Chapter 4
DENNY HAD MET Anna Denton at a Montauk bar when she was thirty-two years old.
He was five years older, coming out of a rocky and long relationship with a woman who had been a mediocre and overpaid private chef to multimillionaires in the Hamptons.
They had never married—his call. Mostly, he never considered himself the marrying type, and he warned Anna of this right from the beginning.
It was a pink, frothy day, start of season, as the East Enders liked to call it.
Back then, he and Anna had both lived in the city but had found themselves out on eastern Long Island by chance, dragged out, both of them, by friends, crashing at underwhelming houses for the holiday weekend.
He had once accused her of sorcery. “You’re a witch,” he said. “There’s something about you,” and she didn’t deny it, but instead tipped her head to the side and looked at him, the light picking up in her eyes, turning them green—they were prone to changing color—and dusting the accusation off.
“Witches aren’t real, Denny,” she said.
“You’re real,” he told her. “And you’re a witch.”
He didn’t exactly believe that, though. He didn’t believe in any mysticism, or in religion, not since Catholic school had turned him sour.
His own parents still attended mass daily, still kept rosary beads roped around every available surface in their Florida Gulf Coast condo, but mostly Denny believed in magnetism and a certain order of the universe.
That Anna had convinced him to live this life with her was part of her outstanding magic.
He had been a head-down bachelor on the heels of a bad relationship, with a dog and a little bit of credit card debt, and she came along one May afternoon with smooth, tanned legs and something he could not quite put his finger on.
Persistence might have been the word for it.
She liked to tell people that she was terrible at taking no for an answer, and he had been all no, all resistance, all loner in his little life-for-one until she hammered her way into his heart.
“Don’t get involved with me. I’m an accident waiting to happen,” he said on the day that they met.
Then he raised his margarita, rimmed with salt, even though he pretty much never drank stupid drinks like that, and toasted to her, and to the very pretty background scene unfolding behind her: rosy sky, cerulean water, people dancing like they’d never left the city before.
“It sounds like a warning, but I’ll take it as an invitation,” she had said.
She was always saying things like that, cloaked in mystery, and maybe she didn’t even know she was doing it at the time.
He could never quite figure out if she knew her language was like that, always luring people in, making promises, sometimes delivering, other times not.
“I didn’t say that,” he had replied. There was something crackling that day.
Electric. Like, you could almost feel the air snapping.
Had he felt that before? A rainstorm on the horizon, except it wasn’t going to rain, he was sure of that.
One of those afternoons slipping into evening that promised a perfect sunset.
(It delivered—he remembered that much.) Maybe they had drunk too much, or maybe they just fit the right way on the wooden benches that overlooked the water, and so, at some point, Denny put a hand on her knee and felt skin that was soft and smooth and even he knew that he couldn’t fight whatever magnet was pulling him to her.
Later, he drove her home in his 1971 Chevelle, top turned down, Bose speaker on the dash because the radio had stopped working the minute he inherited the car.
She hadn’t tied her hair back and he tried not to look at her, but she wanted him to—he knew that much.
She was staying in some upside-down house near the F streets, where the weather was always good, unlike the cloudy, rain-befallen area near Ditch Plains, and he pushed her hair back behind her ear.
He meant to stop there, but she grabbed his hand.
She really was a witch. He believed that.
And then there was no turning back, not even when the lights of that upside-down house came on and a voice called out, “Anna, that you? I’ve been calling you! Where have you been?”
All that, of course, had been a very long time ago.
In the in-between, they had settled into whatever the medium stage of marriage is.
Anna woke up in the gloom before the sun, Denny rolled over and pretended to sleep for the remaining hour before the house shook with life, but actually didn’t, tried to avoid his phone, tried to prevent his thoughts from racing, did none of those things, and finally stabbed around in the dark for a sweatshirt and pants, and then padded downstairs for the first in a long line of duties.
He had worked a series of different jobs throughout the course of their marriage, falling, finally, into computers, but the one he had now, as a self-governed carpenter of sorts, was his favorite.
The pandemic brought all kinds of new purposes to the surface, and a weird tick in the Instagram lifeline made him an unlikely influencer, even though he barely knew how to make a reel.
He began making things: small things at first, like a concrete patio table that consumed his boredom when he couldn’t sit still at home.
The base arrived from pieces of black pipe, and he mixed concrete and poured it into a wooden frame that he built out of spare pieces of scrap that had been lying around the basement.
Anna had come out every few hours, staring wide-eyed, first at the mess, then at the mess that had evolved into a developing thing.
She had always been able to craft things from words, a talent he admired, but he could tell, from her face, and from the way she tilted her head a little to the left while looking, that this was beyond her.
“Well?” he asked. He didn’t like soliciting praise, but he was proud of this thing that he had done with his hands.
