The Beach Club

1 The Opening

May 1

Dear Bill,

Another summer season is about to begin on beautiful Nantucket Island. I have just returned from my winter retreat-Nevis, Vail, Saipan-it’s your guess where I’ve been. The important thing is that I’m back, and I am prepared to sweeten my offer to buy the hotel. I know you have some crazy idea about family loyalty and passing the business on to your daughter, but things don’t always work out the way we want them to. Alas, I have learned this the hard way. So as you start this season of sun and sand, consider my offer: twenty-two million. That’s a pretty good deal, and if you don’t mind my saying so, you’re not getting any younger.

Feel free to write to me at the usual P.O. box downtown. I’ll be waiting to hear from you.

As ever,

S.B.T.

On the first of May, Mack Petersen swung his Jeep into the parking lot of the Nantucket Beach Club and Hotel for the start of his twelfth summer season as manager, the Almost Head Honcho. Twelve was an important number, Mack decided, with its own name. A dozen. Mack’s dozen years of working at the hotel were like eggs, all in one basket, like the Boston cream doughnuts served at the hotel’s Continental breakfast, one practically indistinguishable from the next. There were twelve months in a year, twelve signs in the Zodiac, twelve hours of A.M. and P.M. Twelve was a full cycle, a cycle completed. Maybe Maribel was right, then. Maybe this was the year things would change.

Mack walked across the parking lot to look at Nantucket’s most picturesque beach. Over the winter, northeasterly winds blew the sand into smooth, rounded dunes, in some places six and eight feet high. Mack trudged to the top of one of the dunes and gazed out over the water. The Beach Club sat on the north shore of the island, on Nantucket Sound, where the water was as flat and placid as a fishing pond. The white sand was clean and wide, although they lost beach to erosion, some years as much as twenty-five feet. Last year they had gained beach and the owner of the hotel, Bill Elliott, was so happy that he had thrown his arm around Mack’s shoulder, and said, “See there? We’re not going to lose her after all.” As though the Beach Club and Hotel belonged to them both. Which, of course, was not the case.

Mack had stayed on Nantucket through the winter with his girlfriend Maribel, but he hadn’t checked on the hotel even once. It was a rule he’d created over the years: I won’t think about the hotel in winter. Were the shingles falling off? Was the paint peeling? Were they losing beach? Those were questions for Bill and his wife, Therese, but they spent their winters skiing in Aspen, and if anyone were going to check on the place, it would be Mack. But he never did. He knew that if he let it, the hotel would obsess him, drive him crazy.

The most photographed part of the hotel was the pavilion-a covered deck with five blue Adirondack chairs facing the water. All summer, guests sat in the low, wide chairs with their feet up on the railing, drinking coffee, reading the paper. This picture of summer bliss made it into the Nantucket chamber of commerce guide year after year.

The lobby of the hotel was its own freestanding building with a row of windows that looked over the pavilion and the beach. The hotel rooms began outside the back door of the lobby: twenty single-story, cedar-shingled rooms formed a giant L. Ten rooms ran down toward the water and ten rooms faced the water. All the rooms had small decks, and thus the rooms were distinguished by the names, “side deck” and “front deck.” Therese had further nicknamed the front deck rooms the “Gold Coast,” because they were so expensive.

Twenty rooms might not seem like a lot at first, but the beach also hosted a private Beach Club: One hundred members paid annual dues to sit under umbrellas for the ten weeks of summer. They could have saved themselves the money and gone to Steps Beach to the west, or Jetties Beach to the east, but year after year membership of the Beach Club was full. Mack’s primary job was to treat the guests and the Beach Club members like royalty. He arranged dinner reservations and the delivery of flowers, wine, steamed lobsters, birthday cakes. He had a key to every door, and knew the location of every extension cord, vacuum cleaner bag, feather pillow. He hired and fired the staff and created the weekly work schedule. He knew every Beach Club member’s name by heart and the names of all the children. Mack ran the place. Bill and Therese had owned the Beach Club and Hotel for twenty years but Mack understood its ins and outs, its cracks, sore spots, and hideaways better than anyone. It had been his course of study now for twelve years.

A thousand guests would walk into the lobby over the next six months. Some had been coming to the hotel as long as Mack had worked there. The baseball managers (in July, over the all-star break), Leo Hearn, a lawyer from Chicago (Memorial Day), Mrs. Ford, a widow who came for the month of September and smoked a pack of cigarettes in her room each day.

Then there would be Andrea Krane, a woman Mack thought he might be in love with. Andrea arrived in June and stayed for three weeks with her autistic son, James. Mack imagined her long, honey-colored hair twisted into a bun or a braid. Smiling a rare smile, because when she arrived at the Beach Club she was happy. She had three weeks stretched in front of her, twenty-one days sparkling like diamonds on a tennis bracelet.

Mack watched the ferry approach in the distance. It was full of people coming to work for the season-waiters and waitresses, ice cream scoopers, lifeguards, landscapers, nannies, chambermaids, bellmen. Twelve years ago it had been Mack on that boat-his first time on the ocean-and when he stepped off at Steamship Wharf his life changed. Nantucket had saved him.

Twelve years ago, Mack was eighteen, a farm boy. Born and raised in Swisher, Iowa, where his father owned a 530-acre farm-corn and soybeans, hogs and chickens. The farm had originally belonged to Mack’s grandfather, then his father, and Mack grew up understanding that it would one day be his. School felt like a waste of time, except that it was a place to socialize. Mack loved to talk-the bonus for spending hours on a combine by himself was that his father took him to The Alibi for a greasy ham-and-egg breakfast, or to the feed store-and there was always lots of talk.

Mack’s mother worked part-time at an antique store in Swisher-a quiet job of crystal figurines and classical music. Mack’s parents belonged to Swisher Presbyterian, but they weren’t strict about going to church, nor were they prescriptive about what Mack should believe. In fact, his mother once told him she didn’t believe in heaven.

“I just don’t believe in it,” she said as she scrubbed potatoes at the sink and Mack puzzled over his trigonometry homework at the long oak harvest table. “I believe that when you die, you die, and you’re back to where you were before you were born. Oblivion, I guess you’d call it.”

Two months before Mack’s high school graduation, his parents went out for their Saturday night dinner date. On their way home on Route 380, a tractor trailer sideswiped their car and they crashed into the guardrail and died. There hadn’t been foul weather-no rain, no ice. Only carelessness on the part of the truck driver, and possibly, on the part of Mack’s father, who should have hit the brakes harder when the truck pulled in front of him. (Had his father been drinking? A cocktail before dinner, wine?) It didn’t matter to Mack; it didn’t change the fact that two good people were dead. Mack was left orphaned, although orphaned wasn’t a word anyone used, and neither was it a word Mack thought of often. He was, after all, eighteen. An adult.

Mack left the farm to his father’s lawyer, David Pringle, and his father’s sidekick Wendell, and the farmhands who worked there. He picked up his high school diploma, caught a bus east and took it as far as it would go, a romantic idea, one his mother would have liked. When the bus stopped in Hyannis, Massachusetts, Mack thought he would find a small apartment and a job, but then he caught his first glimpse of the ocean and he learned there was a boat that would take him even farther east, to an island. Nantucket Island.

Mack found his job at the Beach Club by accident. When the ferry pulled in to Steamship Wharf, Bill Elliott stood waiting on the dock, and when Mack stepped off the boat, Bill tapped his shoulder.

“Are you here for the job at the Beach Club?” Bill asked.

Mack didn’t even think about it. “Yes, sir, I am.”

He followed Bill to an olive-colored Jeep. Bill hoisted Mack’s duffel into the back and they drove off the wharf and down North Beach Road without another word. When they pulled into the parking lot of the hotel, Mack saw the view of the water-he was still not used to so much water-and then he heard a hum. Hum. Hum.

“What’s that noise?” Mack asked.

“The seagulls?” Bill said. “They can be pretty loud. Where did you come from?”

“Iowa,” Mack said.

Bill’s forehead wrinkled. “I thought you were coming from New Jersey.”

It confirmed Mack’s fear: there was some kid from New Jersey standing on the wharf, waiting for Bill to pick him up.

“No, sir, I came from Swisher, Iowa.” He heard the noise again. Hum. Hum. Home-it sounded like a voice saying “Home.” “You don’t hear that?” Mack asked.

Bill smiled. “I guess you didn’t have too many gulls out in Iowa. I guess this is all brand-new.”

“Yes, sir,” Mack said. A voice was saying “Home, home.” Mack could hear it as plain as day. He extended his hand. “I’m Mack Petersen.”

Bill frowned. “Mack Petersen wasn’t who I was picking up.”

“I know,” Mack said. “But you asked if I was here for a job, and I am.”

“Do you know anything about hotels?” Bill asked.

“I will soon, I guess,” Mack said. And he heard it again; it was the funniest thing. Home.

Mack didn’t believe in spiritual guides, past lives, fortune-tellers, tarot cards, or crystal balls. He believed in God and in a heaven, despite what his mother told him. But what Mack heard wasn’t the voice of God. The voice wasn’t coming from the sky, it was coming from the land beneath his feet.

Mack had heard the voice at other times over the past twelve years, too many now to count. He read about phenomena like this-the Taos Hum, the Whisper of Carmel-but never on Nantucket. Mack once found the courage to ask Maribel, “Do you ever hear things on this island? From this island? Do you ever hear a voice?” Maribel blinked her blue eyes, and said, “I do think the island has a voice. It’s the waves, the birds, the whisper of the dune grass.”

