The Castaways

JEFFREY

On the fifteenth of July, the corn was ready. It had been the perfect growing season; everything was ahead and bountiful. The strawberries were finished now, but the crop had been legendary; the squash and zucchini and cukes were runaways, multiplying faster than rabbits.

And on July 15, corn. The earliest ready date in twenty-five years. Jeffrey almost didn’t believe it, but he peeled the husks back on ten ears of butter and sugar, all of them pearly and mature, bursting, ready to go. He tasted them raw. Sweet. He sent pickers out and went upstairs to his office to notify his accounts-thirty-two accounts on Nantucket alone, and another dozen on the Cape. There were local farms on the Cape, but many places preferred his corn, grown thirty miles out to sea in that sandy soil. There was something about it.

Jeffrey’s office was above the retail space of the farm market. It was, properly, the attic. It had open studs on a wicked slanted ceiling and it was hotter than hell, despite the efforts of strategically positioned fans. The sun beat down on the roof and Jeffrey was directly underneath. This kept it toasty warm in winter, but it was a frying pan today, July 15, the official first day of corn.

“Whew!” he said aloud when he reached the top of the stairs. To no one, because Jeffrey’s office was his and his alone. He worked without an assistant, and everyone else-the farm market manager, the marketing person, the head chef, the buyer-all had offices on the first floor, which was air-conditioned. Jeffrey had segregated himself on purpose because he was a serious person who savored silence and his privacy.

It was beastly hot. There was sweat in his eyes. He pulled a bandanna out of his back jeans pocket (yes, a real red bandanna-Delilah teased him, but he didn’t care) and wiped his face.

There was someone sitting in his chair. Andrea.

He was speechless. But not surprised. Somehow he’d expected her. The other day he’d spied a beat-up black Jeep Wrangler in the parking lot and his heart had sung out a short, sweet tune because he thought it was Andrea’s-but then he realized that Andrea no longer drove a Jeep. She hadn’t driven one in over fifteen years. He was losing his mind.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey, Peach,” she said. She was wearing a white T-shirt and jean shorts. Her dark hair was in a ponytail. There were flip-flops on the floor, but her bare feet were tucked under her bare, tanned legs. Andrea’s legs were her best feature; they were very strong, taut, powerful. They weren’t sexy to look at, maybe, but they were sexy for sex-she used to tense and kick and fight him off. He remembered this instantly and it embarrassed him, and then he thought about how her showing up here in this dim, sultry room was like the beginning of one of the porn movies Delilah tried to get him to watch to spice up their sex life. He felt a surge of energy. Entirely inappropriate. He forgot all about the corn.

She was sitting in his chair, so there was nothing for him to do but stand. But he couldn’t stand. It was too hot and he was too rattled by this unexpected visit. He pulled a milk crate out of the shadowy eaves, flipped it over, and sat down at her feet.

They had been a couple for twenty-six months. From May of 1990 until July of 1992. They had met on the steamship on a chilly, miserable, slate-gray day. They had each bought a discolored, overcooked hot dog at the snack bar and were standing together at the ketchup dispenser as the boat lurched like a drunk through the chop. Jeffrey was feeling a little green; he was a man of the land, not the water. He thought maybe his stomach needed food, hence the hot dog, but the ketchup managed to make the hot dog seem less appetizing instead of more. He smiled weakly at Andrea. She was beautiful, raven-haired, robust, surefooted even as the boat rocked. She was confident, a queen. She regally inhaled her hot dog before Jeffrey could even wrap his properly in a napkin.

“Is it your first time on this boat?” she asked. She seemed genuinely concerned for him. He must have looked as bad as he felt.

He nodded. He handed Andrea his hot dog, staggered to the men’s room, and vomited in the toilet.

When he emerged, she was sitting on a bench holding his hot dog gently, like it was a child in her custody.

“You want?” she said.

He shook his head and discreetly (he thought) sucked on a Life Saver.

She said, “Okay if I eat it?”

He nodded.

She said, “Do you talk?”

He whispered, “I do not feel well.”

She beamed at him. “You do talk!”

