Page 25 of Under the Stars

Audrey

Winthrop Island, New York

The two men carry the trunk between them, one at each handle. I spot them as I’m rounding the turn into the driveway on my bicycle and skid to a stop.

“What are you doing with that?” I call out.

Both men turn their heads. I think they’re from the plumber—they’ve been installing the new drainage system this week. “Dumpster,” says one.

“You can’t throw that out!”

“Boss’s orders,” says the other one, shrugging his free shoulder. Overhead, an unexpectedly warm sun burns a hole in the morning mist, and the sweat rolls from his temples and down the side of his jaw.

“We’ll just see about that! Put it down.”

The men look at each other and sigh—you know the one, the sigh that says might as well humor the crazy chicks because you can’t talk reason to them .

“Right here?” asks the first one.

“Carry it on back into the taproom,” I tell him. “The boss made a mistake.”

—

David and I made a lot of mistakes when we opened our own restaurant. The first one was the lease.

“Should we really sign for five whole years?” I said to David. “That seems like a lot.”

“What’s the matter, you don’t think we’ll last five years?”

“It’s a risk, that’s all.”

“It’s not a risk for us, babe. It’s a risk for the landlord. We’re going to be the hottest restaurant in Silicon Valley. And a five-year lease saves us a fuckload of money that goes straight to our bottom line.”

David got his way, of course. He also got his way about the interior designer and the artwork, about the server uniforms and the appliances in the kitchen—he conceded only to purchase the units secondhand from a dealer who specialized in restaurant liquidations.

Nearly new, the dealer called them, and for once the schtick was real—the restaurant we bought them from had just shuttered, only seven months after a jazzy opening.

As you might expect, David refused to see the cautionary tale.

When I unloaded this story on Meredith along some stretch of I-40 east of Amarillo, ranchland rolling into eternity around us, she told me I lacked backbone—that I let the men in my life walk all over me because of my daddy issues.

I said bullshit. I said David could persuade a butcher to go vegan; he could persuade a Cubs fan to root for New York.

Don’t you ever doubt yourself? I asked him once.

Don’t you ever stare into your beer and think, Maybe my cooking is shit, maybe all my ideas are shit, maybe I should just fake my own death and live out of a van?

He stared back at me like I was speaking in Swahili.

The power of David’s self-belief was so absolute, so mesmerizing, you couldn’t help believing in him yourself.

Only later did I discover just how many mistakes we had made.

Lucky for Mike, I remember them all. Don’t worry about the budget, Sedge Peabody told me, during the two April days we spent at the Mohegan bar, emptying bottles of vintage Bordeaux as we laid out our plans.

To which I rolled my eyes and said, “Since you’re obviously not a businessman, I guess I’ll just have to worry about the budget for you.”

“I just mean it’s your kitchen, so do what you think is right. Don’t cut any corners. Go ahead and dream big.”

I cast a look around the stained walls, the worn floorboards, the heavy beams holding back the slanted ceiling. “Dream big ? Here?”

“Within reason, obviously.”

On the plans, we renamed the bar area the taproom.

Mike said it was too bougie, but you should hear the way he throws around the word taproom now.

It’s cute. The tables and chairs are out with a shipwright in Noank getting refinished, so they won’t wobble when you lean forward and stick your elbows down on either side of your plate.

(Shipwrights do the most precise woodwork, Mike insists, plus you don’t pay the interior design markup.) The floor’s been sanded, the walls painted, the bar cleaned out and scrubbed; fresh glassware, new taps hooked up to a range of local beers.

The ice machine arrives on Wednesday, God willing.

The wiring’s all done, the Wi-Fi reaches most corners of the building, and the plumbers, as I said, are working like maniacs to get the new water filtration and drainage system in place so we can hook up the nearly new appliances and start cooking.

As you can imagine, they don’t appreciate some crazy chick wasting their time moving this trunk back and forth.

“Here?” says one, just before he drops his end on my freshly sanded taproom floor with a thump that shudders your bones. The other end follows a second later.

“Thanks so much,” I tell them. “I appreciate it. How’s the filtration coming along?”

But they’re already stumping through the door and back down into the cellar.

I cross my arms and study this object in front of me.

