Chapter 8
WILLIAM
Before William opened his eyes, he thought of Aunt Eleanor.
She rose like oil to the surface of his consciousness.
In his hotel bed, he shuddered at the memory of how, in death, her clothing and jewelry looked like a costume, like someone had dressed her up to look like Aunt Eleanor, even though she no longer could be.
Aunt Eleanor always told their mother something was wrong with Shay.
Not a devil on her shoulder but a wild lynx curled in her belly.
At their grandfather’s funeral, when Shay was seven years old, she winked at Aunt Eleanor as she walked down the church’s central aisle.
Shay said that it was just because she had a butterscotch in her mouth, Eleanor’s favorite, that she’d even stuck out her tongue to show her, but from that day on, Aunt Eleanor said there was a sliver of ice in the girl’s blood.
She had always liked William better, though his mother explained that away by saying she favored men, that she unfairly dismissed so many women as frivolous, though that was obviously not the fault she assigned to Shay.
When he’d returned to his room the night before, he’d slid his finger under the flap of Shay’s envelope, gently opening it. It would be too painful to read what Aunt Eleanor had written, so he simply felt for a check in the card, but there was nothing.
He had slept too late for breakfast. The dining room was being cleared by an older man stacking plates on the sideboard, and William’s stomach rumbled at the sight of an untouched omelet.
He realized he should find Shay, that it would be odd to see her for the first time that evening, surrounded by everyone, though he wouldn’t say a word about Aunt Eleanor.
He wouldn’t ruin her wedding. At the front desk, there was the same young woman from the evening before.
She was clipping her nails, a graveyard of thin white curls littering the wooden surface.
“Do you know what room the bride is in?” he asked.
“I do, but you just missed her. She went out sailing.”
“Oh.” He scratched the back of his neck. “Well, can I still have it? For later?”
She looked him over, eyes catching at the tiny rip near his T-shirt collar. “How do you know her?”
“I’m her brother.”
“I guess you do look like her.” She sighed. “We were told not to give out her room number, but I guess it’s fine.”
“Thanks,” he said, surprised anyone thought that was necessary. She was not involved with Synanon any longer. What did she need protection from? “I mean, I am her brother.”
The woman nodded, pressing her thumb against one of the loose nail clippings. She looked down at her fingers, two of which she hadn’t gotten to, clearly wishing to finish this real work. He felt like an imposition, even though he was a guest.
“Sorry, what is it then? The room number?”
“Oh. Twelve.” She paused and shook her head. “No, no, sorry, it’s seventeen now.”
He thanked her and asked where he could get something to eat, and she directed him to a gas station that sold biscuits and coffee half a mile away. “If it looks closed, just wait a few minutes,” she said. “The owner, Red, thinks it’s healthier if he walks outside when he smokes.”
Two women were perched on rocking chairs on the hotel’s front porch. They looked dressed for tennis: short skirts and navy polos, hair perfectly feathered, undoubtedly members of Andrew’s family. William lit a cigarette and tried not to think of what he’d overheard the previous evening.
He had met Andrew’s parents—the Pruitts—at Shay’s college graduation.
She and Andrew had been dating since the start of that school year, and with him, she’d seemed so much older, tamed and strange, allowing Andrew to order a Cobb salad for her at the inn’s restaurant when they all went out to lunch, even though William had never seen her eat a piece of lettuce in her life, even on a hamburger.
At the time, he didn’t worry much. Since their father’s death, he’d felt a growing distance between them, and although he was hurt by this, his mind was also clouded with his own high school graduation, just a month away.
And Andrew was kind and attentive to their mother, modest when he spoke about the finance company he’d work for in New York.
His parents’ appearance was brief. There was a jolt of strained smiles and the immediate calibration of their families’ vast gap in wealth, apparent to William in the weight of Mr. Pruitt’s steel watch, which was clasped to the man’s wrist like armor.
He never thought he’d see any of the Pruitts again.
And he hadn’t, until the evening of the engagement party.
As far as William could tell, there was no main street on the island.
There was a restaurant and a green-roofed general store by the dock, but everything else was scattered.
On his walk, he passed houses, a marsh with a rowboat tipped over in its shallow water, and a wooden beauty parlor with a set of heavy-lidded eyes painted on its side, the lashes long as his forearms. The gas station was easy to find.
He could smell the diesel from the street over.
Three plastic tables and chairs sanded with dirt were scattered around its entrance.
In the front window, block-lettered signs gashed in blue paint advertised bait and biscuits.