“It is remarkable, Denny,” she said. And then, just a dig, because she could. Always because she could. She looked back at him, turning on her heel, just for a minute. “But you knew that, right?”
Maybe that was why he had started making the reels, anyway.
To prove something to her, to prove that he could do this thing and that someone would care about it.
For the table he took three-second videos of the concrete, poured out like caramel.
A nail gun, puncturing the surface of the wood for the frame.
He asked Ben to hold the camera for just a second while he hammered.
He spliced it all together and added a bunch of random hashtags and put it up on Instagram, and there it was, his beautiful mess, and he thought not much of it, really, until Anna came out to the patio the next morning, sun on her hair, dress sweeping behind her, carrying the catkins from the oak trees that made everyone sneeze.
“You’re viral,” she said.
“What?” He was shaking the mold, getting rid of the bubbles before the concrete was fully set. It was one of the things you had to do when you’re building a table. It wasn’t even done yet. There wasn’t even a complete photo of it, just a series of process videos.
“See?” she clicked on the image.
He looked. Beneath the reel, there was a number, indicating how many people had viewed it. Thousands. Actually, hundreds of thousands, a clear departure from any social media post he had ever put out into the world at this point. (Previous post’s likes: thirty-two.)
She looked at him and blinked. “I don’t know, Denny.
People seem to like it. So keep doing it.
” It was the closest she could come, he figured at the time, to acknowledging that he was good at something.
He considered that a win. He finished the table.
It had a creamy gray top, speckled with flecks of pink and white in it.
Online, someone offered him $6,000 for it, and he said no, but he offered to make another one if they could pick it up in person, and they said yes, and sure enough, a few weeks later, there was a transaction, masks, and a trailer hooked up to the back of a luxury SUV.
That was the beginning of his weird business, before things took off.
He had never believed that the Internet had power like that, had never believed Anna, in particular, when she told him that people could become successful overnight in exactly this way.
And then he had done it. But then, she was right about a lot of things, he now realized; she had a gut instinct that guided her and let her see the round and sharp edges of the world in ways that he couldn’t.
“It can be as big as you want,” she said once. “I feel like this could be a really big business.”
“I don’t know,” he said. He was genuinely unsure about its sustainability.
Before this, he had worked for other people.
His long-term career had been in IT, and he had been good at that work, because he was a natural problem-solver, but he never quite knew how to ask for more, even when he knew he deserved it.
The money was good. Every few years, he climbed up, except for the years when the economy was shit.
He learned the things that others were too bored or too lazy to learn, he had a team beneath him, he was an executive with perks now, and that spot on the ladder was safe, so why disrupt it?
But Anna always believed in unsafe choices.
“You don’t get anywhere by standing still,” she loved to say.
Sharks die from immobility, and she was definitely a shark.
She hated the idea of sitting at home during time off.
She hated complacency in any and all forms. Hated people who failed to use their power to change the world.
She never saw gray or nuance. It was black or white, good or evil, yes or no, and this kind of quality could be extremely endearing and powerful in a person, and also very frustrating.
Still, it pushed him, humble Denny who only ever wanted to do the kinds of creative things that he liked—draw excellent pictures or build things with his hands—but who had fallen into computers as a way of making a living because, well, that’s what adults did.
“Just throw everything you have at it and make it work,” she said.
“People are buying it. Let them overpay. You determine what your work is worth anyway. Capitalism 101.” After he sold the table, he built a set of cabinets for a local family, a contract project.
It was a business, Anna said. He could do furniture.
Mirrors, like the one he once made as a pet project: the pages from Moby-Dick rolled up and encircling the center piece of glass.
“And what if it fails?” he wanted to know.
“Don’t let it.”
The advice always sounded so simple when she framed it that way, because, according to her, there were only two options: You succeeded, or you failed, and the only barrier standing between the two was you.
He often wondered if seeing the world the way his wife did was refreshing or heavy.
Was it easier to exist in this binary framework, where everything could be placed into one category or the other?
But the truth was, in this instance she was right.
Her instinct for his work—that he could pursue the passion of his followers and his creativity—was intuitive.
He made things. People wanted them. They paid big bucks for them.
Enough for him to leave behind his past life in computers.
Down the line, he would even consult for other furniture companies, like Thuma, a company based in San Francisco that made minimalist, low-profile beds and dressers, pieces that people coveted, heavy wood pieces, which Denny sketched out on card stock late at night when everyone else in the house had gone to bed.
Once Anna had given him the push, there was no looking back, not at the office job he had held before, or whatever boring job he had held before that.
It was like flying, this new opportunity, and yes, he had Anna to thank for the self-assurance to set himself free.
She was always like this, igniting something in him that he never knew existed, and it was lovely and beautiful, and also a thing that could really make the wrong person extremely irritated, he knew, because not every person appreciated the perspectives so closely held by someone like Anna Plummer.