The Hotel Nantucket — Chapter no 23

23. Full Send

The Brant Point Grill is the restaurant at the White Elephant Hotel and Resort, the Hotel Nantucket’s rival, so it seems like an odd choice for drinks—but Ms. English picked it and who is Chad to argue? The spacious bar has a lot of dark wood and big mirrors and the clientele is older and more sophisticated than in the places Chad frequents (or frequented, in his past life). There’s a jazz combo playing in the corner—piano, drums, stand-up bass. Past the bar, Chad can see the elegant dining room, where enormous windows offer a vista of the flat blue sheet of Nantucket harbor, dotted with boats.

Chad has been to the restaurant before with his parents, an Easter brunch one year when Paul and Whitney thought it would be “fun” to visit the island in the off-season, but Chad remembers that he and Leith had been disenchanted by the whole experience—it was cold enough for them to need winter parkas on April 9 and everything was still closed downtown, including the Juice Bar and their yacht club, which was how they’d ended up at the Brant Point Grill.

Ms. English leads Chad to two seats at the long bar, ones that are in front of a mirror, which means that Chad is confronted with the reflection of himself sitting next to his now-fancy boss in a bar.

“What would you like, Long Shot?” Ms. English asks. “Drinks are

on me.”

“I can pay,” Chad says.

Ms. English laughs. She motions for the bartender, who hurries over to take their order. “The usual, neat, for me, Brian.”

“Appleton Estate Twenty-One, Magda, you got it,” Brian says with a wink.

They know each other, Chad thinks. Ms. English comes here, to the rival hotel’s restaurant. He supposes it’s better than getting a drink at the Blue Bar, where Ms. English is still sort of at work and where everyone knows her. Another good thing about the Brant Point Grill, he realizes, is that they’re anonymous, surrounded by another hotel’s guests.

“I’ll have a…” Chad is hesitant to order his usual, a vodka soda, because that’s the stereotypical Chad drink. At the long-ago brunch, his parents ordered Bloody Marys, which came extravagantly garnished—one with a lobster tail on a skewer and one with a cheeseburger slider—but Chad doesn’t want to inflate Ms. English’s bar tab with an expensive drink. “A beer,” he says. “Whale’s Tale, if you have it on draft?”

“We do,” Brian says. He sidles away to make the drinks. Although Chad is dying to ask Ms. English the question that’s reverberating through his mind, he knows enough to wait until their drinks have been set before them and they’ve raised their glasses to each other.

“Thank you for inviting me,” Chad says.

“Thank you for coming, Long Shot. This is way overdue.”

Is it? Chad thinks. There’s no time to consider how long Ms.

English has been wanting to invite him for drinks, because the urge

to know what happened to Bibi is overwhelming.

“So, what…”

“Barbara gave her notice at the beginning of last week,” Ms.

English says. “She was accepted at UMass Dartmouth with a scholarship and she’s going to pursue a degree in criminal justice.”

“What?” Chad says. “She is?”

“Yes, how about that! She forwarded me her acceptance e-mail—I fear because she thought I wouldn’t believe her. Her first day of classes was today.”

Bibi wasn’t fired. She didn’t go on the lam looking for Johnny Quarter. She wasn’t bullied by Octavia and Neves (that was a crazy theory). She was going to college on a scholarship! Chad is embarrassed to find tears gathering in his eyes—he’s so proud of her!

“Why didn’t she tell me?” Chad says. Mixed in with his emotions is the sting of betrayal. Bibi just walked off the day before like everything was normal. See ya, Long Shot.

“She wanted me to tell you,” Ms. English says. “She was afraid of a messy goodbye, I think. Some people are like that.” Ms. English nudges Chad with her elbow. “And the two of you grew so close this summer!”

“It wasn’t like that,” Chad says. He drinks deeply from his beer. It’s the first drink he’s had since May 22, and it gives him an instant buzz. “We were friends.”

“You were more than friends,” Ms. English says. “You planted that belt in the laundry in order to protect her.”

No, I didn’t, Chad wants to say—but he can’t lie, so he shrugs.

“I take it that belt belonged to your mother?” Ms. English says.

“Has she missed it?”

Ha! No. The last thing Chad is worried about is Whitney missing her belt. “I thought Bibi might have taken the belt and I didn’t want her to get in trouble.”

