Elizabeth of East Hampton (For the Love of Austen #2)

Chapter 3

CHAPTER 3

At exactly 11:04 a.m., the ethereal sound of Stevie Nicks singing “Dreams” through the bakery’s ancient speakers was interrupted by the distinctive voice of Mrs. Joanne Bennet.

“BOB!”

Lizzy winced, leaning back from the massive glob of sourdough she was shaping into loaves to peer through the kitchen doorway to the front room. The morning rush had abated hours ago. To be fair, it wasn’t much of a rush. With the exception of that pretentious guy who hated palm trees, it had just been their regulars who ordered the same thing every Saturday morning. Now the front of Bennet Bakery was empty except for the woman maneuvering her way inside.

“Why do I have to do everything myself!?” Mrs. Bennet cried, struggling to fit through the front door with her pink tote bag on one arm and a life-sized pair of disembodied mannequin legs wearing iridescent zebra-print leggings under the other.

Lizzy turned to peer into the small office near the bakery’s back door. “I think that’s for you.”

Mr. Bennet looked up from the bank statements on his desk to glare over the rim of his reading glasses at his daughter. Crumbs of a past donut dusted his mustache, accentuating his frown. Whether the look was due to the bakery’s negligible profit margin or the arrival of his wife was unclear.

He stared at Lizzy. She stared back. And then, in unison, they each raised a single fist.

“Rock, paper, scissors, shoot!” they recited in unison.

Mr. Bennet threw scissors.

Lizzy threw paper.

Mr. Bennet barely cracked a smile as he turned back to his paperwork.

“We need to go back to flipping a coin,” Lizzy mumbled as she wiped her hands on her apron and started toward the front room.

When Lizzy reached the doorway, Mrs. Bennet was just navigating around the glass countertop and heading toward her, a blur in bedazzled purple athleisure wear as she dropped her pink bag in a nearby chair. It missed, falling to the floor with a thud.

“Is he back there?” she demanded, stopping in front of her daughter.

Lizzy crossed her arms and leaned against the doorframe. “Dad? No, he took a job at this paper company in Scranton. Good benefits.”

Mrs. Bennet rolled her eyes and pushed herself and her mannequin legs past her, through the kitchen, and into the back office.

“Why was my leggings display still sitting at home this morning when I told you—Bob Bennet, are you eating a donut?” her mother shrieked, the door slamming shut behind her.

For a moment, Lizzy debated whether she should go rescue her father, but then Lydia’s voice cut through the air.

“Oh my God, it’s so early .”

It seemed the other Bennet sisters had arrived, too.

Lizzy turned back around and saw Jane first. The eldest Bennet sister was kneeling down to pick up their mother’s tote bag where it lay upside down on the red tile floor. Her dark hair was in a ponytail, with a few wisps framing her heart-shaped face. It was hard for her sister to skew her angelic features into anything like disapproval, but she was trying her best as she replied, “It’s eleven a.m., Lydia.”

Lydia moaned as she landed in a chair at a nearby table, then promptly let her head collapse into her arms. Kitty sat down across from her, her attention on her phone. They were identical twins and for most of their life, it had been almost impossible to tell them apart. Then they both started at Suffolk County Community College two years ago. Within a few weeks, Kitty had joined the Future Business Leaders of America, while Lydia joined TikTok. Now, with both about to graduate next month with associate’s degrees, they couldn’t be more different: Lydia, with long hair like a silk curtain over her back and an oversized sweatshirt almost completely covering her small biker shorts, barely passed most of her classes. Meanwhile, Kitty—who looked like she was on her way to a board meeting with a short bob and perfectly pressed white button-up shirt—was already looking into bachelor’s programs at SUNY.

“Eleven is early,” Lydia whined into her sleeve.

“Not when you were supposed to be here at six,” Kitty murmured, attention still on her screen.

Lydia picked her head up, eyes barely open. “Why are you yelling?”

“I’m not yelling.”

“You’re so loud,” Lydia grumbled as she stood up again and shuffled around the counter, her Crocs making a dull scraping sound on the floor as she made a beeline to the coffee machine. “I don’t even know why I have to work this weekend anyway. Do you even know how many parties are happening? This is child abuse.”

Lizzy cocked her head to the side. “Bold claim from a twenty-one-year-old.”

