Summers at the Saint

Prologue

The first time Traci Eddings saw the Saint she was six or seven. It was an early summer morning, and she was with her grandfather, in his twelve-foot aluminum fishing boat, drifting along in the river, when she glimpsed the improbable pink turrets and crenelated towers rising up from the fog-shrouded marsh, like something out of one of her storybooks.

“Pops, look!” She pointed at the apparition. “It’s a fairy castle.”

Her grandfather would only have been in his early fifties back then, but he already seemed ancient, bent and beat down from all those years working on the loading dock at the paper bag plant over in Bonaventure.

He’d been studying the red-and-white bobber he’d cast out a few minutes earlier, letting it float along on the river’s placid gray-green surface.

Pops looked up now and flicked half an inch of ash from his ever-present Marlboro into the water.

“Why, honey. That’s just the Saint. No fairies. Just a whole lot of rich people.”

“I want to go there,” Traci wheedled, knowing that this was surely a place of enchantment. “Please, Pops, can we?”

His weathered face softened, but only for an instant. “Afraid not. People like us don’t belong over there.”

He’d quickly changed the subject, pointing at the ripples surrounding the bobber. “Look there, doodlebug,” he whispered. “You got a fish on the line.” He handed her the slender rod with the Zebco spinning reel. “Now you wait ’til he takes that bobber down a little bit more, then you pull back and reel that bad boy on in here. Can you do that?”

But her eyes were still fixed on the pink wedding-cake-looking building, and by the time she turned her attention back to the bobber, the line had gone slack, and Pops was shaking his head in disappointment.

The first time she actually stepped onto the property came when she was thirteen, and Meredith, a new girl from school, invited just eight girls to join her for a birthday party to be held at the Saint. Traci had been surprised to be included and dismayed that Shannon, her best friend, had not.

“I don’t want to go to that rich bitch’s party anyway,” Shannon had claimed, tossing her long tresses, which she’d recently begun highlighting with a bottle of Miss Clairol that she’d shoplifted from the CVS.

Traci had felt torn between loyalty to her best friend and the excitement of finally experiencing the Saint. In the end, the lure of the pink castle, which is how she still secretly thought of it, won out.

She’d used all her babysitting money to buy a new bikini to wear to the party. When her mother offered to drive her to the Saint, Traci recoiled in horror at the idea of anyone spotting her rolling up to the resort in her mother’s battered beige Aerostar minivan. Instead, she’d bribed Shannon’s older brother Joe to drop her off in return for doing his English homework.

The big day was a steamy Saturday. After the security guards at the Saint’s main gate checked her name off the guest list, Joe pulled up to the hotel’s front door to drop her off.

Traci had gaped at the lobby’s high ceilings, marble floors, and the grand staircase with its intricate wrought-iron railings rising up to a mezzanine. A man in a tuxedo sat at a gleaming baby grand piano playing soft classical music, and scattered about the vast room were seating areas with plush sofas and chairs, and tables with huge bouquets of fresh flowers. Even the air in the room was rich with a faint floral scent.

When she got home that night she gave Shannon a recap of the party. “You were right, Meredith is a bitch. And her mom is too, but they gave out these amazing goody bags, and her birthday cake had three layers with strawberry filling and I ate so much I barfed in a fountain when nobody was looking and oh, my God, the Saint. Someday you and I are going to live at that place.”

Two years later, when they were fifteen, through a friend of a friend, Traci and Shannon got summer jobs working at the Saint’s ice-cream parlor, biking across the river on the causeway that led from their working-class Bonaventure neighborhood to the rarefied atmosphere of the Saint Cecelia resort.

Three weeks into that first summer the girls got educated about the two distinct social classes existing in their small coastal community.

It was Gayla, the ice-cream shop’s twenty-year-old manager, who set them straight, when she noticed Traci and Shannon lingering near the pool after they’d gotten off work, flirting with two preppy- looking teenaged boys.

“Y’all can’t be messing with the hotel guests or the members or the members’ kids,” she’d counseled when they reported for work the next day.

“Why not?” Traci asked.

“’Cuz the bosses don’t like it. And the members don’t like their kids hanging out with the townies or the help. Don’t you get it? Those rich kids, they’re Saints. Y’all are just Ain’ts.”

And that’s how Traci found out that instead of living on the wrong side of the railroad tracks, she lived on the wrong side of the causeway. And that was pretty much the way things had stayed, until she met Hoke Eddings.