Peter says, “I’ll just have a beer. A Cisco.” He hands the menu back to Tabitha.
Is she supposed to order? she wonders. She is closer to the bar than Peter is, but Peter is the man. Peter invited her for drinks. She turns back to him. He raises his eyebrows expectantly, as if he has never seen her before, then says, “I’m going out front to have a cigarette. Be right back.”
A cigarette, Tabitha thinks. It’s the final nail in the coffin for this date. She gets the bartender’s attention—cute guy, bearded, smiley—and orders the drinks. When he brings them—the Nauti Dog a glorious deep red color, thanks to the Campari and the freshly squeezed grapefruit juice—Peter is still outside. Which leaves Tabitha to pay. She forks over twenty-five bucks. The bartender gives her change, and she says, “Keep it.”
“Thanks, bae,” he says, and he gives her another smile, looking into her eyes.
Bae, not ma’am. She loves him for this. Could she date the bartender? Tabitha wonders as she takes a sip of her drink. He might be thirty. Maybe. Is that too young? Tabitha tries to imagine Eleanor’s reaction when Tabitha announces she is dating a twenty-nine-year-old bartender from Nautilus. Tabitha would have to explain it for what it is: a rebound from Ramsay.
But no matter the circumstances, Tabitha doesn’t sleep with bartenders. Harper does.
Tabitha wonders about the text from Vineyard Haven. Tabitha and Harper have barely spoken since the horrible weeks following Julian’s death, fourteen years earlier.
Then Tabitha remembers the voice mail from five or six weeks back, also from Vineyard Haven. It was Harper, saying that their father, Billy, was having trouble with his kidneys and had to go to the hospital. Tabitha had meant to call Billy, but the news had come at a busy time—she was having the carpet in the boutique replaced and trying to finish up all the summer buying—and then Tabitha hadn’t heard anything else, so she’d assumed the problem had cleared up.
Tabitha is tempted to pull her phone out to see what Harper wants, but there is nothing more pathetic in the world, in Tabitha’s opinion, than a woman alone at a bar checking her phone.
She takes a long swill off her drink, and when the bartender swings back by, she says, “What’s your name?”
“Zack,” he says.
Zack: probably he’s younger than she thought. Zack is a name that became popular in the nineties.
She turns around to see what’s become of Captain Peter, but the crowd is thick and she can’t locate him in it. The couple next to Tabitha stands up, and Tabitha wonders if she should snag one of the stools for Captain Peter, but before she has a chance to do so, another couple sits down.
Tabitha blinks. It’s Ramsay and Caylee.
Ramsay grins. “What luck.”
Caylee swivels around. She smiles at Tabitha. “I’m sorry. Were you saving this seat for someone?”
She is so pretty, her teeth white and straight, her hair long and shiny, tucked behind one ear. But it’s her skin that Tabitha really envies. If she could go back in time and change one thing it would be this: she would have worn sunscreen. Lots of it.
“Yeah,” Ramsay says. “Who’s the beer for?”
His voice is so familiar, his wicked smirk so easy to interpret, that it’s as though Caylee unwittingly inserted herself between a long-married couple. Ramsay is the ideal life partner for Tabitha in nearly every way. But there are deal breakers. It’s not only that he wants a child. It’s also that he has never lost anyone, and he’s incapable of understanding the depth and intensity of Tabitha’s emotions. There are things that activate her Julian anxiety: Julian’s birthday, obviously, and the day of his death, but also babies and boys who are now the age that Julian would have been. Fourteen. Ramsay was impatient with Tabitha’s emotional lows as they related to Julian; the more she tried to talk it through and make him understand, the more he urged her to “get over it” and “move on.”
That Tabitha is now so unhappy without Ramsay has come as a surprise. That she is fiendishly jealous of Caylee—honestly, Tabitha would like to cut her—is a shock.
“That’s my date’s,” she says. “Captain Peter.” She wants the title to make him sound like a figure of authority, but it comes across as goofy. She might as well have said Captain Crunch or Captain Kangaroo.
“Guy wearing a white uniform like Merrill Stubing’s?” Ramsay says. “I just saw him out front. He left.”
“He left?” Tabitha says. Have you ever lost anyone? she thinks. She has now lost Captain Peter, but she feels only a wave of relief. Thank God he’s gone! If only this news hadn’t been reported by her ex-boyfriend, she would be a very happy woman indeed.
She picks up Captain Peter’s beer and drinks the entire thing in one pull. She has, officially, turned into her twin sister. Caylee looks impressed, Ramsay surprised. Tabitha hides her burp behind a cupped hand.
“I’m out,” she says, grabbing her clutch and blowing a kiss to young Zack. “You two have fun.”
“Tabitha,” Ramsay says.
Tabitha looks at him. He loves her; she can see it written all over his face. But love isn’t enough.
“Good night,” she says, and she heads for the door.
Tabitha can hear the music, feel the music—hell, she can practically taste the music—from two houses away. It’s rap or whatever kids call rap these days, but there are fewer tricky lyrics and a heavier bass line. When Tabitha pulls into the driveway, the music is so loud that the walls of the house seem to expand and contract. It looks like the house is breathing.
Or maybe that’s the effect of the Nauti Dog.
Then Tabitha sees the cars. One is the black Range Rover that overindulged, unparented Emma drives, and the other is a white pickup that Teddy—Ainsley’s boyfriend—drives.
Tabitha gets out of her car and steadies herself with a hand on the hood. How has Eleanor not heard the music? She really is going deaf. It’s so loud Tabitha can’t believe the neighbors haven’t called the police.
She opens the door into a miasma of pot smoke.
This is just not possible, she thinks.
But of course it is possible; Ainsley is sixteen. She is grounded, and what she will no doubt say is that she hasn’t left the house. She didn’t ask if she could have friends over, because if she had asked, Tabitha would have said absolutely not. But because Ainsley didn’t ask and Tabitha didn’t say no, Ainsley will argue that she is not technically breaking any rules.
Tabitha kicks off her kitten heels. The layout of the carriage house is upside down; the bedrooms are on the ground floor, the living space upstairs. Oh, how Tabitha would love to slip into her room, take an Ambien, and go to bed. She doesn’t have the energy to deal with this.
You’re a piss-poor parent, she hears Ramsay say.
Then she hears something else. A hollow thocking noise. Thock thock thock. Thock thock thock.