Mack never mentioned the voice to anyone again.

Mack listened for the voice now as he lingered on the dune. Just four days earlier, he’d received a phone call from David Pringle, the lawyer who’d supervised the farm in Iowa for all the years since Mack left. David called every now and then urging Mack to rent out the farmhouse, or to apprise him of profits and loss, taxes, weather. But he had never sounded as serious as he did four days ago.

“Wendell gave his notice,” David said. “He’s retiring after harvest.”

“Yeah?” Mack said. Wendell, Mack’s father’s right-hand man, had been in charge since Mack left.

“I told you this was in the future, Mack. I told you to do some thinking.”

“You did,” Mack said. “You surely did.”

“But you haven’t done the thinking.”

“No,” Mack said. “Not really.” When had Mack last talked to David? Last November after harvest? A Christmas card? Mack couldn’t remember. He only vaguely recalled a conversation about Wendell getting ready to leave.

“We need someone to run things,” David said.

“Hire one of the other hands to do it,” Mack said. “I trust your judgment, David.”

David sighed into the phone. He was a good person, and less like a lawyer than anybody Mack had met on the East Coast, where even men who weren’t lawyers acted like lawyers. “Since the Oral B plant opened, we’ve lost a lot of help,” David said. “We haven’t had a hand here longer than six months. You want me to put a transient like that in charge of your father’s farm?”

“Are they all transients? Aren’t there a couple of hardworking kids, looking for a chance?”

“Wendell and I don’t think so,” David said. “We’ve talked about it. If your little love affair with that island isn’t over, Mack, I mean, if you’re going to stick it out in the East, then Wendell and I agree it’s time to put the farm up.”

“For sale, you mean?”

David hummed into the phone. “Mmmm-hmm.”

“I don’t think I can do that,” Mack said.

“You have the summer to think it over,” David said. “If you’re not going to sell it, then you ought to come home and do the job yourself. You’ve been out there a long time.”

“Twelve years,” Mack said.

“Twelve years,” Mack could practically see David shaking his head in disbelief. “Your decision, but this is what your father left you. I’d rather see you sell it than let it fall to pieces.”

“Okay,” Mack said. “So I’ll talk to you in a couple of months, then?”

“I’ll be in touch,” David said.

Mack couldn’t imagine selling his family’s farm but neither could he imagine leaving Nantucket. The farm was the last place he’d kissed his mother’s cheek, he was born and raised there, and worked side by side with his father. Sell the farm? Leave Nantucket? An impossible decision. Twelve years later, Mack didn’t know where his home was. And so, as he stood on top of the dune, he listened; he wanted the voice to tell him what to do.

May first was Bill Elliott’s least favorite day of the year; it was one of the few mornings that he didn’t make love to his wife, Therese. May first was Therese’s day to sleep in undisturbed while Bill tried not to panic. The doctor told him panic was bad for his heart; stress of any kind could take months off his life. (Bill noted the use of that word, “months,” and it terrified him. His life had been pared down to increments of thirty days.)

At dawn, he left his house for a walk along Hulbert Avenue. The summer homes on Hulbert were boarded up, Bill was relieved to see; it looked as if the houses were sleeping. So there was still plenty of time to whip the hotel into shape. The reservation book filled up by the Ides of March, but taking reservations was the easy part. The hard part was now, this morning, thinking about all the work that had to be done. The enormous, rounded dunes of the beach. Twenty rooms with furniture piled on top of the beds, draped with white sheets. Dusty, disorganized.

Bill reached home, wheezing. He was sixty years old and because of his weak heart, already an old man. This past winter in Aspen, he hadn’t been able to ski the black diamonds, nor the blues; he had been embarrassingly limited to the gentle green slopes of Buttermilk Mountain. His hair was the color of nickels and dimes, his knees ached in the evenings, and he needed good light for reading. Last week on the flight back from Aspen, he used the lavatory four times. But the kicker was this: Just after the New Year, he and Therese were out at Guido’s with another couple, a doctor (though not Bill’s doctor) and his wife, eating cheese fondue when Bill felt pressure in his chest, a squeezing, as though his heart were a balloon ready to pop. The doctor at the table took charge of calling an ambulance. There was talk of choppering Bill to Denver, but thankfully, that wasn’t necessary, and in the end, Bill was okay. It hadn’t been a heart attack, just angina, heart muscle pain, a warning. The doctor recommended retirement. A few years ago, last year even, this would have been unthinkable, but now it sounded tempting. Bill’s daughter, Cecily, would be graduating from high school in a couple of weeks and she’d already passed her eighteenth birthday. So it was only a matter of time before he could leave the running of the hotel to Cecily.

As Bill opened his front door, a white envelope fluttered to his feet. The letters had begun! Bill tore the envelope open and read the letter-as ever, from the mysterious S.B.T., an offer to buy the hotel out from under Bill’s feet. Good old S.B.T. had been writing letters for several years now trying to convince Bill to sell. Twenty-two million? Don’t tempt me today, S.B.T., Bill thought. Bill occasionally wrote back to the post office box-he’d never met the man (or woman) and they wouldn’t offer a name at the post office when Bill inquired. There weren’t any S.B.T’s in the phone book; for all Bill knew, the initials were fabricated. The mysteriousness of it was both frustrating and intriguing, like having a secret suitor. A suitor, at his age! Bill crumpled the letter and deposited it into the trash can at the side of his house. Are you watching, S.B.T.? Are you watching?

When Bill reached the kitchen and poured his first cup of decaf, he heard a car pull into the parking lot, and the tightness in his chest alleviated a bit. Mack. Bill was so happy that he wanted to shout to Therese, Honey, Mack’s here! He interrupted more than a few of her May first slumbers this way. But this time Bill was quiet. He closed his eyes and recited “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” to himself, like a prayer. And miles to go before I sleep. It was amazing the way the words came to him. After the episode at the restaurant, Bill had retreated into poetry, into the words of an old man, a New Englander. Never mind that Frost’s Vermont was a far cry from this island (there wasn’t a single tree on Bill’s whole property). Never mind that. For reasons unexplainable, Frost’s poetry helped; it was a balm, a slave. It eased Bill’s aging soul.

Mack looked exactly the same: the ruddy, smiling face and that bushy head of light brown hair. Bill knew Mack as well as he might have known a son. Bill shook Mack’s hand and he couldn’t stop himself from hugging him too.

“So,” Bill said, “you decided to come back.” This was their long-standing joke. Mack never said he would return in May, and Bill never asked. But every May first Mack appeared in the parking lot and each time, Bill greeted him this way. Bill wanted to say something else; he wanted to say “Thank you for coming back,” but he didn’t. It would embarrass Mack, and it might be better if Mack didn’t know how much Bill needed him. “How was your winter?”

“Not bad. I worked for Casey Miller on a huge project in Cisco. It snowed twice and both times I got the day off and went sledding.”

“How’s Maribel?” Bill asked.

“The same,” Mack said. “They love her at the library. And at the post office and the bank, and Stop & Shop. She knows everyone. It’s like walking around with the mayor.”

“She’s hankering to get married?” Bill asked.

“I can hardly blame her,” Mack said. “We’ve been together a long time.”

“So is this it, then? Is this the year Mack gets married?”

Mack shrugged. Bill could see he was embarrassed now, by just this. Bill clapped him on the shoulder. “How about we give this place the once-over, for starters?”

Mack looked relieved. “Okay,” he said.

There was no way Bill Elliott could look at his hotel objectively; it was as familiar to him and well loved as the face of his wife. Always on May first the hotel looked formidable and tough, boarded up like an old western ghost town, and today was no exception. The hotel had gray cedar shingles like nearly every building on Nantucket. Plywood had been fastened over her doors and windows, paint peeled from her frames. Bill pictured the hotel at the height of summer; it was the only way he could keep his blood pressure from skyrocketing. Her trim would be as white as fresh eggs, her windows sparkling, Therese’s geraniums and impatiens in full bloom-red, white, pink. The water temperature at sixty-eight degrees, the skies clear with a light southwesterly wind that would barely flutter the scalloped edges of the beach umbrellas. Who could complain then? Still, even today, Bill was in love with what he saw. Despite the shutters and the peeling paint and the undulating beach, she was the most beautiful hotel in the world. He would no sooner sell it than cut out his own heart.

Bill and Mack walked along the side deck rooms and took a left by the front deck rooms. Room 21 through room 1, skipping a room 13, of course. All present and accounted for, although Bill had nightmares during the winter of the rooms flying away in a northeaster like something from The Wizard of Oz. Bill stepped up onto each deck and stamped his feet to check for rotting boards. Mack perused the roof for missing shingles and inspected the shutters for leaks. “She’s tight,” Mack said. They headed back across the beach to the parking lot and Bill took keys out of his pocket. He unlocked the doors to the lobby and they stepped in.

“Home, sweet home,” Bill said.

“Oh, brother,” Mack said.

“Are you ready?” Bill said. He wished Mack looked more confident, more eager. Maybe this winter had taken a toll. “I’m going to shower and change,” he said. “And you can get started. We have a hotel to run.”

The Beach Club was Therese Elliott’s canvas, her block of clay. Every May presented the same challenge-to make the hotel look more glorious than the year before. Therese had embarked on the quest for beauty when she was a girl growing up on Long Island-in Bilbo, perhaps the most unattractive town in all of America. Therese’s family lived in one of the first subdivisions, on a cul-de-sac where the houses were built in three styles: ranch, split-level, and bastardized saltbox. Her parents’ house (from the age of ten she referred to it as her parents’ house, never her own) was a ranch with plasterboard walls, white Formica countertops threaded with gold, and veneered kitchen cabinets. The house had a swatch of green lawn and a chain-link fence that marked the property line along the sides and the back.