He was an ag student, newly graduated from Cornell. She was three years out of BC, a championship swimmer, and this summer she was to be Nantucket’s head lifeguard. It was her third summer on the island. Jeffrey had a deed to a farm left to him by his grandmother’s unmarried half-brother-a great-uncle he hadn’t seen in years.

“I thought that kind of thing only happened in the movies,” Andrea said.

“Me, too,” Jeffrey said. The deed to the farm from Uncle Ted had come as a whopping surprise. Jeffrey’s parents had been astounded. Ted Korkoran had been the only son of Jeffrey’s great-grandfather’s second wife; Ted was a bit of a black sheep, declaring himself homosexual and as such escaping duty in World War II. He moved from Fredonia to Nantucket in 1950. He and his partner, Caleb Mills, bought a farm and worked it together. They had cows that supplied 70 percent of the island’s milk, they had chickens for eggs, pigs for bacon and ham. They slaughtered turkeys at Thanksgiving, and made their own goat cheese long before the public had cultivated a taste for it. Jeffrey had heard these stories from his grandmother, and Jeffrey would see Uncle Ted and his friend Caleb every summer at the Korkoran family reunions, Ted and Caleb as sober and grouchy and properly masculine as all the rest of the Korkoran men. But then Caleb got mysteriously sick and died-this was in the mid-eighties, and it was all kept very quiet-and Uncle Ted stopped attending the reunions. And then, five years later, Uncle Ted died and left his farm to Jeffrey. No one could figure out why. All Jeffrey remembered were Caleb’s recipe for baked beans with brown sugar and Uncle Ted’s dead eye in horseshoes. Ted had left Jeffrey the farm because he received a Christmas card from Jeffrey’s mother every year. He knew Jeffrey was an ag student at Cornell, a farmer-to-be in need of a farm.

And here was a farm.

Andrea listened as she polished off the second hot dog, and then a soft pretzel dripping with yellow mustard. She had been an English major at BC; she loved sprawling family sagas. She came from a large and storied Roman Catholic background herself, complete with closeted priests and nuns living in the basement and undercover cops and Mafia ties.

“And when you get a free century,” she said, “I’ll tell you all about it.”

Meeting Andrea had been all bundled up with Jeffrey’s meeting Nantucket. He set eyes on the quaint gray-shingled town first, then took in the scope of the farm that was now his. A hundred and sixty-two acres of fields-his! A greenhouse and barn, tractors, combines, plows-his! A dilapidated little house that had not been cleaned out and hence still contained the day-to-day detritus of a lonely bachelor. Andrea was there with him when he first set foot in Uncle Ted’s house. She saw the dishes in the rack by the kitchen sink, the pie-crust table that supported a rotary phone and the King James Bible, the two single beds side by side in the house’s only bedroom. On the bedside table was a photograph of Ted and Caleb in front of the barn, holding chickens in their arms like babies. Andrea was there because she decided before the steamship even docked that Jeffrey needed her help. What he was doing-seeing the farm for the first time, taking inventory, and uncovering the life of the man who had left it to him-was not something he should do without a friend.

She was right. She helped him find someone to clean out the house, she showed him where the Town Building was so he could register the deed in his name, she drove him around in her black Jeep with the top down, even though Nantucket in May was cold and windy and rainy. (Did anything grow here? Jeffrey had to wonder. Maybe the farm was a joke.) She took him for chowder and steamed lobsters and scallops wrapped in bacon. She let him crash on the floor of her room in the rental house that she shared with two other lifeguards. And then, after a full week of this platonic, almost sisterly help, she invited him into her bed and took his virginity.

Because, yes, Jeffrey had been a virgin at twenty-two. Owing to his girlfriend Felicity Hammer’s love of Jesus and her refusal to make love to him until the day they were married.

Andrea was different from Felicity in every way. Andrea was strong and athletic and dark-haired and capable and Italian and Catholic and confident of her many talents and charms. Felicity was blond and petite and meek and easily frightened; she was shy and God-fearing, she was a small-town Baptist whose father had sent her to community college. She was a baker and a knitter. She wanted six children. Felicity had thought that once Jeffrey got settled with the farm, he would send for her and they would get married.

