“Simpsons are moving ahead! Tom Junior is behind you with Lally!” Mrs. Hacking cried as the motorboat skipped away.
At Jumping Rock, Evelyn jumped out of the boat and ran up to safer ground. Nick was about ten drinks in and had decided the path to the Jumping Rock guesthouse should be marked with cairns, and he enlisted Preston in gathering stones from the woods. Tired, Evelyn retreated to the boathouse deck with a bottle of S green punch, settling into a deep Adirondack chair. She was drunk enough forty minutes later that she could almost tamp the uneasiness she felt about the finish. Bing was lingering just to the side of the finish line in his boat, and when he saw Chrissie and his daughter finally coming toward the line, he made another loop so he could come in last, and his daughter and girlfriend would get the dreaded second to last. As Evelyn listened to the air horn marking Chrissie’s place, then the second air horn marking Bing’s, she exchanged the S for a T. Bing stood up in his boat to laughs and applause from the shore, bowing. Phoebe and Camilla flew down to give him hugs, and Mrs. Hacking, who’d brought her megaphone onto land, yelled her congratulations into it. Evelyn looked for Chrissie and saw her trudging up the hill, her wet and wilted scarf still glopped around her head.
Evelyn scrambled to her feet and hurried to the boathouse bathroom, where she grabbed one of the stacked beach towels she’d noticed earlier. “Hey,” she said when she’d caught up to Chrissie. “You must be cold. I thought you could use this.”
Chrissie turned, soaked, as Evelyn held out a towel.
“That was so awful,” Chrissie said, wiping her eyes. “So awful. So wet, and so long, and then Bing…” She trailed off.
Evelyn shook out the towel with one hand and draped it around Chrissie’s shoulders, and Chrissie clutched at it. “Thank you,” Chrissie said.
Evelyn had brought the bottle of T, and held it out to Chrissie with a sympathetic smile. “It’s strong,” she offered. “I can’t promise your problems will go away, but at least you’ll be drunk when you see everyone back at Shuh-shuh-gah.”
Chrissie considered this, then poured the T down her throat. When she handed the bottle back to Evelyn, Evelyn took a long drink, too.
CHAPTER SIX
Sag Neck
It was the long July Fourth weekend, and Camilla’s profile, created by Evelyn, had gone live on PLU two days prior. Evelyn had chosen a fabulous profile picture of Camilla and, via the overpaid PR consultant the site had hired, had parlayed that into a Page Six mention: “WE HEAR … that saucy socialite Camilla Rutherford has joined People Like Us, and other people like her are clamoring for the site’s coveted invites.” She had put up a page for Nick, too, and Bing, and had even managed to start a lively discussion about Adirondack real estate so that Camilla would have a harder time figuring out that she had been bluffing about Camp Piemacum. Evelyn was starting to get unsolicited bids for profiles and, in approving members one by one, she approved many but turned down a few without explanation, as the random rejections would make the acceptances all the more appealing.
Barbara had made it clear that she didn’t want Evelyn coming home over the summer at all, really—it was the season to be hopping between summer spots and meeting a future husband. Their conversations had been stilted lately. Evelyn had called after Lake James, brimming with excitement over how well things had gone there and wanting to describe the parties and the dinners that she thought her mother would love hearing about. Her mother had instead responded that she had never been very interested in sales. Her father was no better, asking if she was still hanging around with socialites. “In my day, you didn’t get paid for that,” he said.
Evelyn hadn’t called back since and was surprised to get a message from her mother summoning her home for the Fourth of July. It was Sally Channing’s annual blowout for patriotism—Tommy Channing was a partner at her father’s law firm, Leiberg Channing—and the family wanted Evelyn home for it. Evelyn briefly thought about disobeying and heading to Nick’s house in the Hamptons instead. Yet this new world required a lot more money than Evelyn had; she needed a loan from her parents, and if she needed a loan she’d have to submit to their rules, at least briefly.
She got off the Amtrak at New Carrollton, Maryland, where the summer air hung heavy around her, and she felt like she was breathing cotton. She had called her father en route, both on his cell phone and at his office, but he hadn’t responded. As the heat evaporated the train’s air-conditioning sheen from her skin, she began to sweat. Lifting her bag to her shoulder, she circumnavigated the parking lot. When she passed a vaguely familiar tan Datsun, and saw a broad-shouldered woman standing next to it, Evelyn recognized the woman as Valeriya, the disapproving Russian woman who had taken over as Sag Neck housekeeper a few years ago.