Now that Therese was in the hotel business, she compared the neighborhood where she grew up to a Holiday Inn-every living space alike in its absolute sterility, in its absence of charm. As an adolescent she felt bewildered walking home from school past the identical houses and identical yards, realizing that for some reason people chose to live like this-without distinction, without beauty. Her neighborhood couldn’t even be called ugly, because ugly might at least have been interesting. The best word to describe the neighborhood of Therese’s childhood was unliterary. She couldn’t imagine anything noteworthy or romantic happening among the white-and-black, gold-threaded Formica-ness of the place.

And so, at eighteen, she left.

For Manhattan, with its color and confusion, beauty and ugliness side by side. She flunked out of Hunter College after two semesters, because instead of studying she spent hours walking through Chinatown, Chelsea, Clinton, Sutton Place, the Upper West Side, Harlem. When her parents received her poor grades, they insisted she return to Bilbo and enroll at Katie Gibbs, but she refused. She found a job waitressing at a German restaurant on Eighty-sixth and York, where fat old men admired the color of her hair and gave her generous tips. She saved enough money to leave the city for the summer with a girlfriend whose family had a beach house on Nantucket.

Nantucket cornered the market on beauty-the tumbling south shore waves, blue herons standing one-legged in Coskata Pond, Great Point Lighthouse at sunset. Therese took a job as a chambermaid at the Jared Coffin House in town, and when summer turned into fall and her girlfriend returned to the city, Therese stayed. More than thirty years later, she loved it still. She had married a local boy, given birth to two children, one who died and one who lived, and she and Bill transformed the Beach Club into a hotel. A beautiful place where love flourished.

Bill and Therese lived on one edge of the hotel property, in an upside-down house. The first floor had two spacious bedrooms-one for their daughter, Cecily, and one for the baby that died. The second floor had a rounded bay window that overlooked the hotel, the beach, and the sound. Therese stood at the window on this first day of May, but all she could see was a reflection of herself. It was a bad, vain habit, catching glances of herself in mirrors and windows, in the glass of picture frames, but she couldn’t keep from looking. What did she see? At the age of fifty-eight, she still fit into a silk skirt she bought before Cecily was born. Her hair was the color of ripe peaches, with one streak of pure white in front that appeared after she gave birth to her dead baby. Her mark of strength and wisdom, of Motherhood.

Above anything, Therese was a Wife and a Mother. But now her family was in danger of falling apart. Her husband suffered from heart problems and her daughter was graduating from high school and headed for college. Suddenly, Therese pictured herself abandoned, alone. Bill dying, Cecily going away, until there would be nothing in her life except her own reflection.

She had to force herself away from the window and down into the hotel lobby. When she flung open the doors, her spirits lifted. Mack crawled around on the exposed beams of the lobby, wiping them down with a damp rag. Mack in the rafters: it was a sure sign of spring.

“You got to work before I could hug and kiss you,” she said. “You got to work before I could tell you what to do.”

Mack swung around and sat with his legs dangling. “I already know what to do,” he said. “I’m not exactly new here.”

Therese flopped onto a sofa that was covered with one of the hotel’s sheets and put her feet on a dusty sea captain’s chest. “You could run this place alone, I suppose. The rest of us are only getting in your way.” She had known Mack for twelve years and he was closer to her than anyone except for Bill and Cecily. She could tell him just about anything.

“You sound so melancholy,” Mack said. “Where’s the uptight woman I know and love? What happened to the never-ending pursuit of cleanliness?”

“I’m worried about Bill,” she said. “He had heart problems this winter. Did he tell you?”

“No,” Mack said. “What kind of problems?”

It was comforting to hear a voice from above. “Problems that happen when people get older,” Therese said: “His doctor told him he could only ski the baby slopes. It wasn’t a good winter for Bill.”

“He looks okay,” Mack said. “A little pale, maybe, but okay. And his spirit’s up.”

“You think so?” Therese was concerned about Bill’s preoccupation with Robert Frost-he’d taken it up the way a dying person might take up religion-although the reading and reciting seemed to help him.

“How’s Cecily doing?” Mack asked.

“She doesn’t know about her father’s heart,” Therese said. “That’s one nice thing about having her away at school. She doesn’t have to worry. And since she’s not worrying, she’s doing quite well.”

“She wrote a letter at Christmas telling me about some Brazilian guy she met and I haven’t heard from her since,” Mack said. “Is she going to graduate or did she run away to Rio?”

The Brazilian boyfriend, Gabriel, another stumbling block. But Cecily had barely mentioned him the last two times she called home, and Therese hoped that with the end of the school year in sight, her infatuation was petering out. “Believe it or not, she’s going to graduate.”

“And College?” Mack asked.

“The University of Virginia. Hard enough to get into that she impressed her friends, and reasonably priced enough to impress her father. We’re thrilled.”

“She’ll be on the front desk this summer? She’s more than capable, Therese. If she’s going to run the hotel someday she needs to learn it.”

“Not the desk,” Therese said firmly. Mack rolled his eyes. He could think what he wanted, that Therese babied her daughter, but Cecily was still a child. She didn’t need a job that could drive even a mature, well-adjusted adult insane. “Bill hired a woman to work the day desk, someone he met at the gym in Aspen. Her name is Love.”

“Love?”

“Yes,” said Therese. “We need more love around here. Speaking of which, you noticed I haven’t asked about your girlfriend.”

“I didn’t expect you to,” Mack said.

“I can’t resist. How are things? Are you still together? Still happy?”

“Yes.”

“Still happy, but you’re not going to marry her?”

“We have no plans to get married, no,” he said.

“Wait until you see Cecily,” Therese said. “All grown up. A woman. And so gorgeous. Vibrant. Irresistible.” And headstrong, opinionated, difficult, her Cecily. Therese lifted her feet from the dusty chest and stood up. “If you marry Cecily this will all be yours. Bill would be so relieved. He loves you like a son, you know. He really does.”

“You make it sound like we’re living in a fairy tale,” Mack said. “If I marry the fair daughter, I get the whole kingdom.”

“You could rule the Beach Club kingdom.”

“I’m not marrying Cecily, Therese.”

“Well, you’re not marrying Maribel.” Therese and Mack had this same conversation every year, and she knew it irked Mack, but Therese couldn’t help herself. To her, only one course of events made any sense-Mack marrying Cecily and the two of them taking over where Bill and Therese left off. She also knew that people rarely did what made sense.

“I haven’t decided about marriage at all yet,” Mack said. “But I can tell you, if and when I do get married, it won’t be to Cecily. And if you don’t believe me, ask her. She’d rather eat glass, direct quote.”

“I won’t give up,” Therese said. She caught her reflection in a tarnished mirror, and then she pulled out her artist’s tools from the utility closet-vacuum, bucket, cleanser, and her feather duster-and started to work.

Maribel Cox knew she was the subject of gossip-among her mother’s friends at the Christian Calendar Factory, among her colleagues at the library, among Mack’s co-workers and Bill and Therese down at the Beach Club. She knew they were all whispering, “When are Mack and Maribel going to do the right thing? When are they going to get married?”

The truth of the matter was this: Maribel wanted to get married with a raging, fiery passion, but the only person who knew it was Maribel’s mother, Tina. Every Wednesday night, Maribel called Tina and every Wednesday night, Tina said, “Well?” Meaning: well, did Mack finally say those five little words, “Maribel, will you marry me?” Every Wednesday night, Maribel said, “Well, nothing.” And her mother said, “Keep the faith.”

Maribel and Mack had been dating for six years, living together for three. Maribel had found a man Afraid to Commit.

“Like mother, like daughter,” Tina said. Maribel pictured her mother: twenty pounds overweight, permed hair, smoking a cigarette as she talked on the phone. Tina herself had never been married. She met Maribel’s father at an outdoor concert, and Maribel was conceived in the woods nearby, up against a tree. Her mother never saw the man again; she’d only known him for one day.

“If he’s anything like you,” Tina was fond of saying, “he must be a great guy.”

Maribel loved her mother dearly, although this love was tinged with shame and pity. Tina worked as a supervisor at the Christian calendar factory in Unadilla, New York. Her mother didn’t belong to a church, and yet spending all day around Christian calendars, she picked up certain phrases: “Keep the faith,” and “Godspeed,” and “We are all His little lambs.” It had always been just Tina and Maribel; there was never anyone to help them out, no man in Maribel’s life growing up. Mack lost his parents in a car accident and Maribel tried to believe this was the same thing as her not having a father, but in fact, it was vastly different. When Maribel thought of her father, there was no one to picture. She was left with an empty spot inside, a part of her missing. A hole.

When Maribel was thirteen, she begged Tina to describe her father. “Remember, Mama, remember everything you can.” Tina sucked on her cigarette and closed her eyes: His name was Stephen, he had sweet, chocolaty breath and a pencil-line scar above his eyebrow. I remember the scratch of bark against my back. It was getting dark, the sky turning pink and lavender through the trees. I didn’t know your father real well. But when I was with him, I had a feeling something good would come of it.

Maribel wanted to get married for two people-herself and her mother. She wanted Mack to take care of them, the way Stephen might have. Mack made just as many comments about the future as Maribel did, if not more. There was no doubt in Maribel’s mind that Mack wanted to spend the rest of his life with her. He loved her.