But meeting Andrea at the ketchup dispenser changed that. Andrea was a storm, a force of nature. He could not resist her any more than he could stop the rain. They fell in love. In October they moved in to the tiny farmhouse, now clean, cozy, and all fixed up. They made love, they made pasta, they made curtains for the windows. Jeffrey made a plan for the farm. He got rid of all the livestock except for the chickens. Chickens and eggs he could handle; everything else was too expensive and beyond the perimeters of his expertise. He wanted to grow things: corn, vegetables, flowers. He had no money. He went to the bank for a loan way beyond what he would be able to pay back in this lifetime, but they gave him the money eagerly, with the land as collateral. Andrea got a job teaching private swim lessons at the community pool.

They were happy. They talked about getting married. They talked about kids. They ate a lot of eggs. They had nicknames for each other. He called her Andy. She called him Peach, which had something to do with sex-how he tasted, or the fact that he’d been a virgin until she took a bite out of him.

Life was weird, right? It was weird because Jeffrey and Andrea had been happy, they had been a couple on their way to matrimony and wedded bliss, until somehow it unraveled. As though a sweater had a snag and he pulled at it, or she did, and one by one the stitches came undone until it was a pile of yarn at their feet. Jeffrey was obsessed with the farm, consumed by it; he could not give Andrea his full attention, he could not give her any attention. She complained, he heard her complaining, but he could do nothing about it. He was single-minded, he always had been, and his mind was on the farm, the fields, the crops, the business of it.

At the beginning of their third summer together, Andrea, once again Nantucket’s head lifeguard, went to a party for town employees, where she met the new police chief. Young guy, she said. Single. From Swampscott.

And two weeks later she moved out.

In all honesty, Jeffrey was too busy to do anything to stop her. By the time he got off his goddamn tractor in the figurative sense, Andrea and the new police chief, Ed Kapenash, were engaged.

Life was weird, because instead of Jeffrey’s relationship with Andrea ending, it started a new incarnation. At first Jeffrey was tentatively friends with the newlywed Kapenashes; then Jeffrey met Delilah and they became couple-friends with Ed and Andrea. Andrea’s cousin Tess started dating Greg, and they moved to the island permanently, then Phoebe and Addison joined the scene and the eight of them, over time, developed an insanely tight bond. What did Delilah call them? The Castaways. And it did, at times, seem like just the eight of them alone on a deserted island.

Life was weird because although Jeffrey had seen Andrea every week for nearly twenty years, seeing her now sitting in his chair was sort of like seeing her for the first time. On a rolling boat, by the ketchup dispenser. You do talk! It was as if he’d looked up, finally, after getting the farm running, profitable, and fully staffed, and noticed that she was gone. And he went looking for her. And he found her here, in his chair. Because there was something about her that transported him back. The nickname, Peach. Or the way it was just the two of them here, alone, unlikely to be interrupted. (Had that happened even once since they split?) Or it was the way she was looking at him.

“What are you doing here?” he asked her.

She said, “I’m having a hard time.”

He said, “She worshipped you, Andrea. You were her friend and her sister and her mother wrapped up into one. You did right by her.”

Her tears were silent. “How can you say that? She’s dead.”

“It was an accident.”

“Was it?”

“Wasn’t it?” Jeffrey said. He shifted on the milk crate. He had a nugget of classified information that no one else knew, that had been lobbed at him like a hand grenade by April Peck. I was with him the night before he died. But what did that mean? Did it mean anything? Was it even true? (In his heart, Jeffrey felt it was true. He realized now that Greg had been hiding something.) One thing was for sure: Jeffrey was not going to share this radioactive nugget with Andrea.

“I don’t know,” Andrea said. “All I can tell you is that I’m in agony. I am hurting worse than I could ever imagine I could hurt. Like I lost one of the kids. Like a stranger came into my house and held Kacy’s head under the bathwater until she died. And I wasn’t around. I let it happen.”

“Greg was the stranger?” Jeffrey said. “He was Tess’s husband. Twelve years they were married.”

“He made her miserable.”

“Did he?” Jeffrey said. Jeffrey’s understanding of Greg and Tess’s marriage-before April Peck-was that Tess had loved Greg with the same ardor and enthusiasm that she loved everyone else in her life. “So you wish you’d… what? Spoken up at their wedding, when the priest offered the chance?”

