At eight o’clock Monday night, there’s a knock on the front door. Chad is up in his room playing Madden NFL, though he’s supposed to be getting a head start on his packing. His job at the Brandywine Group starts the Tuesday after Labor Day.
After his drinks date with Ms. English the previous Wednesday, Chad marched into his house and invited his mother, father, and Leith into the formal living room. They complied, probably only because it was such an unusual request; they never used the formal living room.
Chad had some things he wanted to say.
“First of all, I’d like to apologize. I’m to blame for Paddy losing an eye, for Lulu’s death, and for all of the damage done to our house.”
“Chaddy,” his mother said. “I thought we agreed to move on.”
Chad ignores this predictable response. “I got a job at the Hotel Nantucket because I wanted a summer of honest work. I didn’t want to teach little kids to chip and putt, I wanted to do something difficult—unpleasant, even.” Chad paused. “I didn’t take the job to make you proud of me, I did it for myself. But even so, I’m surprised that you don’t seem to find my decision laudable.”
“You’re using some good SAT words there, bruh,” Leith says.
“You seemed embarrassed that I was cleaning rooms,” Chad said to his parents. “You never refer to my job, never talk about it, never ask how my day was.”
“It isn’t what Mom and I wanted for you,” Paul Winslow said. “We wanted you to be able to recharge your batteries before coming to join me at the firm.”
“About that,” Chad said. “I won’t be joining you at the firm.”
Chad’s mother shrieked as though she’d seen a rat hiding beneath her prized Edra sofa.
Leith said, “This is getting good.”
“I like working at the hotel,” Chad said. “I want to stay in hospitality, maybe go back to school and get into a management program.”
Paul kept his cool because keeping his cool was his job. “Our administrative assistants make over two hundred thousand dollars a year,” he said. “Which is more than double what you’ll be making as a manager at the Holiday Inn.”
“I don’t care about money,” Chad said.
“That’s easy for you to say. You’ve always had it. You don’t know the first thing about being poor or even middle class, Chadwick. You’ve never had to pay for a single thing in all your life.”
“I know that money doesn’t make you happy,” Chad said. “I mean, look at the three of you.” With that, Chad stomped upstairs to his room, high on his own righteousness. He would stay on Nantucket through Columbus Day and he would get into some kind of hotel-management program. He would work at the Hotel Nantucket the following year even if it meant cleaning rooms again, though he hoped he could secure a job on the desk. He wondered what Ms. English would think of this.
But now, only five days later, everything has changed. The first thing Chad heard was that Richie Decameron, the night auditor, got arrested for selling guests’ credit card numbers. This had actually been sort of good news as far as Chad was concerned (though he’d never admit this to anyone) because the position of night auditor was one Chad might be able to fill the following year. Then Chad learned that Xavier Darling was putting the hotel on the market. He was going to sell it—and it might not be a hotel at all next year.
And so Chad is back to facing a future at his father’s firm. He’s playing video games because it’s a way to avoid preparing for a life he doesn’t want to live.
When he hears the knock on the front door, he jumps to his feet. He fears it’s one of his (former) friends, trying to lure him out just once before the summer ends. Because who else could it be?
Chad peers out the window and sees the gunmetal-gray Jeep Gladiator that Ms. English drives.
Whoa! Chad thinks. He runs down the stairs, opens the front door, and sure enough, there’s Ms. English standing on his porch.
She smiles at him. “Hello there, Long Shot.”
“Ms. English!” he says. Ms. English is here, on Eel Point Road? Chad then recalls seeing her down the street at number 133 back in the middle of the summer. He’d never mentioned seeing her because he didn’t want her to know that he knew she cleaned other houses. A chilling thought comes to him: Ms. English is here tonight to see if she can clean for his family. Now that the hotel is closing, she must need a job.
Chad feels mortified by what Ms. English has already seen: the long white-shell driveway lined on either side by pruned boxwood, the hydrangea bushes showboating along the front porch, and the needlessly enormo waterfront home behind him.
“Is your father at home?” Ms. English asks.
“My father?”
“Yes,” Ms. English says. Her outfit falls somewhere between what she normally wears to work and what she wore to drinks the other evening. She has on white pants and a navy tunic printed with white hibiscus. Her hair is in corkscrew curls to her shoulders and she’s wearing pearl earrings. “He’s expecting me.”
“He is?” Chad says—and at that second, Paul Winslow strides out from the back of the house.
“Magda, hello!” he says—and Chad nearly falls through the floor. His father knows Ms. English? Chad experiences a moment of vertigo as he wonders if maybe this whole summer has been a setup. Has Paul Winslow been pulling the puppet strings all along? Did his father want him to be working at the hotel to teach him the lessons that he thought he’d learned on his own?
“I went out today and got a bottle of Appleton Estate Twenty-One,” Paul says. “Just to have it on hand for you. Can I pour you a glass?”
“I’d love it, Paul, thank you,” Magda says.
Paul claps Chad on the shoulder. “Show Magda to my study, please, bud. I’ll be back in a second with the drinks.”
Paul heads to the kitchen and Chad stares at Ms. English for a second. Is this another one of those moments, like when she told him what happened to Bibi, where nothing is what it seems? Maybe Paul is interviewing Magda—not for a job cleaning their house but for a job at the Brandywine Group. If Ms. English works there, will that make Chad’s position there any more palatable?
No, Chad thinks. Not really.
“The study, Long Shot?” she says.
“Oh, right.” Chad shows Ms. English into the study. She sits in one of the butterscotch suede club chairs and crosses her legs. She pulls her phone and a legal pad out of her bag.
“Okay,” Chad says. “I’ll see you tomorrow morning.”
“Don’t you want to stay?” Ms. English asks.
“Stay?” Chad says. “If you don’t mind my asking, what’s going on? Why are you here?”
Ms. English laughs. “Oh, Long Shot, you should see your face, it’s priceless.” She leans forward and whispers, “Your father and I are forming a partnership. We’re going to buy the hotel.”
28. The Cobblestone Telegraph
When we next see Fast Eddie, he’s seated at the big front table at Cru, where he has ordered a magnum of Dom Pérignon, which is attended by two servers and three live sparklers.
Well, it’s no wonder. It has taken a mere three days for him to secure a twenty-million-dollar offer on the Hotel Nantucket. The buyer is known only as the Long Shot Trust, but because Eddie can’t keep his mouth shut (something his sister, Barbie, scolds him for nonstop), someone among us discovered that the property was purchased in equal parts by two entities. One was Paul Winslow, a principal at the Brandywine Group who owns a home on Eel Point Road, and the other was Magda English, the head of housekeeping at the Hotel Nantucket.