So what, then, was the problem?

After years of taking self-help books off the shelves at the library, Maribel drew a conclusion: Mack was afraid to grow up. The phone call he received from David Pringle last week proved it. Mack owned a huge farm in Iowa, but he didn’t want to go back and run it and he didn’t want to sell it. Both options involved too much commitment, too much responsibility. It was as though he wanted the farm to exist on its own, magically, a farm from a dream, while he stayed on Nantucket and ran the stupid hotel. At any minute, Bill Elliott could drop dead and the hotel would go to Cecily, and Mack would be out of luck. But Mack loved his job at the hotel-six months on, six months off, never telling Bill if he were coming back or not-because it gave him freedom. Because he didn’t have to take it-or anything else-too seriously.

In Maribel’s opinion, Mack needed to ask Bill Elliott to profit-share. Thirty percent of the hotel’s profit should go to Mack each year. Many of the guests who took Mack and Maribel out to dinner admitted (after a few cocktails) that should Mack ever leave his job, they would stop coming. The hotel was lovely, they said (but expensive, and the rates went up every year); it was the service that kept them coming back. It was walking into the lobby and having Mack there with his cheerful, booming voice, “Hel-lo, Mr. Page! Welcome back. How was your winter?” It was Mack who picked up the Page children and swung them around while he complimented Mrs. Page on her new haircut. And that was what people paid for. They wanted to be coddled; they wanted to be courted.

Maribel was convinced profit sharing was the answer. If Mack profit-shared, he would take his job seriously. He would take his life seriously. He could afford to hire someone really qualified to run the farm. His house would be in order. He would propose. And the empty spot inside of Maribel would shrivel, shrink, disappear.

On May first, Maribel and Mack had just moved into their “summer place”-a basement apartment in the middle of the island. It was the only housing they could afford in the summer, when island rents doubled and tripled. In winter, things were different; in the winter, they lived on Sunset Hill, next to Nantucket’s Oldest House. The house on Sunset Hill was just a cottage, but Maribel and Mack called it the Palace. They loved the Palace-its low doorways and slanted ceilings and floors. In the quiet, cold, gray mornings of January, they lit a fire in the kitchen and Maribel made Mack cinnamon toast and oatmeal before he went out to bang nails. In the evenings, they walked into town through the deserted streets, past houses closed for the winter, sometimes not seeing another soul. They loved the Palace and it was sad every year to pack up their belongings and move to mid-island.

Maribel waited to broach the topic of profit sharing until Mack had worked at the Beach Club for three days. By then he’d gotten a taste of all the work the hotel needed and he’d had a chance to reflect on the crazy summer ahead of him. Then, on the fourth morning, Maribel made Mack scrambled eggs with fresh herbs. They sat at the dining table surrounded by stacks of unpacked boxes and duffel bags. Moving in went slowly.

“I’ve been thinking about money,” she said. “And the housing.”

“I know you hate this place,” Mack said. “But every year you get used to it.”

“I had an idea, Mack.” She curled her bare toes into the fibers of the shag carpet. “I think you should ask Bill to profit-share.”

There was a long silence, Mack eating. “You’ve been talking to your mother?” Mack said. “You’ve been reading one of those Men Live on Mars books?”

“You need to secure yourself a future at the club. It’s been twelve years. It’s time to ask Bill to profit-share.” She spread her painted-pink fingernails out on the dining table and counted off twelve years, then she counted off six years of Mack and her together.

“I can’t,” he said.

“Why not?”

“Because I can be replaced. If I ask to profit-share, Bill can say no, and fire me. He can hire someone else.”

Maribel clasped her hands and leaned forward. She wasn’t eating. Too nervous. “He would never fire you. He loves you. And you say he’s not doing well. Don’t you think he wants to know that you’ll be there to take care of the hotel after he’s gone?”

“The hotel will be Cecily’s,” Mack said, his mouth full.

“She’s a child.”

“She’s eighteen. She’ll figure it out.”

“What about you, then?” Maribel said. “Us? What do we do when Bill dies? I know it’s not something you want to think about…”

“You’re right, it’s not. He’s not on death’s door, Maribel. He’s just a little frail.”

“He’s never been well. Now he’s just one year closer.”

Mack finished his eggs and buttered a piece of toast. Maribel brought him a jar of Concord grape jam. Then he said, “I don’t want to ask.”

“Why not?” Maribel said. She dipped a finger into the jam and tasted it.

“Because it’s his business to pass on to Cecily. My father left me a business. I understand how it works. I’m not going to put Bill in the awkward position of having to relinquish part of his profits to keep me happy.”

“You could use the money to hire someone to run the farm,” Maribel said. Mack slathered the jam over his toast. Maribel watched his every move; he was a mystery to her. “And it’s not as though you’re asking him to hand over the business. You’d simply be asking for part of the profits. Don’t you think you influence those profits?”

“Of course,” Mack said. “But I’m not going to ask him. I’ve worked for Bill for a long time. It would embarrass us both.”

“Okay, then,” Maribel said. “If you don’t want to ask Bill, let’s move to Iowa. Let’s run the farm ourselves.”

“You don’t want to move to Iowa,” Mack said.

“Yes, I do,” Maribel said. This wasn’t a lie, exactly. If it would take moving to Iowa to get Mack to marry her, she would do it. She thought of her mother’s life-twenty-eight Christian calendar years of being alone. That would not be Maribel’s life.

“But I love Nantucket,” Mack said. “I’m happy here.”

“So you’re going to sell the farm then?” Maribel said. “You’ve decided?”

“No,” Mack said. Maribel felt a twinge of guilt, because he did look completely at a loss. He wiped his plate with the crust of his toast. “Why do I have to decide now?”

“Because you’re thirty years old, Mack. Because you want more money, more respect. Don’t you want things to change?”

“I guess,” he said.

Maribel reached across the table and touched his hand. He trusted her; he knew that her thinking was for both of them. “Ask Bill to profit-share. If he says no we can leave for Iowa.”

Mack took his empty plate to the sink. He turned the faucet on, then off, then on, and he poured a glass of water and drank it slowly and deliberately, in a way that made Maribel want to scream. He was always making her wait!

“Let me think about it,” he said.

“Don’t you think it’s time we took the next step? Don’t you think it’s time you got what you deserved?”

“Yes?” Mack said.

“Okay, then,” Maribel said.

Maribel watched from the living room window as Mack walked out to the Jeep and drove away. I want you to feel good about yourself, she thought. I want you to ask me to marry you!

The first thing Jem Crandall thought when he arrived at the Beach Club to interview for the bellman’s position was that it was like a scene from a movie-the ocean, the sand, and then the leading man-strong handshake, sailing-instructor suntan, who called himself Mack, and said Why don’t we interview on the pavilion? The pavilion! Nantucket was the fanciest place Jem had ever been, and he’d certainly never been interviewed on a pavilion before.

The pavilion turned out to be a covered deck with blue Adirondack chairs that faced the ocean.

“This is like a little porch,” Jem said, taking one of the chairs.

“What do you think?” Mack said. He half sat, half leaned on the railing with his back to the water, so he could look at Jem. Jem stared at Mack’s ankle, swinging back and forth like a pendulum. He was wearing deck shoes without any socks.

“It’s fucking gorgeous,” Jem said. He shut his eyes. What had he just said? Fucking? Swearing, in a job interview! “Excuse my French,” he said. “I just meant…”

“I know what you meant,” Mack said. He scribbled something down on his clipboard, probably, Low-class, not right at all for the job. Jem sat up straighter in the chair, but it was hard to achieve really perfect posture because of the way the back of the chair was slung.

“Sorry,” Jem said.

Mack checked his Ironman sportswatch. He was dressed like a J. Crew model-navy cotton sweater, khakis, a Helly Hansen Gore-Tex vest lined with fleece. Jem tried to keep from fixating on Mack’s swinging ankle.

“So you want to be a bellman,” Mack said. “I have two questions. How long can you stay and do you have a place to live?”

Jem arranged his thoughts. In career counseling at William and Mary, he learned that the key to a good job interview was to tell the truth, and not what he thought the interviewer wanted to hear. “I can stay until closing,” Jem said. “I graduated from college, like, last week.”

“Where’d you go to college?” Mack asked.

“The College of William and Mary.”

“Okay, so you graduated. And you don’t have another job to start in the fall?”

“Not lined up, no.”

“What are you planning to do?”

Jem tried to sit up. “I’m going to California. I want to be an agent.” An agent: that was the first time he’d said the words out loud. It sounded okay. I want to be an agent. Jem was afraid to tell his parents about his plans because they would reject the words “Los Angeles” right away. They would argue it was too far from home. Jem’s parents lived in Falls Church, Virginia; they were small-town people. They had to pull out the atlas to locate Nantucket.

“An agent?” Mack said.

“Yeah,” Jem said. His feet itched and he wondered if he’d gotten sand in his socks. He stared at Mack’s bare ankle, then tore his eyes away. “An agent for actors.”

“Do you act?”

“I’m not very good. I modeled a little in college, though. I was Mr. November in the college calendar.” Mr. November: It was a good, handsome picture-Jem in jeans, sitting on a split-rail fence in historic Williamsburg. But now Mr. November sounded ridiculous. Things that seemed okay in college didn’t always translate to the real world. Jem should have kept his mouth shut. From now on, he was just going to answer the questions.

Mack pinched his lips together in a line, as if he were trying not to laugh. “What about a place to live?”