A rogue tube of lip gloss had rolled under a chair, and Jane stuffed it back into their mother’s tote as she gave Lizzy a look. It was the look the two eldest Bennet sisters had honed over the past twenty-five years: a weary smile, a furrowed brow, a roll of the eyes. All a truncated version of the same conversation they had had a million times before:

Be nice , Jane would say.

I am being nice , Lizzy would reply.

Okay. Then be patient .

Jane, I don’t think anyone could survive in this family without the patience of a saint.

Are you the saint in this scenario?

In the colloquial sense? Absolutely.

Jane smiled and shook her head.

“Like, the party last night was epic,” Lydia continued, oblivious. “It was at this huge house in Sag Harbor, and there was just… so much rum.”

Jane stood and placed the tote on a table, her eyebrows knitted together. “I thought you hated rum.”

Lydia paused, the coffeepot in hand, as if this fact sounded familiar. “Do I hate rum?”

“You hate rum,” Lizzy, Jane, and Kitty answered in unison.

Lydia scowled. “You’re all so loud.” Then she let out a tortured cry. “How am I supposed to get a cup of coffee if there’s no cups for the coffee?”

Jane was already coming around the counter, picking up a sleeve of to-go coffee cups from below the register as she passed. Lizzy followed, taking the cups from her sister’s hand before she could restock them. “You’re not on the schedule today.”

Jane smiled, trying to grab them back. “Neither are you.”

“And where are all the sour cherry muffins?” Lydia moaned.

Lizzy ignored the question as she dodged Jane’s reach, then handed the sleeve of cups to Lydia. “Here. Restock these.”

Lydia offered another pout, and Lizzy was about to remind her that if she had bothered showing up for her shift, she would have known they sold out of sour cherry muffins hours ago, but then their mother’s voice pierced the air again.

“It’s not going to take up the whole bakery! I just need a little space up front for a small display. You won’t even notice it.” She emerged from the back office and marched through the kitchen, the mannequin legs still cradled under her arm. Mr. Bennet followed behind her, though there was no evidence he was actually listening to his wife. He was still studying his paperwork as he stopped in the doorway.

Mrs. Bennet walked to the front of the bakery, lifting the mannequin legs onto the table by the window. “We’ll put it right here. That way, even if she doesn’t come in, she’ll see it when she walks by, you know?”

Lizzy watched, amused. “And who is ‘she’?”

Mrs. Bennet’s eyes lit up, realizing she had stumbled into a rare moment when she had her family’s attention.

“Oh, you haven’t heard?” She abandoned the leggings to waltz into the center of the room. “Well, Donna called me last night with some very interesting news.”

Lizzy leaned across the glass counter and rested her chin in her hand. She knew what was coming. Her mother wielded gossip the way the Dutch masters wielded a paintbrush.

“You know that house near the end of Lily Pond Lane?” Mrs. Bennet said. “The enormous glass one that’s been empty for ages?”

“Marv’s Lament?” Kitty ventured.

Mrs. Bennet continued as if she hadn’t heard. “You know, Marv’s Lament! Well, someone rented it! A rich businesswoman from Manhattan. And you’ll never guess what she made her money in!” Mrs. Bennet paused to not-so-subtly motion down to her bedazzled purple leggings as she waited for an answer.

“Charades?” Lizzy offered.

Mrs. Bennet rolled her eyes. “No, fashion . Her name is Annabelle something or other, and she owns a chain of boutiques that’s worth millions!”

Kitty’s head popped up from her phone. “You mean Annabelle Pierce? I just saw a piece about her on Bloomberg ! She expanded her mom’s clothing store in Denver to over two hundred locations across the country and she’s only like thirty-two or something. She’s brilliant. God, do you think she’d be willing to look over my business plan? Maybe I could even—”

“And she’s coming here for the whole summer!” Mrs. Bennet cut her off. “Can you believe it? Just when I’ve started to break into the fashion business myself. It’s kismet!”

Lydia yawned as she ripped open a sugar packet. “So what? Rich women from New York are like a dime a dozen here.”

“Oh really?” Mrs. Bennet said, turning to glare at her youngest daughter, even as a sly grin pulled at her lips. “And how many of those rich women bring their single brother with them?”

This made Lydia perk up enough to abandon her coffee. “Brother?”