“All of my cleaners are extremely honest people,” Ms. English says. “With squeaky-clean résumés. I see to that.”

“What about me?” Chad asks. He finishes his beer; he probably drank it more quickly than he should have. Without his even asking, another one arrives in its place. “Did you do any background research on me?”

“No,” Ms. English says. “You, I hired out of desperation.” She laughs, and Chad has to smile. “I had a feeling about you, but it was a gamble. That’s why I call you Long Shot.”

Yes, Chad gets it. Preppy dudes from wealthy families don’t clean hotel rooms—except this summer one did, and he did it well, he thinks. “Thank you for taking the chance,” he says. “This summer

helped me.”

“Helped you?” Ms. English says.

Chad stares into his beer, then takes a long swallow. “Remember at my interview, I told you I messed up?”

“Yes, Long Shot, I do. I’ll admit, I’ve wondered about that statement periodically over the summer. You’re such a hard worker, conscientious, respectful, prompt, responsible, and, as I noticed in regard to your relationship with Barbara, thoughtful and kind. I can’t imagine you being otherwise.”

“Oh, but I was,” Chad says. “I was otherwise.”

Ms. English pats his back lightly. “You don’t have to share,” she says. “Unless you want to, in which case I will listen with rapt interest.”

Chad thinks it over. He has done everything right this summer but he hasn’t taken the most important step in moving on: He hasn’t talked about what happened with anyone. Share, the word Ms.

English used, makes him feel like she’ll accept part of the burden he’s been carrying around.

“Something happened this spring,” Chad says. “On May twenty- second.”

On the morning of May 22, Chad woke up freshly graduated from Bucknell University with gentleman’s Cs, looking at a delicious, responsibility-free summer on Nantucket with his parents and his sister, Leith, before he joined his father’s company, the Brandywine Group, in September. Chad’s parents were driving to Deerfield Academy to pick up Leith, who had just finished her junior year. Paul and Whitney Winslow were making an overnight trip of it because they liked to include a romantic stay at the Mayflower Inn. (Chad didn’t like to dwell on this, obviously; they were his parents.) All he cared about was having the house in Radnor to himself so he could throw a little graduation party.

Before his parents left, his mother kissed his cheek and said, “Please be good, Chaddy. And remember to take Lulu out every two hours. She can’t make it to the door by herself anymore, so you’ll have to carry her.”

“I will,” Chad said. Lulu was their fifteen-year-old dachshund whom Chad loved like another sibling. He would be good to the dog —but TBH, he couldn’t wait for his parents to leave.

He’d invited everyone he’d ever known to the party, including a bunch of guys from Bucknell, some of whom had road-tripped for hours to get to the Winslow home. Chad wanted the event to be a step up from the parties he’d thrown in high school, so he bought steaks to throw on the grill, and a bunch of the girls he invited showed up with potato salad and guacamole. Tindley Akers, whom Chad had known since nursery school, brought pot brownies. Chad sampled one as an appetizer—and it sent him flying! After dinner, Chad started a bonfire in the firepit while a bunch of kids splashed around in the pool. Things got wilder from there; honestly, Chad couldn’t remember all the details. He knelt for the Full Send beer funnel multiple times; he did shots of Jägermeister and hoovered cocaine off the vanity in the downstairs powder room (that became a joke—“Meet me in the powder room”—though Chad felt guilty when he looked at his mother’s little embroidered towels and fancy soaps).

Thinking about his mother made Chad remember the dog. He was supposed to take her out every two hours, and how long had it been? He found Lulu on her bed on the screened-in porch. Chad dutifully carried her outside, let her whiz, and then set her back on her plaid Orvis bed. She looked so old and forlorn that Chad almost wanted to tell everyone to go home while he and Lulu snuggled on the sectional in the rec room to watch Family Guy—that was their thing; Chad was certain that Lulu understood the show because it always held her rapt attention—but what was he, nuts? It was a party! His friends were here!

Still, he couldn’t just leave Lulu to wallow in her old-dog misery, so he went in search of a rawhide or a treat, which required a trip to the basement—where Chad’s attention was snagged by his parents’ wine cave. (They pronounced it “kahv,” which made Chad and Leith cringe.) He snatched a bottle of champagne off the rack, and upstairs, he grabbed a ten-inch chef’s knife from the kitchen. In Chad’s final week of school, his professor of French culture had shown the class how to saber the top off a bottle of champagne.