“I have a place to live,” Jem said. Jem rented a room through a college friend’s aunt who had a house on North Liberty Street. The room was fine, but it didn’t have kitchen privileges. When Jem asked the friend’s aunt how he was going to eat, she said, “I usually rent to people in the restaurant business.” Jem’s father owned a bar in Falls Church-an English-style pub called the Locked Tower; if he’d wanted to wait tables, he would have stayed at home. “The room’s decent,” he told Mack. “But it doesn’t have a kitchen. And I need to save money to go to California.” He straightened his spine. “I’m on the lookout for free food in a big way. What I really need is a girlfriend who likes to cook.”

“My girlfriend likes to cook,” Mack said. “And look what it got me.” He patted his gut. “Love handles.”

Jem smiled politely.

“Are you handy?” Mack asked. “Can you change a lightbulb? Set an alarm clock? Do you know what a circuit breaker is? If a guest calls the front desk and says his electricity is out, could you fix it?”

“Probably. I can change a lightbulb and set an alarm clock. I know my way around a fuse box.”

“You’d be surprised how many people can’t set an alarm clock,” Mack said.

“Well, I can,” Jem said. “Like I said, I just graduated from college.” He laughed. Mack scribbled down something else.

“Hopefully, you’ll remember to set your own,” Mack said. “The day bellman needs to be here at eight A.M.”

“Do I have the job, then?”

“I need someone for three day shifts and three night shifts, one day off. There isn’t a lot of sitting around. If you’re not stripping the rooms for the chambermaids or helping a guest with bags, then you’ll be doing projects, assigned by me. Small maintenance jobs, watering the plants, cleaning the exercise room, sweeping up shells in the parking lot. And part of the deal is helping to open the place, from now until Memorial Day. That’s eight to four every day but Sunday. I can offer you ten bucks an hour, plus tips. Do you want the job?”

Tips. A world-class beach resort. Contacts waiting to be made. Jem could have kissed the guy. “Yes, I do. Absolutely.”

Mack offered his hand and Jem tried for a nice, firm handshake that showed he meant what he said.

“You have the job,” Mack said. “Welcome to the Nantucket Beach Club and Hotel. You’ll work with a bellman named Vance Robbins who’s been here twelve years, just as long as I have. Vance will show you the ropes. Come tomorrow at eight, ready to shovel.”

Jem jumped to his feet. “I’ll be here,” he said. He probably sounded way too eager, but it was exciting-getting a job, spending the summer on this island. He couldn’t wait to write to his parents and tell them. But first he had to find a grocery store and buy some bread and a jar of peanut butter and hope it didn’t draw ants.

Mack led him to the front porch of the lobby. “We’ll see you tomorrow,” Mack said.

“Do you own this place?” Jem asked. A seagull dropped a shell onto the asphalt of the parking lot and then swooped down to eat whatever was inside.

“No,” Mack said. He tugged at his vest defensively.

“Oh,” Jem said. “Well, it is gorgeous.”

“Fucking gorgeous,” Mack said. “You’re right. It is.”

Vance Robbins stood six feet and one half inch tall, which was the same height as Mack Petersen. He turned thirty years old on March 22, and so did Mack Petersen. They were exactly the same height and exactly the same age.

“Like twins,” Maribel once made the mistake of saying. Vance and Mack were not twins. First of all, Vance was black and Mack was white. Secondly, Vance was a bellman and Mack was the manager.

Vance had hated Mack for twelve years. Twelve years ago, Vance was a high school graduate on his way to Fairleigh Dickinson in the fall, and he lined up a summer managerial position at the Beach Club with Bill Elliott over the phone. Bill was supposed to be waiting when Vance got off the ferry, but Mack cut in and replaced him. It was pure dumb luck-Mack got off the boat first and he was the right age, he had the right look, and Bill took him to the hotel instead of Vance. It wasn’t until an hour later that Bill returned to the wharf to get Vance-and by then Mack had infiltrated the joint. Bill claimed Mack had better experience because he’d worked on a farm-a farm, for God’s sake-and he wasn’t leaving for school in September, and so Mack got the manager’s job. Vance was Mack’s equal in height and age, but returning to the Beach Club in the spring and seeing Mack made Vance only too aware of how they weren’t equal. Vance was a black sheep, an evil twin, a kid who got off the boat thirty seconds too late. A bellman.

“Hey, Vance! Good to see you, man! How was your winter?” Here was Mack now, clapping Vance on the back, pumping his hand. Mack ran his palm over Vance’s smooth skull. “You shaved your head…it looks great. You look, I don’t know, intimidating.”

“Thanks,” Vance said. He couldn’t help smiling. He expected Mack to say shaved heads weren’t acceptable at the Beach Club. Vance caught himself and tried to scowl. This was how it happened every year. He spent all winter despising Mack and then when he showed up in the spring, Mack was disarmingly nice, cool even, and Vance was forced to abandon his hatred. But not this year. This year Vance was going to hang on to his hatred with both hands.

“Man, how was your winter?” Mack asked. “How was Thailand? Did you get laid?”

“Of course,” Vance said, and again, he couldn’t help smiling. When he pictured himself on the beach at Koh Samui or under the capable massaging hands of Pan, a nineteen-year-old Thai girl with long, shiny black hair, he wanted to give up every detail. Mack, he knew, had spent all winter on this gloomy rock. “Thailand kicked ass. I rented a bungalow on the beach for six bucks a night.” He nodded toward the hotel. “Closer to the water than room eleven and a hundredth the price. I got massages that lasted well into the night. I ate banana pancakes and grilled fish every day.”

A young guy with dark curly hair holding a shovel approached them. “That sounds like paradise,” he said. “Where were you, California?”

“Thailand,” Mack and Vance said at the same time. Their voices were indistinguishable. Vance shook his head.

“Thailand,” Vance said again, on his own. The familiar acidity of hatred filled his chest, and he popped two Rolaids. In the summer, when Mack was around, Vance ate hundreds of them.

“Vance, this is Jem. I hired Jem yesterday. Jem, Vance Robbins, the head bellman.”

Vance took another look at the kid as he ground the chalk between his molars. He was too handsome but probably impressionable. Easy to boss around.

“Jem, like in To Kill a Mockingbird?” Vance asked.

Jem nodded. “Not many people get the reference.”

Vance stuck out his hand. “Pleasure,” he said.

Mack ran his palms over Vance’s noggin again. “I missed you, man. How come you didn’t send me a postcard?”

Vance shrugged. Why the hell did Mack like him so much? Why couldn’t he take a hint?

Vance and Jem started digging out the snow fence. The sun was shining and it was actually kind of warm. By noon they would probably be able to work without shirts. Vance liked opening and closing work best because it was quiet work, and honest. He’d started jogging in Thailand, and doing sit-ups and push-ups. He’d swum every afternoon. He was bigger now in the arms and across the shoulders. Sometime this summer he was going to beat up Mack-beat him to a pulp, just once, so that Mack would know Vance hadn’t forgiven him for horning in, for stealing away the job that should rightfully have been his.

Vance and Jem worked side by side peacefully with Jem only looking up once to ask, “Hey, do they buy you lunch around here? I’m starving.”

Vance checked his watch; it was ten-thirty.

“Sometimes the boss will spring for subs,” Vance said. “Bill Elliott, the owner. Have you met him yet?”

“No.”

“It’s always good to remember that Mack isn’t really the boss. Bill is.”

“So Bill buys us subs?” Jem asked.

“If we put in a hard morning he sometimes will,” Vance said. “But not every day.”

“Does this place serve breakfast?” Jem asked.

“Continental breakfast, eight-thirty to ten. You’ll be in charge of setting it up and taking it down when you work the day shift. Didn’t Mack tell you that?” Vance was annoyed; Mack was lax about explaining duties to new workers. It always fell to Vance to explain the whole truth and sometimes the new bellman got bristly, thinking Vance was creating more work for him. But this kid, Jem, just beamed.

“No,” Jem said, “he didn’t say anything about breakfast. That’s great!”

Vance heard his name being called, and Maribel jogged onto the beach. She was wearing shorts and a red sports bra, and she had a windbreaker tied around her waist. Blond hair in a ponytail. She threw her arms around Vance’s neck and kissed him on the cheek. As much as Vance hated Mack, he couldn’t bring himself to feel anything but dumbstruck infatuation for Maribel.

“You look divine!” she said. “Positively exotic. I love men without hair. You look like Michael Jordan. How was Thailand?”

“Good,” he said. He couldn’t figure out what Maribel saw in him either. Every time she spoke to him he had trouble stringing together a sentence.

“You’ve got this incredible bod. This is the year you get a girl then, huh?”

Vance clenched the handle of his shovel, hoping she would see his forearm muscles ripple. He was glad he’d removed his shirt. Before Vance could answer, Jem said, “We haven’t met. I’m Jem Crandall.”

“Jem?” Maribel said. She shook Jem’s hand and Vance felt a familiar sense of dread. Jem had his shirt off as well, and he was using some lady-killer smile that showed all his teeth. “Jem, like in To Kill a Mockingbird?”

“Exactly,” Jem said. “Not many people get the reference. Vance did, though.”

Maribel turned to Vance. “Well, of course. Vance is our literary lion.”

Vance shrugged. Maribel called him that because he graduated from FDU with a degree in American lit, and he once had a story entitled “The Downward Spiral” published in a small magazine.

“I’m Maribel Cox. Mack is my boyfriend.” She paused to let this information sink in. It was as though she were telling Jem, I’m important, I’m with Mack.

