Jule worked out and then killed the morning on her own. For lunch she ate two pieces of toast with chocolate-hazelnut spread and drank protein powder mixed with orange juice. She was washing up when Brooke clomped downstairs and dragged her duffel bag into the living room.
“I’m off,” said Brooke.
“Right now?”
“I don’t need the drama. I’m going home to La Jolla. My parents will be like, Brooke, you should get an internship! Volunteer! Go back to school! So it’ll be extremely annoying, but you know, I’m kind of homesick, actually.” Brooke turned abruptly and walked into the kitchen. She yanked open the pantry door and took two boxes of cookies and a bag of tortilla chips, shoving them into her shoulder bag. “The food on the ferry is trash,” she said. “Bye.”
—
In the evening, Imogen returned. She came out to see Jule on the deck.
“Where’s Forrest?” Jule asked.
“He went up to his study.” Immie sat down and took off her sandals. “There’s a memorial service for Scott next weekend.”
“Brooke left.”
“I know. She texted me.”
“She took all the cookies with her.”
“Brooke.”
“She said you wouldn’t care.”
“I wasn’t saving them.” Imogen stood and walked over to the switch that flipped the pool lights on. The water lit up. “I think we should go away. Without Forrest.”
Yes.
Would it really be this easy? To have Immie for herself?
“I think we should leave in the morning,” Imogen continued.
“Okay.” Jule made herself sound nonchalant.
“I’ll get us a flight. You understand. I need to get out of here, have some girl time.”
“I don’t need to be here,” said Jule, glowing. “I don’t need to be anywhere.”
“I have an idea,” said Imogen conspiratorially. She stretched back out on the lounge. “This island called Culebra. It’s off Puerto Rico.” Immie reached out and touched Jule’s arm. “And don’t worry about the money. Tickets, hotel, spa treatments—on me.”
“I’m all yours,” said Jule.
FIRST WEEK OF SEPTEMBER, 2016
MENEMSHA, MARTHA’S VINEYARD, MASSACHUSETTS
Two days before he died, Scott was cleaning the pool when Jule came back from her morning run. He had his shirt off. His jeans were low on his hips. He was trailing a leaf skimmer along the edges of the water.
He said good morning brightly as Jule passed him. Immie and Forrest weren’t up yet. Brooke’s rental car wasn’t in the driveway. Jule grabbed a pile of clothes she’d laid out earlier and hung them up on the hook next to the outdoor shower. Then she went in.
She washed, shaved her legs, and thought about Scott. He was very, very pretty. She wondered about his lat workouts and his all-cash payments. How had he become a guy who was willing to bleach other people’s toilets and mow their yards? He looked and sounded like the great white hetero action hero you saw in movie after movie. He could probably have most things he wanted in this world without too much effort. Nothing was pushing him down, but here he was. Cleaning.
Maybe he liked it that way. But maybe he didn’t.
When she turned off the water, Scott and Imogen were talking on the deck.
“You have to help me,” he said, his voice low.
“No, I don’t, actually.”
“Please.”
“I can’t get involved.”
“You don’t have to be involved, Imogen. I came to you for help because I trust you.”
Immie sighed. “You came to me because I have a bank account.”
“That’s not it. We have a connection.”
“Hello?”
“All those afternoons at my place. I didn’t ask for anything. You came there because you wanted to.”
“I haven’t been to your place for a week,” said Imogen to Scott.
“I miss you.”
“I’m not paying your debt.” Immie’s voice was firm.
“I just need a loan. To get by. Till these guys get off me.”
“It’s a bad idea,” said Imogen. “You should go to the bank. Or borrow against a credit card.”
“I don’t have a credit card. These guys are—they’re not messing around. They left notes inside my car. They—”
“You shouldn’t have been gambling,” snapped Immie. “I thought you were smarter than that.”
“Can’t you front me enough to get this debt paid off? Then you won’t have to see me again. I’ll pay you back and disappear, I promise.”
“A minute ago you were all about what a great connection we have. Now you’re promising to disappear?”
“I have nothing,” pleaded Scott. “There’s five bucks in my wallet right now.”
“Where’s your family?”
“My dad split a long time ago. My mom got cancer when I was seventeen,” said Scott. “I don’t have anybody.”
Immie was silent for a moment. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know that.”
“Please, Immie. Cupcake.”
“Don’t start with that. Forrest is upstairs.”
“If you’ll just help me, I can leave quietly.”
“Is that a threat?”
“I’m asking for help from a friend to pay a debt, that’s all. Ten thousand dollars is nothing to someone like you.”
“Why do you owe the money? What did you bet on?”
Scott muttered his answer. “Dogfight.”
“No.” Immie sounded shocked.
“I had a good dog.”
“Dogfighting is a blood sport. That’s a felony.”
“There was this rescue dog I knew about; she was a real scrapper. And I know a guy who sets up fights sometimes. He has a couple pit bulls. It wasn’t, like, an organized thing.”
“It was organized if this guy sets up fights. There are laws against that. It’s cruel.”
“This dog liked to fight.”
“Don’t say that,” said Imogen. “Just don’t. If someone adopted her and was kind with her, she would have—”
“You didn’t meet this dog,” said Scott, petulant. “Anyway, we had the fight, and she lost, all right? I stopped it before she got hurt too bad, because you can if you’re the owner of a dog, because she was— The fight wasn’t what I thought it would be.”
Jule held still, protected by the wall of the outdoor shower. She didn’t dare move.
“That meant I lost money for all these guys who bet on her,” Scott went on. “They said I should have let her play it to the death. I said the rules say an owner can stop the fight. They said yeah, but no one does that because you shaft all the people who bet on your dog.” He was crying now. “And they want their bet money back. The guy who organized the fight wants his investment back, too. He says people complained, that I ruined his business by fighting a dog when I was…I’m scared, Imogen. I don’t know how to fix this without your help.”
“Let me explain the situation to you,” Imogen said slowly. “You are my yard boy, my pool boy, my cleaner. You work here. You have done a decent job, and you’ve been a good guy to hang around with now and again. That does not put me under any obligation to help you when you have done an illegal and immoral thing to a poor, defenseless dog.”
Jule began to sweat.
The way Imogen said yard boy, pool boy, cleaner. It was so cold. Jule hadn’t seen Immie face to face with anyone she disdained until now.
“You won’t help me, then?” Scott asked.
“We hardly know each other.”
“Come on, you’ve come over to my house every day, some weeks.”
“I never knew you liked to watch dogs tear each other to shreds until they die. I never knew you were a gambler. I never knew you were anything like so stupid and cruel as you are, because you are nothing more to me than the guy who cleans my house. I think you should go now,” Imogen told Scott. “I can find someone else to scrub the floors.”
Immie had been lying to Forrest. And to Jule. Immie had purposefully made up stories about where she went in the afternoons. She’d lied about why she’d come home with wet hair, about why she was tired, about where she’d bought her groceries. She’d lied about playing tennis with Brooke.
Brooke. Brooke must have known about Scott. She and Imogen had often come home together with rackets and water bottles, talking about their tennis games, when they had probably never played tennis at all.
Scott left without another word. A minute later, Immie banged on the shower door. “I can see your feet, Jule.”
Jule gasped.
“Why do you listen to other people’s conversations like that?” Immie barked.