Mrs. Bennet nodded, biting her bottom lip. “The real estate agent who brokered the deal is friends with Donna’s neighbor’s sister, and she said this Annabelle woman was looking for a place for the whole summer for her, her sister, and her brother. Her single, rich brother. At least, that’s what Donna said. Supposedly there’s some other man coming in on the weekends, too, a friend of the brother or something.”

Lydia’s expression flattened. “So he’s gay.”

Mrs. Bennet shot her a look. “He’s not gay.”

“To be fair, he could be gay,” Lizzy said, barely holding back a smile.

Her mother waved her off. “If he was gay, he’d go to Fire Island.”

Kitty looked as if she was going to object, but Mrs. Bennet barreled on.

“Anyway, according to Donna, they’re all supposed to arrive today, but no one has seen them yet.” She turned back to her husband. “So?”

There was a long moment before Mr. Bennet looked up from the bills in his hand. “What?”

Mrs. Bennet gestured wildly to the door. “Has Annabelle Pierce come in yet!”

“I didn’t see anybody named Annabelle.” His attention went back to the bills. “But two guys from the city stopped in a little while ago.”

All eyes turned to him.

“Two… men?” Mrs. Bennet took a step toward her husband. “Did you get their names?”

He paused, deigning to give the query a moment’s consideration. Meanwhile, Lizzy and Jane shared another look. They both knew their father probably remembered, but toying with his wife’s nerves was one of the few joys Mr. Bennet had these days. They let him savor it. “One of them was named Charlie something. Powell? Prince?”

“Pierce!” Mrs. Bennet practically screamed.

“Yeah. That was it.”

Mrs. Bennet let out a strangled cry as Kitty and Lydia eagerly leaned toward him.

“What did they say?” Kitty asked.

“Were they hot?” Lydia probed.

“Girls, focus!” their mother said, recovering. Then she turned back to her husband. “Tell me everything.”

Mr. Bennet’s frown returned. “It’s a bakery, Joanne. They came in, bought some muffins, and got some coffee. Then they asked where they could grab a drink tonight and Lizzy told them to go to Donato Lodge.”

Mrs. Bennet’s mouth fell open in horror as she turned to her second oldest daughter. “You sent them to the Lodge ?”

Lizzy cringed. When she’d recommended the Lodge to the palm tree hater, it had almost been a joke, a small payback for a man who obviously needed to be knocked down a few pegs. She hadn’t thought her mother would offer a critique. After all, she didn’t seem to mind that her daughters spent almost every Saturday night there. Of course, that was usually in the off-season, when their town was dead and the bar was only ever half-full with locals imbibing warm beer and Tater Tots. Summer changed its DNA, when tourists clogged the dance floor, making it feel like a Disneyland version of a dive bar.

“They said they wanted someplace authentic,” Lizzy replied with a shrug.

Lydia snorted out a laugh.

“Okay, you know what? This is fine,” Mrs. Bennet said almost to herself. “Completely fine. We can work with this.”

Jane sighed, betraying a half second of exasperation, which, for a woman who spent most weekdays teaching a room full of six-year-olds, was colossal. “Mom, can we not spend another summer trying to sell—”

“Come on, ladies! It’s Lux Leggings time!”

There was a collective groan across the bakery.

The only other thing as consistent as gossip in East Hampton Village was their mother’s dedication to a new multilevel marketing business every summer. By May, Mrs. Bennet would latch on to one that inevitably took over their entire basement for the season, and then, like clockwork, it would be abandoned by September. Last year it was Porto-Pockets, detachable pockets that could be stuck to any dress with Velcro. The year before had been the Shimmer Scrunchie, a hair accessory that featured solar-powered LED lights. Now their mother had decided the best way to succeed was by starting her own MLM from the ground up. So, after weeks of YouTube sewing tutorials and hundreds of yards of fabric strewn around the house, she was ready to bring her brainchild to market: Lux Leggings, the world’s only leggings with a built-in belt (patent pending).

Lydia frowned as her mother turned the disembodied mannequin legs so their zebra-print Lycra hips were angled toward the door. “You think this lady is going to want to buy your leggings?”

“You better hope so, or all five of you will be stuck working at the bakery until the end of time,” Mrs. Bennet quipped.

The comment lodged in Lizzy’s chest, heavy and sharp and too close to the truth. She had dreamed of leaving East Hampton since childhood, staying up past her bedtime to read countless breaking news stories about the world beyond her bedroom walls. Then, in twelfth grade, a hurricane tore through the Hamptons and she wrote about the town’s lack of preparedness for her school newspaper. The article was so explosive it was picked up by New York Magazine and almost got Marv impeached. But more importantly, it gave Lizzy a purpose: she wanted to be a journalist.