“Maribel works at the library,” Vance said.

“Explains why you know about books,” Jem said.

“Are you just starting here today?” Maribel asked.

“Yeah,” Jem said. He leaned on his shovel with crossed arms. “They’ve got me digging ditches already.”

Maribel turned back to Vance. “You guys should come over for dinner tonight. I’ll roast a chicken, do those real French pomme frites that you like.”

“I can’t,” Vance said. One of the rules he had set for himself was No More Socializing with Mack.

“I can,” Jem said eagerly, but Maribel ignored him.

“Maybe next week then,” she said. “Is Mack around?”

“Look out back,” Vance said. “Or in the office. He might be in the office with Bill.”

“Okay,” Maribel said. She touched Vance’s flexing forearm. “Hey, you, good to see you.” She jogged toward the hotel. “And nice meeting you, Jem!”

When she was out of earshot, Jem said, “That girl is a knockout. And she cooks!”

“Taken,” Vance said. He spoke in a way that might be construed as protecting Mack. But Vance just wanted Jem Mockingbird to realize that if Vance couldn’t have Maribel, no one else could either.

Love O’Donnell arrived on the island by high-speed ferry. Even though it was mid-May, the weather was gray and drizzly. And cold. Love stood on the bow of the boat, her Polar Fleece wrapped tightly around her. She wanted to watch the ferry approach Nantucket. She wanted to feel sea mist on her face. As it was, she wasn’t sure if the moisture she felt on her face was sea mist or rain, and through the dense blanket of fog she couldn’t see Nantucket at all until just before they reached the harbor. Then she caught a glimpse of the red beam of Brant Point Lighthouse and behind, the gray-shingled buildings of town, and the white steeple of the Congregational church she’d seen in pictures. The Beach Club, where she would be working, was to the west someplace and the cottage she had rented for the season was mid-island, where the locals lived.

Love wasn’t a person who went places on impulse. This trip qualified as the most impulsive thing she’d ever done. She’d lived in Aspen for the past seven years working at a popular outdoor magazine. But then she met Bill Elliott at the gym. They were lying side by side on the mats, using the Abdominizers. Love sneaked a look at Bill in the mirror, because that was what one did at gyms in Aspen-inspected the opposite sex. Especially Love. Ever since her fortieth birthday, Love had been looking for a man to father her baby.

She smiled at Bill in the mirror. “Sometimes I wonder if these things actually work,” she said, indicating the Abdominizer.

Bill laughed. “I figure everyone using them looks pretty good.”

Love crunched twice more, then said, “Do you live here in Aspen?”

“Just for the winter,” Bill said. “How about you?”

“Local,” Love said. “Where do you live in the summer?”

“Nantucket,” Bill said. He finished with his Abdominizer and stood up. Love stood as well and followed Bill to the StairMasters. An out-of-towner was a requirement in Love’s search for a father for her baby, because she wanted a baby but absolutely did not want a husband.

“What do you do in Nantucket?” Love asked. She punched her weight, one hundred pounds even, into the console of the StairMaster.

“My wife and I own a hotel,” he said.

“Oh, you’re married,” Love said. This was not necessarily an obstacle; after seven years in Aspen, Love knew he could still be thinking of an affair.

“Yes, and I have an eighteen-year-old daughter at boarding school. Finishing up.” Love pumped up and down on the stairs. She was so delighted to hear that Bill already had a child that she felt almost guilty. Out of town, previous reproductive success, a business owner-Love ran down her mental checklist, and glanced around the gym. There were two noticeably pregnant women using free weights, and who knew how many others not yet showing. Many of Love’s friends, co-workers, and acquaintances were now, in their late thirties and early forties, starting families. In the past eighteen months, Love had taken a crash course on new millennium parenthood: seven-grain zwieback crackers, strollers with allterrain mountain bike tires. She saw women in the gym and on the cross-country paths with healthy, swollen bellies. Love’s desire to be a mother was a physical, painful hunger. Since her fortieth birthday, she could think of nothing else. Love wanted a baby, flesh and blood that would be connected to her for the rest of her life, and she wanted to raise her child alone. There was a group in Aspen called Single Mothers by Choice; Love saw their flyer posted in the health food store. When she finally got pregnant, she would join.

At the end of the workout she smiled at Bill, and said, “You’re in good shape.”

Bill winked. “Just doing what the doctor says: I get plenty of exercise, and I make love to my wife. Good for the spirit!”

Love’s hopes fell down around her feet like a couple of sagging ankle weights. It was okay with her if a man wanted to admit he was married, but talking about his sex life was taboo. She hoped her disappointment didn’t show. But then, on their way out of the gym, Bill offered to buy Love something from the juice bar. While Love sipped a carrot-raspberry juice, Bill told her about the hotel on Nantucket.

“She started out as a Beach Club in 1924. Men wore silk suits and top hats, and women carried parasols. There were over four hundred wooden changing rooms, rented twice a day to meet the demand. My father bought the place in 1952 and I built hotel rooms on the property when he retired twenty years ago.”

“It sounds wonderful,” Love said. “I’ve always wanted to see New England.”

“Well, then, I’d like to make a proposition,” Bill said. Love’s thighs tensed. “What’s that?” she said.

“Why don’t you come work for me this summer? We need a full-time person on the front desk. She’s a beautiful hotel, I promise.” Love was familiar with his tone of voice; she heard it all the time. He was setting her up on a blind date. Still, it might be the perfect plan. Leave Aspen for the summer and return in the fall, pregnant.

She finished the last of her juice, licking her teeth clean of raspberry seeds. “I already have a job,” she said. “But it’s a thought.”

Bill offered Love the job every time he saw her at the gym. “What would you miss in six months?” he asked her. “Would you be leaving someone behind?”

This question offended her. She was certain Bill knew the answer was no. No one and nothing to leave behind. Not even a dog, like so many other athletic, unmarried Aspen women. Dogs made her sneeze.

“No,” she said.

“Listen,” Bill said, “I’m going to be retiring soon, whether I like it or not. I’d like to have a good summer. If you think you want to be part of it, I’d love to have you work for us.”

His liver-spotted hands trembled at his sides, and despite all his exercise, his skin had a grayish tint. But his eyes sought her eagerly, as though he believed there really was a talented front-desk person somewhere inside of her. And so, at the beginning of April, with the closing of the ski slopes imminent, Love agreed to take the job. A summer at the beach, then, on Nantucket.

The ferry sounded its foghorn. Here she was.

Love O’Donnell was organized. She had three maps, and a book called Vintage Nantucket which she had read cover to cover. She disembarked onto Straight Wharf and picked up her luggage: a North Face duffel bag and her Cannondale M1000. (She never went anywhere without her mountain bike.) She inhaled the ocean air. It smelled of salt and fish, as she expected. What she did not expect was how rich it was, how luxurious; it was air pregnant with oxygen. If nothing else, she would be happy to live here all summer and breathe this air.

Love’s taxi driver was a tall, thin girl with dyed-black hair, a nose ring, and seven or eight earrings in each ear.

“Where you headed?” the girl asked. Her T-shirt said Piping Plovers Taste Like Chicken.

“Hooper Farm Road. But I’d like to see a little first, if you don’t mind. What’s your name?”

“Tracey,” the girl said. “And I’m no tour guide.”

“Do you live on the island?” Love asked.

The girl glanced behind her at the line of cabs. She threw Love’s bike in the back of her station wagon, got into the driver’s seat and waited for Love to climb in, then she pulled away. “I’m here for the summer,” she said.

“Your first summer?” Love asked.

Tracey nodded. They drove slowly up the cobblestones of Main Street.

“Mine, too,” Love said. Her voice jumbled and bounced with the tires. “Did you know these cobblestones were brought here by the early settlers as ballast on their ships?”

Tracey didn’t respond. Love looked out the window at the names of the shops and restaurants: Murray’s Liquors, Espresso Café, Congdon’s Pharmacy, Mitchell’s Book Corner. They they reached a brick building with stately white columns: Pacific National Bank.

Love tapped on the glass. “They call this the Pacific Bank because the Nantucket whaling ships had to sail to the Pacific Ocean to hunt whales. They went all the way down around Cape Horn. Sometimes ships were gone for five years. But that’s where the money came from, the Pacific Ocean.”

“You’re a regular encyclopedia,” Tracey said.

Love ignored the sarcasm. She didn’t want her first interaction on Nantucket to be a negative one. She studied her map. “Let’s keep going to the top of Main Street.”

They crept up on the Greek Revival Hadwen House, which Love intended to tour in the next few days. “This big white place on the left has an upstairs ballroom,” Love said. “The ballroom was built with a retractable roof, so people could dance under the stars.”

“Really?” Tracey said. She slowed down. “You mean, the roof rolls back?”

“It’s such a romantic idea, dancing under the stars,” Love said. She leaned back in her seat. “I’ve got something to confess, Tracey. I came to this island to get pregnant.”

“Whoa, lady, that’s more information than I need to know,” Tracey said. “If you want to tell me stuff about the history that’s fine, that’s stuff I might use again on somebody else, but don’t tell me personal stuff, please. They don’t pay me enough.”

Love laughed. “Everybody comes to Nantucket for a reason. Some people came to hunt whales and the Quakers came to escape religious persecution. And I came to get pregnant. It feels good to tell you that I came here to have a baby. Now that someone knows, I feel like I’m responsible for it.”

“You’re not responsible to me,” Tracey said. “Believe me, you’re not.”