Inside, an older man in a baseball cap—undoubtedly the owner, Red—was seated in the corner, one of his mud-caked boots propped up on the counter. He was reading a physics textbook.
“What can I get you?” he asked without glancing up from the page.
“Is it too late for biscuits and coffee?” William asked.
Red looked up and let his foot fall to the floor, as if surprised to find William there. His eyes were the pale blue of the sky.
“Never too late. Well, unless I’ve run out, but I haven’t run out yet.
” He pulled over a tray covered with a checkered cloth, removing two towering golden biscuits, nothing like the small pucks William’s aunt Pam would make for Thanksgiving.
He slid them into a toaster oven to warm and poured coffee into a ceramic mug, Kennedy and Johnson for America printed on its side.
William also asked for a fresh pack of Winstons, which he slid into his back pocket.
“Thanks,” he said. The mug was hot against his palm.
“Wasn’t expecting an out-of-towner. You must be here for the wedding.”
“Yeah, I am.”
“Groom or bride’s side?”
“Bride. My sister’s actually the one getting married.”
“Ah, you’re Shay’s brother?”
“You know Shay?”
“I do. Haven’t seen her this week, but usually she’ll come in here early, sometimes before I even open. I think she has trouble sleeping, but she never really likes to talk about herself, so we stick to quantum theory.”
“I barely passed algebra, so I don’t know what that even is.”
“Most people don’t, and most others just pretend they do. She’s a smart one.”
“Yeah, she is.”
William was proud of his sister, of how she’d gotten enough of a scholarship to attend Cornell, even though, with his string of Cs and Ds, he had only community colleges open to him.
His parents never paid enough attention to realize how he was failing—his father ricocheted between increasingly manic highs and lows, which made his mother retreat even further into herself, insistent that nothing was amiss.
It wasn’t until graduating high school that he realized just how absurd the world of privilege his classmates existed within was, and how outside of it he truly stood.
While they packed their suitcases for university, he left home and began to work in restaurant kitchens.
His mother said he was a poet, though he wrote no poetry.
Aunt Eleanor said that as long as he voted Democrat, she wouldn’t consider his education a waste.
Shay alone was proud. You just need to stay away from that apartment, she’d said. However you can.
“And now she’s officially becoming island royalty.
In the sense that she’ll have more money than God and no one here will likely ever see much of her.
” Red laughed, and William smiled, though it felt like a small betrayal.
It was difficult for him not to mirror strangers, a knee-jerk reaction after more than three years in the service industry.
“So you don’t like the Pruitts?” William asked.
“Oh, no, no, I’d never say that. A man loves his king.” The oven dinged, and Red slid two biscuits onto a paper plate. The smell of butter softened the room’s sear of gasoline. “That’ll be a dollar.”
“They founded the island, didn’t they? I mean, their great-great-grandfather or whoever.” William counted out quarters.
“They like to say that, but plenty of other families were on that boat. Pruitt just owned the boat, so I suppose then he owned the island. But the rest of those families are still here, really here, living their lives, not just taking the ferry when the weather suits them to eat crab on china plates.”
Red’s chair squeaked as he sat back down. William noticed he had two different gold bands on his ring finger. Wrinkles branched out from his eyes and mouth. Everything about him suggested he’d lived not just decades more than William, but centuries.
“I don’t really know them,” William said, almost as an apology.
“You probably won’t even when you do.”
William nodded and thanked him, unsure what else to say, and picked up his biscuits.
Outside, it felt warmer than it had ten minutes before, and the wind smelled like salt and smoke, as if someone had lit a bonfire.
From here, he could see the shoreline, the water a perfect azure.
He sat in a plastic chair and broke off a crisp biscuit end to soften in the coffee.
He nearly swallowed the rest without chewing and finished the second in a matter of seconds, wishing he had five more.
The coffee left a mealy sludge on his tongue.
He realized he hadn’t said grace. This was always when he remembered the custom: after he’d already eaten.
Closer to the water, a golf cart rumbled down a gravel road.
How odd it was, that any place in America should be car-less; it made the island feel not exactly foreign, but forgotten.
A large, stocky man was behind the wheel, with a boy in jeans and a button-up seated in back, holding a small duffel.
William looked down at his empty mug and then back up again, the cart hooking his attention, like his brain had finally begun to process the sight in front of him: the boy’s fine features, his long pale arm—stark as a birch tree branch—gripping the roof.
The coffee curdled in William’s stomach, for in the bleach of the sun, he couldn’t tell if the figure was, in fact, a teenage boy, or a young woman with a shaved head.