CHA PTE R 3
WAKE TO THE SOUND OF robins just as the sky is starting toI brighten. I’m in the daybed under a musty wool blanket, and it takes me a second to remember why I’m here. Mrs.
Goldberg lent us a mattress and linens she’d been keeping in her garage, and I decide that replacing them will be high on today’s list. Waking up on the sleeping porch should be the opposite of musty. My legs and back are a bit sore from all the biking I did yesterday. I think of the women who pay thirty dollars for a spin class and smile to myself. My eyes focus on the corner above the Singer, where the wood is black and a bit of the screen has come away from the frame.
I stretch and give myself a pep talk: I’m doing great.
Everyone’s doing great. It’s all fixable. I’m in Whitfield for the summer, where there’s always extra time. The fish house doesn’t open until eleven.This is practically vacation, I tell myself, and grab my spiral notebook and my blue pen.
I’m about a quarter of the way through this notebook, college ruled, with a single task on every line. I write the tasks in blue and cross them out in green. Green means go.
On to the next thing.
My line additions for today:
Call Christopher’s doctor.
Buy new bedding. Or sew?
Organize Gus’s closet.
Follow up with Little League refund.
Register Gus for lifeguarding camp.
Major grocery shop, produce heavy.
Sand singed wood.
Find YouTube on reframing a screen, otherwise get
duct tape.
Q: Is it possible to DIY a whole roof?
I review my list, and it centers me. There’s nothing on here that’s more than a task. I changed a millionaire’s tire yesterday. I can figure out the roof.
I get up, pull a hoodie over my nightgown, and head into the kitchen to turn on the gas under the teakettle. I set the oven to three-fifty and pull Maud’s mixing bowl out of a low cupboard. There were three overly ripe bananas by the sink last night, perfect for a breakfast loaf of banana bread. I smash the bananas, add the eggs and the soft butter, and mix in the dry ingredients with Maud’s big wooden spoon. When it’s in the oven, I creep past my dad’s door to the laundry closet and pull last night’s wash out of the dryer. It’s still damp, so I head to the sleeping porch and add “take dryer apart to remove rogue lint” to my list. This happens at least once a year.
Christopher is the first to wake up. He stops on the stairs when he smells the banana bread, and I watch the smile spread across his face. There is no quicker way to wrap someone in love than by creaming sugar and butter and flour.
“Chocolate chips?” he asks before sitting down.
“Of course,” I say, serving him a still-warm slice right from the pan. “I’m not a monster.”
Christopher laughs and eats his whole slice in one bite.
My dad emerges in his old flannel robe. “I thought I was dreaming that smell, and then I remembered you were home.” He hugs me and I feel the joy of having warmed the kitchen. I can’t wait for Gus to wake up.
I LEAVE THE fish house at four because there are no deliveries.
Dad insists he can mop and Rikki showed up to do the till. It’s cool for late June, and I grab Dad’s extra gray fleece from the back of his office chair on my way out. I pull it on and tie my hair in a knot on top of my head as I walk out onto Main Street and let the sun warm my face for a second, eyes closed. These are micro-breaks, I recently read, and are helpful for overdoers. I spent the rest of the morning pulling lint out of the disassembled dryer and then redrying and folding the laundry. I helped Gus oil the chain on his bike.
Christopher’s doctor adjusted his meds without asking to see him, which was a small win, but twice today my dad half joked about turning the dingy storage space above the fish house into two bedrooms and a bath. The roof is feeling like an unsolvable problem, and picturing them there with no kitchen and no yard is giving me a low thrum of anxiety behind my chest. I open my eyes because someone is standing in front of me, blocking the sun.
“Hi,” he says.
Stewart Whitfield’s in a tissue-thin blue button-down, broad on his shoulders but slim along his sides, perfectly following the way his body tapers there, like a swimmer’s. I pull my eyes away. His sleeves are cuffed just once, like he was about to get relaxed but then forgot how.
“How’s the car?” I ask.
“Fine, I got a new tire.”
“Yeah, good,” I say, and hike my straw bag up my shoulder, purposely not looking at how his shirt hugs his torso.
