y
’sin the mood for a cocktail. Bikini under her dress, a spring in her step. Why not? To be fair, it’s only four-thirty,
and it’s only Monday. But there are just two Mondays left in August, and then there’s Labor Day, and then life around the
island will start to slow down, and, who knows, maybe a Monday cocktail won’t even be a possibility for much longer. Gather
ye rosebuds and all of that.
Something she loves about Poor People’s Pub is that no matter how hot and bright the day it’s always cool and dark inside,
just as a bar should be. Today there was rain, then sun—it’s hot now, and is thirsty.
“Mudslide, please,” she says as she slides onto a barstool. She smiles outrageously at the bartender—he’s younger than ,
but not illegally so—and tries not to take it to heart when he doesn’t give her much of a smile back. He’s busy.
She wonders if Jack Baker might join her. Why not?
It can’t hurt to ask.
She texts him.
Her Mudslide arrives, and she sucks down a third of it right away. Man oh man, whoever invented the Mudslide deserves a prize of some sort. What’s the equivalent of a Nobel Prize for cocktails? should invent it, and assign herself the job of publicizing it. She would slay that job.
Still no answer from Jack. She texts him again. Should she call him?
She probably shouldn’t.
But she does.
No answer.
The past sneaks in, as it has a wicked tendency to do. Many summers ago sat right at this very bar and had a drink
with Anthony Puckett, the local writer who is the reason she came to the island in the first place. She’d been chasing a PR
opportunity, trying to get Anthony and his father photographed by Annie Leibovitz. Never panned out, then the father died,
and obviously after that it was too late. But, hey, found herself a new home. There had been an older man in Manhattan
at that time, and was in the process of leaving him. What better way to leave someone than to move yourself to an island?
She orders a second Mudslide and checks her phone again. Jack Baker owes her nothing—not a call back, not a text. Intellectually,
she knows this. She knows that in their relationship she was the pursuer, not the pursued. She also knows that calling whatever
went on between them a “relationship” is a fairly generous term.
She’s known all summer that he was also seeing Juliana’s neighbor Nicola, who is pretty in a fresh, unassuming way, which is exactly the opposite of the way is pretty. is pretty in a processed, Instagram-ready way. She can’t settle on a hair color. She has eyelash extensions—the longer the better—and henna brows. If she didn’t tan so well naturally (thank god she does) that would be fake too, and as the winter approaches certainly it will be. She can’t stand the way she looks with no color. But even acknowledging this, and even somewhat liking Nicola, she can’t get her mind off Jack. What if he’s The One? If he’s The One for but not The One for Nicola (and, seriously, there’s almost no way he’s really into someone who spends her days with her hands in a fish tank)? Thus has a right—nay, a duty !—to wrench him away from Nicola.
Sure, it would be better if the act were less forceful than wrenching , but.
could call someone else, but who? Juliana? Taylor? One of her local island friends? (She does have them, though this
summer she’s been distracted with her work for Buchanan, and for Juliana, and of course with Jack.) On a Monday, people are
probably working. She feels a little bad—she does! She really does!—that she told Taylor about Juliana’s name having been
Jade in college at the party over the weekend. It just slipped out while she was drinking. But Taylor had said she could keep
a secret, hadn’t she? Surely she’s not going to say anything. doesn’t even know why it matters, but it seems important
to Jade that nobody find out.
Oops, Juliana.
I Don’t Like Mondays by The Boomtown Rats is playing. ’s brother used to play this song.
“Sweet sixteen, ain’t that peachy keen?” sings the bartender under his breath as he racks dirty glasses.
“You know this song is about a suicide, right?” tells him. This gets his attention. He looks up, startled. Good.
“Whoa. Mood shift. I thought it was about, like, not liking Mondays.”
“Well, it’s not,” says . Her voice sounds more shrill than she means it to.
The bartender tells another customer he has to change the keg on the Captain’s Daughter Double IPA. (This beer, has
heard, is so strong that there are some places that won’t serve a customer more than two.)
When he comes back, she decides, she’ll have one more Mudslide. Just one. They’re on the smaller side, after all.
“Can I have another, please?” She taps the edge of her glass with a turquoise nail. (These too are completely unnatural: acrylics. Nicola’s are cut as short as they go, probably so she doesn’t get like crab poop caught in them. Do crabs poop? There’s so much about the world still doesn’t know.)
The bartender looks at her carefully. Okay, has he finally noticed that she’s pretty ?
“You driving?”
She sighs. Is losing her touch?
Did ever have a touch?
“No,” she says untruthfully—her car is parked across the street. “I’d like one more, please, and then I’m going to walk to
another establishment.”
’s college boyfriend, a lacrosse player from Maryland named Ryan Griffin, broke up with her at the beginning of the
season senior year, fourteen months into their relationship. It was his last year of college lacrosse, and he wanted to give
it his all. No distractions.
“Fair enough,” said , playing it cool. Inside, though, she was dying. (She was a distraction ? This whole time, she had considered herself an asset .) “I totally get it.”
