She had looked at Angie first, then at Deacon, then back at Angie. “Can I help y’all?” she asked.
“I’m the groom!” Deacon had exclaimed.
“Let me go fetch Mrs. Oliver,” the maid had said.
Deacon and Angie had remained on the front porch. It was the first of a thousand times Angie had wished to go home.
Mrs. Oliver had turned out to be Scarlett’s mother, Prudence, known to her familiars as Prue; Angie was certainly not the woman’s familiar and decided never to call her anything, not even Mrs. Oliver. Prue was simply an older version of Scarlett, with the same black hair, hers pulled back in a chignon; the same pale skin; the same vermilion lipstick. “Deacon,” she said, making the name rhyme with “bacon.” “You’re here.”
“That I am,” Deacon said. He shook Prue’s hand, then ushered Angie forward, like a hostess gift. “And this is my daughter, Angie.”
“Yes,” Prue had said. “I’ve heard all about Angie.”
Angie assumed this meant Prue had long ago been warned that Angie was black.
There had been many offensive things about Deacon’s wedding to Scarlett. Angie had been the only family member to attend—Hayes had gotten a pass because he was on his first assignment for the magazine, in Switzerland—and the only other person to attend from Deacon’s life was Buck, who had served as best man.
“Rewind, repeat,” Buck said to Scarlett’s uncle, the appeals judge who married the happy couple. “I was Deacon’s best man the last time around as well.”
The ceremony had been held in the meticulously landscaped back garden of the yellow mansion. Angie had roasted in the long-sleeved lavender lace dress that Scarlett had picked out for her. It was Givenchy, but who cared? It was sadistic to put a dark girl in long-sleeved scratchy material in a sickening color when it was a hundred and ten degrees out.
Worse than the heat and Scarlett’s relatives (who were self-proclaimed Confederates and therefore, Angie assumed, racists), or the fact that the Thorpes were so woefully outnumbered, was that Deacon was trying so hard to make Scarlett’s family like him, to accept him, to consider him good enough. Angie didn’t understand the dynamics at play. Scarlett had been their nanny; she had worked for them. But when Angie tried to make this point, Deacon said, “Scarlett comes from an old Savannah family, sweetheart. She was raised as a member of society.”
Deacon had worn a seersucker suit and a bow tie, and Angie had barked out a laugh and said, “What did you do with my father?”
It wasn’t bad enough that Angie was losing her father; apparently, he was losing himself. Gone was his cool self-confidence, gone was his devil-may-care attitude, gone was what Angie had thought of as his essential superiority to every other man in the world. When he was conversing with the judge uncle and Scarlett’s parents—Prue and Scarlett’s upright corpse of a father, Brace—Deacon sounded downright obsequious. He must have mentioned sixty times that Angie was getting straight As at Chapin, “a prestigious girls’ boarding school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan,” and that his own “five-year plan” included “opening my own place somewhere in midtown, just as soon as I cultivate the right group of investors.”
Angie thought, Since when do you have to brag about my grades or state your goals?
The worst of the worst, however, happened during the champagne toasts that preceded the cutting of the cake. By this time, Angie was rip-roaring drunk herself, thanks to a fraternity boy from Ole Miss named Burt, who slipped a liberal amount of rum into each of Angie’s Cokes.
Deacon had raised his flute and said, “Scarlett and I have an announcement to make.”
Angie had thought, What kind of announcement? They were already married. What was left?
Scarlett said, “I’m pregnant.”
There was an ambiguous reaction from those assembled—some grumbles, some here-here’s with glasses held aloft. Angie’s own reaction had been clear-cut: she had vomited in the grass at her feet.
Now, she and Hayes ascended the steps to the front porch in near-perfect unison. A board on the floor of the porch in front of the welcome mat was loose, and Angie nearly stumbled over it.
Hayes pulled a couple of white pills out of his pocket. He threw one back, washed it down with a sip of the watery Bloody Mary he’d been nursing since they got off the ferry. He held the other pill out to Angie.
“Vicodin?” he said. “Take the edge off?”
