shifty, eavesdropping one I’ve apparently become. My hands are shaking.
Then someone else’s hand falls on my shoulder.
“Er. Guinevere.”
I turn to meet Henry Ellington’s eyes.
“Mother’s told me what a hard worker you are. I appreciate your—” He clears his throat. “Tireless efforts on her behalf.”
He reaches into his pocket, pulls something out, then flips it open on the kitchen table, bending over it to write.
A check.
“Rose Ellington is not easy,” he says. “Used to certain stan-dards. You meet them. I think you deserve this . . . a little extra.”
He folds the check, extends it to me.
I’m frozen for a second, staring at it as if he’s handing me something far more deadly than a piece of paper.
After a moment, as though that’s what he had intended all along, Henry sets the check down on the kitchen table, on the dry, clear spot between where I spilled the water and where I put the groceries. As though it belongs there, as much as they do, as natural, as accidental, as those.
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Chapter Twenty-seven
“He’s robbing her blind,” Vivie says. She hangs a hard left in the Almeida’s van, throwing both Nic and me against the passenger doors. “He’s divorced, right? He cheated with the underage babysitter and now her family’s asking for hush money, his ex took him to the cleaners even though she was having it on with the doorman, he’s broke because he’s embezzling from his boss, and he’s counting on Mommy to bail him out. With-out her knowing.”
“Wow. You got all that from what I just told you?”
“Drama Queen,” Nic says.
“I’m not.” Viv jerks the wheel, tires squealing, to turn onto Main Road. I land hard against the door.
“Why wouldn’t he just ask her for the money?” I say, right-ing myself, kicking upright the bag of quahogs at my feet— we’re doing a clam boil for St. John de Brito Church tonight.
“Those guys never talk to each other,” Nic says. “I swear, we were painting the dining room at the Beinekes’ today.
Place was draped in sheets and stuff, and Hoop and I are doing the edging, but Mr. and Mrs. Beineke and their poor granddaughter are still eating in there. It’s all ‘Sophie, can you ask your grandmother to pass the butter’ and ‘Sophie, 277
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please tell your grandmother we are running low on salt,’
even though the table’s four feet by four feet and Grandma and Gramps can hear each other perfectly. They just let every-thing important stay unsaid.”
“The question is, do I say anything?” I ask. “Or should I—”
“Left up here!” Nic interrupts, pointing right.
Viv turns left.
“No—that way!” Nic points right again.
Viv swears under her breath, making a U-turn that tosses Nic and me against the doors again.
“Do you think this is a handicap, Vee?” Nic asks. Do you think the academy won’t take me because I always have to make that little L thing with my hand?”
“Maybe you’ll get a special scholarship,” Vivien says, patting his shoulder, squinting at me in the rearview. “Gwenners, the thing is, you don’t really know anything. You’ve worked for them for a few weeks. They’ve had a lifetime to complicate and screw up their relationship. Don’t get involved.”
Don’t get involved. Don’t think about it. Nas histórias de outras pessoas.
Thinking those thoughts is starting to seem like the snooze button on an old alarm clock, one I’ve hit so often, it just doesn’t work anymore.
“Gracious, Gwen, where are you today?” Mrs. E. waves her hand in front of my face, calling me back to the here and now.
On her porch, nearly at the end of the day. A day I’ve spent daydreaming about Cass and preoccupied about Henry, going through the motions with Mrs. E., who deserves better.
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“Clarissa Cole tells me the yard boy, dear Cassidy, is teaching your brother to swim.”
The island grapevine is evidently faster than a speeding bul-let. Mrs. E. rests a hand, light as a leaf, on my arm. “Oh, uh, yeah—yes. He’s got a lesson tomorrow.”
“Would it be too much to ask if an old Beach Bat could come along?”
“To swim?”
“Merely to observe. I spend too much time in the company of the elderly, or”—she lowers her voice, although Joy-less the nurse has not yet arrived, having called to say she’ll be late, and somehow making that sound like my fault—“the cranky. I’ve missed several days with the ladies on the beach—just feeling lazy, I’m afraid. It would be a pleasure to see how your dear boy handles this.”
“He’s not my dear boy, Mrs. E. We just go to school together.”
She looks down, turning the thin gold bracelet on her wrist, but not before I catch the flash of girlish amusement. “So you say. Well, I was a young woman a very long time ago. I cannot, however, pretend that I haven’t noticed that while the neigh-bors on either side have grass that is growing rather long and paths that are a bit overdue for weeding, my own yard has never been so assiduously tended.”
Have to admit, I’ve noticed that too. And when he called to figure out a time for Em’s next swim lesson, there was a certain amount of lingering on the phone.
Cass: “So I should go . . .” (Not hanging up) “Uh . . .”
Me: “Okay. I’ll let you go.” (Not hanging up) “Another family thing?”
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