“He hurt her,” Andrea said. “Last fall, that whole thing? He cut her heart out. And she was never the same. The week they separated? God, Jeffrey. We talked for hours. She was trying to make sense of it. Do you think he lied to me? Do you think he lied to Flanders? Do you think something happened between him and that girl? And the answer is, Yes, of course. Something happened, we don’t know what, we’ll never know exactly what. And there’s Greg, sending flowers and hounding her cell phone and calling the house begging and pleading…”

“Yeah,” Jeffrey said. “That was a weird week.”

While Tess was at the Kapenash house with the twins, Greg had taken refuge at Jeffrey and Delilah’s. It was, of all awful things, the week of Thanksgiving, the holiest family holiday, but despite that, or maybe because of that, Tess decided to take the kids and leave. She had meant to go to her brother’s house in Pembroke, to visit her mother at the nursing home in Duxbury, but in the end she had simply sought refuge with Andrea. She slept with Andrea in Andrea’s bed and the kids slept in the guest room. And Greg, although he had his house to himself, slept on Jeffrey and Delilah’s leather couch each night. He never stayed over intentionally-otherwise he would have used the guest room. He came over for dinner and drinks, and he and Delilah stayed up so late talking and he was so drunk that he ended up crashing on the couch. And in the morning he would be awakened by Drew and Barney and SpongeBob SquarePants. He would eat Delilah’s delicious breakfasts, talk about going home to grab a shower, but then there would be college football and lunch and Barney begging him to play the guitar… and he just stayed on and on. A few of those nights, Greg and Delilah worked at the Begonia and came home absurdly late. Jeffrey was busy at the farm market-the kitchen had orders for three hundred fresh turkeys and six times that many side dishes-and if he didn’t catch every nuanced detail of what was going on, could anyone blame him? Delilah was the head paramedic of this particular train wreck; she was in charge of tending to Greg. Jeffrey noted Greg’s attempts to reach Tess, but she was not taking his calls. He heard about a bouquet of flowers sent, and returned to the florist by Tess. Jeffrey wasn’t sure how he felt about the whole thing; what he wanted was to stay out of it. This was, no doubt, what the Chief was doing, and this was what Addison and Phoebe were doing. The prizefight was between Tess (and her trainer, Andrea) and Greg (and his trainer, Delilah) in the opposite corner. Jeffrey did not love it that his house had inadvertently become Greg’s c & he felt like he was harboring a fugitive.

There had been one night in particular that bothered Jeffrey. It was four-thirty in the morning and Jeffrey was rising for the day when he noticed that Delilah was not in bed. He tiptoed out to the kitchen for coffee and he heard Greg’s voice. Greg was murmuring to someone. Although Jeffrey was the last person to eavesdrop, he couldn’t help it-and goddamn it, this was his house. Jeffrey thought, If he is talking to Delilah like that, I am going to throw him out. Because, really, Jeffrey had had enough of the Greg and Delilah confidante thing. Greg was not good for Delilah, or for Jeffrey and Delilah’s marriage.

But when Jeffrey reached the kitchen, he saw that Greg was on his cell phone. Greg noticed Jeffrey and said quickly, “I’ll call you later.” And hung up. And then, despite the fact that Greg had seen Jeffrey and Jeffrey had seen Greg, Greg closed his eyes and pretended to be asleep.

Delilah, as it turned out, was upstairs sleeping with Barney, who tended to wake up in the middle of the night and want his mother.

Jeffrey did not say anything to Greg about the phone call, but he knew it wasn’t Tess on the other end.

Then there was Thanksgiving itself. Tess had ceded a little ground and allowed Greg to see the kids in the morning. Greg had hoped for a family reconciliation for the holiday, and learning that he was only gaining custody for four hours like the divorced man he was sure to become depressed him. He had nothing planned. Delilah suggested that he take the kids to breakfast at the Downyflake, or for a walk on the beach, but Greg seemed eager to avoid quality time when the twins might have a chance to ask him questions he was ill-equipped to answer, such as Why is Mom so mad at you? or Why are we living at Auntie’s house?

