“Yes, you e-mailed it to me three times.” Mike sighs. “Cissy, I really hate this.”
“Listen, move the house all the way to the street. No yard? That’s fine. I can hold my parties indoors. Do whatever you have to do.”
“I can’t move it any closer to the street.”
“Take out the privet hedge! I realize that I said to keep it at all costs but if that’s the cost of saving Cliff House, so be it.”
“Cissy,” Mike says again and takes a few steps closer.
Bess stands in place, ogling. He is a brave man to tell Cissy no.
“You can put in sandbags,” he says, and gently pats her arm. “You can take out privacy hedges. You can do both of these things but the fact is that this land is unstable. A pool, you ask? I wouldn’t put a bowl of good chowder anywhere on this property.”
“But isn’t there any way—”
“See that?” he says, and points toward the door. “My soil-testing kit outside? It’s pouring rain but I’m going to walk out there and grab it. I’m afraid it won’t survive the holiday weekend and I’ll be out fifty bucks. Never mind the kit, though. If I were you…” He looks at Cissy. He looks at Bess. “I’d get out. Now. You don’t have a lot of time left.”
41
Friday Night
The rain has stopped, mostly, but even the lingering drizzle doesn’t impede Felicia Bradlee’s multiboat soirée. And why would it? Bankers and lawyers can rough it in hats and raincoats. They wear their slumming-it shoes. It makes them feel outdoorsy despite so many hours logged in conference rooms.
Bess sits on the bench of Kip’s Folly, a glass of white wine in hand, not a friend to be found. Flick is off humoring guests with work anecdotes and her brusque, infectious laugh. Palmer and Brooks are chasing Amory around, making sure she doesn’t drown in the marina. Bess checks her watch. It’s already past Amory’s bedtime and soon Bess will have no compatriots left at the party. The guest she invited never responded.
If that’s not humiliating enough, even her mother is missing. Cissy promised to attend, RSVP’d even (unlike certain local contractors), but in the end stayed home, leaving Bess to explain her absence.
To Aunt Polly and Uncle Vince: “She’s not feeling well.”
To Flick: “She’s being Cissy.”
And to Palmer: “The engineer told her a big fat ‘NOPE’ on moving Cliff House so she’s hunting down someone willing to give her the answer she wants.”
“Cis, you have to come,” Bess said earlier, as she rooted around her suitcase for something to wear.
She and Palmer picked up new tops and some “darling” wedge heels in town, but diaphanous silk blouses and slick-bottomed shoes weren’t going to cut it in that weather. A gross error in judgment when the party called for the delicate sartorial balance between looking decent and keeping warm, a formula that very much defined life on-island eighty percent of the summer. It’s something Bess should’ve remembered as the woman in the shop swiped her card. Summer People. They have no clue.
“Finding a new engineer is more important,” Cissy said as Bess settled on a cashmere white-and-navy sweater. “As for the party? It was a courtesy invite. No one really wants a sixty-year-old woman there. How come Yelp won’t let you expand the search to ‘entire eastern seaboard’?”
“Of course people want you there, Cis. And it’s rude to bail. You can’t say you’re coming and then not show up.”
“Felicia only invited me to be nice,” Cissy said. “Listen, my back is against a wall. You heard Mike. This predicament is time-sensitive. I’ll attend the wedding. That’s the main event. No one will miss me tonight.”
“Mom, people always miss you. You add a unique dimension to any gathering of two or more.”
Cissy peered out over her glasses.
“Don’t be fresh.”
And so Bess sits alone, on a boat, in a fog so thick she can’t even pretend to gaze wistfully out toward sea. At thirty-plus she should be okay with the solitude, and she is, for the most part. But it’d be nice to not feel so out of place.
Bess takes a sip of Chardonnay: the teensiest, tiniest, most minuscule bubble of a taste. It burns on the way down—more than it should, as Flick surely bought the good stuff. A punishment, Bess decides, though she isn’t sure for what. God, she is pregnant. Pregnant! Thirteen weeks almost. It’s inexcusable to be that far along.
She sets down her glass (glass, on a boat, for the love of all that’s logical) and glances around. Little groups of people wander up and down Old South Wharf, and Bess finds herself scanning the crowd for any meanderers of the male persuasion, approximately six foot two in height. After all, she didn’t request a response, she simply asked him to show up. But people around here only walk in packs.
As Bess returns her focus to the party, she accidentally provokes eye contact with a girl standing a few feet away. The stranger offers a small wave and makes a move in her direction. Bess flinches, but it’s too late to disappear.
The girl, a woman really, is in her mid-thirties, too, give or take. She wears skinny jeans and a gray cashmere sweater. Her hair is pulled back, thick and straight and blond like a horse’s tail. As she approaches, Bess recognizes her from somewhere. Choate? Boston College? Definitely not Nantucket High. She’s too shiny for that. Bess smiles, trying to dredge up a name, but can’t get it anywhere close to the tip of her tongue.
“Hi!” Bess says brightly, too brightly.
“Bess Codman in the flesh!” she says, right out of the gate, showing off her superior facial recognition skills. “So great to see you! You look fabulous.”
The woman leans down for a hug and then plants herself beside Bess.
“Gosh, thanks,” Bess says. “You, too.”
The woman is beautiful, though Bess doesn’t know whether it’s more or less so than before.
“I almost didn’t recognize you,” the woman says. “Did you get glasses?”
“It’s not so much that I ‘got glasses.’ I’m just not wearing my contacts.”
“Oh, weird.” She makes a face. “Anyway, what have you been up to?”
The woman sips some reddish-pink concoction through a straw so as not to muddle her lip gloss.
“Uh, er, um…” Bess stutters. “What have I been up to?”
Choate. The woman has to be from Choate, since Flick went to Penn. Although maybe they took sailing lessons together at the club umpteen summers ago.
“Do you work?” the woman asks. “Stay at home? What?”
“Oh. Right. I work in an ED?”
The woman crinkles her nose.
“The Education Department?” she asks. “Is that in Washington?”
“No … no … the emergency … I work in the ER, in San Francisco.”
“Oh! A doctor!” The woman claps. “That makes sense. You were a total brainiac.”
“I was?”
“I work in publishing, which everyone thinks is so cool and so glamorous. People just mob me at parties, peppering me with questions, trying to tell me about some half-baked book idea.” She rolls her eyes. “Everyone thinks they can write a book. It’s so annoying.”