Chad ran outside to the deck, but the party was so out of control, there was no way to get anyone’s attention. Everyone was in or around the pool—swimming, drinking, smoking, making out, dancing.

The outdoor speaker blasted Pop Smoke’s “What You Know ’Bout Love.”

Chad ran the blade of the knife along the throat of the champagne bottle, just as Professor Legris had shown them, then hit the bottle with the blade, and—whoosh—the top of the bottle sliced off, neat and clean. Bubbles spewed over Chad’s fingers. He enjoyed one split second of blissful satisfaction—the sabering worked! This was a party trick he could use for the rest of his life!—before he saw his college roommate and best friend, Paddy, hunched over, holding his face.

Somehow without even knowing, Chad knew.

He ran over to Paddy. “You okay, man?”

There was blood spurting out of the fingers that Paddy was holding over his left eye. The cork and the top of the bottle with its thick glass edge had hit Paddy in the face.

“Call nine-one-one!” Chad shouted, but nobody heard him and Chad’s phone was over by the outdoor speaker, controlling the

music. He grabbed the nearest person—Tindley, as it turned out— and called the ambulance from her phone.

Paddy wasn’t making any noise, and he was as white as a sheet.

Tindley had the presence of mind to bring Paddy a damp towel for his eye. Chad held Paddy’s arm, the one that wasn’t pressed to his face, and wished like hell the cork had hit anyone but Paddy. Paddy Farrell was not only Chad’s best friend; he was a genuinely good and smart person. He’d been a scholarship student at Bucknell. His dad was a long-haul trucker and his mom worked as a legal secretary; they lived in a town of four hundred called Grimesland, North Carolina.

“I’m so sorry, man,” Chad said, wondering why the hell he had sabered the champagne when there were people around? How irresponsible was that? He hadn’t noticed Paddy sitting on the deck; that was the thing. Paddy must have been alone in the dark, which made Chad feel even worse. Paddy didn’t know anyone at the party besides the three other Bucknell guys, and he was quiet by nature.

Paddy had driven up from Grimesland at Chad’s insistence. You have to come, man! There are going to be so many girls!

When the ambulance arrived, some people scattered, thinking it was the police. Chad grabbed his phone but left the music playing and climbed into the back of the ambulance with Paddy, who kept insisting he didn’t need to go to the hospital and shouldn’t go because his parents didn’t have that kind of health insurance.

“I’ll pay for it, man. It was my fault,” Chad said.

The paramedic, a woman named Kristy who was actually kind of hot, managed to pry Paddy’s hand away from his eye. She said, matter-of-factly, “That’s going to need surgery.”

“I can’t,” Paddy said. “Afford it.”

“I’ll pay for it,” Chad said again and he thought about how what he meant was that his parents—who at that very moment were probably gazing across a candlelit table at each other, splitting a chocolate mousse—would pay for it. They would find out about the party unless Chad got everyone out of there pronto. He wondered how bad it would be if he didn’t go to the hospital with Paddy and instead stayed home and did damage control.

Bad, he thought. And for the first time in a long time, maybe ever, said a prayer.

When they got to the hospital, Paddy was rushed away; Chad heard someone mention an eye specialist. He was buzzing from the cocaine but also drunk and high and teetering on the edge of paranoia. A nurse gave him a form to fill out but he knew only some of the answers. He needed to call Paddy’s parents—or his own—but he was waiting to see what the doctors said. He was hoping it would turn out to be just stitches and a shiner.

When he handed the clipboard back to the nurse, he said, “Whatever this costs, I’ll pay for it, just make sure he gets the best care.”

They were at Bryn Mawr Hospital, which was where Chad had been born. He hadn’t had a reason to return here in twenty-two years and neither had anyone else in his family. They were just that fortunate, so fortunate that Chad almost broke down crying, but instead he stumbled over to the water fountain and tried to suck it dry.

His phone rang. It was Raj, which was not unexpected. After Paddy, Raj was the nicest guy that Chad knew. Raj was from

Potomac, Maryland, and he was supersmart and driven; his parents were doctors. He was probably calling to see how Paddy was, but Chad couldn’t talk to him yet. He didn’t want to talk to anyone until he knew Paddy was going to be okay.