Instead Greg took the twins over to the Drake house, and this, in combination with the overheard phone call, led Jeffrey to understand that Greg was lost, hapless, and in possession of the maturity of a twelve-year-old boy. Jeffrey therefore took over. He rescued the kids from the PlayStation by driving everyone to the farm, where they went for a hayride. Jeffrey drove the tractor, and Delilah and Greg sat in the back with the kids. The kids liked the bumps, and Jeffrey obliged them. The day was sunny but cold. Jeffrey took the long way, all the way around the edge of the property. Time and circumstances were suspended. Everyone had fun, and at the end of the ride they drank apple cider and ate moist pumpkin muffins, and then suddenly it was one o’clock. Delilah had to get home to check on the turkey, and Greg had to get the kids back to the Kapenash house.

Normally the eight of them, plus the six kids, had Thanksgiving dinner together, and Delilah and Andrea alternated years hosting. This year it felt like they had all divorced. The Chief and Andrea had Tess and the kids. Jeffrey and Delilah had Greg. Phoebe and Addison, not wanting to take sides, went to the Ship’s Inn by themselves. It felt awful. Jeffrey, Delilah, Greg, and Drew and Barney held hands around the table and said grace, but when they looked up, they could see how wrong everything was. Jeffrey thought about Ed and Andrea’s table, with Eric and Kacy and Tess and the twins, and he wondered if things felt wrong there, too. He hoped they did.

Jeffrey never found out how or why, but by Sunday night Greg and Tess were back at home with the kids. Four weeks later, the eight of them were on vacation in Stowe and everything was back to normal. Tess had forgiven Greg, forgotten April Peck, and moved on.

Now Andrea was taking the credit for this-or the blame.

“I convinced Tess to take him back. For the kids’ sake. Ed and I both thought that was the best thing.”

“It was the best thing,” Jeffrey said.

“How can you say that?” Andrea said. She was shaking and crying. Her face was wet with tears. Jeffrey wanted to reach out to her, to hold her. He had lost her so long ago, when he wasn’t watching, and although it was his fault completely, it had never seemed fair. Now she was back. She needed something and he would try like hell to give it to her. “How can you say that when she’s dead?”

“Remember when Tess came to visit us?” Jeffrey said. “And she borrowed my bike?”

Andrea wiped at her tears. “And she insisted on riding it barefoot? And she fell and-”

“Broke her arm,” Jeffrey said.

“But we didn’t believe her,” Andrea said. “We didn’t believe her when she said how much it hurt. We made her go to the movies.”

“And we saw The Player.”

“And it was the best movie of all time.”

“And we couldn’t figure out why Tess was crying at the end…”

“And it was because of her arm.”

“We took her to the hospital,” Jeffrey said. “You stayed by her side while they X-rayed her and set it.”

“You stayed in the waiting room,” Andrea said. “And fell asleep across four chairs.”

“I felt so guilty,” Jeffrey said. “It was my bike.”

“I felt so guilty,” Andrea said. “She told me her arm was broken and I gave her some Advil and told her to toughen up.”

“We made her sit through that movie.”

Andrea was quiet. She stared at her legs. Her strong, beautiful legs that had nearly gotten her to the Olympics, that had locked around him when they were making love. This was the pornography of grief-going back and remembering a moment in a dead person’s life, step by step. So few people were willing to comb back through it like this, because it was too intimate or too painful or it wouldn’t help anything, it wouldn’t bring the person back. But this, perhaps, was what Andrea needed. Let Tess live in the minute detail of their memories. Jeffrey could see Tess’s teenaged face, as plain as day. He could see her bare toes on the spiky pedals of his Cannondale.

“Thank you, Peach,” Andrea said, as she stood up to go. “Thank you.”

Jeffrey was at a loss, because of both her arrival and her departure. “You’re welcome.”

Andrea continued to appear in Jeffrey’s office. Jeffrey never knew when she would show; she didn’t call or forewarn. He would climb the stairs to the attic, and there she would be, sitting in his chair. She always came in the morning, after she dropped off the twins at camp. Jeffrey started to anticipate her visits and look forward to them; on days she didn’t come, he felt let down. He worried, stupidly, that he would never see her again.

He had stumbled across what she wanted. She wanted someone else to remember Tess, to miss Tess, to tell stories about Tess. She wanted a partner in her grief. Not a sympathetic listener-any poor motherfucker could listen. She needed someone to share the burden, to do the talking and remembering for her. No one wanted to do this.

