17. Amalfi Lemons
In the days following the Pink and White Party, Coco expects life at Triple Eight to quiet down, but she’s busier than ever.
One of her duties, which wasn’t mentioned earlier, is applauding Leslee as she congratulates herself.
“I heard multiple people saying that Saturday night was the best party they’d ever been to. Like, in their lives,” Leslee says.
“Everyone had a great time,” Coco says.
“Rachel McMann, the dentist’s wife, is leaking all kinds of videos,” Leslee says. “You know what that gets her?”
“Followers?” Coco says.
“Blackballed,” Leslee says. “Bull and I loathe social media. We prefer to experience our lives in person.”
Right. Coco checked for both Bull and Leslee online and came up empty, which she finds strange. Leslee loves attention and could easily cultivate a devoted following on Instagram in the aspirational-lifestyle space. Coco nearly mentions this—but why feed the beast?
“Lots of people reached out to thank me,” Leslee says. “And I’m keeping track of the ones who didn’t. I haven’t heard from the Kapenashes. I haven’t heard from Delilah Drake, but that tracks because I’m pretty sure she hates my guts. I haven’t heard from Blond Sharon.” Leslee pauses. “She’s apparently a vicious gossip. I need to know what she thought.”
Blond Sharon? Coco thinks. That’s a person’s name? Then she remembers. “Oh, she and the Steamship guy had to leave during the dancing. She said she had some kind of emergency at home, but she made a point of telling me she had a fabulous time.”
Leslee winds her long dark hair around her wrist and forearm. Coco has learned this is a nervous tic, but it’s actually kind of fetching, so much so that Coco is considering growing her hair out.
“Someone killed my Rothschild’s slipper orchid,” Leslee says. “It was fine before the party, and the morning after I found it wilted.”
“Maybe it drank too much,” Coco says.
Leslee offers a vague smile. “Do you think the skinny-dipping took things a step too far?”
“That was the best part,” Coco says. And it was, right up to the moment Lamont swam away.
“Oh, yes,” Leslee says. “I thought so too.”
Coco’s other tasks are more straightforward but also more frustrating. The first pages of her Moleskine notebook are filled with lists, notes, and instructions; she also keeps a detailed log of her productivity in case Leslee ever asks her to account for her time. On Monday afternoon, Leslee informs Coco that Bull is hosting a breakfast meeting the next day and he’d like coffee, a fruit salad, and a dozen morning buns from Wicked Island Bakery.
“He likes mango in his fruit salad,” Leslee says. “We had it every day on St. John.”
Right, because St. John is a tropical island where mangoes grow on trees, Coco thinks. On Nantucket, thirty miles out in the Atlantic, she has to go to four places before she finds a mango that isn’t as hard as a rock. However, the mango is a breeze compared to the morning buns.
To get the morning buns, Coco has to rise at five thirty in order to be standing in line at six when the bakery opens, and then she learns the limit per customer is six, and no amount of bribery (Coco offered to pay double; she offered a hundred-dollar bill) can persuade the girl behind the counter to give her a dozen.
In the end, this doesn’t matter. The breakfast goes largely uneaten.
On Tuesday night, Kacy texts Coco that Eric had a fishing charter cancel for the following day and he has offered to take Kacy and Coco out on the boat. Coco says: I wish I could but I’m too busy. Kacy texts back: How do two people create so much work?
Coco wonders this as well. On Wednesday morning, she provisions for the household. She buys steak tips and salmon fillets from the Nantucket Meat and Fish Market, then heads down the street to Pip and Anchor for a wedge of Savage cheese (sourced from the von Trapp family farm in Vermont) and a certain organic rosé that Leslee likes. Coco selects tomatoes, lettuce, and herbs from Bartlett’s Farm. (“Don’t you want to use Sea View Farm?” she asked Leslee. “The owners, Jeffrey and Delilah, were at your party.” “Go to Bartlett’s, please,” Leslee said. “As I mentioned, Delilah never thanked me.”) Next it’s off to 167 Raw for bluefish paté, jumbo shrimp, and a key lime pie. Then Coco heads into town—where finding parking is like an episode of Dude, You’re Screwed—to procure a loaf of sourdough, sliced thin, from Born and Bread. Leslee has requested a growler of Wandering Haze IPA from Cisco Brewers as well as Tanqueray and a bottle of Flor de Ca?a 18 rum (something else Bull developed a taste for in St. John) from Nantucket Wine and Spirits. Coco rounds out her errands with a trip to the mid-island Stop and Shop (with her cart and her list, she thinks, It’s official—I’m a mom) and a visit to Dan’s Pharmacy, where she picks up prescriptions for Leslee (Ambien, Ativan) and Bull (Viagra, eww).
Coco is about to text Kacy: Today I ran all over hell’s half acre. She realizes she sounds like her mother, deletes this, and writes, Provisioning today required nine different stops! Surely Kacy will think this is hyperbole. It’s not.
