That is why Tabitha likes Teddy: Teddy has lost someone.
Teddy’s mother subsequently fell apart and tried to take her own life. She is now at a psychiatric hospital in Tulsa, and Teddy was shipped to his only other living relative—his father’s brother, Graham Elquot, who is a scalloper here on Nantucket. In the summertime, when scalloping season is suspended, Graham works as a raw bar shucker for all the fancy cocktail parties. Tabitha saw him in action over Memorial Day weekend at the Figawi tent, but she didn’t have the courage to introduce herself as Ainsley’s mother.
Behind Teddy, the room is shadowy.
“Get your clothes on, Teddy,” Tabitha says. “Are you sober?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Teddy says, and Tabitha believes him.
“I want you to drive some kids home. You take half, and Candace will take half.”
Teddy nods.
“Send Ainsley out, please,” Tabitha says.
Her daughter emerges thirty seconds later wearing a vintage Janet Russo sundress of Tabitha’s. She has had sex in Tabitha’s bed, raided Tabitha’s closet, and turned the living room into a Jersey Shore arcade. Tabitha worries that Ainsley will be defiant, but she looks ashamed. Actually that might be overstating it. She looks mildly contrite.
“You said midnight at the earliest,” Ainsley says. “I planned on having everyone out and everything cleaned up by then.”
“As if that makes it okay,” Tabitha says.
“Please,” Ainsley says. “Please don’t be a buzzkill.”
Candace takes half the kids—including Emma—home in Emma’s Range Rover, and Teddy takes the rest of the kids home in his uncle’s truck. Tabitha tells Ainsley she’s not going to bed until the upstairs is spotless. There are rings on the Stephen Swift table that will never come out.
“Do you have any idea how much money this table cost me?” Tabitha asks. Then, before Ainsley can answer, she says, “Twenty thousand dollars.”
“Do you ever listen to yourself, Tabitha?” Ainsley says. “You are so materialistic.”
Do you ever listen to yourself? Tabitha thinks. You sound like a privileged, entitled snot.
“Do not,” Tabitha says, “call me that.”
“Why not?” Ainsley says. “Emma calls her father by his first name.”
“It shouldn’t be your aspiration to be like Emma,” Tabitha says. “That girl is bad news. Always has been, always will be.”
“Always has been, always will be,” Ainsley says in a high, mocking tone. “You’re so judgmental.”
Tabitha is about to say that she’s supposed to be judgmental where Ainsley is concerned, because how else will Ainsley figure out what’s acceptable behavior and what’s not? But this will no doubt end up sparking angry responses, coming one after another like an endless string of firecrackers.
Tabitha lets it go.
They get the table returned to its usual place, moving it together, which feels sort of okay—thirty seconds of a common goal. Tabitha empties the ashtrays and tosses out the roaches. She and Ainsley throw the beer cans in the recycling pile.
“So,” Ainsley says. “You came home early. How was your night?”
Oh, how Tabitha would love to change the tenor of the evening by sinking into the Gervin and telling her daughter about her night—the party on the Belle, meeting the captain, going to Nautilus, bumping into Ramsay. But Tabitha recognizes Ainsley’s words for what they are: a strategy. Ainsley has never once asked Tabitha about her night. Ainsley is painfully self-absorbed. Ainsley asking now is Ainsley wanting to butter Tabitha up so that Tabitha forgets she’s supposed to punish Ainsley.
It doesn’t matter how Tabitha fields the question, because at that moment Ainsley finds the cup in the kitchen that contains her submerged phone. The scream could shatter glass.
Tabitha feels a childish sense of triumph. Gotcha, she thinks.
Later, when Tabitha is lying in Ainsley’s bed—she isn’t about to sleep in her own bed after what happened—and Tabitha is wondering just whose flawed genes her daughter inherited, she remembers Harper’s text. She checks her phone. It is now 12:15 a.m., the hour she was expected home.
She clicks on Vineyard Haven, MA.
The text says: Billy is gone.
AINSLEY
They are going to Martha’s Vineyard.
Billy is dead. Billy is the only grandfather Ainsley has ever known, because her father’s father, Wyatt senior, died before Ainsley was born.
Ainsley, Tabitha, and Ainsley’s grandmother, Eleanor, take the fast ferry from Nantucket to Oak Bluffs. While standing in line, Ainsley accidentally refers to it as Oaks Bluff, and she is reprimanded by a woman even older than Grammie who is standing behind her. This woman puts a hand on Ainsley’s shoulder and says, “One tree, many bluffs. Or, more likely, one kind of tree, many bluffs.”
“Whatever,” Ainsley says.
Eleanor pipes up. “One needs to know.”
Ainsley nearly rolls her eyes in her mother’s direction until she remembers that she hates her mother. Tabitha intentionally destroyed Ainsley’s phone, and thus Ainsley has no way to get hold of anyone—not Emma, not Teddy. Her mother kept her in the house all weekend, even though it was beautiful weather. Her mother didn’t go to yoga class and, even more shocking, didn’t go to check on things at the boutique.
Ainsley had said, “You can go into the store for a few hours, Tabitha. I’m not going to go anywhere.” (This was a barefaced lie. As soon as Tabitha pulled out of the driveway, Ainsley intended to ride her bike to Teddy’s.)
Tabitha said, “Grammie is going in for me.”
“Grammie?” Ainsley said. Eleanor is a designer. She is an artist and a genius, but she has not, to Ainsley’s knowledge, ever gone into the boutique to manage or supervise. That has always been Tabitha’s job.
“Yes,” Tabitha said. She had given Ainsley her fakest smile. “I’m staying here with you.”
Spending two days shut up in the house without a phone had been a living hell. Because Billy had died, Tabitha spent most of the time mooning around. She pulled out old photo albums—all photo albums were old, Ainsley knew, but these were really old—displaying pictures of her mother and Aunt Harper when they were babies. Tabitha had encouraged Ainsley to join her on the sofa, which smelled like marijuana smoke and probably would forever, a fact that secretly pleased Ainsley. Tabitha had said, “You should see these. These are pictures from when we were a whole family. Your grandparents are married, and Harper and I are wearing matching outfits.”