He declined the call. Raj immediately called back, and when Chad declined again, Raj texted: Pick up, bruh, it’s urgent.

I can’t talk, Chad texted back. Waiting room.

Raj sent a fire emoji, which Chad ignored. Then Raj called again and Chad whispered into the phone, “What?”

Raj said, “Someone set your house on fire.”

Chad hung up. Raj was drunk, stoned, high, and he thought he was being funny, great. A man in blue scrubs entered the waiting room. “Chadwick Winslow?” he said.

Chad raised his hand like he was in fourth grade. The man approached and said, “Dr. Harding, nice to meet you. You’re here

with Patrick?”

Chad nodded.

“He’s gone into surgery. The cornea appears to have been sliced.

We’re going to try to save the eye but there’s a better-than-not chance Patrick will have partial to full vision loss.”

Chad gagged, but no, he couldn’t yuke here in the waiting room.

He breathed in through his nose. “I want to pay for it.”

Chad’s phone rang; it was Raj again. Dr. Harding clapped Chad on the shoulder and said, “We’re keeping him overnight. Why don’t you go home and get some rest. One of our nurses has contacted Patrick’s family.”

No, Chad thought. He’d met Mr. and Mrs. Farrell a handful of times. They weren’t fancy or sophisticated like Chad’s parents, but

they were kind, decent people. Paddy had an older brother, Griffin, who was in the U.S. Navy, stationed in Honolulu; they FaceTimed once a week.

The doctor disappeared back down the hall and when Chad pulled his phone out to call an Uber, he saw another text from Raj.

Your house caught on fire. The fire department put it out but the deck and the screened-in porch are torched. You need to come home right now. Your neighbors are here. Also, man, I hate to say this in a text, but your dog is dead.

Lulu! Chad thought, and for a second he couldn’t breathe.

Chad’s phone rang again. The screen said DAD.

“I burned down part of my house,” Chad says to Ms. English. “That was the least awful thing I did. I killed my dog, whom I loved so much, whom my whole family loved, and my sister still won’t speak to me. She hates me.” He gets an aching lump in his throat. “All I can think about is Lulu’s fur catching on fire or her coughing from the smoke.” He stops. It was so terrible and it was all his fault! He pushes his beer away. He thought he’d be okay to drink again, but now his stomach is churning just like it did that night at the hospital.

“And my best friend, a guy I loved like a brother and always wanted to protect, a guy who was kind of like Bibi, because he didn’t come from a background like mine, lost his vision in his left eye. Forever.

And we’re not friends anymore. I haven’t heard from him since he went back home.”

Chad had stayed at the hospital until his parents and Paddy’s parents had shown up. Paddy underwent surgery and was released

two days later. When the nurse wheeled him out with a patch over one eye, Chad started apologizing, insisting it was an accident, he hadn’t seen Paddy sitting there, but he could hear his voice ricocheting off a new steeliness encapsulating Paddy that Chad hoped was just the painkillers but that turned out to be anger. You’re shallow, thoughtless, and oblivious to your own privilege. You didn’t check to see who was sitting around you when you sliced the top off a glass bottle with a ten-inch chef’s knife, because you didn’t care, anyone sitting in your direct line of fire would have been in your way, spoiling your fun, and we both know nothing and no one means more to Chad Winslow than fun. Your whole existence is filled with empty, meaningless pleasure and this will continue to be true because no one is ever going to hold you accountable. You’ll never develop character and you won’t go to heaven or hell because you don’t have a soul.

Paddy had been at least partially right: Nobody held Chad accountable. His parents did extreme damage control, calling in a favor at the Philadelphia Inquirer so the incident didn’t make the papers and personally phoning the parents of every kid who attended the party and promising favors in exchange for their kids’ silence or threatening lawsuits because someone—Chad still doesn’t know who—threw a can of lighter fluid into the firepit. The can exploded, and burning fragments sliced through the screen of the porch and instantly ignited the sisal rug and the drapes…and the dog bed. Chad overheard his mother lying to people on the phone, saying they’d “put Lulu down.” She was so old and feeble, poor thing. Paddy didn’t tell anyone anything; he returned to Grimesland, which was far, far away from the gossip channels of the Main Line.

