Page 9 of Under the Stars

She laughs.

“You know what your problem is, honeybee? You’re no fun. It’s all straight and narrow with you. Play by the rules. You need to live a little. Jesus Christ. No wonder that husband of yours took off without a forwarding address.”

My mouth moves but the words won’t take shape.

I turn around and force the limp out of my walk, all the way back to the house.

—

When David didn’t come straight back home from the restaurant that night, I wasn’t worried.

Only Foster fretted when we climbed into bed.

All night she kept getting up and circling around herself and whining at the door, which was strange because she only ever tolerated David.

She was my dog; I had found her behind the CIA restaurant one night, foraging for scraps in the garbage.

I called her Foster because I was just going to foster her until I found her a forever family, which turned out to be me.

She was a mix of God knows what. Every time I tried that app that identifies your dog’s breed from a photograph, it returned a different answer.

Some Lab, some retriever, some beagle, some Chihuahua. Some breeds I’d never heard of.

In a firm voice, I told Foster she was being ridiculous.

There was nothing out of the ordinary about David’s going out with his team after a busy Saturday night service.

He did it all the time. To let off steam, he said.

You understand, right, Audrey? The stress and everything. You know you can trust me, right?

Of course I understood. I’d worked dinner service with him until we realized this was bad for human marriage; I knew how the steam built up and needed letting off before you could safely fall asleep in your own bed.

Of course I could trust my own husband . We were as close as two fingers wrapped around each other. We were like fettucine and alfredo sauce—impossible to separate, magic together. So universally appealing we were almost…well, cheesy.

We’d met in my first kitchen after culinary school. Everyone else in my college class had gone off into finance or law school or med school or Teach for America; when I said I was going to train at the CIA, they thought I wanted to be a spy.

I told this story to David over drinks and he laughed his head off.

He’d asked me out after our very first service together; I thought it was just a friendly get-to-know-you invitation, new colleagues grabbing a beer, but somehow we ended up at his apartment afterward.

I’d never slept with anyone on the first date, had certainly never had an orgasm on the first try.

I remember lying in his bed afterward, stunned and sweaty.

He grinned at me across the pillow. Hazel eyes, full lips, hair the color of buttered toast. Holy shit, he said, stroking my belly. Didn’t see that coming.

Instead of shame, or panic, or any of the usual emotions I felt after sex with a new man, I felt something else.

I felt beautiful. I felt like Venus, rising from her shell.

Not to be dramatic. Hair tumbling over my shoulders.

I rolled onto his chest and said, right before I kissed him, Let’s see what else I can surprise you with.

We got married two months later. Meredith gave me away, wearing a dress that was just yellow enough to call champagne instead of white, and a scowl that settled on her face whenever she looked David’s way.

( You know I have a feeling for people, honeybee, and something’s just not right with that man.

) My father didn’t show up, but he sent a check for a thousand dollars.

I was going to send it back but David said no, we’ll put it in our restaurant fund.

The restaurant we were going to open together, someday.

So it was funny, really, that the first hint of disaster came from that very account we’d opened up with my dad’s wedding gift to fund our dreams. A bank alert on my phone.

There were insufficient funds to complete a transaction, it informed me, even though I had checked the balance just the day before to make sure we had enough to meet payroll.

There must be some mistake, I thought. Foster whimpered at the foot of the bed. David’s side was undisturbed. The bank balance, when I opened the app, was zero.

Didn’t see that coming.

Meredith, on the other hand, was pleased to tell me that she’d told me so.

—

Meredith swings into the kitchen while I’m putting away the groceries from the car—barefoot, dripping, shoes dangling from one hand. She opens her arms and says she’s sorry.

“Don’t worry about it,” I tell her.

“You’re upset. I can tell when you’re upset.”

I set the hummus on a shelf in the ancient fridge and close the door. “Look, Meredith. You are who you are. I mean, I can’t expect a duck not to quack.”

“Are you calling me a duck?”

“We’re stuck with each other, that’s all. I promised I’d see this summer through, and I will. I’m your daughter, it’s my duty. After that, we’re done. Is that clear? You screw up, it’s on you. You go on to win an Oscar, enjoy your fabulous new life. We’re over.”

“ Well, ” she says.

“You say stuff you don’t mean. I get it. Or you say stuff you secretly do mean but shouldn’t say out loud. Whatever. It’s who you are. You’re fifty years old, you’re not going to change. So I don’t have to keep trying with you.”

“You know, you’ve got a few quirks of your own, honeybee. Nobody’s perfect.”

“I put your bags in one of the bedrooms upstairs. I don’t remember which one. I got kind of lost up there. But you’ll find it. It’s the one that has a bathroom attached?”

“How considerate.”

“Tomorrow morning we’re going to start to work with buckets and mops. Both of us, Meredith, okay?”

She salutes me. “Yes, ma’am. Buckets and mops at six a.m. it is. My therapist’s always telling me I should do more housework.”

“Stop acting like this is some kind of joke, okay? I’m done. The first day of August, I walk away for good. Is that clear? We’re quits.”

“Oh, honeybee. You know how many times you’ve said that?”

She reaches for my shoulder. I flinch away and head for the door.

“This time I mean it,” I tell her.

—

I don’t remember going to bed. In fact, when the sunshine truck crashes into my head the next morning, I don’t remember a thing. I stare at the brilliant window, the flowery curtains, and strain to recollect where I am. Who I am. Who has drugged me and thrown me into this pit of oblivion.

Sleep, like Meredith, has been an unreliable companion to me over the years.

I have this memory of sitting in the doctor’s office, on the examining table, paper sheet crackling beneath my legs.

