“Wow,” the guy said. He grinned and held out his hand. “My name is JP Clarke. Are you lost? Do you need a ride somewhere? This is a pretty uptight neighborhood—actually, it’s a private way, so… I wouldn’t want you to take flak from any of the residents for wandering around.”
“You’re JP?” Angie said. She couldn’t believe it. Deacon had talked about “JP this” and “JP that” all the time in recent years, but Angie had never met him, despite Deacon incessantly promising Angie that she would love him. Great guy, real local, lives off the land, fishes, hunts, knows all the best spots. You two would really get along. Deacon had met JP surf casting out at Great Point, and from there, the friendship had grown. JP had sent Deacon Nantucket bay scallops the past few Octobers, and Angie and Deacon always ate part of the shipment raw, with a squeeze of lime juice and a sprinkle of salt. Hobo seviche, Deacon called it. JP also sent backstraps of venison from the one buck he shot each November, and Deacon would marinate it for three days, then grill it to rosy, juicy perfection and serve it at staff meal.
Angie had thought JP would be older. She had imagined someone her father’s age, but JP barely looked thirty.
“I am JP,” he said. “Who might you be?”
“Angie,” she said. “Angie Thorpe.”
“Angie Thorpe,” he said. He moved his sunglasses to the top of his head, as if he wanted to get a better look at her. “Oh my darling. Your father…”—here he trailed off and squinted out the windshield at the lighthouse beyond—“was a fine human being. Just… I don’t know? An original. I can’t seem to use my words here. He was super cool in his every aspect. I feel blessed to have known him.”
“He felt the same way about you,” Angie said. “He talked about you all the time. Okay… that jam you sent him? The Concord grape? He took one jar home to eat on toast, and the other jar he reduced into a sauce that he served with a pheasant special we ran—and it was the night Pete Wells came in to review for the New York Times. And what was the first dish Wells raved about? The crispy pheasant with the Concord grape sauce.” Angie felt a flush thinking about that night. Joel was the one who had suspected the diner registered as Albert Emerald was actually Mr. Wells. He had come back to the kitchen immediately to tell Angie and Deacon, and Deacon had sent out the pheasant dish.
But then, suddenly, a less pleasant thought cut in. “Oh God,” she said to JP. “You’re the one who found him.” She closed her eyes, and the dark world spun.
“Yes,” JP said. “I’m sorry.”
“I’m the one who’s sorry,” Angie whispered.
JP nodded at the seat next to him. “I was just going up to the house to see if your family needed anything. And I brought some strawberries that my mother picked up at Bartlett’s Farm.” He nodded to a cooler in the back. “Let me give you a ride up to the house?”
“I’m not sure I want to go back there,” Angie said.
“Things are that bad already?”
Angie nodded.
“Is Laurel your mother?” he asked. “Because she sounded really cool.”
“She is really cool,” Angie said. “But she’s not my mother. My mother is… Belinda. Belinda Rowe.”
“Ah,” JP said. “Well, I liked her in Brilliant Disguise.”
“You and every other man in America,” Angie said.
“I’m not as typical as you might think,” JP said. “I’m the ranger out at Coatue all summer. You could always come stay in my shack.”
Angie smiled. This guy was terrific. She thought about spending all summer in a one-room shack out on the wild, deserted arm of beach that was Coatue. There was nothing out there but sand, water, and seabirds. “You’d be surprised how much I’d like that,” she said.
“The offer stands,” JP said. “You can help me protect the plover eggs and tow tourist Jeeps out of the sand.”
Angie blushed.
“Maybe we shouldn’t move in together right away,” JP said. “Maybe you should just hop in. I’ll drive you home, and you can surprise everyone with hand-picked strawberries.”
“Deal,” she said.
HAYES
He couldn’t feel anything and so he had to pretend, or he would be discovered. His mother, in her job, dealt with junkies every hour of every day; she knew the signs. He couldn’t scratch, and he couldn’t lose his focus, or he would nod off.
He said to Laurel, “I’d love to get unpacked and maybe go for a swim before dinner. Or…? I don’t know… is that bad? I mean, we don’t have to sit shiva, right?”
Laurel studied him for a second, and he thought, She knows.
She started to cry soundlessly, and Hayes hugged her tight. His mom. She was still so pretty, still so young, only fifty-four. And still so cool, the coolest person Hayes had ever known. Hayes had loved his father, but he and Deacon had been more like casual, easygoing friends, and really, that was only later in life.
Hayes had carried around a fair amount of anger after his father left. He could remember Deacon flying home from L.A. one weekend a month to “spend time” with Hayes, which meant a Yankees game or kite flying in the park or checking out the dinosaurs at the American Museum of Natural History. All of this was fine except that Hayes, even at age eight or nine, could sense that his father was trying too hard. At least forty times over the weekend, Deacon would ask Hayes if he was having fun, and then would come the litany about his own father.
He didn’t want me, Deacon would say.
But I want you, Deacon would say.
Kiss on the forehead, no matter who was watching.
The weekends in New York were better when Buck joined them. Buck had no children, and so he treated Hayes like an adult and Hayes flourished—they talked about the Knicks and the stock market; plus, it alleviated the father-son pressure. So things were sometimes okay, sometimes not, but every visit ended the same way: Hayes would have dinner at the Manchester Diner, down the street from Laurel’s apartment, with both of his parents. His mother and father would hold hands, and Hayes could see the air shimmering with electricity between them. Usually his father would start crying first, then his mother, but sometimes it was the other way around. It was guaranteed that both of them would cry and run through a stack of paper napkins, blowing their noses and wiping their eyes, and, since no child wants to see either of his parents cry, Hayes hated the weekends with his father, purely for the way they always ended.
Things got better once Deacon and Belinda adopted Angie, because then Deacon got more on board with the family program, but even so, what Hayes remembered was spending time with Angie and Angie’s nanny, who had been Scarlett, whom Deacon had eventually married.
Was it any wonder Hayes was addicted to drugs?
He squeezed his mother. He loved his mother; she had been his rock, his guiding light, his true north, his best friend for all his life. Hayes was in agony about his father’s death, not to mention really scared. His father had had a bad heart, and so what did that mean for Hayes? Nothing good, he was sure. But if Hayes had lost his mother… well, that would have been a different story altogether. Hayes couldn’t imagine a world without his mother in it. His last serious girlfriend, Whitney Jo, had told Hayes that he was too attached to his mother and that was why he was thirty-four and unmarried. Because no woman could ever measure up.
Laurel wiped her eyes on the collar of her shirt. “I’ve been trying very hard to be civil to Belinda.”
“Oh,” Hayes said. “Right.” His mother and Belinda were not cool with each other—nope, not at all. It had made for some awkward family gatherings in the past. When Hayes was growing up, he wasn’t allowed to watch any of Belinda’s movies or play with the toys Belinda had bought him or even say her name—otherwise, his mother got this sad, spooky expression on her face. It was okay for him to talk about Angie, thank God; his mother had always liked Angie. Even Scarlett was okay in Laurel’s book. Not great, Hayes thought—his mother had been “disappointed” that Deacon had done the “predictable thing” and fallen for the nanny. But, Laurel had said, I’m sure she paid attention to him, and Belinda didn’t.