“I didn’t get in any trouble,” Chad says. “My parents were angry, of course, and they were disappointed. But mostly, they were worried about how the incident would reflect on them. They thought everyone would say they were bad parents, and so they did what they could to sweep it under the rug. They bought me a brand-new Range Rover as a graduation present and it was delivered to my house the day after Paddy went home, so it felt like I had done all these heinous things and was rewarded.” Chad shakes his head and his eyes flood with hot tears as he thinks, What the actual f— Ms. English lays a cool hand on his arm. “But you corrected course on your own,” she says. “You came to me and I put you to work in a place where we don’t sweep anything under the rug.”

Chad wipes his eyes with the back of his hand. “You told me that you believed even the biggest messes could be cleaned up.”

“And that’s what you did,” she says. “I’m sure your parents are very proud of you.”

“They’re not, though,” Chad says. “Neither one of them has praised me for getting this job. My father told me to quit!”

“But you didn’t quit,” Ms. English says. “Because you do have character, Long Shot.”

“I don’t want to work at my father’s company,” Chad says. “I want to stay at the hotel until it closes for the season.”

Ms. English tsks. “You have to get on with your life.”

“But I don’t want—”

They’re interrupted by a silver-haired gentleman in a pink shirt who puts a hand on Ms. English’s back and says, “Hello, Magda.”

Ms. English rises from her stool and offers the gentleman her hand. He kisses it like someone in the movies, and Chad thinks,

Who is this dude? The guy is gazing at Ms. English like she’s a Victoria’s Secret Angel, and Chad feels uncomfortable—like he’s the one interrupting them, not the other way around—and protective too.

He gets to his feet.

“Hi,” he says. “I work for Ms. English.”

The gentleman turns to Chad, then looks at Ms. English. “This is your long shot?”

Ms. English chuckles. “It is indeed. Xavier, please meet Chadwick Winslow. Chadwick, this is Xavier Darling.”

Mario’s “I Love You” Playlist for Lizbet

“XO”—Beyoncé “Let My Love Open the Door”—Pete Townshend

“Whatever It Is”—Zac Brown Band

“Never Tear Us Apart”—INXS

“Come to Me”—Goo Goo Dolls

“Everlong”—Foo Fighters

“Head Over Feet”—Alanis Morissette

“Never Let You Go”—Third Eye Blind

“Wonderful Tonight”—Eric Clapton

“Swing Life Away”—Rise Against

“Something”—The Beatles

“You’re My Home”—Billy Joel

“I Believe”—Stevie Wonder

“Better Together”—Luke Combs “You and Me”—Lifehouse

“All I Want Is You”—U2

“In My Feelings”—Drake

“Lay Me Down”—Dirty Heads

“Sunshine”—World Party

“Crazy Love”—Van Morrison “Stand by My Woman”—Lenny Kravitz

It’s late on the night of the twenty-fourth, so late it’s the twenty-fifth, and Mario slips between the sheets of Lizbet’s bed and starts the ritual of unbraiding her hair. He likes the way it looks all kinked and long, so she indulges him. Lizbet isn’t fully awake but her desire stirs at the feel of his hands in her hair, his front pressed against her back. Because she’s in that liminal state between waking and sleeping, her animal instincts emerge, and she loses all inhibition.

Their lovemaking is a storm—and this night, she hears the tapping of rain on her cottage’s roof, then the tree branches swiping at her windows, then a sharp crack followed by a grumble of thunder.

Lizbet’s and Mario’s bodies move over the bed in a darkness that’s briefly illuminated by flashes of lightning. It’s cinematic, she thinks; how beautiful they are in those split seconds when their bodies are silvered by the electrical charge in the air.

Afterward, they lie flat on the bottom sheet, the duvet kicked to the floor, and Lizbet wonders if she’s ever been this happy. She has focused all of her energy not on fighting the old, but on building the new, just as the sign at the end of her bed has been urging her to do for nearly an entire calendar year. She wishes that back on September 30, she could have somehow known that one day she would be lying in bed next to Mario freaking Subiaco after having

impressed the hell out of the new owner of the Hotel Nantucket, where she was the general manager. Would she have believed it?

