As Eddie drives along Polpis Road, he chastises himself for not doing a better job of reading the Christys. He should have skipped the old-school summer homes. Those will eventually sell to someone who grew up summering on Nantucket and always dreamed of owning a house on Hulbert Avenue or Lincoln Circle. To appreciate the pedigree and charm of those cottages, one needs to have an affinity for understatement and reserve.
Eddie is so consumed with disappointment and doubt in himself—What if I blow this sale? I can’t blow it! I’m counting on the commission!—that he almost doesn’t notice Grace pedaling down the bike path. Eddie hits the brakes and swivels his head. That’s Grace, all right, head hunched over the handlebars like Dennis Quaid in Breaking Away. She’s headed toward town.
“My wife!” Eddie says. He realizes he’s cutting Masha off; she’s in the middle of a long-winded story about a cruise she and Raja took to the Bahamas. Their luggage was lost and not returned to them until the very end of the trip. How did they even get on that topic? Eddie wonders. He follows the thread backward and thinks, Oh yes. The last time Masha and Raja were on an island. “I’m sorry,” Eddie says. “It’s just that that was my wife back there, riding her bike on the path. We just passed her.”
“Funny,” Masha says. “That happened to us once. Raja stopped at Lanzilli’s after work to buy some cheeseburger-flavored Pringles, which he loves but I refuse to buy, and I was at Lanzilli’s because we’d completely run out of toilet paper. I’ve never been so surprised to see anyone in my life, and I’ll tell you what, neither was Raja. He thought he was getting away with something.”
Eddie can’t come up with a response to that; he’s too busy checking the rearview mirror for another glimpse of Grace. It was her—she was wearing her new favorite hat, the dark-green one with the faux-mink pom-pom on top, and she had on Allegra’s old navy Whalers hoodie, which she favors because it makes her feel young.
“Is your wife a big biker?” Masha asks. “Neither Raja nor I exercise, except when we walk Jack.”
“And I walk to the T station,” Raja says.
“We both walk to the T station,” Masha says. “But it’s only half a block away, so it doesn’t count for much.”
Eddie knows that Grace took to riding her mountain bike while Eddie was in jail, but she hasn’t, to his knowledge, ridden it since he’s been back.
Why today? he wonders. It isn’t as though she has to go to the bank or the grocery store. She’s all the way out here on Polpis Road. It’s not raining or even very cold, but neither is it sunny and mild like it was on Wednesday.
Why today?
And then Eddie notices a big black truck barreling toward him. He freezes. Is it Benton Coe’s truck? He looks at the man driving, while at the same time trying to memorize the license plate—M23…—but he can’t do both at once. He got half the plate and a split-second glimpse of the driver, who was wearing a hat and sunglasses. Impossible to tell if it was Benton Coe or not, and half a license plate is useless. Benton Coe does drive a black truck, or he used to before he left for Detroit. But then again, half the contractors on Nantucket drive black trucks. That could have been anyone. Eddie can’t let his wild imagination get the best of him.
He has missed the last three or four paragraphs of Masha’s ongoing monologue. Now she’s talking about a recipe for s’mores you can make under the broiler, which makes you feel like you’re beside a campfire even when you’re sitting in an apartment in East Boston.
Eddie’s phone pings. He’s distracted and nearly misses the turn for Medouie Creek Road. They are now out in Wauwinet, not far from the house where Eddie and Grace used to live. He wonders if Grace decided to bike out here to look upon their house and maybe even wander through their old gardens. The people who bought the house, the Pattons, live in Dubai and are on Nantucket only in August, so there would be no danger of interrupting anyone at home.
Somehow the thought of Grace pedaling out to set her eyes on their old life makes Eddie even more depressed than thinking of her rendezvousing with Benton Coe. Eddie failed her, failed her badly. He lost everything they had—and still she has stayed with him.
He will make it up to her. He will sell the Christys a house, this house on Medouie Creek Road, listed at thirteen and a half million, and he will invest every cent into Grace’s future happiness.
But first he has to get his head back in the game!
The nice thing about Masha is she doesn’t require anyone else’s participation in the conversation; she just prattles along happily by herself.
Eddie pulls into the driveway. “Here we are,” he says. It takes a second to recall that this is Rachel McMann’s listing; her turquoise Mini Cooper is parked in front of the garage.
“Now that’s what I’m talking about!” Masha says, interrupting herself when she sees the house, the pool, the pool house, the trimmed boxwood hedges and manicured lawn, the hydrangea bushes neatly bundled in burlap for the winter, and the view of the harbor spread out before them like a painting.
Rachel is standing in the doorway, wearing a dress that would look right at home on Marion Cunningham from Happy Days. She has an apron on over the dress, and she’s holding out a plate of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies; Eddie can smell them from the front walk.
So this is how she does it, he thinks.
He might as well be invisible. From the second the Christys walk through the door, Rachel takes over. She has made cookies, and she has classical music playing and a fire burning in each of the six fireplaces. She has staged every single room. There are fresh flowers in the common areas, including an arrangement of fresh lilies in the vestibule that towers over Eddie’s head. There are French milled soaps in the bathrooms and stacks of novels on each of the nightstands. The house has every amenity known to man: six bedrooms, each with its own bath, and a deep Jacuzzi tub in the master; a cathedral-ceilinged gourmet kitchen; a library; and in the basement, a home theater, a billiards room, and a wine cellar.
Masha is speechless.
Raja eats four cookies in rapid succession, then takes a fifth, which he carries around with him as they head outside to look at the pool and the pool house, which also features a steam sauna and a fully equipped gym, the answer to the Christys’ lack of exercise. Then they all meander out to the end of the deep-water dock.
“Do you two have a boat?” Rachel asks.
“Not yet,” Masha says. “But we might soon, right, Raj?”
Rachel leads them back to the house to warm up by the fire. Masha says she needs to use the little girls’ room.