Chapter 1 #2
I bike away from the fish house, down Main Street, through Whitfield.
I pass bars and restaurants and the yacht club where I worked nights laundering linens as a teenager.
The Whitfields’ yacht is on display in perpetual drydock in front of the yacht club.
It’s its own kind of museum and people circle it, admiring the polished wood of the hull.
I shake my head as I always do at the idea of people who have yachts they don’t even use. Extra yachts.
I bike to the edge of town, away from the shops, to where the summer people live.
Elm trees line the streets and touch in the middle, giving the roads the most delicious spattering of dappled light.
My legs are a bit sore from my morning bike ride, but as I smell the thick salt air, it’s hard to believe this is still the same day.
I ride my bike in Boston only when I need to pick up my car.
I rent out the parking spot that comes with our apartment to a Boston College student for $200 per month and then park my car four miles away for $90.
This life hack has been a highlight of my year.
It pays for Gus’s baseball and makes me feel like I’m getting paid to exercise.
More than anything else, it reinforces my sense of self-sufficiency.
I can pull resources out of thin air. Every time I get on that bike, I mentally pay myself for the Peloton I never bought.
My primary worry of the day is Gus’s perpetually sullen mood, but my background worry is that I still need to email his Boston baseball league and ask for a refund for summer ball.
I have about $1,200 in my checking account, and the lifeguard camp he wants to do here would cost $1,000.
It’s pretty tight, though I guess we’ll be eating fish all summer for free.
I picture Gus in a white T-shirt with the word Lifeguard stamped in red.
When he’s sixteen, it would be an actual paying job, probably better pay than the fish house.
We could start coming back here for entire summers and sublet our apartment in Boston to students.
I pedal faster with the excitement of having just pulled more money out of nowhere.
The houses start to get larger and farther apart as I approach the Whitfield estate, Eight Oaks.
My younger sister, Patsy, and I used to do deliveries out here together because it was a fun ride at the end of the day.
We’d laugh and play music off our iPods, until we got to Eight Oaks’s gate at the end.
Then we’d get churchly quiet. Theirs is a black iron double gate adorned with gold acorns.
There are eight of them, intricately fashioned to have the exact imperfections of actual acorns, but each at least the size of my head.
They should be in a museum, not out here where birds can crap on them.
I think of my mother and how much she loved the careless way rich people treat valuable things.
If carelessness is aspirational, my mother nailed it when she walked away from us, easily her most valuable things.
I walk my bike through the open gates and gaze down the oak-lined driveway.
I am a million miles from the fluorescent lights of the fish house now, and I have to admit there’s nothing lovelier than Eight Oaks.
At the entrance to the property, the land is still wide enough that I can’t see the water on either side.
I get back on my bike and pass the stables on the left, made of river stones, where an older man is leading a black horse through an old wooden door.
On the right is a pool and two tennis courts, and in the distance there’s a small white clapboard chapel.
It’s not long before the house emerges in front of me.
Gleaming white limestone. You could not knock it down.
It would cost more to knock this place down than it did to build it, I think.
Tall, impenetrable, like the Whitfields themselves.
It’s now that I can see the water on both sides, so I get off my bike again.
The sounds of the Atlantic to the east and the bay to the west replace the crunch of gravel under my tires.
I try to imagine all this white noise surrounding me all the time; it’s all part of the ease.
I’m standing in the circular driveway, staring at the ten-foot-tall black high-gloss front doors, when I remember that I am not a front-door person.
The delivery entrance is around the side, so I wheel my bike through the formal gardens, where carefully manicured boxwoods alternate with giant blue hydrangeas, snapdragons, and lavender.
Rich people are always worried about the bees, I’ve noticed.
I drop my bike at the side entrance and ring the bell marked Deliveries.
The woman who has been opening this door since my very first delivery at nine years old appears.
She is rosy everywhere. Her cheeks, her lips, her pink top that looks like scrubs from a pediatric unit but is probably for cooking.
She’s in her late sixties now, which is not as shocking as the fact that I’ll be forty in January.
“You!” she says with a bright smile. “I haven’t seen you in years.”