To be honest, I’m not sure why I give a damn.

It’s not what you’d call a handsome specimen.

The wood is warped with damp; the leather peels away from its nails.

There’s no decoration of any kind, nothing beautiful about its lines.

It’s old, sure, but not because it’s some treasured family heirloom.

It’s just forgotten junk of the kind people bring to Antiques Roadshow, praying some appraiser will tell them it’s worth a fortune.

I kneel to examine the lock. It goes without saying the key’s missing.

I wriggle the fastening a few times, in case it was left unlatched, but the lid remains sealed to the seam.

On either side, a leather strap comes together in a tarnished brass buckle.

I work one prong out of the stiff leather and pull the strap free.

The other one is more stubborn. The leather’s molded around the buckle and doesn’t want to let go.

I fetch a corkscrew from the bar and slide the blade between metal and leather to separate them.

When it gives way, the whole trunk seems to sigh.

The lock’s another story. I rattle it around some more, hoping the rusted parts will give way; I insert the tip of the corkscrew blade and feel around for the mechanism. The lid remains resolutely shut—a mouth that refuses to speak.

I stand up and kick the side.

“What about a crowbar?” says Sedge Peabody.

I spin around. He stands behind me in a checked linen shirt untucked over a pair of dock shorts, like he just stepped off a sailboat. His hair is in need of a trim. “I thought you were still in Boston,” I tell him, a tick more sharply than I’m thinking it in my head.

He lifts his brows. “I can go back.”

“Sorry. Little frustrated.” I deliver the trunk another kick.

Sedge steps forward and crouches low to set one hand on the leather top. “Where’d you find this thing?”

“In the cellar. The plumbers were taking it out to the dumpster. Mike’s orders.”

“What’s in it?”

“Well, gosh, Sedge. If I could open it, we’d find out.”

“Looks pretty old.”

“Okay, Captain Obvious. If you’re finished enlightening me, could you go find a crowbar?”

He stands up, grinning. “Little feisty today, aren’t we? All right, all right,” he adds, reading my expression. “Crowbar. Got it. Don’t go anywhere.”

“I do have work to do, you know!” I call after him.

Four weeks after meeting him, I still have only a vague idea what Sedge Peabody does for a living—not that he needs to make a living, obviously.

I know that Sedge stands for Sedgewick, which was also his father’s name.

I know that the Peabody estate is called Summerly and sits somewhere at the eastern tip of Winthrop Island, deep behind the guardhouse that separates the private half of the island from the public half, nestled in a sweet spot between the golf course and the Atlantic Ocean.

I know that his grandmother is almost ninety-nine years old and sharp as a switchblade, though I haven’t met her, and that from Easter to Thanksgiving she lives at Summerly, where Sedge keeps close tabs on her because, he says, they’ve already put down a deposit on the catering for her hundredth birthday party and don’t want to lose it.

(I think he’s joking, but you can never tell—old money is cheap as hell.)

But if you’re asking me how he keeps busy when he drives back to Boston in the vintage Aston Martin he inherited from his father?

I have no idea. I wouldn’t dream of asking.

I’ll text him if something comes up with the renovation, and he’ll answer with a flattering quickness that suggests he’s been sitting around waiting for your next message, until you realize he’s the type of person who responds equally fast to customer service surveys.

Once he called me with an idea about the menu.

He was having dinner in some restaurant and it sounded like he had a woman with him.

Homemade ketchup, he said. Can we do homemade ketchup?

It’s unreal. It’s like it’s not even ketchup.

Sure, we can do homemade ketchup, I told him. But you get to tell Mike the good news.

He’ll be gone for three or four or sometimes five days and then pop back inside the Mo without warning, like he did just now. I think he takes pride in startling the shit out of me. Whatever. He returns now with a crowbar in one hand. I tell him he could use a haircut.

He runs a hand through his hair. “You and Granny,” he says. “Want to do the honors?”

For a second I think he means the haircut. Then I notice the crowbar he’s pointing in my direction.

“Go ahead,” I tell him. “I would so much rather critique your technique than the other way around.”

“Fair enough.”

He applies the edge of the crowbar to the seam and the damn lid pops right open.

—