He’s wearing glasses, horn-rimmed, and they frame his chocolate-brown eyes and masculine brows just so, while also making him look two percent more vulnerable. But the way he stands there like he owns the whole street reminds me that Stewart Whitfield has been to the White House to advise the president.
“Okay, so are you here to thank me again? I think we covered it.”
“No,” he says. He takes off his glasses and puts his phone in his pocket. He’s looking down at me, and I am annoyed by his interrupting my micro-break, standing there being handsome and rich. I’m annoyed by the thing my mother loved so much—how easy it is for these people. I need to come up with fifty grand, and I bet my 2003 Volkswagen Jetta cost less than his belt. “You really don’t read thePost, do you?”
I’m about to say something about my limited budget for random out-of-state newspaper subscriptions when my Good Sports phone trills theRocky theme song. “Shit,” I say, fumbling in my straw bag. “Good Sports. You’re on a recorded line. How can I help you?” I put up a finger to let him know I’ll be a minute and sit on the cedar bench.
Stewart stands, arms crossed, and watches me. “Yes, people are loving that vest. Okay. How long have you been using it?
I don’t know. I mean, it’s difficult to tell if your bone density has increased. You’d need to see a doctor for that. No, I am not a doctor.” I look up at Stewart and roll my eyes, I can’t help it. I wrap it up by asking how else I can possibly be of service and hang up.
“What was all that?” he asks.
“Side hustle,” I say, getting up. “I’m the call center for a small sporting goods company.”
My personal phone pings, it’s Gus. “Oh, that’s my son.” I read the text: Christopher’s in a beach chair on the front lawn and he’s not wearing pants “I’ve got to get home,” I say. “Glad your tire’s fixed.” I hike my bag back up on my shoulder again and start walking.
“Son? Are you married?” He’s walking alongside me, his long legs matching my pace.
“Yes, son.” I stop walking, and he does too. “Hopefully he’ll be delivering your shrimp a lot this summer. Kid on a bike, Red Sox cap.”
“Thank God, not the Yankees.” If this isn’t a joke, it’s joke-adjacent. And possibly at his own expense. This softens me toward him just a tiny bit.
“Yeah,” I say. We look at each other for a beat. I try to imagine what kind of woman walks away from a guy like this.
Wide-set chocolate-brown eyes and full lips, even when pressed into a firm line like they are now. Just looking at him I can remember the delicious way he smells, and I’m annoyed all over again. “And no, I’m not married. See you later, Stewart.”
I turn to go and he says, “I’ll walk you to your car.”
“I’m walking home.”
“Perfect.”
“You are not walking me home,” I say. My home is currently a dangerously raw nerve with a pantsless man on the lawn. I don’t want him anywhere near it. I let out a breath and we face off, me in my dad’s fleece and Stewart Whitfield in a six-hundred-dollar shirt.
“So you have two jobs? The fish house and the call center? Both part-time?”
“What is this?” I ask. “Why are you talking to me and asking questions?”
He doesn’t answer. He’s three inches too close to me, more than enough to trigger that weird current in my chest.
It’s hard to tell if I’m allergic to him or drawn to him, but there are definitely magnets at play. He’s just standing there, his gaze steady, like he’s prepared to wait forever for my response. I would never want to be in a negotiation or a poker game with him.
“You can walk me to the end of this block,” I say, and start walking. I quickly learn that silence is his favorite power play. I take step after step, the silence building between us until I can’t take it anymore. He might as well have me in a windowless room under a single hot lightbulb.
“I’m part-time at the fish house, just this summer, to help out my dad. But I’m a full-time kindergarten teacher in Boston and a part-time Uber driver when my son’s not around or asleep. The call center is only sporadic, but always at the worst time.”
“That’s a lot,” he says. “I thought I worked hard.”
“Well, there’s no accounting for the idle rich,” I say, and give him a sideways smile so it seems like I’m kidding. He smiles back and it’s the opposite of an easy smile. It’s as if he’s trying his smile out for the first time in a while and it hurts. This strikes me as odd because if I was Stewart Whitfield, I’d be smiling all the time.
