Thirty minutes later, the room is sparkling clean. There are fresh sheets on the bed; the cribs have been broken down and stored; the rug has been vacuumed; the food remnants have been thrown away and the ants along with them; the puddle in the bathroom is mopped up; the towels have been replaced; the sink, tub, and toilet are scrubbed. The minibar has been emptied, cleaned, and restocked. The hangers have been counted, the robes placed on the back of the bathroom door, the blow-dryer checked, the bottles of shampoo, conditioner, and lotion refilled. It’s so satisfying, Chad thinks, restoring this room to glory. He’s almost glad he’s no longer friends with Bryce and Eric, because they wouldn’t understand this feeling.
Paddy might understand. In the summers, he ran a lawn-mowing business in his hometown of Grimesland, North Carolina. He kept a push mower in the back of his Ford Ranger and drove to his clients’ homes—most of them ranches or saltboxes that would fit into Chad’s living room—and cut the grass, fifteen bucks for front and back. He did five or six lawns a day and put all his money in the bank so he’d have it to spend at Bucknell, but even then he had to be careful and sometimes he stayed home rather than go out to Bull Run, although Chad always offered to spot him.
Chad closes his eyes. The best part about working with Bibi is that he never has time to think about Paddy or wonder if Paddy is healed enough to go back to mowing lawns and look over the grass, striped with diagonal lines, and feel proud of his handiwork.
Normally, Chad is done with work around five, but today he and Ms. English don’t finish until after six. Lizbet has let them know that the boats are up and running again, and there are some pretty unhappy people waiting in the lobby for their rooms to be ready. From the five checkouts combined, there are sixty-five dollars in tips, which Ms. English presses into Chad’s hand, despite his protests.
“I don’t want it,” he says. “You take it.”
This makes Ms. English laugh. “Don’t be ridiculous, Long Shot.”
Chad stuffs the bills into the front pocket of his khakis. “I’ll give it to Bibi tomorrow.”
“To Bibi?” Ms. English says. “She didn’t earn it. She got a day off.”
But she needs it, Chad thinks.
“I hope you and Bibi aren’t getting romantically involved,” Ms. English says. “I don’t want to have to worry about you two alone in the rooms.”
Chad feels his face redden. The idea of fooling around with Bibi in one of the rooms makes him very uncomfortable. He wishes Ms. English hadn’t said that; he’s afraid it will be all he thinks about tomorrow, and if he’s awkward around Bibi, she’ll notice.
“No way,” he says. “Nothing like that.”
“But you brought her peaches,” Ms. English says, and she winks.
Chad has no interest in going home to face his father, so he delays the inevitable with a drive through town. It’s a summer evening on Nantucket and there are couples strolling into galleries for openings and a well-dressed mob crowding the hostess lectern at the Boarding House. Chad sees a group of—well, for lack of a better term—Chads walking right down the middle of the street, cutting off traffic without any consideration for the drivers, heading (he’s certain) to drink at the Gazebo, where they will order their vodka sodas and talk trash about their father’s boats, their golf handicaps, and girls.
Chad used to be one of those guys but he isn’t any longer, and he’s glad. He loops around and heads for home.
He’s driving out Eel Point Road when something catches his eye. It’s the gunmetal-gray Jeep Gladiator that Ms. English drives, parked in the driveway of number 133. The house is huge, even bigger than the Winslows’ home, and it’s closer to the water. Chad slows down. He’s pretty sure his parents considered buying number 133 as an investment property and renting it out for fifty or sixty grand a week until they eventually gifted it to Leith or Chad.
He watches Ms. English climb out of the Gladiator.
He comes to a stop and nearly calls to her. His Range Rover is hidden by the tall decorative grasses around the mailbox. What is Ms. English doing at number 133?
A dude wearing a panama hat and a wheat-colored linen suit comes out of the house and shakes Ms. English’s hand. He holds open the door and she steps inside.
Chad takes a beat to absorb this. Ms. English must be interviewing to clean number 133. A side hustle.
Chad drives off, feeling queasy—and the worst is yet to come.
When Chad pulls into his own driveway, he sees his father’s Jaguar.
He finds Paul Winslow on the back porch in a rattan chair, sunglasses perched on top of his bald head, eyes closed, gin and tonic on the table next to him. He’s dressed in shorts, a polo shirt, and Top-Siders, which is what he wears all summer long except when they go out for dinner; for that, Paul favors pants printed with whales, lobsters, or flamingos. Chad gets it—his father works in the pressure-cooker environment of venture capital, and these six weeks are his time to relax. If Paul lets off steam by wearing flamingo pants, fine. He deserves to enjoy the things his money has bought—the pool, their private beach, the view of Nantucket Sound.
Chad doesn’t hear anyone else in the house and he realizes his mother’s Lexus wasn’t in the driveway. He takes a step backward and Paul’s eyes open.
“Hey, hey, hey, son!” Paul says, rising to his feet and offering a hand as though Chad is a client. “I’ve been waiting for you. Where’ve you been?”
“Hey, Dad,” Chad says. He feels like a bluefish gutted with a gaff. What he wouldn’t give to wriggle free of this moment. “Where are Mom and Leith?”
“They’re at the salon,” Paul says, “getting gussied up for dinner.”
Dinner, Chad thinks. In the garden at the Chanticleer, which is their tradition the first night Paul arrives on island. Chad completely spaced about it. He can’t believe things in their family have just gone back to normal after what happened in May, but maybe enough time has passed that they all feel they can just move on—or his parents do. Leith will hate him forever, he’s pretty sure.
“I was at work, actually,” Chad says. “I got a job at the Hotel Nantucket, cleaning rooms.”
His father’s face shows no surprise, so Chad’s mother must have prepped him. Paul sits and extends a hand to indicate that Chad should take the seat next to his. “Let’s talk that through for a minute, shall we?” Paul’s tone of voice has switched to executive mode, and seeing no option, Chad sits. “Can I get you a beer, son?”
“No, thank you.”
Paul chuckles. “Don’t tell me you’re on the wagon. If your mother and I thought you needed rehab, we would have sent you to rehab.”
“No,” Chad says, though he hasn’t had a drink since that fateful night. “But I’m all set for right now.”
Paul sits in a pose of introspection, leaning forward in the chair, elbows on his knees, fingers tented, head bent. “So what I’m hearing you say is that you got a job.”
“Yes,” Chad says. “At the Hotel Nantucket, cleaning rooms. I work for the head of housekeeping, Ms. English, who’s an extremely cool person. There are three girls—women, I mean—on the crew with me. They all live on the Cape and commute over and back every day, so, because the boats weren’t running earlier today, it was just Ms. English and me, which is why I’m late. I usually finish around five.”
Paul nods along to all this, a signal that he’s listening. “I just closed a five-billion-dollar deal. Do you have any idea why I work so hard, Chadwick?”
Chad isn’t sure how to answer. His father’s not brokering peace in the Middle East or curing childhood cancer or teaching undergraduates the novels of Toni Morrison. He’s betting on the success of ideas, technology, natural resources. Every once in a while, this does the world some good; his firm buys a pharmaceutical company that brings out an important drug or backs a fledgling company that does something to improve people’s lives. But mostly, Chad understands, Paul is playing a game on an exclusive field, which results in a lot of winning. A lot of money. “Because you like it?” Chad says.