Page 10 of Under the Stars

Meredith

Winthrop Island, New York

He was from Watch Hill, he said. Sailed over with a friend this morning for a house party in Little Bay. He had light blue eyes and sandy hair and a pair of wide, lean shoulders designed for hauling sails. He said his name was Coop. Coop Walker.

“Of the Watch Hill Walkers?” Meredith said.

“The New Canaan Walkers, actually,” he told her. “Watch Hill is just for summer. Lighthouse Road?”

Meredith sipped her beer and focused her gaze over his right shoulder and down the bar. “No kidding,” she said.

“What about you?” He leaned his elbow on the bar and looked soulfully into her eyes. “What’s your name?”

“Meredith.”

“Meredith who?”

“Fisher.” She returned her gaze to his face and smiled.

He’d drunk a couple of beers on top of a shot of J?germeister, so the dreamy look might be because of her, or might be the booze.

He was cute, though. Definitely cute, if you liked them scrubbed and preppy.

He was probably nineteen or twenty, she thought.

College kid. The New York cops had better things to do than ferry out to Winthrop Island to make sure the Mohegan Inn was observing the state minimum drinking age, and the Mo was more than happy to accept the money of anybody old enough to sail a boat across from the mainland.

At her smile, Coop Walker lifted his hand from his knee and danced his fingers on the back of her hand atop the bar. Nice move. Classy, not to go straight for the thigh. You’d be surprised about these preppy types—they might exude polish, but they wooed you with all the grace of a mountain gorilla.

“So where do you live, Meredith Fisher?”

“Here,” she said.

“I mean the rest of the year.”

“Here. I live here.” She gestured to the crowded, sticky interior of the Mo to emphasize her point.

“No shit. You’re a townie?”

Meredith laughed. “What town? I don’t see a town.”

Coop leaned in next to her ear. “You’re too fucking beautiful to be a townie.”

“You’re such a dick, Coop. Where do you go to college? Yale?”

“Princeton,” he said sheepishly.

“Let me guess. Does your dad work at, like, Paine Webber?”

“Nah. Debevoise. He’s a lawyer?”

“Oh, so one of the good guys.” She shrugged off his dancing fingers and reached for her beer. “I don’t know, Coop. I think you might be too big a douchebag for me.”

“Aw, come on. Give a guy a chance.”

“I mean, you’ve pretty much hit all the wrong buttons. Princeton, New Canaan, Watch Hill. Dad’s a cog in the capitalist machine. What have you got to offer me except good looks and an attitude?”

“What are you, some kind of hippie?”

“I’m just not into douchebags, Coop. And you’re boring me.”

“Boring you? What the fuck?”

“This preppy shit. You’re all the same, you know that? Like, what’s your major? Let me guess. Economics?”

He grinned. “Dismal, I know.”

“Dismal?”

“The dismal science?”

“Whatever, Coop,” said Meredith. “I mean, do you know anything interesting ? Anything a normal person would want to hear about?”

“You mean like sports?”

“Sports bore the shit out of me, Coop.”

Coop tilted his head and stared through the jet trails of cigarette smoke to the ceiling beam that loomed above her head. “Okay, Meredith. How about this. What do you know about that piece of wood up there?”

Meredith craned her neck. “What, the beam?”

“Not just any beam, babe. That’s made from American chestnut, which means it’s at least a hundred years old—”

“No shit, Sherlock. The whole building dates back to, like, before the revolution.”

“Okay, but sometimes beams get replaced, right? Renovation and stuff. But this baby right here—” He rose from his barstool and reached up to knock it with his fist. “Yep, American chestnut. So. Did you know that, like, a century ago, the whole eastern United States used to be stacked with chestnut trees? They were fucking everywhere. You could swing on branches all the way from Massachusetts to Appalachia. The great American tree. Big, tall, fast-growing. So riddle me this, Meredith Fisher. Why can’t you find a single chestnut tree anymore? ”

“I don’t know. Some asshole timber corporation cut them all down?”