“Stop for a second,” he says, and pulls out his phone. He holds it up to me. “You didn’t see this?”
It’s Page Six of theNew York Post again, but there’s a photo of me sitting on the pavement, holding a lug wrench, and Stewart bent over, both of us looking up at the camera.
The headline reads: P O W ER HO UR —W HITFIELD TEACHES GAL PAL TO CHANGE A TIR E.
What the. Teaches me? I scroll down to the paragraph about how the recently jilted tycoon had already moved on to a new relationship before his fiancée started canoodling with a Yankee. “What the hell is this?” I ask.
“This is what I’m here to talk to you about.” He takes a breath. “Dolly, I have a big job.”
“Wow, newsflash,” I say. My sarcasm flusters him, but he composes himself and goes on.
“I have a lot on the line. For me. For my family. My image is, for a variety of reasons, a bit shaky.”
“Because of the Yankee?”
“That, and lower-than-expected numbers on a few projects. ThePost sent this photo to my assistant last night for comment, because they thought it was what it actually was.”
“You not knowing how to do anything for yourself.” I’m being rude, I know. But I don’t appreciate the amped-up way he makes my body feel. And I’m having a hard time feeling compassionate about a millionaire’s business woes when my family’s house could be condemned.
He lets out a huff. “I know how to do things.”
“Scramble eggs?”
“Well, no.” He crosses his arms over his chest and treats
me to that rugged profile again.
“I stand by my statement.”
“This was actually my sister Busy’s idea, to use the photo to make it look like I had a girlfriend, like I was already leaving the relationship. With Audrey.”
“So you’d look like you’re as big a jerk as your fiancée.”
“It’s better than looking weak,” he says. “This is an exceptionally bad time for me to look weak.”
“Are you asking me not to call Page Six and tell them that of course I know how to change a tire?” If my dad saw this,
he would laugh his head off. Even Patsy knows how to change a tire.
“Yes, that’s what I’m asking. And I’m sorry that this makes you look bad. And is dishonest.” He’s earnest. He truly looks like he needs my help.
“It’s fine,” I say. “Literally no one I know reads theNew York Post. But I do need to get going.”
“Stewart! Is this her?” A woman in her sixties in a caftan has her hand on Stewart’s arm.
“Clara, hello,” he says. His demeanor has gone from distraught to even, like he’s just zipped himself up. This is the beauty of manners, I think. Knowing how to behave when you don’t really know how to behave. “This is Dolly,” he says.
I shake the hand she offers me.
“Dolly. Adorable. So lovely to meet you. Where are you two off to?”
Stewart says, “I’m walking her home.” He’s not touching me anywhere, but he’s leaning in to me, closing the space between us, and it occurs to me that he’s trying to make it seem like we’re together. “Beautiful day,” he adds.
Clara gives Stewart a wink and makes her way down Main Street. We just stand there. I’m watching Stewart as
he nods at his own thought.
“Are you okay?” I ask.
People are passing us on the sidewalk. Stewart directs me out of the foot traffic, and I lean against the window of Whitfield Blooms. Inside, there’s a small bouquet of ranunculus. The season for them is so short, I almost never see them. This bouquet is bright orange and pink, just shouting about fleeting summer joy.
“What if I asked you to play along?” he asks.
“Pretend to be your gal pal?”
“She bought it. And she smiled. She’s the first person I’ve talked to today who hasn’t given me a pity face.”
I make the face, in spite of myself. Head tilted, bottom lip
jutted out.
“That one, yes,” he says.
“Absolutely not.” I cross my arms over my chest and say it again, thinking of all the spare time I do not have.
Pretending to be his girlfriend would most certainly involve hand-holding and a staged public kiss, and just the thought of it has my chest doing that thing. “Absolutely not.”
“Just for a couple of months, maybe through the Starlight Gala. A few photo ops around town, dinner as necessary.
There’s an event in Providence next week that would be a nightmare to go to alone. Just enough that I can get through
this and come across like…”
“A guy who’s got it going on.”
“Yes,” he says. “Well, no. I work a lot. It’s a long story. I just need to seem involved.” He gestures between us to indicate some level of involvement. “And then we can break up. Or let it fizzle. That doesn’t need to be in the paper.”