“I’m impressed by how you’re handling this,” said Ryan. He gave her a friendly arm tap that had a definite guys-in-the-locker-room
vibe. “I’ll be honest, it’s not what I was predicting.”
When he was leaving she couldn’t resist, though. She grabbed his sleeve and pulled him back. “But we had fun, right?” She
could hear the note of pleading in her voice and she hated herself for it.
“Sure,” he said. “Lots of fun.”
Could she help it that she called him a couple of times after nights out? Okay, more than a couple. Among her many traits,
some good and some bad, is the fact that Salazar is an incurable drunk dialer.
It was after one of these calls that he hit her with a whopper so hard it still stings when she lets herself think about it, which she doesn’t do often. “Your problem, , is that you don’t know when things are over. You never pick up on the end of the party.” He said this to her gently, and that’s what gutted her. He wasn’t trying to wound her. He was trying to educate her.
was, in a word, bewildered. How did other people know when things were over? What was she missing? She’s bewildered
by this still.
The third Mudslide goes down like water. It’s practically evil, how good these things are. She pays then heads toward the
door. Though she’s been in Poor People’s many times, she’s never before noticed that the floors are uneven. They must be,
because she stumbles a bit on the way out the door.
There’s a twentysomething couple on their way in, the guy in a Sox cap and a T-shirt, the woman in a pretty pink beach cover-up
and flip-flops.
“Whoa, hey, you okay?” says the guy. He catches her by the elbow.
“Fine,” she says breezily.
“You’re not driving, are you?”
“No,” says . Why do people keep asking her this? She can feel the couple’s eyes on her as she crosses the street, so she
gets out her phone and studies it while she waits for their attention to shift back to their own day.
It’s just after 6 p.m. There’s still a lot of the evening to fill.
This is why I don’t like Mondays, she thinks. This, right here. This is exactly why I don’t like Mondays.
When she gets in her car, she points it toward Spring Street and drives as slowly as a great-great-grandmother. The sidewalks
in town are teeming. She slows down so much that the car behind her honks. Two mopeds by the statue of Rebecca almost throw
her off her game, but they swerve just in time.
In her mid-twenties, when she was first living in New York City and working for a small PR firm, Salazar briefly saw a therapist named Eleanor. Eleanor was the first person ever talked to— really talked to—about her family.
’s father left when was ten years old and her brother, Tyler, was fifteen. At the time she remembered everyone
talking about what a devastating event this was for Tyler. Such a precarious age for a boy! Just entering the most difficult
of the teenage years, and having to navigate them without a father present!
“Meanwhile I was like, hello ?” told Eleanor. “It was not a great situation for a ten-year-old girl either. Let me tell you. But nobody cared.”
All people could focus on was the fact that Tyler had made the varsity football team as a sophomore and his father, who’d
moved from the family’s home on Long Island to McLean, Virginia, would not be able to attend his games.
Her fingers hover over her phone screen. Should she text Jack Baker?
Your problem, , is that you don’t know when things are over. You never pick up on the end of the party. She sees now that this is—has always been—her Achilles’ heel. If you please, Jack Baker isn’t the only one with an Achilles
problem.
What did she expect, anyway? That he’d want to take on the PGA Tour with him? Obviously not, although she did think
she’d be pretty good at coming up with spectating outfits. White denim skirt, pastel top (sleeveless?), cute white sneakers.
She pulls into the small parking lot at Mohegan Bluffs. She gets out, takes her phone and her keys, locks the car, starts
down the stairs. It’s 6:43. Sunset is—what? Maybe an hour away. The day is waning, and summer itself is waning too. She’ll
go down to the beach, and she’ll engage in something that is not always her forte. That thing is Introspection.
Finally she reaches the bottom of the stairs. The beach is completely deserted. The sight of so much water, the rocky, unpeopled
sand, fills with a sudden, piercing loneliness.
When ’s parents divorced, Tyler, , and their mother stayed on in the family home in Plainview; it was the only place and her brother had ever lived. It emerged sometime later—when was entering her own precarious teenage years!—that ’s mother had had an affair with a client at the real estate office where she worked. She’d sold this man a three-bedroom, two-and-a-half-bath house with an “exquisite gas fireplace” and a “generous backyard, perfect for weekend barbecues with the family.” And then she’d slept with him.
This was why ’s father left, you understand. But nobody told for three years. When she confronted Tyler about
it—by then he was a senior, a veritable giant in shoulder pads with eye black perpetually smeared along his orbital bones—he
shrugged and said, yeah, he’d always known but they’d asked him not to tell . She’d been so young, and had so many more
years to live under their mother’s roof.
“Can you freaking believe that?” told Eleanor.
It was Eleanor who helped understand that by trying to shield her from the truth her parents damaged her in an irrevocable
way.
Soon after what Eleanor called ’s “significant progress,” changed jobs, which necessitated changing health coverage,
and Eleanor was no longer part of her network. could have found another therapist, but the thought of starting all
over again with someone else was exhausting. How was she supposed to re-excavate the past when the shovel was so heavy the first time around?
Why is she thinking about all of this now? Eleanor hasn’t crossed her mind in years.
