USA | Canada | UK | Ireland | Australia | New Zealand | India | South Africa | China

  penguin.com

  A Penguin Random House Company

  First published by New American Library,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) LLC

  Copyright © L. Alison Heller, 2014

  Readers Guide copyright © Penguin Group (USA) LLC, 2014

  Penguin 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 to continue to publish books for every reader.

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA:

  Heller, L. Alison.

  The never never sisters/L. Alison Heller.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-1-101-59325-7 (eBook)

  1. Marriage counselors—Fiction. 2. Sisters—Fiction. 3. Family secrets—Fiction. 4. Domestic fiction. I. Title.

  PS3608.E453N48 2014

  813'.6—dc23 2013050247

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  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

  To my mom and sister—whose love and goodness I know as well as anything—and also to my dad, whose love and goodness we remember

  acknowledgments

  Ms. Kerry Donovan, you are a writer’s dream come true: smart, talented, passionate, crazily efficient, a highly entertaining lunch date and a supportive friend to boot. Thank you, K, for all of that and specifically for kicking the stuffing out of the Reinhardt Sisters (editorially, of course). I’m beyond grateful!

  Big thanks, of course, to Elisabeth Weed, as well as to the wonderful team at NAL: Kara Welsh, Isabel Farhi, Daniel Walsh, Jane Steele, Katie Anderson, Alissa Theodor and everyone else who helped this book evolve from manuscript to novel.

  I’m blown away by the thoughtfulness of the following dear friends, who, in the midst of their own busy lives, have provided support and/or an ear and/or a boost at a crucial moment: Diane Simon, Joanna Costantino, Kevin “Easter Egg” Costantino, Donna Karlin, Matt Karlin, Konrad “No C” Tree, Toni Guss, Jenny Guss, Lois Ravich, Carroll Saks, Anne Joyce, Jacqueline Newman, Lori Dyan, Jen Hsu, Justin Hsu, Bethany “Emoji” Chase, Meg Donohue, Solana Nolfo, Patty Lifter, Michele Brown, Carolyn LaMargo, Ginny Markovich, Amy Montoya (for beans and more!) and Neil Bagchi. Hugs and kisses to all whether you want them or not!

  For their time and valuable wisdom along the way, thanks to Alice Peck, Alicia Cowan and Tanya Farrell.

  To my wonderfully generous online pals (you know who you are): thanks for helping to spread the word about my books—meeting you has been a true joy. And to the book clubs who so generously hosted The Love Wars, and with whom I had the most exhilarating discussions, thank you! I look forward to seeing you again very soon.

  Thanks to Samantha Heller, the world’s best and most overused first reader, Sue Ann Heller, Kate Ostrove, Edith Roberts, Raj Bhattacharyya and, of course, Kannon and Dashiell Bhattacharyya, my incredible nephews (who have been blessed with PowerPoint skills as prodigious as their enthusiasm).

  And, of course, to Zoe, Gigi and Glen: thanks (infinity times infinity times infinity’s worth) for making it all worthwhile.

  Finally, two books in particular were helpful to me as I imagined and wrote this novel: Addict in the Family by Beverly Conyers and Beautiful Boy by David Sheff.

  contents

  Praise for L. Alison Heller

  Also by L. Alison Heller

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Epigraph

  prologue

  July

  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

  chapter thirty-six

  chapter thirty-seven

  chapter thirty-eight

  chapter thirty-nine

  chapter forty

  chapter forty-one

  chapter forty-two

  chapter forty-three

  chapter forty-four

  chapter forty-five

  chapter forty-six

  October

  chapter forty-seven

  About the Author

  Readers Guide

  If ever two were one, then surely we.

  —ANNE BRADSTREET

  If you do not tell the truth about yourself, you cannot tell it about other people.

  —VIRGINIA WOOLF

  prologue

  THE FIRST THING I do is offer them candy. I keep a jar of it, well-stocked, right there on the coffee table.

  In my experience, people are one hundred percent less likely to tell a lie with a Hershey’s Kiss tucked into the side of their mouth. So while th
ey’re unwrapping their chocolate or caramel or whatever, I lob the easy questions at them: How long have they been together? Do they have any kids?

  And then, once they’ve relaxed a little, settled into the beige couch across from my blue chair, I probe: What do they want out of our meeting? If I sense from one of them a certain reticence, as I did that Tuesday morning, I repeat the question.