Six years and countless online classes squeezed in between her shifts at the bakery later, she earned her bachelor’s from SUNY. And maybe if she had wanted to stay in the Hamptons, covering stories close to home, that would have been enough. But she didn’t want to stay here. She was going to travel the world, covering issues that mattered to millions of people. And to do that, she needed her master’s. She had spent weeks perfecting her application to Columbia’s School of Journalism before finally sending it in. It was a long shot—she hadn’t even told her family—but then, on a mundane morning in March, she received her acceptance email. For a brief, shining moment, it felt like everything was finally falling into place. Like all the hard work and monotony had counted for something. Then, two days later, before she’d even figured out how to tell her parents, she walked into the bakery to find her father on the floor of the kitchen.

The stroke had been so severe that the paramedics said if they had arrived five minutes later, he would have died. And even though Mr. Bennet was out of the hospital after two weeks, claiming he would be back to his old self in no time, his doctor said recovery could take a year, if not more. Suddenly, Lizzy’s plan to spend the summer getting ready to start school in the fall was usurped by the need to keep the family business afloat. Columbia let her defer for a semester—space permitting—but she didn’t know if it was long enough. Her sisters did what they could, but none of them knew how to run the bakery the way she did. Even now, Lizzy realized, they hadn’t all bothered to show up. “Where’s Mary?”

Lydia waved her hand indiscriminately in the air. “I think she’s still tied to that tree on the North Shore for PETA.”

“It’s a Green Justice protest,” Kitty murmured, eyes back on her phone.

“Can we focus, please?” Mrs. Bennet clapped her hands, bringing the conversation back to herself. “I need you all to think big picture, m’kay? You girls show up to the Lodge tonight all wearing Lux Leggings. Annabelle comes in, sees them, and the seed will be planted. She’ll compliment you—of course—then she’ll ask where you bought them. She’ll tell her friends, they’ll all post about them online. Orders will come flying in! Then this Annabelle woman will see everyone wearing the leggings she discovered, and she’ll want to invest! And that brother of hers? Supposedly he works in mergers and acquisitions! He literally buys companies! You can bet he’ll take an interest, too. What else does he have to spend his money on? It’s like my mother always said: ‘A single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of—’?”

“Zebra-print leggings with an adjustable waistband?” Lizzy said, offering her mother an overly sweet smile.

“Well, he’s definitely not looking for a twenty-five-year-old with a mess of split ends and overalls.” Then Mrs. Bennet clicked her tongue in disappointment as she seemed to finally take in the pile of red hair on top of her daughter’s head. “Honestly, Lizzy. Did you even try that deep-conditioning mask I left in the bathroom?”

“I’m going with an organic seaweed treatment,” Lizzy said, fluffing her topknot and pretending to fix her flyaways. “You just take bits of seaweed you find floating by and grab them, which is actually really hard to do because they’re so slippery—”

Mrs. Bennet huffed and picked up her tote from where Jane had placed it. “I’m leaving. Bob! No more donuts! You have an appointment with your neurologist next week. Lizzy! I don’t want him eating any more donuts.” She didn’t wait for Lizzy’s reply, just turned to Lydia. “And I need you at home for inventory. We should narrow down the options for tonight.”

Lydia rolled her eyes. “But it’s eleven a.m. On Saturday .”

“Exactly. We have to get going,” Mrs. Bennet replied, her tote over her shoulder as she started for the door. “God, I haven’t even gone through the new bedazzled collection yet. You can help me with that, Jane.”

“Actually, I have to head to the school today and get the classroom ready for—”

“You can do that after,” their mother continued, undaunted. “Okay, I think that’s it. Now where’s Kitty? Kitty!”

Kitty looked up, brows pinched. “I’m right here.”

“Well, why didn’t you say so?” Their mother didn’t wait for an answer, just threw open the front door and ushered the women through. “I’m not waiting around all day, ladies! Come on!”

There was a flurry of goodbyes, a sympathetic look from Jane to Lizzy, and a final moan from Lydia before the door closed behind them with a ring of its tinny bell.

And just like that, the bakery was quiet again, with only Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours still playing overhead.