Then, miraculously, her phone pings with a text. It’s Jack. It’s Jack! He’s on a boat moored out in Great Salt. Johnny O’Neill’s
boat.
(Is she supposed to know who Johnny O’Neill is?)
People are hanging out. She should stop by.
She waits a few beats, not wanting to appear too eager, then texts back, K . She wants to say something more, but she forces herself to exercise restraint. You never pick up on the end of the party.
IT’S AN AZIMUT. GORGEOUS BOAT.
Okay. is not exactly sure what that means, but ooookay. Why not? She taps her acrylics on the phone screen, thinking,
then types:
HOW DO I FIND U?
TEXT WHEN YOU GET TO PAYNES . She gives this the thumbs-up. SOMEONE WILL GET YOU. BAD INTENTIONS
She texts back, ?
NAME OF THE BOAT. BAD INTENTIONS.
Well, okay, then. As she makes her way back up the stairs she observes that she’s more sober than she was going down them,
which is a good thing for getting herself to Payne’s but not promising for the rest of the night. She’ll catch back up when
she gets on the boat.
By the time makes it onto the boat—true to Jack’s word, someone picked her up at the dock in an inflatable—it’s almost
sunset. She clambers up on the platform and follows the noise to whatever the living room on a yacht is called (the salon,
she learns). A rough count of the people comes in at about twenty—some in little pockets on the crescent couch, others out
by the railings. There must be bedrooms below, surmises, and who knows who’s hiding out there.
She sees Jack nowhere. (Could he be in one of the bedrooms? Her stomach curdles as she considers this possibility.) A man in uniform offers her a drink. A crew member! This boat has a crew. Wow. has finally arrived at the Big Time.
“Thank you,” she says, when the crew member returns with an elegant blond drink in a martini glass. “What is it?”
“A Limoncello Lemon Drop,” he says. “It’s a nod to the boat’s Italian heritage.”
“Well, then,” answers . “Ciao.” It’s the only Italian she knows. Where is Jack? She doesn’t know, and nobody else on the boat has acknowledged her or tried
to welcome her. That’s okay. She’ll take herself on a tour. In the galley (she knows enough not to call it a kitchen), she
waits until nobody is looking and pulls open a drawer. Each glass and cup has its own wooden cutout in exactly the right size
and shape. It’s enchanting. This setup reminds of a dollhouse she once had as a child. There’s a row of bar glasses,
and another of wineglasses, and a row of espresso cups.
“The richer the person, the smaller the coffee,” she observes. The only person to hear her is a crew member, who chuckles.
The same crew member as before? A different one? ’s not sure. She requests another Lemon Drop, and in no time at all
it’s delivered back to her. Service with a smile.
When drink number two is half gone, she finally spies Jack, out on the deck. Has he been there the whole time? He’s leaning
over the railing, talking to a pretty brunette in a red dress.
“Rude,” she says under her breath. He invited her, and here she is, and he’s not even looking around for her! Should she approach,
or should she wait until he sees her? She stands for a minute, contemplating. She feels very alone. She can’t gain a foothold
at this party. She can’t get any traction.
But just as she’s deciding whether to stay or go, the fun begins.
Okay, now this party is speaking ’s language. A few people begin jumping off the bow into Great Salt Pond, landing with whoops in the dark water below. Should ? Why not? She knew she wore this bikini for a reason. She shimmies out of her dress and stands on the bow. There are lights on the boat, and lights under the boat too. She sways for a moment, then a guy behind her says, “You okay?”
Seriously. Why do people keep asking this?
“I’m chill,” she says. She thinks about her best childhood friend, Caitlin, whose family had a pool with a diving board. This
is where perfected her famous swan dive. “Ready, set, execute,” she says to herself. This is what she and Caitlin used
to say from the diving board. After each dive, they’d rate each other.
In she goes.
She gives herself an eight, maybe an eight and a half. Slight bend in the knees; she could feel it. Still, not bad.
Wow. The water is a little colder than she imagined it would be. She feels like the dive has propelled her all the way to
the bottom of the pond. It hasn’t, of course, and she pops up not far from the boat. It’s all good.
When is the last time swam at night? She can’t remember. It’s invigorating. Exhilarating. She’s never felt more alive.
The other jumpers have all climbed back onto the boat, where the crew members are probably wrapping them in like the plushest
of the plush towels. But not . No. She’ll stay in. She floats on her back, staring up at the starry sky, at the plump,
bright moon. How come she never noticed how many stars are visible here on Block Island? She flips over on her stomach: dead
man’s float. Then she strokes out, swimming among the other moored boats. is a strong swimmer, owing to the lessons
she took as a child. The hours she and Caitlin spent in Caitlin’s pool, racing up and down the length, holding somersault
contests.
How much time passes? She doesn’t know. Should she find her way back to the boat? Maybe. She will soon. She will now. She can still see the lights, shining like beacons, though admittedly the boat is farther away than she realized. And there’s more than one boat with lights, so how does she even know if she’s looking at the right one?
The bump comes out of nowhere.
There’s almost no time for it to hurt. It comes so fast.