Meredith sits on the plastic chair in the corner and says, She’s a very anxious child, Doctor.

I don’t know what to do with her. The doctor asks her, How is she sleeping at night?

And there is this puzzled pause from Meredith as she studies the question.

How would I know that ? she asks him at last, perfectly earnest.

But last night, sleep held me tight. My brain crawls out into the sunlight, blinking. Assembling the pieces. Ferry. Winthrop Island. Meredith’s house. Under the blankets, I turn to reach for Foster’s furry comfort.

Gone.

I roll on my back and close my eyes. Go back to sleep, I tell myself. It’s just a nightmare.

The sun burns my eyelids. The old anxiety stirs and picks at the back of my head, at the pit of my stomach. Something’s wrong. Disturbance in the force. Meredith.

My eyes fly open.

—

I find her on the stairs from the cellar, carrying a bottle in each hand.

“It’s not what you think,” she says.

“What the hell, Meredith. We’ve been here one night .”

She climbs the remaining stairs and wedges past my disapproving stare at the top.

She wears a pair of black leggings and a man’s white shirt; an Hermès scarf in a blue-and-white pattern holds back her hair from the ledges of her cheekbones.

I follow her into the kitchen, where a garden of bottles now sprouts from the counters and the floor.

She sets down the pair she’s carrying and turns to me.

“I’m getting rid of them, honeybee. Pouring them down the sink. Clean slate.”

I pick up one of the bottles and read the label. “Holy shit, Meredith. This is a 1970 Latour. You can’t pour this down the sink .”

“Watch me.”

“Where did this come from?”

She shrugs. “My dad, probably. Or maybe my aunt. She and my uncle used to give dinner parties when they were visiting.”

“You mean Aunt Miranda? This was her personal wine stash?”

“I used to polish off the bottles when they were in the dining room with their friends. Mom caught me once.” She shakes her head at the memory and starts back for the cellar stairs.

I set my hands on my hips and contemplate this candy store around me.

I’m wearing flannel pajamas, a worn flannel robe.

Hair twisted up in a claw clip. Without my contacts, the details of the kitchen are pleasingly blurry, like an Impressionist painting.

I pick up a bottle or two, examine the labels.

I think of this news story I read, not too long ago, about a man who bought a house or inherited a house (I don’t remember which) out in the country somewhere, and he goes to check out the barn that’s falling down, roof caved in, and discovers a collection of midcentury Ferraris, in mint condition under an inch-deep layer of dust.

Meredith looks up in surprise when she encounters me on the cellar stairs. “What’s the matter, honeybee? Don’t you trust me?”

“It’s not whether I trust you or not,” I tell her. “I’m just going to find some crates.”

—

After lunch, Meredith helps me carry the crates to the car. With the seats down, everything fits—over two hundred bottles of mostly French wines, plus another dozen or two of cognac and single malt Scotch, none of them less than forty years old.

“Are you sure you don’t want me to come with you?” Meredith asks.

“Do you want to come with me?”

“Hell, no.”

“Exactly.” I swing into the driver’s seat and turn on the ignition. “Let me know if you find any more bottles, all right? No backsliding on my watch.”

“Careful of those potholes,” she says.

I crawl down the driveway at about two miles an hour, easing in and out of the craters. At each bounce, the bottles jangle behind me. When I pull from the driveway onto West Cliff Road, I draw a sigh of relief.

Of course, Memorial Day is still a month away. When the summer families arrive.

The Mohegan Inn sits about halfway up the hillside that slopes into the bay where we arrived yesterday evening.

Between the trees and houses, I spot the ferry terminal, the marina, the handful of buildings that line the docks.

I imagine those Connecticut kids tying up their boats and scampering up the hill to this place—white clapboard colonial house, haphazard additions tacked on as needed.

The stone chimneys are blackened by decades of soot, and the parking lot has been eked out from what was probably once a stableyard—there is room for ten cars, max.

I back Meredith’s Mercedes into the space nearest the entrance and climb out to stand on a patch of crumbled asphalt and gather my nerve.

Meredith used to tell me stories about this place.

I don’t know how true they are; Meredith’s stories all tend to develop to the advantage of Meredith and her shining qualities.

She said she would sneak out of Greyfriars at night and bicycle to the Mo for some excitement—to meet mainlanders, mostly, and maybe the sons and daughters of the families who belonged to the private club at the other end of the island.

There was beer and bottom-shelf liquor, burgers and tuna melts, sometimes a little live music when you could persuade a band to make the voyage from the mainland.

Your basic dive, in other words, I said.

But it was our dive, said Meredith. The only place we could go for a drink and a bite to eat in the evening.

I open the back and hoist a crate of Pétrus. Better to have something in my arms, goes my logic. Better not to walk in naked.

I carry the Pétrus around the corner of the building and push open the door with my elbow.

The room is large and low-ceilinged. A wooden bar stretches across the opposite wall, backed by the usual shelves of glasses and bottles.

In the corner sits a postage-stamp dais just large enough for a guitar and drums and singer at the mic.

Five or six tables along the front windows, to make the place look bustling from the outside.

Smell of old wood and stale beer and summers past.

A man walks out of the doorway next to the bar, wiping his hands on a dish towel. He might be nearing fifty—ginger hair faded and thinning, eyes bright blue. Lazy growth of stubble on his chin. He takes me in with the affable patience of any pub landlord.

“Bar’s not open until five today,” he says. “Can I help you?”

I set the crate of Pétrus on the bar and wipe my hands on my jeans. “Are you Mike? Mike Kennedy?”

“That’s me.”

I stick out my right hand. “Hey, Dad. It’s Audrey.”