Chapter 15
Chapter Fifteen
Jack was sixteen years old and richer than he’d ever been.
The cash he’d earned through his partnership with Tio Angelo lined the back of his dresser, the wooden slats under his bed, and the floorboards he could pry up.
When he went to sleep at night—usually much later than his parents knew—he felt bubbly with the belief that he was a powerful businessman, that his Tio Angelo wouldn’t have asked him into the business if he wasn’t special.
He was wealthy, but nobody could know that. Not yet.
It was the afternoon before the high school’s spring dance.
Jack left school right after the bell, bypassing a few of his typical buyers as he headed to his car.
He’d promised to help Tio Angelo with a special delivery that afternoon, a delivery that Tio Angelo was cagey about.
The story was that they had to take multiple boxes of whatever it was to the pier, where they’d load it on, take the cash, then head out.
Tio Angelo had told Jack it was a very special operation and he couldn’t trust anyone else to do it.
Jack got home at three ten, just ten minutes after school was out.
Nina was the only one home, sprawled out on the grass with her arms on either side of her and her eyes to the sky.
She was always daydreaming, always trying to throw her mind elsewhere.
Jack tickled her stomach as he hurried to the tunnels beneath the lodge to help his uncle carry boxes.
“Hey!” Nina cried. “Cut it out!” But there was laughter in her voice. She loved Jack very much. And then she added, “Where are you going? Can I come, too?” but Jack was already gone.
Tio Angelo and Jack spent a good twenty minutes securing the boxes in the back of the lodge’s delivery van.
Tio Angelo was in good spirits, whistling and singing an old Italian song.
When they were done, he slammed the back doors closed and told Jack to hop in.
“It’s showtime,” he said, wagging his thick eyebrows.
On the way to the pier, the radio played The Alan Parsons Project, and Tio Angelo tried and failed to sing all the words. He still wasn’t very good at English. Their windows were open, and beautiful fresh air streamed past their faces.
“You know what I think, my boy?” Tio Angelo asked, his smile enormous. “I think you’re about a thousand times smarter than your papa.”
Jack’s stomach stirred. Although he loved his uncle’s compliments, he never knew what to do when he began to talk badly about his father.
Jack knew that his father was none the wiser about his drug dealing and Tio Angelo’s operations.
He knew he wouldn’t be pleased if he found out—and that was an understatement.
“He doesn’t have the foresight you do,” Tio Angelo said. “He doesn’t think about the bigger picture!”
Jack tried to smile, but his joy felt flat.
“It’s just that your papa and your mother, my wonderful sister, they have everything,” Tio Angelo said. “They have all the money in the world. But what did they do to deserve it? Your father was born into the White Oak Lodge. Your mother was born into luxury in Italy.”
Jack didn’t want to point out that Angelo had also been born into luxury in Italy.
He knew that Angelo felt rejected by his family, that after he’d committed so many crimes (all of which he could explain away), they weren’t entirely keen on bringing him back into the fold.
But Jack’s mother was soft. She would do anything for her little brother.
“I was born into the lodge,” Jack pointed out instead. “I was born into the Whitmore family. So I guess I’m privileged too?”
“Yes, but your father wants Alexander to take over,” Angelo quipped. “Doesn’t that make you angry? Doesn’t that make you want to explode?” He smashed the steering wheel, then yanked it to the left before coming to a dramatic halt by the pier. It was time to unload.
That night at dinner, Jack considered what Angelo had said about his father and mother, about all they’d been given. As Benjamin twirled pasta around his fork, his eyes looked grave and sunken in. Jack felt that his father looked weak, far weaker than Angelo. Jack wondered what was wrong.
Before everyone had finished their meals, Angelo got up, kissed his sister on the cheek, and announced he had things to tend to.
He made eye contact with Jack before leaving, as though checking to make sure that Jack remembered he had to go to the school dance later to sell.
Amos planned to meet him there; they would make the rounds and bring what they’d earned.
But something about Jack’s father’s face made Jack hang out at the table longer than he’d planned.
One after another, the others in the family went off, either to prepare for the dance, to do more work for the lodge, or to sit in their rooms and listen to music.
It was just Jack, Benjamin, and Francesca at the end.
Francesca collected the plates and went outside to speak in Italian on the phone with an old friend. This left Benjamin and Jack alone.
Jack ached, worried that his father was weak and upset and maybe just as “bad” as Angelo had explained before.
He felt a love for his father that in no way matched his love for Angelo.
He wanted, too, to tell his father how successful he’d been for Angelo’s business; he wanted to prove that he was good at something that made a great deal of money—but he knew he couldn’t, as the business was illegal.
But that was when his father turned to him, tilted his head, and asked, “Do you want to go for a sail?”
It had been a long time since Benjamin and Jack had been out on the water, just the two of them.
Jack had been overwhelmed with his tasks for Angelo, and Benjamin had been killing himself with lodge responsibilities for most of the spring.
Now, as their sailboat glided toward the horizon, surging over the salty waves, Jack performed all the necessary sailing duties that his father had taught him as a child, laughing at how automatic his muscles moved.
He would never forget how to do this, not for as long as he lived.
When the boat slowed to a halt in front of the most splendid sunset, Jack’s breath caught in his throat.
He knew he should have been preparing to go to the school dance and meeting Amos in ten to fifteen minutes.
But his soul told him he was in the right place.