  I’ve found it helpful, when pressing for the truth, to lean forward and hold eye contact. So I employed this method as I posed the question once more to both Scott Jacoby and his wife, Helene.

  “What. Do. You. Want?”

  Helene—a tiny, feminine woman with the brash voice of a New York City traffic cop—stared back at me with an electric gaze. “To save our marriage.”

  I’m not sure how I developed this particular niche, but usually the couples who I meet with in counseling sessions aren’t in need of mere tune-ups. No one asks me for tips on how to stoke an already ignited passion or to help mediate a dispute so that both parties feel sufficiently heard. My clients come to me in full-on crisis mode, swinging from the broken rope bridge of their marriage—the point at which they’ll either let go into free fall or scramble to safety.

  Scott was still silent, his arms crossed over his navy suit jacket. I hadn’t yet determined whether he was annoyed at having to leave work in the middle of the day or if his body language was a symptom of greater marital fatigue.

  He stared across the room in the direction of the photo I’d hung on the wall. It was a picture from my wedding two years before, not that my clients could tell this, because it was of our midsections and taken from the back: my white silk veil, the dark block of my husband Dave’s tux, our interlocking forearms. I hoped it was generic enough that people would see in it their own happier times, but Scott’s unfocused eyes indicated that he wasn’t envisioning anything so hopeful.

  “What do you really want, Scott?”

  Waiting for his response, Helene leaned so far forward in her chair that she appeared to be praying. I’ve seen a lot of heartache in my office, but it took my breath away—those troubled eyes in the middle of that frozen, perfectly made-up face.

  “Scott?” My voice was as gentle as it could be.

  Finally, Scott sighed, then rubbed his cheek with his right hand. “I don’t know what I want.”

  “Okay.” I took care to sound appropriately neutral. “Take some time. Try to think about it.” I pushed the candy jar toward him. It should be said that I buy only the good stuff: Hershey’s Kisses, Werther’s, Reese’s Minis—none of those nubby little mints or hard candies with wrappers in the image of strawberries to help you associate the flavor.

  Although I know better than to take it personally whether my clients’ marriages work or not . . . I can’t help myself. I take it all very personally.

  Dave had pointed out the irony of this when I came home one day and declared I was a failure. (I was right on that count; the Guinetts did not make it.) “You ask them what they want, right?”

  “Yes.” He’d left out the second part, the “why,” so I reminded him. “It’s like an oral contract. They commit to wanting the marriage to work in that initial moment and it’s helpful later, when things get tough.”

  “But if you keep having to remind them what they want, how do you know it’s still truly what they want?”

  “You wouldn’t understand,” I had said. “It’s a very intimate environment in my office.” I didn’t have a good response right then, but two days later, when I heard his key in the lock, I met him at the door with a spatula. “Listen,” I said.

  He’d stepped back, out of the range of the spatula, which had dripped marinara sauce in a large splotch in the entry hall. “Listening.”

  “If people come to me, they want to protect their marriages. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to help them—okay?”

  He’d leaned down and kissed my head. “Okay.”

  As I explained to Helene and Scott how we could proceed, that was the undercurrent I tried to convey: that I respected their step toward protecting the sacred and that I would help them as best I could.

  I will always remember that—the three of us sitting in the office, clustered around the candy jar, as we pledged to resuscitate their marriage, me just the tiniest bit smug, totally oblivious to the fact that at that exact moment, my own marriage had begun to fall apart.

  July

  chapter one

  ALTHOUGH IT WAS only three o’clock in the afternoon when the Jacobys left my office, I was done for the day. I really wanted Helene and Scott to hire me. I respected their marriage, yes, but I was also salivating at the thought of an additional Tuesday or Thursday session.

  Dave had had a brutal few months at the office: seven-day workweeks and late nights. The summer was not unfolding as we’d planned back in February, when we’d optimistically rented a house in Quogue that we’d seen online. Quogue was not one of the scene-y Hamptons towns, and the house itself was just what we could afford—modest and far from the beach, but it looked adorable. Three tiny bedrooms upstairs, a bright yellow kitchen with big white-knobbed fifties-style appliances and a sweeping tree with a rope hammock in the front yard. Dave had been too busy with work, so my mom had helped me narrow down the search. “Charming,” we’d both proclaimed at first sight of the Quogue cottage. “That’s it!”

