It was Taco Night at the Palmer house. Brock was out of town in who-knows-where. (Brock, who did something lucrative in the mystifying world of debt consolidation, was always out of town.) Rob was more than welcome to stay and eat with the girls, Deirdre said. She had a gargantuan taco bar spread the length of her extensive kitchen island, nearly a dozen small white bowls filled with various fixings: scallions, cilantro, olives, pico de gallo, shredded cheese. And so on. “There’s plenty!” she said. “Stay!”
But Rob had left some paperwork for Cabot Lodge on the boat—a misguided attempt a few days earlier, before Eliza left, to get some quiet work time in, some perspective. He was going to take the launch from the club and pick up the papers and be back in time to collect the girls from Deirdre’s, get them home, and kiss them good night.
On the way to the club from the Palmers’, he called Eliza’s cell phone twice. She didn’t answer either time. He blamed the service up there in Little Harbor. She’d been gone fifty-one hours and he’d talked to her only once, long enough to learn that her dad had hit his head and sprained his arm. It didn’t seem like a big deal, but she wanted to stay a few more days to make sure all was well. As long as Rob could hold down the fort.
Could Rob hold down the fort? Of course he could—that was one of the supposed results of leaving the architecture firm of his longtime mentor, Mo Francis, to go into business on his own. More time at home, less time commuting back and forth to Boston. (“You’re here more,” Evie, the miniature grown-up, had told him. “But you’re here less.”)
“Of course,” he’d told Eliza. “Of course I can hold down the fort. You be with your dad.” Eliza’s dad was a gruff, taciturn specimen of a man, but Evie and Zoe and Eliza went absolutely crazy for him. Rob did his best with Charlie Sargent, just as he knew Eliza did her best with Rob’s often-present, sometimes-abrasive, usually tipsy mother, Judith. Judith and Eliza, to put it gently, sometimes clashed.
Rob pulled into the club’s entrance and the guy in the booth waved him through. Eliza always slowed down significantly to let the booth guy get a good look at her when she drove to the club. She practically pulled out three different forms of identification and offered her fingerprints, a bank statement, and a description of what she’d had for breakfast. She hadn’t grown up going to yacht clubs—she had a semisecret fear that somebody was going to throw her out, even though, of course, they were members in good standing and had been forever. Rob had learned, all these years into his marriage to Eliza, to approach her relationship to money the way a bounty hunter might approach a criminal: on tiptoe, in the dark, without a warrant.
In fact, knowing how Eliza felt about their accepting so much from Judith was one of the reasons he’d decided to have the talk with his mom about the money. But he didn’t want to think about that right now.
Rob passed into the parking lot that served the clubhouse and the tennis courts and continued on toward the dock. He could see her out there, A Family Affair, all fifty-two gorgeous feet of her. They said in the yachting world that there was nothing quite like a Hinckley, and, by golly, they were right. Though speculation in Barton was rampant over the price—was it two and a quarter million? Two point five? Surely not three million?—Rob did not know the figure himself. Nor did he really want to.
The kid running the launch was young, three shades of cocky, good-looking in the way that was familiar to Rob from his prep-school days. Broad shoulders, good hair, deep-but-not-Miami-deep summer tan. A thoroughbred. One of the Marshall twins, Rob couldn’t say which. The twin said, “You’re not taking her out this close to sunset, alone, are you, sir?”
“Nope, just want to visit.” He never took the boat out alone; he’d promised Eliza. Also he didn’t want to leave the girls with Deirdre for too long—he really wanted to get those papers and get back to work.
He climbed aboard the launch, and the Marshall twin started the motor.
“Nice evening,” attempted the Marshall twin after a few moments of silence.
“Sure is,” said Rob. Then looked and saw that it was true. The sky was azure and the moon was very faintly outlined, as if politely awaiting its chance to come out.
He shelved his thoughts about Cabot Lodge and felt for his lucky coin in his pocket. Sometime after Rob’s father, Robert Barnes I, moved to Thailand to live with a beautiful, smooth-skinned, young woman named Malai, he sent Rob a ten-baht coin, featuring King Bhumibol Adulyadej on one side and the Temple of Dawn on the other. This was long ago, when his father’s absence was still new, the wound raw and bleeding, and Rob took the arrival of the coin in the afternoon mail—the envelope tattooed with foreign stamps—as a sign that his father would be coming back soon. He put the coin in the pocket of his school pants on that very first day, making a promise to himself that he’d keep it with him until his father returned.
Obviously, Rob was wrong about the coin’s significance. His father wasn’t coming back, not then, not ever. And yet it became a habit, moving the coin from his pocket to his dresser each night, returning it to his pocket in the morning, feeling the raised, bespectacled face of King Bhumibol Adulyadej. He’d clung to that coin when Eliza went into early labor with Zoe, when he shot a 79 on the Old Course at St. Andrews, the day he told Mo Francis he was starting out on his own—and every day in between. He’d no sooner leave the house without that coin than he’d leave the house without underwear.
The Marshall twin pulled the launch alongside A Family Affair, idled, looked to the sky, and squinted. “This boat is fucking awesome, man,” he said. He dropped the cockiness, tapped down the barrier of cool, and became a little kid in front of the biggest toy in the world. “Best boat in the harbor.”
“I know,” said Rob. He didn’t even attempt modesty, because the Marshall kid was exactly right. Sometimes bigger boats came through. But not better, no sir. Not better.
“Fifteen minutes?”
“Yup,” said Rob. “Right. Fifteen minutes. Just want to check on a couple of things, grab something I left.”