Ta-da! He’d announced himself with open arms, the back of the suit jacket still toasty from the iron, just as Leslie, Brooks, and Eva were climbing into the car headed to the club. His wife’s smile warmed him inside out. A peace offering, he hoped, since they’d been fighting like cats and dogs for weeks.
The car was running, Eva strapped into her car seat, Brooks fiddling with the radio dials until he found what he wanted—a station blasting “Baby Got Back”—and then Leslie was laughing, dancing, wiggling her hips in the seat, even Eva waving her plump arms above her head. Jules popped the trunk. He’d left his new dress shoes back there. The price tag had made his mouth go dry but Leslie had insisted. Brooks’s backpack was tucked next to the shoes and when Jules lifted the shoebox, the backpack rattled. Like it was full of metal.
He unzipped the bag—not that he needed proof. He’d grown up a city boy. He knew the jangling of spray-paint cans when he heard it.
When they had pulled up to the clubhouse, Jules busy handing the keys over to the valet, Brooks had disappeared. He must talk to his son. Then he, Brooks, and Leslie would sit down and have a long talk about what came next. Leslie would refuse, but Jules didn’t see a way around going to the police. Maybe, if Brooks turned himself in … he stopped himself. Brooks could be holding on to the cans for someone else? Those ratty metal-head kids who had ruined the ballroom walls with their foul tags. SAVE ME. FUCK ME. He’d stopped there, not wanting to read any more. Who, he wondered, did they think was listening? He’d told Leslie about the sprayed walls and she’d responded with the same apathetic shrug she’d used again and again those past few months.
He managed to lose Veronica and downed his third drink, something fizzy with lime, the rim coated in red, white, and blue sugar granules. The American flag swizzler poked him in the nose. Then he heard his father’s voice so loud and clear, he searched the room, turning in a slow circle. He was losing his mind, he thought, then spotted Brooks with Eva by the lemonade fountain. Brooks hand in hand with a pretty young girl who, Jules guessed, was the Maddie. His son was nervous, his fingers lifting to pick at his hair, his eyes moving from one corner of the room to the next like he was waiting, but for what? Each time the girl leaned close to him, to whisper in his ear, to tug on his shirtsleeve, Jules saw Brooks pull away. Something he guessed Maddie noticed too, because her smile looked put on. A mask.
You better keep watch over that boy, his father’s voice grumbled. Jules finished the drink and made his way back to the bar for another. Something to silence his pops.
But after the fourth drink, and even the fifth, his tongue fuzzy from the lime, the voice remained.
Don’t just stand there like some tar-faced lawn jockey, Julius.
Leslie waved to him—a wiggle of fingers from her spot at the great window overlooking the rolling hills of the golf course.
Like some damn trophy husband. A pet to keep chained up in the garden.
His stomach convulsed, and he was heading for the bathroom that smelled like aftershave and pipe tobacco, where Muzak slipped out from invisible speakers, and a Hispanic man not much younger than Jules handed out towels and received a measly quarter in a porcelain dish.
Veronica reappeared. She tugged him forward and spent the next twenty minutes introducing him—thrusting him into the middle of conversations was more like it—to one confused old lady after another. At first, he smiled meekly, shook the offered hands, every one bedecked with jeweled rings stuffed over swollen knuckles. He assumed Veronica was trying to get him gardening work, but when her sassy side took over, he saw it was a game. She was mocking the island elite, and the dumb lugs didn’t even know.
“No, Dolores,” Veronica said with a sweet smile, “He can’t trim your rosebushes. He’s not a day laborer, he’s a landscape architect. He went to Harvard, for chrissakes!”
Veronica grabbed Jules’s arm and pulled him away and he did his best to stifle a laugh as he glanced back at poor Dolores, her mouth hanging open over her doubled chin.
“Forget that dingbat,” Veronica mumbled. “And be careful no one hands you their empty glasses. Half these people think you’re a busboy.”
Coming from anyone else on the island, Jules would have been offended. But Veronica had felt, ever since that night at the Castle after the mad Colonel tolled the bell, like a friend. Or a comrade, at least. Neither of them belonged on this island.
He thought, at first, she was drunk. Her eyes were glassy. Bloodshot.
“Ms. Veronica. You seem,” he started, “different tonight.”
“Shucks.” She slapped his arm playfully. Like a teenage girl flirting in the school hallway, he thought. “An old hippie like you should be able to appreciate my elevated state of being. Come with me, Julius. Let us transcend together. Ooh, lookie there!”
He followed Veronica’s crooked finger. Orchid Lady from the fair stood by the buffet in a shimmery blue dress that made Jules think of porpoises. A jumbo shrimp tail stuck out of her mouth and when she spotted Veronica pulling him toward her, she nearly dropped her plate.
“I don’t think this is a good idea,” he whispered into Veronica’s poufy silver hair, tasting hairspray.
“It is indeed,” she said. “Just watch me do my magic.”
“Really,” he said, “I don’t think—”
She stopped him. “Don’t think, just smile. She’ll be less scared if you smile.”
He heard his father’s voice. They’re all scared of you. They’ll always be scared of you. Jules knew he was right. No matter how hard Veronica, in her sweet but manic Good Samaritan crusade, tried to change their minds.
She’s just another Lady Van der Meer, his father’s voice said. And you’re her pet project. One that has to be leashed in the garden each night. God forbid you go rabid.
As Veronica rattled off directions to a slack-jawed Orchid Lady, who, it turned out, was named Lorna Hennessey, and the chair of the East Avalon Flower Festival that year, Jules thought of his mother’s lady, which is what she’d always called Mrs. Van der Meer, her employer of more than four decades and, no matter how much his father had wanted to deny it, their family’s benefactor.
It was, he thought, as Orchid Lady nodded—why certainly Jules could participate in the flower festival that year—thanks to Mrs. Van der Meer that he was standing there listening to these two ancient white ladies discuss him like he was stock to be traded. It was still a mystery to him how his sweet-natured mama had won the argument with his father, convincing him to let Jules attend the private high school paid for by Mrs. Van der Meer. Must have taken Mama all her patience, and courage, to stand up to the man who was as hard as dried cement. His pops had ranted that taking white people’s money was like … how had his father put it?
Like forging your own chains.