Coop sucked his beer. “Not the timber company. Blight, babe. Invasive fungus. Started at the end of the nineteenth century. By, like, 1950 it had killed off the whole fucking species. Only the root system stays alive. So the trees, saplings, whatever, they keep sprouting back up, right? And then the blight kills them before they get going. And they resprout and die again. Over and over. So, not technically extinct. But never growing up into trees.”

“Oh my God. That’s so sad. That’s, like, the saddest thing I ever heard. The way they keep trying?”

“Yeah, well. That’s what I got. Other than being a good-looking capitalist douchebag from New Canaan.” He raised his pint glass and finished off the beer. “I got fucking chestnuts.”

Funny, the smoky look was gone. During the course of his arboreal lecture, Coop had undergone a metamorphosis.

Eyes wide and focused, back straight. If he were a soldier or a dog, you would say he had come to attention .

Or you might say he crackled with electricity .

Meredith reached out and ran her hand up his thigh.

“So where do you go to learn about trees, Coop?”

A pair of thick hands came down on the counter between them. “Hey, man. Meredith. Everything all right here?”

Meredith looked up. “Hey, Mike. What’s up?”

“Just making sure you’re enjoying yourself, babe.”

Mike said this while his eyes rested coldly on the swoop of Coop’s sunbeam hair. One hand fisted a dish towel. Mike had taken up weightlifting over the winter and his shoulders strained the fabric of a Led Zeppelin T-shirt that might or might not have been a size too small.

Meredith plucked Mike’s chin with her fingers and turned his face toward her. “Down, boy.”

It was not enough to say that Mike Kennedy was her oldest friend in the world—not even enough to say that he was her only friend in the world.

They had been born three weeks apart, nineteen years ago, and raised less than a mile away from each other.

She called him her twin, though she didn’t exactly think of him as a brother, either—three summers earlier, they had lost their virginities to each other, because they agreed it was better to have sex for the first time as a kind of controlled detonation, with someone you trusted.

They had done it every night for a week until Meredith felt she had the hang of things and moved on to work her new magic on this aloof, enigmatically handsome trust fund writer guy who was staying at the Greyfriars colony that summer to write a roman à clef about a precocious misfit at a dystopian boarding school.

He was twenty-five and thought (or allowed himself to believe) that Meredith was eighteen.

When Mom caught them together, she hit the roof.

Gavin (was that his name? or Garrett?) was gone the next day—heartbreak.

Years later, Meredith heard that the novel had gone on to be named a Best Book of the Year by Time magazine, which hailed the work as brilliant and original.

Anyway, Meredith couldn’t think of a day in her life that she hadn’t seen or spoken to Mike Kennedy—they did not, in fact, even need to speak. He stared at her now; she stared right back, smiling, until she broke him. He batted away her fingers and shook his head.

“You want another beer?” he said to Coop.

“Sure, man.”

Mike took his glass and pulled another beer. Coop and Meredith watched without a word until Mike set the pint glass on the paper coaster and said, “That’ll be five bucks.”

“You can put it on my tab,” said Coop, grinning.

“We don’t keep fucking tabs here, man. This ain’t the Watch Hill yacht club.”

Coop reached into his wallet and pulled out a crumpled ten-dollar bill. “Keep the change,” he said, still grinning his shit-eating grin. Mike rolled his eyes and walked away, leaving the Hamilton on the bar, curling at one end. Coop sank the beer and looked at Meredith.

“You want to get out of here?”

—

When Meredith was twelve or thirteen, she overheard her mother talking shit about her to Aunt Miranda.

Uncle Joe and Aunt Miranda came to stay every summer until Granny died.

Technically, they were not Meredith’s blood relations—Meredith’s mother Isobel and Aunt Miranda were stepsisters, and the woman Meredith called Granny was Miranda’s mother, not Isobel’s.

But since Granny was like a mother to Isobel and like a grandmother to Meredith, it felt like family, with all the usual dysfunctions.

To keep herself from going nuts, Aunt Miranda always organized a summer stock performance on the beach at Horseshoe Cove, involving the Greyfriars summer residents plus her own three kids and, of course, Meredith.