There were certain ways in which Jeffrey didn’t want to do this either. Or couldn’t do it. How much attention had he really given Tess, after all? But he would try, for Andrea.

He was methodical in all things, and so in this endeavor he moved chronologically. The broken arm story led to the story of Tess’s first beer. Tess’s first true, cold beer had been consumed at a bonfire on Ladies Beach under the careful, almost parental watch of Jeffrey and Andrea. A Coors Light in a frosty silver can. Tess’s arm was in a sling, her drinking arm, her everything arm. Jeffrey had to open the can for her and put it in her left hand.

“Had she asked for a beer?” Jeffrey said. “Or did we force it on her?”

“She asked for it,” Andrea said.

Jeffrey did not remember it that way. He remembered that they had packed a cooler for a beach barbecue, and when they opened the cooler, they found they had nothing to drink except beer. They weren’t used to hanging out with teenagers. He remembered saying to Tess, Looks like it’s beer or ocean water.

Andrea covered her eyes. “Oh, God,” she said. “You’re right.”

“And she drank the whole thing down right away and let out that burp they could hear in Portugal.”

“Yes!” Andrea said. She was most delighted by the details she had forgotten. “And we gave her another one and another one and another one.”

“She drank five,” Jeffrey said. “And then she-”

“Puked in the dunes,” Andrea said.

“And we took her home and she passed out on the bathroom floor. And when she woke up in the morning, there were tile marks on her face.”

“Yes!” Andrea shouted. She put her hands up in the air. He had scored again.

“And you made her sign that slip of paper,” Jeffrey said.

“Promising she wouldn’t tell my aunt and uncle,” Andrea said. She was laughing, then crying. Sweetly weeping. “Thank you, Peach,” she said. “Goddamn it, thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” he said.

How about the night Tess met Greg? Could Andrea handle that one? She looked dubious, but Jeffrey pointed out that he wasn’t going to be able to tell stories for very long if he couldn’t mention Greg.

“Okay,” she said. Then she cocked her head. “Wait a minute. You weren’t even there that night.”

“I still know the story. I’ve heard it a hundred times. Do you want me to tell it or not?”

“Tell it.”

Girls’ night out, summer 1995. Andrea, Tess, Delilah, Lisa Shumacher, who waitressed with Tess at the RopeWalk that summer, and Karin Poleman, who had taken over the head lifeguard position from Andrea when Andrea got pregnant with Kacy. The girls went to dinner at the Boarding House, they went for drinks at 21 Federal, drinks at the Club Car, drinks at the RopeWalk, where Lisa and Tess, on their night off, were treated like royalty and plied with tequila shots. Then, finally, they went to the Muse to hear this band everyone was talking about called the Velociraptors.

The Velociraptors were five guys who had done a PG year together at the Berkshire School and who had then done separate tours of duty at egregiously preppy colleges like Colgate and Bates and Middlebury, and who had reunited on Nantucket. Greg MacAvoy (Hamilton College) was the lead singer. He was twenty-three years old, he jogged and surfed and lifted weights, he wore a white rope bracelet and a shark’s tooth on a leather choker, he sang while holding a Corona, he sang with his hair in his eyes. He sang “Loving Cup” by the Stones and “Sheena Is a Punk Rocker” by the Ramones, he sang “The Core” by Eric Clap-ton with a hot redhead who tended bar and only came up onstage for that one song. It was well documented that Greg MacAvoy, currently of the Velociraptors (formerly of the garage bands the Porn Stars and Eklipse), could have any woman he wanted. The band house behind the Muse, where the Velociraptors had pretty much taken up residence (though the drummer Beckett Steed’s parents owned a house in Sconset where they technically lived), had a throng of girls teeming around it every night after-hours, like bacteria around a fresh cut. What happened in the band house? Well, pretty much what you’d expect.

On the night in question, Tess was drunk.

“We were all drunk,” Andrea chimed in.

Tess was wearing jeans, flip-flops, a white T-shirt, a green bandanna in her hair, and dangly silver earrings. She and the rest of the girls were dancing right up front; their beers were sitting on the edge of the stage, next to the amplifiers. With all the girls on the dance floor and the promise of yet more girls banging down the door of the band house, what was it about Tess that caught Greg’s attention? The green bandanna? The sparkling earrings? The freckles on her nose or her big blue eyes or her tiny feet with nails painted a color called Cherry Pie?