Angie stared at the pill. There were multiple loci of her pain—her father’s death, Joel’s puzzling silence, and then… whatever waited inside this house. But Angie surprised herself by realizing that she didn’t want to take the edge off. She wanted to feel everything. Mostly, she wanted to cry.
“No, thanks,” she said.
Hayes shrugged, pocketed the pill, and held the door open. “After you,” he said.
Laurel and Buck were sitting on stools in the kitchen, having drinks. When they saw Hayes and Angie walk in, they jumped to their feet.
“You made it!” Laurel cried out. She hugged Hayes, and Buck hugged Angie.
Angie wanted to grill Buck with a thousand silly, insecure questions: Did my father love me? Did he think I was talented? Did he think I was smart? Was he proud of me?
Did he know about me and Joel?
Did he love me as much as Hayes or Ellery?
Buck released Angie; he and Laurel did a little dance step and switched partners. Buck gave Hayes a man hug, while Laurel embraced Angie.
“Oh, sweet Angie,” Laurel said.
“It’s so weird being here without him,” Angie said. She had been coming to this house with her father every summer of her life. Just behind Laurel’s head was the spot on the door frame where Angie, Hayes, and Ellery had all been measured with pencil marks at the end of each summer. Home is where the hash marks are, Angie thought. Deacon used to do the measuring on the last day of their stay, and he always said the same thing: My, my, look how you have grown!
“I haven’t been here in nearly thirty years,” Laurel said. “It looks exactly the same as it did the summer we bought it, or nearly. I’m sure it’s difficult for you. I’m sure you expect him to pull into the driveway any second in that crazy jeep.”
“The jeep died for good last year,” Angie said. “We all thought that was the end of the world, but no. This is.”
“Angie?”
A different voice.
Oh no.
Angie turned to see Belinda enter the kitchen.
“Mom?” Angie said. She had known her mother was coming, obviously—Buck had told her, and Belinda had confirmed it herself in the two dozen voice mails she had left on Angie’s phone—but Angie had been positive Belinda would back out because of Laurel. Belinda and Laurel hated each other, and Belinda also hated Scarlett. Although Scarlett wasn’t present—Buck had said she wasn’t coming at all—this was, technically, Scarlett’s house now, and how could Belinda be expected to deal with that gracefully, when Scarlett used to be the nanny?
Angie was an idiot; she should have accepted the Vicodin.
“Darling,” Belinda said. She moved swiftly into Angie’s arms. Belinda was so much smaller than Angie that it was as if their roles had reversed and Belinda was the child and Angie the mother. Angie could have picked Belinda right off the ground. Instead, Angie gave her a halfhearted hug. Deacon’s dying hadn’t changed the fact that Belinda was a conniving, vainglorious disaster.
“Vainglorious”: that was a Deacon word. He had loved it—but he’d only ever used it to describe one person.
“When did you get here?” Angie asked.
“This morning,” Belinda said. “I took the red-eye from L.A. But I should have gotten here earlier. Then maybe I would have gotten a decent bedroom.” She cut a glance at Laurel.
“Why, what room are you staying in?” Angie asked.
“Laurel assigned me to Clara’s room.”
Angie couldn’t help herself: she smiled. She tried to picture Belinda Rowe, the most celebrated actress of modern times, sleeping in the narrow convent bed of Clara’s cramped room. Deacon had made up colorful stories about Clara Beck over the years; she had been the nursemaid for the five Innsley children, and for Mr. Innsley himself before that. Deacon had portrayed her as very homely and very strict. As such, Clara’s room had been used as a place of punishment. When Angie, at five or six, had thrown sand at another child on the beach, she had been whisked right up to the house and made to sit on the bed in Clara’s room for twenty minutes. It had seemed an eternity. When Angie was seventeen, she had come home from a bonfire at Gibbs Pond completely smashed and stoned, and Deacon had made her sleep in Clara’s room. The walls had seemed to close in on her as the bed spun. That night, Angie had seen the ghost of Clara Beck. She was dressed in a high-necked ivory gown, and her hair was rolled up in pink, spongy curlers. Angie had been too drunk to be afraid; she had closed her eyes against the apparition, then puked into the wastebasket.