“Yes, I’m just back for the summer.” I hand her the still-cool bag of shrimp. “Five pounds of shrimp.”
“Perfect timing. I was just setting up for cocktail hour.”
On the west veranda to catch the sunset, I don’t say. Breakfast is served on the east veranda for obvious reasons.
She reaches into her pink pocket and pulls out a carefully folded ten-dollar bill. She hands it to me and says, “Which one of Freddie’s daughters are you?”
“Thank you,” I say, taking the tip. “I’m Dolly. Here helping out for a bit.”
“I heard there was a fire.”
“Yes, a small one. We were lucky.”
“Well, I’m Gladys,” she says. “Welcome back to Whitfield.”
I tuck my ten-dollar bill into the front pocket of my shorts, always safer than the back, and I bike down the long driveway.
I slow down at the chapel, white clapboard with a pristine steeple pointing straight up to heaven, as if the Whitfields have a direct line.
It would actually explain a lot. When we were kids, Patsy and I called it the princess chapel.
We imagined a princess in a bedazzled tiara and a gentle man (we took this literally and pronounced each word—the man would be gentle, like our dad) helping her navigate her giant dress onto the back of a white horse.
That she got to keep. We always added that clause because we were more interested in her getting to keep the horse than we were in the man with his gentle ways.
I should call Patsy about the fire, but I haven’t because I don’t feel like doing our resentful dance.
It’s the one where I act like it’s fine that I’m handling everything and she acts like I’m so lucky to be home.
Which I am; I love it here. But I still don’t think it would kill her to take a turn being the emergency contact.
I pedal back toward town, and the leafy streets are quiet.
No mail delivery. No UPS truck. The day is catching up with me, and I am surprisingly sleepy when I see a brand-new black Range Rover come to a stop on the wrong side of the road twenty yards ahead.
I keep pedaling in its direction and Stewart Whitfield gets out of the car.
I know it’s him before I see his face. It’s in the way he stands.
Tall, broad shoulders thrown back. As if he has a vantage point higher than mine so he can survey the vast expanse of all he owns.
My best friend, Naomi—an avid Whitfield watcher—is going to flip.
Stewart is generally considered the handsomest of the Whitfields, and is certainly the most powerful as the heir apparent to the role of CEO of Whitfield Industries.
Unlike his playboy brother and his socialite sister, he’s rarely spotted around here.
He’s about my age, and I used to see him sometimes in the summers when I was young.
He’d come into the fish house (crabcakes, extra tartar sauce, no thank you to the plastic fork) or I’d see him as I headed into work at the yacht club.
Stewart Whitfield is always winning—boats, horses, Yale—but, notably, I struck him out in summer Little League when I was eleven years old.
If you’re a townie, you remember striking out a Whitfield.
I don’t slow down as I pass, but he calls to me. “Excuse me!”
I stop my bike and turn, just my head. His dark brown hair is precisely cut.
It’s shorter than it was in the engagement photo that made the cover of The Boston Globe in February and was then reprinted three weeks in a row in The Whitfield Gazette.
He’s wearing a blue blazer, a white shirt, and the tan of someone who doesn’t have three jobs.
Just the idea of him annoys me. I get off my bike with a pinched smile and yank down my denim shorts where they’ve ridden up.
“I was wondering if you had a phone charger. For a car,” he says.
“I’m on a bike,” I say.
“Yes. I see that. I was just hoping you might…” He holds up his dead phone and nods to his car behind him. All sleek lines of Range Rover perfection, shining like it’s been buffed by the soft bellies of kittens. The front left tire is flat.
“Your tire,” I say.
“Yes. It just happened and I started to call my assistant when my phone died. It’s been a hell of a day, workwise.
” He holds up his phone as if I can tell by looking at it just how hard it’s been working.
“All around, actually.” He looks to the side like he’s trying to remember why he’s standing there, or maybe to give me a chance to admire his breathtaking profile.
The straight line of his jaw, the slight bump on his nose that turns his perfectly symmetrical face into something more masculine.
We get it, Stewart. You have everything.