She knew all the words to “Low Spark of High Heeled Boys.” He noticed that. He smiled at her, winked at her. At the break, he said to his bass player, “Hey, that little Gidget girl is hot.” He dispatched a roadie to speak to her.

“Greg wants to know if you’ll join him in the band house later.”

Roadie asked Tess this in front of all the girls. Roadie offered Tess a cold Corona, a present from Greg. The girls stared, speechless.

Tess said, “The band house? No way.”

Delilah said, “Are you crazy? Every woman on Nantucket wants that guy.”

But Andrea approved of Tess’s answer. Andrea had a baby and a two-year-old at home; she was mother superior. She was drinking and having fun like the rest of them-more than the rest of them-but she did not want to see her beloved younger cousin, Tess, disappear into the opium den/syphilis shack that was the band house.

Tess said no, and Greg was fired up. The hunt was on!

“What did he do to get her?” Andrea scanned Jeffrey’s desk for a piece of paper. She wanted to make a list.

“He tried to find out her last name,” Jeffrey said.

“Failed,” Andrea said.

“He tried to get her phone number.”

“Failed.”

“But then someone told him where she waitressed…”

“He showed up at the RopeWalk with flowers.”

“Didn’t work.”

“The next time he showed up with that CD he made her. With ‘Romeo and Juliet’ by Dire Straits on it.”

“Didn’t work.”

“He ordered the lobster dinner to impress her.”

“It was just like Greg to be so misguided,” Andrea said. “Ordering the lobster was not impressive.”

He asked her out each and every time. Where did she want to go? The Chanticleer? The Wauwinet? Beckett Steed’s parents had a Boston Whaler. Did she want to go out on the Whaler?

“She told him she was afraid of the water,” Andrea said quietly.

Did she want to go on a picnic? Would she meet him for breakfast? Coffee?

He showed up at her yoga class; he did all the positions, hoping she was watching him in her peripheral vision. He waited for her by the water cooler, but she breezed past him.

“He borrowed a dog,” Andrea said. “That golden retriever.”

Jeffrey shook his head. “Jesus. I forgot about the dog.”

“She almost fell for it,” Andrea said. “But when she found out it wasn’t his, it set him back.”

“So what was it, in the end?” Jeffrey said. The Greg-in-pursuit-of-Tess story was in fact a well-documented and much-laughed-about legend, and the first-night-at-the-Muse story could easily be told by people (like himself) who hadn’t even been there. But what had flipped her? What had changed her mind? Jeffrey couldn’t remember, or didn’t know.

“I gave her permission,” Andrea said. “I told her the guy clearly deserved a chance, he was going to so much trouble. I told her it was okay to relent. To say yes. And that was all she needed. She did.”

“Oh,” Jeffrey said.

“Thank you, Peach.”

Jeffrey nodded. “You’re welcome.”

He did not tell anyone about Andrea’s visits or about the recounting of Tess’s life in obscene detail. Meaning he did not tell Delilah. This was unprecedented, because one of Jeffrey’s hallmark qualities was that he was an open book. His accounts were honest, his slate clean. He hid nothing; he had no secrets. He prided himself on operating this way; he felt it gave him the upper hand. Delilah had secrets; she had hundreds of hours unaccounted for that fell under the category of “time to myself” and was therefore unimpeachable. She was always hiding something, covering up, making excuses. It was exhausting to live that way; Jeffrey could see the toll it took on her, harboring an entire emotional life she refused to share with him.

He decided to keep Andrea’s visits a secret, not for his sake but for Andrea’s sake. It went unspoken, but Jeffrey was pretty sure the Chief knew nothing about the hours she whiled away in the farm attic. Delilah, if she knew, would get mad, she would feel threatened (though she claimed again and again that it was impossible to feel jealous of someone like Andrea); she would ridicule Jeffrey first, then Andrea; she would degrade their attempts at self-help, at memory as therapy. She would misunderstand it and misrepresent it to others and ruin it.

It was working. Jeffrey could tell just by looking at Andrea that she felt better.

And so did he.