“Would you look at me?” Love asked.

“What?” Tracey said.

“Would you turn around and look at me?”

Slowly, Tracey turned. Her brow twisted in extreme discomfort.

“I came to the island to get pregnant,” Love said. “I will get pregnant.”

“Okay, so now what do you want me to do? Say ‘Amen’?”

“No, just watching me say it is enough.” Love checked her map. “Let’s go to the Old Mill,” she said. “I know the way.”

The next day, Love skated to the Beach Club. A pleasant-looking, sandy-haired man was standing on a stepladder, fiddling with the lamppost. Love swung in a half-circle near the ladder and came to an easy stop.

“I’m Love O’Donnell,” she said. “You Mack?”

“Yep.” He screwed the glass bulb back into the lamppost and patted it. “Hope this works.” He stepped down from the ladder and shook Love’s hand. “It’s nice to meet you.”

“Likewise,” she said. He had nice blue eyes, and Love judged him to be in his early thirties. Too young.

“I need to wash my hands and then we’ll get started,” Mack said. “Feel free to look around. Those are the doors to the lobby.” He pointed across the parking lot. “I’ll meet you there in a few minutes.”

Love skated across the parking lot. Bill had explained the hotel as an L, and that’s what Love saw: plain, gray-shingled rooms, some running down toward the water and some facing the water. Nothing special about them from the outside except that they were all built in the sand and looked out over the ocean, which today was slate gray. Love felt a wave of disappointment. She was expecting world-class, something grandiose. What had Bill said he charged? Six hundred dollars a night?

Love skated over to the steps that led into the lobby. She removed her Rollerblades thinking she would go in and talk to this guy Mack, but if it didn’t work out she could probably get a job in town. At the Jared Coffin House maybe, or another place with a bit more character.

The lobby, however, was a pleasant surprise. In fact, Love decided after about thirty seconds that it was the most attractive room she’d ever seen. The first thing she noticed were six quilts that hung from the exposed beams so that they resembled sheets billowing on a clothesline. The floors were polished wood and hunter green carpet that sank under Love’s stocking feet. There was a brick fireplace against one wall and the opposite wall had giant windows that faced the beach. The room was decorated with white wicker furniture, plants and trees, a black grand piano, and toys: miniature bicycles, tiny Adirondack chairs, a rocking horse. Love approached the front desk, which was made of the same shiny, honey-colored wood as the floor. She picked up a tiny brass bell and gave it a tentative swing. Mack appeared from the back.

“Come around,” he said.

He showed Love the door that led to the office. The office was a cramped, cluttered room with a stereo, a fax, and a horribly messy desk, although it had the same million-dollar view of the water. Then Love saw a cracked door and noticed there was another office behind it. Bill’s office? Love knocked timidly and pushed the door a bit. Bill sat at a huge, lovely desk, reading.

“Hi, Bill,” Love said.

Bill looked up. He fumbled with his book and it fell to his feet.

“Oh, hi,” he said. “Hello. You’re here. You Came.”

“Yes, of course,” she said. Would it be presumptuous to imagine that her presence flustered him? “I told you I’d be here.”

Bill picked the book up from underneath his desk.

“Well, okay,” he said. “Good. What do you think?”

“The lobby’s pretty,” she said. “I haven’t seen the rooms.”

“They’re not quite ready yet,” Bill said. He flipped through the pages of his book and they made a ruffling noise, like a bird’s wings flapping. “Mack will show you the ropes. But it’s good to see you here. I guess I’ll see a lot more of you.”

“Yes,” Love said. “I guess you will.”

“The key to your job as a front desk person is to dot your i’s and cross your t’s,” Mack said. “Write everything down. A guest wants dinner reservations: write it down. A guest receives a fax: log it into the fax log book. A guest needs a cab to the airport at six A.M.: write it down for Tiny. Tiny works the night desk. She’ll call the cab the night before, and make sure the guest has paid his bill. Never fails, once a summer a guest walks out of here without paying his bill because some desk person forgot to write it down. Not a good thing.”

Love produced a notebook from the front pocket of her anorak, and scribbled things as Mack spoke. “Tiny,” Love said.

“Tiny doesn’t answer personal questions, so don’t ask her any. She’s probably the smartest one of us all. She doesn’t air her dirty laundry. The rest of us, well, we work together so much, sometimes we can’t help it. We’re kind of like a family.”

“Family,” Love wrote.

“You brought a notebook,” Mack said. “I like that. I’ve trained at least fifteen desk people over the years. There’ve been good ones and bad ones. Good desk people are detail oriented. They pay attention. They listen. They use discretion.”

“Discretion.” Big letters. Underlined.

“A lot of our clientele are very wealthy,” Mack said. “They’re used to having certain things done for them. For example, some people won’t want to take a cab into town. They’ll expect a ride.”

“What do I tell them?” Love asked.

“Explain that it’s not our policy to give rides but that you’d be more than happy to call them a cab.”

“Common sense,” Love said.

“There will be guests who say they don’t like the fruit at breakfast. They’ll want peaches instead of bananas. If someone asks for peaches, write it down. I buy the breakfast and I’ve been known to honor requests for peaches. We don’t offer room service so we try to do the best we can on the breakfast.”

“No room service,” Love repeated. She wrote it down.

“You’ll be working every day from eight to five, except Tuesday, your day off. That’s a lot of time on the desk. In July and August it can get pretty hectic. You’ll be bombarded with requests, questions, people checking out, people checking in. If it gets to be too much, let me know. Let Therese know, let Bill know. Don’t try to tackle everyone’s problems at once. It won’t work.”

“I took a magazine to deadline each month,” Love said. “I can handle the pressure of twenty hotel rooms.”

“Mid-June, of course, the Beach Club starts,” Mack said. “We have a hundred members who pay dues to use the beach. They each have a locker. They each have a key. They all need chairs and towels. The kids want buckets and shovels. On a hot day in August when you have thirteen check-outs and twelve check-ins and twenty-five kids running through the lobby with sandy feet and a guest in room twelve telling you his toilet is overflowing and old Mrs. Stanford has lost the key to her Beach Club locker, then you will know the meaning of pressure.”

Clearly he was trying to scare her. “I guess so,” Love said.

Mack lowered his voice. “I did want to say a little more about the guests. What I’ve learned in twelve years is that it’s common to experience feelings of…resentment.” He looked around the lobby as though there might be a guest or two hiding behind the wicker sofas. “The people who stay here, the people who use the beach, all have a lot of money. And they look to you not as an equal but as someone who works for them. Listen, a guy comes from New York, he has two weeks off a year and he’s spending that precious time and a boatload of money here at the hotel. He wants things perfect. You see what I mean? It gets tricky, dealing with egos. There’s a lot of financial muscle flexing going on here.”

Love smiled. Didn’t he know she had come from Aspen? “I get your point.”

“But what I’ve learned is that wealthy people are frequently sad people,” Mack said.

“I’ve found that to be true as well,” Love said. “Money can only get you so much. It can’t cure your cancer or get you love. It can’t make you fertile.”

Mack smiled. “Fertile?”

Love blushed. Her personal life was slipping already, showing like a bra strap. “Yeah, you know, money can’t get you a child. Your own child.”

“Exactly,” he said. “You’re going to do a fantastic job. I can tell.”

After Love finished her lesson about the phones and the fax and the credit card machine, and after she impressed Mack with her knowledge of the island, he left to take care of a lock in one of the rooms. Love drummed her fingers on the polished wood of the desk, stared down at the phone console, gazed out at the lobby, and thought, This is where I’m going to meet the father of my child.

She heard a voice in the back office. She tiptoed through Mack’s messy office and listened at Bill’s door, which was still ajar.

Love held her breath and knocked. Bill cleared his throat, then said, “Come in!”

He was the only one in the office. “I heard you talking,” she said. She smiled at him. “Do you always talk to yourself? I do.”

“I was reciting Robert Frost,” he said. “One could do worse than be a swinger of birches’ and all that. I didn’t realize anyone was still here.”

“Sorry I startled you,” Love said. “The poem you were reciting, is that a favorite of yours?”

“They’re all favorites,” Bill said, thumping the cover of his book. “This one is called ‘Devotion.’ I just stumbled across it.”

Love moved farther into the office. There were two wicker chairs by the windows. Love sat down. “Read it to me,” she said. “I don’t read nearly enough poetry.”

Bill closed his eyes and leaned back in his creamy leather chair. He was so thin his wrist bones protruded like knobs. “’The heart can think of no devotion, greater than being shore to the ocean, holding the curve of one position, counting endless repetition.’” He opened his eyes. “You know what that means, don’t you?”

My first day of work, a man reads poetry aloud to me. “What does it mean?” she asked.

“He’s talking about love,” Bill said. “He’s saying the greatest demonstration of love is devotion, being there with your beloved day in and day out. Have you ever been married?”

“No,” Love said.

“I’ve been married thirty years, and I love my wife more now than ever. It’s like all those days, even the really boring, awful days, have added up. Each day I love her yet more.” He closed the book. “So I guess I’m what Frost would call devoted.”

“Sounds like it,” Love said. Her feelings a bit crushed.

“How about you? Are you devoted to anything?” Bill asked. “Anyone?”

“I’m devoted to having a baby,” Love said. “I’m devoted to finding someone to father my baby.”

Bill’s eyebrows arched, his mouth formed a silent O. Love’s personal life was a woman popping out of a cake, Surprise!

“A baby is certainly a noble devotion,” he said.