When Coco arrives back at Triple Eight with all the goods, she groans: There’s a package waiting by the front door. The UPS and FedEx trucks pull in several times a day (setting off the alarm both coming and going; the chimes are starting to trigger headaches), and Coco is responsible for opening the packages, saving the return slips, and breaking down the boxes. She layers them in the back of Baby like some kind of cardboard mille-feuille awaiting her next trip to the dump out in Madaket, twenty-five minutes away.
Most of the packages are clothes for Leslee from places like Cult Gaia, Rat and Boa, Retrofête. Others are linens and home goods, some from Serena and Lily, some from Ban Ban Studio in LA. But this box, she sees, has been shipped from Italy. It’s marked PERISHABLE. Coco imagines a craggy chunk of Parmesan, a loop of exotic salume, a whole black truffle. But once Coco gets the box—along with all her other bags and packages—upstairs, she slices through the top and finds a wooden crate filled with straw and, nestled within the straw, a dozen limoni. Lemons.
“My Amalfi lemons!” Leslee cries. She lifts one out of the box with cupped hands as though it’s a baby chick. She holds it out for Coco to see, to smell. It’s the roundest, most fragrant lemon Coco has ever seen or smelled. It’s a lemon worthy of a van Gogh painting. Each lemon is swaddled in a little white jacket.
“These are the best lemons in the world,” Leslee says. “The most flavorful. The juiciest.”
“Will you use them in a recipe?” Coco asks, though she has yet to see Leslee cook. The provisioning and specialty ingredients are all for Bull—he’ll grill up the steak tips for lunch, cut the salmon into tartare for a late-afternoon snack. Leslee eats sourdough toast, sometimes with a slice of tomato on top, sometimes with the Savage cheese from Pip and Anchor. Bull and Leslee go out for dinner every single night. But maybe the arrival of the Amalfi lemons warrants an evening at home—a scampi with the shrimp Coco bought, perhaps?
“They’re to display,” Leslee says. She disrobes the lemons, places them artfully in a white ceramic bowl, and sets the bowl on the kitchen island.
Coco checks the packing slip. One dozen Amalfi lemons cost Leslee two hundred and twenty-four euros, plus sixty euros in shipping. Two hundred and eighty-four euros for lemons that—if Coco has to guess—will sit in that bowl until they soften and grow spots of green mold.
This gives Coco pause. She thinks of her mother, Georgi, slicing Black Forest ham behind the deli counter at Harps. Georgi’s job is not glamorous, but at least it has a purpose. Then Coco thinks of schoolteachers, police officers, brain surgeons, fishermen, accounts receivable staff, customer-service reps, public defenders, third-shift factory workers, and bus drivers. What would they make of a woman who spends two hundred and eighty-four euros on lemons just because they look pretty on the counter? Coco has often been appalled by the waste in this house—Leslee wants things just to have them; most of the food never gets eaten, half the outfits never get worn—but this is the first time Coco wants to speak up.
But… she has become seduced by the luxuries of her new life—waking up in her king bed, driving Baby down the Polpis Road, ordering lobster salad sandwiches from Something Natural. Instead of making a big deal about the lemons, she decides, she will express her disapproval by leaving the kitchen without putting the groceries away. Leslee has two hands; she can do it.
Coco says, “I’ll take these prescriptions down to your bathroom.”
Leslee isn’t listening. She’s too busy fondling her lemons.
Downstairs, before she puts away the prescriptions, Coco pops into the library, which has become her refuge. She finished A Spark of Light by Jodi Picoult last night and is ready for something new. She pulls out Pachinko by Min Jin Lee, which she has long wanted to read.
As she’s heading down the hall to the primary suite, she hears Bull shouting. Coco nearly drops the book and the bag of pills.
“We should goddamned well be grandfathered in!” This is followed by more profanity—and then what sounds like Bull’s phone hitting the wall.
Coco hesitates, terrified that Bull is going to storm out of his office and realize she heard him. But she’s where she’s supposed to be, doing what she’s supposed to be doing. She keeps going, averting her eyes as she passes Bull’s office; she can see the door is ajar.
“Coco!” Bull calls. His voice sounds improbably cheerful.
She backs up a few steps and pokes her head in. “Hi?”
“Come on in,” he says. “Sit down.”
Coco doesn’t want to go in—she’s holding a book she took from the library without permission and also Bull’s Viagra. But what choice does she have? She steps inside but remains by the doorway.
“Close the door,” Bull says.
This is it, then,Coco thinks. The moment when Bull does the predictable thing and tries to seduce her. I’ve wanted you since the moment I saw you at the Banana Deck, your ass in those cutoffs, your tits in that T-shirt, your eyes, your eyes, your eyes. Coco desperately wants to get her screenplay into the hands of Bull’s contacts. But is she willing to sleep with him?
She closes the door and takes a seat across from him.
He comes out from behind the desk and leans against it, facing her. “How’s everything going?”
“Great,” she says.
“I thought we had an agreement,” he says. “I’m here for the airing of grievances. I’ve got your back. I know working for Leslee isn’t easy.” He tilts his head. “Is it?”
