Please feel free to leave additional comments about your stay, singling out any staff members who made your visit memorable.
I enjoyed my three-night stay at the Hotel Nantucket; however, I’m only giving it five and a half stars overall because the night of my checkin was an unmitigated disaster, and had the hour not been so late and had every other room on the island not already been booked, I would have left immediately. The front-desk clerk and the night bellman were harried and distracted, and the front-desk clerk was, at one point, snippy with me. Then it took the night bellman thirty minutes to deliver my bags to my room when all I wanted to do was put on my pajamas and go to sleep. Furthermore, when the bellman came, he neglected to explain any features of the room. I didn’t realize until my final day, while chatting with a lovely couple at the adult pool, that everything in the minibar was complimentary.
The Blue Bar, however, was outstanding and the perfect place to eat as a party of one. I went all three evenings of my stay. My compliments to the chef!
This review, forwarded to her by Xavier, is waiting in Lizbet’s in-box when she gets to work on June 16. (She could easily check their TravelTattler reviews herself, but she’s too busy overseeing operations at the hotel, and Xavier has a five-hour jump on the day, which feels like an unfair advantage.)
The comments accompanying this survey read as follows:
Good morning, Elizabeth—
After reading this survey, I checked the schedule and discovered that the night-desk clerk was you and that the night bellman was Raoul Wasserman-Ramirez. I suppose I don’t need to mention that, as the GM, you must uphold our rigorous hospitality standards. The hotel isn’t anywhere near full, so I would urge you to pay close attention to the guests who are in residence. The woman who wrote this review could easily have been Shelly Carpenter. Keep your eye on the fifth key, Elizabeth! The fifth key!
XD
Lizbet is starting to resent Xavier Darling. How dare he judge her when he’s in London and she’s here, chest-deep in the trenches. He checked the schedule, as though he’s Big Brother. Bah! He can send all the admonishing e-mails he wants, but he isn’t going to impress Shelly Carpenter or the second woman, whoever she is, if he doesn’t help her deal with their staffing shortages and low occupancy.
Even so, Lizbet’s indignation (and why can he not call her Lizbet like she’s asked him to?) is mixed with guilt and culpability. That woman—Franny Yates of Trappe, Pennsylvania—checked in three hours late (not her fault; Cape Air was delayed due to fog) during a moment of crisis.
The crisis involved Wanda Marsh. The Marsh children had made themselves quite at home at the hotel. Every morning and every evening, Louie would come down to the lobby in a polo shirt buttoned to the top, his hair wet and combed, wearing his funny little glasses, and he would sit at a chessboard playing against himself, waiting for one of the guests to notice him and offer to play a game. Louie always won, and he became something of a curiosity, a six-and-a-half-year-old chess genius right there in the lobby of the Hotel Nantucket! One of the guests (Mr. Brandon, room 301) had written about Louie in his TravelTattler review, saying how much he’d enjoyed playing chess every morning with Louie while he drank his cup of percolated Jamaica Blue Mountain coffee. Lizbet was just waiting for Xavier to award Louie the thousand-dollar bonus.
Wanda wandered the hotel freely as well. She always had a Nancy Drew mystery in her hand—she was working her way through them in chronological order, though her mother had only bought her up to number twelve, The Message in the Hollow Oak, and she was already on number nine, The Sign of the Twisted Candles, so she would soon be out of books. Wanda had also started carrying a spiral notebook and a number-two pencil because she wanted to write her own mystery novel starring girl sleuth Wanda Marsh. She was constantly asking people, staff and guests alike, if they had noticed anything strange or secret around the hotel, but the only mystery she’d learned of was the Case of the Disappearing Almond Croissants. It was unusual how rapidly Beatriz’s croissants, filled with almond-flavored marzipan, vanished from the continental breakfast, and why didn’t the kitchen ever make a second batch?
Unlike her children, Kimber Marsh was having a difficult time settling in. Back on the third night of their stay, Kimber had wandered down to the lobby at one in the morning. Lizbet was on the night desk.
“I suffer from chronic insomnia,” Kimber said.
Lizbet nearly asked if they could switch places: Kimber could watch the desk and Lizbet would go to suite 114 and sleep in the emperor-size bed.
Kimber poured herself a giant cup of coffee—coffee?—and leaned against the desk to have a chat. Fine, good, Lizbet thought. It would keep her awake for her remaining hour.
Kimber said, “My husband left me for our nanny, whom he has now impregnated—and let me tell you, that was a wake-up call.”
Yes, you told me, Lizbet thought. She’d had a wake-up call of her own, though she didn’t want to tell Kimber Marsh about her breakup with JJ. She was so tired, she was sure she’d start to cry.
“I’m going to use this summer to reconnect with my kids,” Kimber said. “I traveled so often for work, I barely saw them. They were always with Jenny, our nanny. Honestly, it’s no wonder Craig left me for her. I was never around, so she slotted herself right into my vacant place and became not only a substitute mom but a substitute wife.” Kimber leaned in. “That’s why the kids are so consumed with the reading and the chess—something was missing from their little lives, and that something was me.” Kimber sipped her coffee and reached for a copy of the Blue Book sitting on the desk. “Starting tomorrow, I’m going to do better. I’m going to do all the suggested itineraries in this guidebook.”
The following day, Thursday, Kimber and the kids took Doug to Tupancy Links for a long walk, then they went to Barnaby’s Place to do an art project, had lunch at Something Natural, and spent the afternoon on Children’s Beach. But on Friday, Kimber plopped herself under an umbrella by the pool and read while Louie played chess in the lobby and Wanda interviewed hotel guests and Zeke took Doug out to do his business. On Saturday, Kimber didn’t come down from her room until late afternoon. When she did, she had her laptop with her; she announced she was going to sit in the lobby and write her memoirs. Okay? Lizbet thought. At least Kimber could keep an eye on Wanda, who was finishing the last Nancy Drew mystery she had, and Louie, who was playing chess against himself. But Lizbet felt dismayed that the Marsh family had spent the entire day inside. Late-June days on Nantucket were the gold standard for the season—blue skies, plentiful sunshine, lilacs and cherry blossoms, and without the overbearing heat and humidity of July and August. But Sunday morning, Kimber rebounded and took the kids strawberry picking at Bartlett’s Farm. When they came back, Wanda walked into the lobby proudly holding an overflowing quart of luridly red fruit. While Lizbet was pleased they had gotten out, she couldn’t help thinking about the pristine white linens on the beds and the Annie Selke rug, so she offered to wash the strawberries and let the children eat them over soft-serve vanilla ice cream in the break room.
Both Wanda and Louie had been gobsmacked by the ice cream machine.
“I want to work here when I grow up,” Wanda announced.
Then, at a quarter past ten on Sunday evening—when Lizbet was fading fast; she’d worked double shifts for seven straight days—Kimber Marsh came flying into the lobby in what Lizbet’s mother would have called “a dither.”