Love put her hands on her thighs and stood up. “Too bad you can’t help me,” she said.

Bill laughed nervously. “Endless devotion.” As Love walked by his desk to leave, he held out his hand. It was a frail hand, but warm and sincere. “Someone is going to be very lucky,” he said.

Mack had been running the Beach Club for twelve years, Bill had owned it outright for twenty, but it was Lacey Gardner, the Grande Dame of Beacon Hill and Nantucket, who had true bragging rights. She had joined the Beach Club in the summer of 1945-fifty-three years ago-did she need to say it? Seven years before Bill’s father, Big Bill Elliott, even bought the place. Lacey had been around longer than anybody.

At eighty-eight, she was the oldest living graduate of Radcliffe College and that earned her a permanent seat in the front row at Harvard’s commencement. Every year on the day following commencement she drove from her apartment in Boston to Hyannis and put her car on the 9:45 ferry to Nantucket.

Lacey’s tenure on Nantucket seemed to her like many different lifetimes. Her parents had brought her over to the island in 1920, when she was ten years old. She remembered the ferry docking and the hoteliers standing on the wharf calling out the names of their establishments: Sea Cliff Inn, Beach House, Point Breeze. Years later, she came to Nantucket for weekends with her chums from Radcliffe. On summer evenings they danced on the open porch at the Moby Dick in ’Sconset. Back then, ’Sconset was a refuge for actors and actresses when Broadway closed for the summer; Lacey still remembered productions of Our Town, Candida, and The Bride the Sun Shines On out at the ’Sconset Casino. Dancing on the porch, lobster and chicken dinners for a dollar fifty a plate, cabaret fashion shows-this was the lively, carefree summertime Nantucket of Lacey’s youth. And she was the only one left to remember it.

In 1941, her gentleman friend Maximilian Gardner proposed to her on the beach in Madaket. Lacey was thirty-one years old and still not married. She worked for the Massachusetts Board of Health. Men called her feisty and independent, and women called her a career girl and a snob. But she loved Maximilian Gardner. At first he was just one of the young men in her fun-loving crowd, but then she noticed the way he looked at her. It was when Maximilian Gardner looked at her that Lacey felt most like a woman.

Lacey and Max were married by a justice of the peace on Madaket Beach, in November 1941, a month before the bomb fell on Pearl Harbor, a week before Max left for basic training. When he came home from the war three years later, they had a church wedding, but by then Lacey was thirty-four, and too old to start having children.

Lacey and Maximilian became permanent fixtures in Nantucket in the summer. They joined the Beach Club-and the Yacht Club and Sankaty Golf Club-and Lacey opened a hat shop on Main Street, called simply Lacey’s. She and Max bought a house on Cliff Road, and they split time between this house and their town house on Beacon Hill. They were married for forty-five years, and they held hands every night as they fell asleep. Lacey was holding Max’s hand on February 14, 1986, the night he died. She had never been a sentimental woman, and yet heart was broken on Valentine’s Day.

This was how her life on Nantucket seemed like a life divided: her life before Max, her life with Max, her life after Max. After Max, she sold the house on the Cliff and the town house in Boston. She rented an apartment in Boston, and asked Big Bill Elliott for a permanent room at the hotel.

“Don’t forget,” she told him, “I’ve been here longer than you have.”

Big Bill didn’t forget. He gave Lacey her own cottage, behind the lobby of the hotel. The view wasn’t great-it looked out at the laundry room and the back of the parking lot-but it had three bedrooms and most importantly, it was her own place-Lacey Gardner’s-bought and paid for with pure longevity. In Big Bill’s last will and testament, he left the cottage to Lacey; it was hers to pass on when she died.

Well, she wasn’t dead yet. She was alive enough to drive her new Buick off the ferry. Always, this thrilled her. She loved shooting down the ramp and feeling her tires hit Steamship Wharf. From the wharf, it was one mile exactly to the Beach Club.

When she pulled into the parking lot, she saw Mack standing on the tiny deck of her cottage, waiting for her with the same smile he wore in the photograph she kept on her refrigerator all winter. The first summer Mack worked at the Beach Club he had knocked on Lacey’s door to introduce himself. This was the summer after Maximilian had passed away, a mere four months later. When the boy said his name, “Hi, I’m Mack,” Lacey nearly tumbled out of her chair. Because of course, what she heard was “Hi, I’m Max,” as though her husband had returned to her in the form of this boy. Now she knew better, but she believed in divine intervention; she believed that somehow, Maximilian had sent her Mack.

Lacey beeped the horn with abandon. She reached for the power window switch and suddenly Lacey and Mack were face to face. He kissed her through the open window before she could even pull into her parking space.

“Hey, Gardner,” he said. “Welcome home.”

Tears rose and she shooed Mack’s face away. Pulled the car into her spot and put up the window and took a deep breath. Mack opened the door, gave her his gentleman’s hand.

“You look wonderful, Lacey. I swear you’re getting younger.”

“Nonsense,” she said. But she took Mack’s face in her hands and gave him a kiss for saying so. Truth was she felt as alive and vital as ever. “Eighty-eight and still kicking.”

“New car?” Mack asked, as he lifted her suitcases out of the trunk.

Lacey nodded. “They were hesitant to give me a loan down at the bank. I told them I’d pay it off in two years. That did the trick. So I’ll be out of debt by age ninety.”

Mack laughed and walked with Lacey toward the cottage. “Everyone’s back. We have a new woman at the front desk and a new bellman. The bellman is very handsome, Lacey, so watch out. He’s on his way to California.”

“Don’t tell me there’s been another Gold Rush? See there, if you live long enough, everything will start to repeat itself.”

“Vance is back. He went to Thailand and shaved his head. I’m warning you in advance so you don’t make some kind of comment. You know Vance is sensitive.”

“Goodness, yes,” Lacey said.

“Bill and Therese are fine,” Mack said. “Cecily got into the University of Virginia, but she has a Brazilian boyfriend, so who knows.” Mack swung the door to her cottage open.

“Here we are,” Lacey said. The place had a familiar smell, a mingling of Pine Sol and her scented talcum powder. She put down her pocketbook and looked around-her Spode on the kitchen shelves, her Maggie Meredith prints. The original sign from her hat shop hanging jauntily over the leather sofa seemed to announce her arrival: Lacey’s. “Pour us a drink. Oh, wait, I forgot-there’s a case of Dewar’s in the trunk of the car.”

“Be right back,” Mack said.

Lacey wobbled down the hall to her bedroom. She touched her pillowcase, crisp and white. It was disturbing to look at the bed, however. She couldn’t look at it without thinking, This could be the bed I die in. She supposed this was true for everyone; her odds were just greater.

Mack mixed a Dewar’s and water and poured himself a Coke while Lacey took a seat in her armchair.

“The cottage looks marvelous, dear,” Lacey said.

“The new chambermaids tried to clean the place, but they didn’t know that in Therese’s vocabulary, clean is an absolute-like truth, or peace. I had to go in behind them and finish the job myself.”

“That makes me feel all the better,” Lacey said. She tried to straighten her dress hem around her knees. That was the darnedest thing about sitting down as an old woman-getting comfortable and looking good were nearly impossible. “You’ve given me an earful about everybody else, but I haven’t heard about you. How, Mack Petersen, are you doing?”

Mack handed her the drink and settled himself on the sofa. There was something he wanted to tell her, she could tell right away. Lacey was a confidante to Mack, and to practically everybody else on the property for that matter. She joked about hanging a shingle, but secretly she liked imparting her wisdom. What good was she if she couldn’t share with people what she’d learned? She had eighty-eight years of experience stored inside her like volumes of an encyclopedia.

“Is there something wrong?” she asked.

“I’m fine,” he said, but he didn’t meet her eyes. He wasn’t ready to tell her what it was just yet, but she could wait. They had all summer.

The day before the first guests arrived, Mack took some time off and went for a drive in his Jeep with the top down. He bumped along the cobblestone streets of town, looking at the historic homes: red geraniums in the window boxes, antique onion lamps, flags snapping in the wind. Painters hung off the sides of houses, and landscapers planted hydrangeas. The air was rich with the almost-Iowa smell of freshly cut grass, and Mack’s Jeep with the top off was an almost-tractor. Growing up in Iowa, he’d learned to appreciate the seasons, and spring on Nantucket was the equivalent of planting time. Getting the land ready, laying seed, and waiting for growth.

He twisted through the narrow streets until he reached the top of Main Street, then he headed west toward Madaket. He hit the gas and sped up, enjoying the wind and sun on his face. He thought about what Maribel said about profit sharing. Asking Bill to profit-share made Mack anxious. What if Bill thought Mack was anticipating his death? What if Bill died thinking Mack wasn’t grateful for all Bill had done for him already? Worse still, what if Bill said no? Bill, his almost-father. But not his father. Mack was thirty years old and he supposed the time had come to expect more from himself. If he weren’t brave enough to ask Bill to profit share, if he weren’t brave enough to make Nantucket his own, then he should return to his five hundred and thirty acres in Iowa.

When Mack reached Madaket, he stopped at the wooden bridge named for Madaket Millie. A sliver of blue ocean showed beyond the dune grass to his left, and Madaket Harbor, with sailboats bobbing on their bright red moorings, was to his right. Speak to me, he thought. Speak to me now. But it didn’t work this way. He never asked to hear the voice, it just presented itself the way it had his first day on Nantucket. Mack listened, hoping. He needed help-anyone could see that. But Nantucket was quiet. All Mack heard was the wind in his ears.