Coco isn’t sure what to say. This could be a trick, a way of evaluating her loyalty. “This job is pretty much what I thought it would be. Leslee makes her expectations clear and I try to exceed them.”
Bull laughs. “God, you’re good.” He lowers his voice and says, “Can we agree the things in this office stay between us?”
Coco is certain now that this is a trap. “Sure.”
“We really want to make Nantucket work,” Bull says. “The other places we’ve tried… well, let’s just say things got uncomfortable. Leslee has a tough time making female friends. No, let me correct myself—she makes friends easily, she just can’t keep them. Other women are threatened by her. She’s beautiful, she’s fun… and she’s naturally flirtatious, that’s just her nature. But she’s a complex creature, which is why I want to check in periodically and make sure you’re okay.”
“I’m okay,” Coco says. She really wishes she weren’t holding the man’s Viagra.
“You probably heard me yelling.”
Coco shrugs. “I was just passing—”
“I’ve built my beverage-distribution business from the ground up,” he says. “My parents owned a shop on the Nullarbor Plain—do you know where that is? It’s a desolate stretch of nowhere in the Australian outback. We used to sell to all the coaches and long-haul lorries that came through. Snacks, drinks, hot meals. I got to know the blokes who delivered our supplies and when I turned eighteen, I went to work for one of them. I rose up in the company, then left and started my own company, and I expanded outside of Australia. Now I distribute to all of Indo. But freaking snowflakes are everywhere, whinging about ecosystems…” He trails off. “I don’t mean to unload on you, I just don’t want you to think I’m a bad guy if you overhear me using some salty language.”
“Not a problem,” Coco says.
Bull notices the book in her hand. “Are you a reader, then?”
“I am. I borrowed this from the library. I’ll put it back when I’m finished.”
“No worries. I’m glad someone’s taking advantage of that room.”
“Are you a reader?” Coco asks.
“Used to be, a bit. These days I mostly read scripts.”
Coco freezes. Is now the time? Can she tell him she has a finished screenplay entitled Rosebush? No, she thinks. It’s too soon. Somehow, she senses this.
“I should get back to work,” Coco says, standing. “Leslee was excited to receive her lemons.”
“It’s appalling, right?” Bull says. “Spending so much money on lemons.” He gives a dry laugh. “And yet I’ve done crazier things to try to make that woman happy. Speaking of which, I heard the party got pretty wild at the end? I conked out right after dinner.”
“It was just the right kind of wild,” Coco says. “I’m actually still exhausted. I worked nineteen straight hours on Saturday.”
“You’ll be paid,” Bull says. “Plus a bonus.”
“I was wondering if I could have a day off, or even an afternoon?”
“Of course!” Bull says. “Why don’t you finish up whatever you’re doing now and take the rest of the day for yourself? Leslee has pickleball this afternoon, then we’re going to the Field and Oar Club with Madam Busybody.”
Ha-ha,Coco thinks. Busy Ambrose. “Would that be okay?”
“Go,” Bull says.
Coco delivers the prescriptions to the bathroom and heads back upstairs to finish putting away the groceries because she’s certain Leslee didn’t do it. She’s right; Leslee is nowhere to be found, and the groceries are all in their bags on the counter. Coco’s mood is lighter now, and she takes great satisfaction in separating produce by color, pouring dry pasta into plastic containers, making sure the edges of boxes are lined up. Coco craved this kind of attention to detail when she was a kid. There was always enough food in her house but everything was shoved into the cabinets willy-nilly; cans routinely fell to the linoleum floor, the flour got weevils, Bree and her kids used to leave bags of chips open, so they went stale. Coco can admit now that while she never dreamed of the kind of extravagant plenty the Richardsons enjoy, she did long for things to be… nice.
When Coco is finished her “home editing,” she brings one of the Amalfi lemons to her nose and inhales. Ahhh, she thinks. She’s free.
She gets a text from Kacy: We’re leaving now, are you sure you can’t join us? We can cruise over and be there in twenty.
Coco gnaws on her bottom lip. She hates to lie, but oh, well: Wish I could! Leslee wants me to detail her car. Have fun!
She springs into action. Bikini, cutoffs, an old Soggy Dollar T-shirt, her straw bag that looks cute as long as you don’t get close enough to see the fraying fibers and the holes. She waits at her apartment window until Leslee pops out of Triple Eight wearing a white tennis skirt and visor, gets into her shiny G-Wagon (Coco took it to the car wash the day before), and crunches off down the shell driveway.
There are some things Coco wants from the big house. Is she brave enough to take them?
Yes. She snatches a bottle of Tanqueray and a bottle of champagne. From the kitchen, she swipes sugar packets and… two of the Amalfi lemons. Her straw bag is sagging with the weight; the bottles clink against each other, making what can only be described as a pilfered-alcohol sound. But it’s fine; Leslee is gone, Bull is back to yelling on the phone, this time in a foreign language. The man contains multitudes, and Coco makes a mental note to look up the Nullarbor Plain.
She heads out to the beach, whistles, and waves her arms. Sorry, Kace, she thinks. She has another kind of fishing in mind.