Mario expels a breath. “I love you,” he says.

The rain has stopped, the wind has died down, the lightning and thunder have rolled past.

“What?” Lizbet says, though of course she heard him perfectly.

Mario faces her. “I love you,” he says. “I’m in love with you.” He starts laughing. “I honestly can’t believe it. I’m…what? Forty-six, almost forty-seven, and in all those years, I’ve told only three other women I loved them. One was Allie Taylor in sixth grade, and yes, that was real love, the purest kind, awkward and unrequited. One was my mother, of course. And the third was Fiona. I loved Fee, but that was different because, although I would have lain down in traffic for her, we weren’t romantically involved.”

Lizbet’s heart feels like an exploding star in her chest. She realizes it’s time for her to say it back, but she wants to hear more.

“How can you be so sure with me?” she says. “Explain yourself.”

“Working backward?” Mario says. “When you ended things a few weeks ago, I thought, Okay, she’s not ready, no problem. Things had gotten serious pretty quickly and I knew you were coming off this other relationship, so I told myself I understood. But I was hurt by it, which was a new feeling for me, or new since sixth grade when Allie Taylor went to the Valentine’s Day dance with Will Chandler instead

of me.” He grins.

Lizbet touches his face. He loves her.

“Before that? I wouldn’t say it was love at first sight, but when I saw you in the parking lot that first day in those sexy heels telling JJ

to leave you alone even though the dude was down on one knee proposing, I thought, That poor guy blew it but I’m not going to.”

“Stop,” Lizbet says, though she’s grinning.

“Before that…” Mario says.

“There was no ‘before that,’” Lizbet says. “That was the day we met.”

“Before that, Xavier told me that he’d hired a lioness named Elizabeth Keaton to manage the hotel. He said you used to run the Deck with your boyfriend but that you’d parted ways and you were

looking for a fresh start.”

“Lioness?” Lizbet says.

“Direct quote. You don’t forget a description like that. I was so intrigued that I did some stalking. I saw the feature about you and JJ in Coastal Living, then I checked out the Deck’s website, and I

developed a little crush on you.”

“You did not!”

“I did,” Mario says. “You reminded me of Allie Taylor.”

Lizbet swats him and he says, “I’m serious. She had blond hair like yours and pale blue eyes and that sweet-but-tough thing going that I haven’t encountered in any other woman until I met you. I always said I was going to find Allie Taylor someday and marry her.”

Lizbet is starting to feel a little jealous of Allie Taylor.

“But when I checked Facebook, I saw she was married with four kids at private schools in Manhattan and I also realized I was happy for her in that life. The magic was gone. But when I look at you…”

Here, Mario traces his finger from Lizbet’s shoulder down her arm. “I feel like I’m twelve years old again and everything is shiny and new

and colorful and full of wonder. And that’s how I know that I love

you.”

“I love you too,” Lizbet says.

“There’s a reason why I’m telling you tonight,” Mario says, “even though I’ve been in love with you for most of the summer.”

“What’s the reason?” she says.

“Xavier was crazy about the bar, our numbers are good, and you

said he was happy with the hotel.”

“He raved,” Lizbet says.

“So today it finally felt real,” Mario says. “It felt sustainable, like I can dig in here. I can stay here and do my thing with the bar and you can run the hotel, and in the off-season we can go wherever the spirit moves us. I still own a place in LA. It’s a bungalow with a little pool out back and an avocado tree.”

“An avocado tree?” Lizbet says. She kisses Mario and pulls the duvet onto the bed. All she wants is to go to sleep dreaming of swimming pools and movie stars, an avocado tree and some Craftsman furniture in Mario’s bungalow. Tomorrow, she will still have to charm Xavier, still have to make sure everything is beyond the beyond for him; a hotel experience isn’t made in one afternoon or even one night. Lizbet closes her eyes and Mario starts breathing deeply but Lizbet can’t settle. She’s in a happy bubble, insulated and safe, but isn’t there the teeniest tear, threatening to deflate it?

Well, she thinks.

The last Friday of the month is only two days away—which means a new Hotel Confidential post. Either Shelly Carpenter has stayed with them or she hasn’t. If she has and she gives them less than five

keys, or if she hasn’t and doesn’t review them at all…what will happen?