For the first time in what felt like ages, he could take full breaths.
Suddenly, his father interrupted his reverie. “You’re sixteen already. Going to be seventeen before we know it.”
Jack flinched and glanced back at his father, whose eyes remained on the pink glow of the horizon.
“Hard to believe,” his father went on. “Hard to believe that you’ll be up against life’s choices soon.
You won’t have to stay here in Nantucket, not if you don’t want to.
Not at first. You have choices that I never did, being the eldest Whitmore.
You can go to college if you want. You can travel the world. ”
Jack searched his father’s eyes, realizing that more than anything, the man had wanted to travel, to leave Nantucket Island and discover who he could be elsewhere.
Lucky for him, Francesca had moved to Italy and come here; she’d built her life around his so that he could extend the family line.
But maybe it hadn’t always been comfortable.
“Tell me, Jack,” his father pressed him. “What is your dream? What do you want?”
Jack rubbed his chest. A warm wind swept between them.
What did he want? He thought of the money beneath his bed and beneath the floorboards.
The only logical thing he knew to want more of was money.
He wondered if that was an empty thing to want, but then remembered that Tio Angelo had told him that money equals power.
“Do you want to travel?” his father asked. “Do you want to get married someday? Have a family?”
“I think I’m too young to think about that.” Jack forced a chuckle.
Benjamin smiled. “Life creeps up on you fast. One minute, you’re sixteen and on top of the world, and the next, you’re my age, burdened with bills and fears and ancient hopes.”
“Does that mean I have to decide everything right now?” Jack asked.
Benjamin laughed and crossed his arms. Just then, Jack thought, he looked sort of like Benjamin, with the same profile and the same glint in his eyes.
Jack knew he looked far more like Benjamin than Tio Angelo although Tio Angelo liked to say that Jack was more Accetta than Whitmore. He filled his lungs with air.
“I hope you know that the things you do and think now can affect your entire life,” Benjamin said gently, still unable to look at Jack. “You’re becoming the man you’ll always be.”
Jack hated how piercing his father’s words were. A part of him wondered whether his father knew what he was up to with Tio Angelo, or suspected something. But when his father finally looked at Jack, there were tears in his eyes.
“Your mother and I have not always been tremendously kind to one another,” he said.
“We’ve loved one another through everything, don’t get me wrong.
I truly believe she’s the best woman in the world, the only one I can really love.
And I think she feels the same about me.
But because of life’s complications and life’s truths, we haven’t always been kind.
And those are the regrets I will carry with me till I’m dead and gone. ”
Jack studied his father’s face. He believed his father loved his mother more than anyone, that theirs was a true romance that was at times all-consuming.
He felt that his father was warning him about something, that he wanted to help Jack avoid the same mistakes he’d made. But Jack was too young to understand.
When they tied up the sailboat at the lodge, Jack let his eyes trace the path up to Tio Angelo’s truck, where his uncle stood with his arms crossed and a horrible expression on his face.
Jack knew that he was in trouble, that he should have been at the dance more than an hour ago.
More than an hour of drug sales had been lost. Not selling, according to Tio Angelo, opened the door for other dealers to come and destroy their monopoly on the island.
“I have to run, Dad,” Jack called behind his shoulder, speeding up the little hill and into the house to grab his backpack and clean himself up a little bit.
Within ten minutes, he was speeding out in his own truck, headed for the high school.
His father’s words continued to clog his mind, begging him to understand that life was shorter than he bargained for.
Did he really want to sell his uncle’s drugs?
Did he really want to extend his life as a criminal?
It sounded so poisonous, especially compared to the life his parents had wanted for him, the beautiful world he’d been born into.
At the high school, Amos stood off to the side of the door leading into the gymnasium, where the dance was held. Amos gave Jack a curious look.
“Where were you, man?” Amos asked.
“I got held up,” Jack said. “How’d it go?”
Amos explained that he’d barely had enough to take care of everyone who wanted to buy. “But they’re doing a slow dance now, which means people will come out after that. They’ll want more. That’s how it always goes,” Amos said.
Jack tried to smile, but his father’s words chased him, dragging him down. He leaned against the brick wall and listened to the slow-dance song, “If You Leave Me Now” by Chicago. It made him want to cry.
Out of nowhere, Jack asked, “Do you want a family someday?”
Amos laughed with surprise. “A family? I don’t know, man. I have enough mouths to feed.”
Jack knew that Amos had far more responsibilities than Jack. It probably made him an adult already.
“Do you want a family?” Amos asked.
“I don’t know. I’m asking myself a lot of questions. Like, Tio Angelo doesn’t have a family,” Jack pointed out. “I mean, not besides my mother and us. I wonder, does it make him happy? Is the business enough for him?”
Amos’s eyes glinted in the moonlight. “I don’t know if I’ve ever seen my mother happy,” he said. “Not till I started paying for more things. Not till I took on some of the slack of her life.”
“I wonder what that means,” Jack said.
“I think it means that life is hard the whole way through,” Amos said. “And it gets harder when you love people, because you want to take care of them.”
“But doesn’t that make life worth living? Taking care of people?”
Amos shrugged. Before he could answer, the Chicago song cut out, and high schoolers streamed into the parking lot to smoke cigarettes and laugh beneath the moon. Amos and Jack would be ready for them, ready to help them ignite their nights. Guilt rubbed Jack’s stomach raw.