  Even though my calendar had Quogue written across each weekend (as well as the last two weeks in August), we had yet to see it in person. All our friends were already out there, and Dave had pushed me to go alone—someone should enjoy it, he said—but he hadn’t had a single day off since Memorial Day, and it would’ve felt disloyal. I didn’t want to resent his work schedule; I wanted to fill mine, but it was difficult to drum up clients in the summer months on the emptied-out Upper East Side.

  I puzzled over this as I walked the five blocks home from my office, that instead of using my free time productively, the opposite was happening: the less I worked, the less I did. I should have been catching up on billing. I should have been focusing on business development: talks, articles, blogs. By Sixty-eighth Street, I’d resolved to contact my master’s program administrators to see whether they knew of any volunteer opportunities. By Seventy-second Street, I realized that I should not be passively waiting for opportunities; I should create one. How hard could it be to write a grant proposal? I would single-handedly bring marriage counseling to an underserved neighborhood. Maybe Mott Haven? By the time I reached my block, Seventy-sixth street, I was imagining being notified of the award I’d receive for my dedication in having started All Hearts, which is what I’d name it. Or For All Hearts.

  I was picturing myself approaching a podium in that navy sheath I’d seen online when I pushed open the door to my apartment and was stopped short by the inside chain. I stepped backward to make sure that I’d gotten off on the right floor, because all the hallways in my building were identical, but our neighbor Jake Driver’s kindergarten scrawl, Welcam, Scotch-taped on the door across the hall, was confirmation: I had made it home.

  “Hello?” I called into the sliver of space between the door and the entryway. I could only see the wall, but I heard the TV, the sound of it being switched off and, eventually, the shuffling of feet down the hall and then the pushing closed of the door, a breeze puffing in my face and the rattling of the chain.

  Then the door opened and there, at three twenty in the afternoon—or, as he would call it on any other day, “lunchtime”—was my husband, Dave, his face streaked with tears.

  chapter two

  HE SPOKE FIRST. “You’re home this early every day?”

  I reached out slowly, put my keys on the entry table. “On Tuesdays, yes.”

  “Wow. No wonder you have so much time to work out.” He turned and walked away from me, back into the living room.

  I followed him. “Dave
?”

  He had slumped down on the couch. “What?”

  I controlled my stream of questions—why was he home and, more important, acting like a total asshole?—and sat down next to him. “Did something happen?”

  He held up a palm, like a celebrity deflecting paparazzi. “No quack talk, please.”

  “No, of course not.” Quack talk?

  “I really don’t want to get into it.”

  “Did you get fired?”

  “No!”

  “You’re crying?”

  “I was.”

  “Is someone . . . hurt?”

  “No.” He slouched down farther. “Not physically. I’m not getting into it.”

  I stood up. “Okay.” I could tell that his diffidence was an act; he was watching me, curious about what I’d do next. If I’d said what I really wanted to say, we would’ve started fighting, so I worked hard, very hard, to lift my shoulders in a shrug. “Just tell me when you’re ready to talk.”

  What now? I walked back down the entry hall and picked up the bag I’d left in the corner of the hall. My hands shaking, I unpacked my wallet and sunglasses and placed them on random shelves in the entry hall closet. How serious could it be if no one was hurt? Maybe something had happened with one of his clients or there was fallout from an office power play? Eventually, Dave shuffled back down the hall.

  “I was suspended from work,” he said. “For two weeks. They wouldn’t tell me why. I didn’t do anything wrong, and I don’t want to talk about it yet.”

  “Okay.” It may sound callous, but I felt instant relief. Dave’s law firm was a notorious hotbed of internal politics, and being temporarily ousted for a mysterious nonreason seemed in line with the other horror stories I’d heard from Duane Covington, like getting summoned back from your vacation when you were standing in line to board a plane to Europe, like being bullied into signing over to a more powerful partner the client you’d worked so hard to land, like pretending you hadn’t billed as much as you had so that same partner could take credit for your work. A suspension explained Dave’s reaction (he was a workaholic and would be understandably freaked-out by this) yet was easily remediable. He didn’t need to stay with Duane Covington; his clients would follow him anywhere. I waited for Dave to tell me more, but all he did was stand in the hallway with a spaced-out expression that was disturbingly similar to Scott Jacoby’s.