He’s thinking all this up as he goes, and I can imagine him at work, making snap decisions about whatever it is that he does.
“Listen, Stewart. I have a lot of jobs and a kid and a brand-new family crisis I didn’t see coming. I don’t have time for this. Tell thePost we had a big affair and broke up today.
Tell them you dumped me, I don’t care.”
“I don’t want to break up.”
And at this, I laugh. Anyone passing by would think I was actually dumping Stewart Whitfield. “We’re not a couple. Try to stay focused on that, okay?”
He takes a new approach. “For career reasons, this would be an opportune time for me to be in a relationship.”
His hands are in his pockets, but his eyes grab me. He really needs this and he’s not going to tell me why.
“Then go meet someone,” I say.
“I don’t have time. I’ll pay you.”
I laugh. “You’re joking.” I let out an exasperated breath and switch my straw bag to the other shoulder. He continues with the even gaze. “Wait, you’re serious?”
He nods once, definitively. He’s serious. He wants me to spend the summer yacht-clubbing around with him. And as much as I hate to admit it, I’ve always wanted to eat in the dining room at the yacht club. I’ve seen it through the kitchen doors, the way they rush the hot sourdough buns to the tables and then open the white napkin just enough to let the steam out. The pats of butter are shaped like seashells.
I would be crazy to turn down any amount of money at this particular point in my life. I would also be crazy to have any kind of relationship—fake or not—with this dangerously attractive man. Everything about him shouts sniff me, touch me, abandon your good judgment.
“I’m not a big fan of the flesh trade,” I say.
He widens his eyes at me, like the thought hadn’t occurred to him. Of course it hadn’t, a man like Stewart Whitfield does not need to pay for sex. Not with his chest looking the way it does now that a little breeze has pressed his barely there shirt flush against it.God, why do I keep thinking about sex with Stewart Whitfield?
“Nothing like that,” he says.
“I’m sure what I’d require is way beyond what you’re willing to pay.” I turn and start walking.
“Give me a number,” he says, matching his steps to mine.
“Give me a contract,” I say.
“Of course. And you’d have to sign an NDA.” This is all completely insane, and I can tell he’s thinking this up on the
spot, following one idea to the next. “Give me a number.”
I stop and turn to him. “Sixty grand.”
“Done.” He holds out his hand to shake. Sixty grand, no
biggie.
“Seriously?”
“Yes.”
I look around Main Street to ground myself. The Salty Clam is across the street and someone’s playing the guitar inside, confirming that it’s Thursday. The sun is at four o’clock. Everything tracks with reality. If he’s serious, this is
a miracle.
“I meant seventy thousand,” I say.
Stewart crosses his arms and tilts his head. “That’s not how negotiating works. You proposed a number and I accepted it. We’re done.”
“We’re not done.” This is insane and I don’t even know him. This could be some sort of a cruel reality show with cameras hidden in the sun hats of passersby. Stewart could be, for some reason that’s not entirely apparent to me right now, interested in human trafficking. “I have terms,” I say.
“Terms?”
“For the contract.”
“What are your terms?” he asks.
“I don’t know yet. But there are definitely terms.”
His eyes soften and he almost smiles. It’s a ploy, I’m sure.
This is his extra handsome face, the closer. “I swear to you, Dolly, I’m harmless.”
“I doubt that very much.” He has to know how absolutely not harmless he is. I stop at the corner of Goose Lane. “Give
me your phone.”
“I’m not giving you my phone,” he says.
“I just want to give you my number, in case you’re serious.”
“I told you, I—” He stops and pulls out his phone. “Give me your number.”
He puts on his glasses and types my number in his phone.
“Okay, then,” he says.
“Okay nothing,” I say. “Let me think about this.”
“Thank you,” he says. “For the help with the tire, for considering this. It hasn’t been the easiest week.”
“That makes two of us,” I say. I turn and start walking past Goose Lane toward Whitfield Tees for a reality check.
I’m not a hundred percent sure, but I might have just secured a fourth side hustle and a new roof.
