The Castaways (12 page)

“I came out of respect for Mr. MacAvoy,” April snapped. She was just a floating head over her mother’s shoulder. Blond hair up-swept, mascara appealingly smudged, transparent pink lip gloss glistening. April Peck was a knockout. That was the problem.

“Yes,” Jeffrey said. “Thank you.” He let this expression of appreciation rest for a moment before he continued. “But because of the difficult situation—last year, I mean—the family has asked that you forgo attending the reception. They feel your presence would be inappropriate.”

Donna seemed truly astonished by this statement. She took a stutter-step backward, narrowly missing colliding with Mrs. Parks behind her, and her black headscarf slipped, revealing her bald scalp.

“I’m sorry,” Jeffrey said. “It’s just that it’s… difficult for the family.”

“It’s difficult for me!” April said. “He’s dead and I want to pay my respects! You think I don’t
know
my presence is ‘inappropriate’? You think I didn’t feel a thousand eyes on me? Of course I did!” April’s voice was loud. Her mother’s expression was one of horror, but whether that was because of April’s outburst or because of her own exposed scalp, Jeffrey could not tell. He was grateful that the church was emptying out. He didn’t want a scene, and he was sure Andrea didn’t want a scene either—but what had she expected when she had sent him on this mission?

“Okay, listen…” he said.

“And for the record, you can’t actually keep me out of the reception.”

“Well, it’s private.”

“Well, I don’t want to go anyway. I never had any
intention
of going. My mother is sick.” Donna, meanwhile, had made her way unsteadily to the back of the church and was standing in front of the rows of candles as if debating whether or not to light one.

“I’m sorry to hear that—”

“She has cancer!” April said. And since her mother was out of earshot, she added, “The chemo may not work.”

Jeffrey nodded solemnly. The unfortunate truth about April Peck was that she had lost all credibility.

“And one more thing,” April said. She took a step toward Jeffrey. She was officially too close. God, if Delilah saw them, she would have a conniption. Jeffrey didn’t want to know one more thing. He had done his duty; April Peck would not come to the reception. Now all he had to do was get out of the church. But April Peck was not willing to let him go. There was something she was determined to tell him. She was so close to him, he could smell her breath: bubble gum. Her sooty eyes were narrowed. She was going to have the last word. “I was with him the night before he died.”

D
elilah hated Andrea Kapenash.

Hated her!

She may have hated Andrea for years but had only now, with the event of Tess and Greg’s death, admitted it to herself. How could she hate someone she was such good friends with? It was all of a sudden obvious: Delilah hated Andrea because they were such good friends. Because for years she had spent hours and days and weeks in Andrea’s infuriating presence. Andrea always had the answer. Tess had been Andrea’s handmaiden, eager to please her, eager for everyone to please her. And so, for the years that they’d been friends, Andrea had controlled everyone’s lives. Andrea was always right, she was the oldest, she had raised her children first, she would tell you how it was done. Andrea was married to the police chief. That gave her power, two feet firmly planted on the Moral High Ground.

But now Tess was dead and certain things were going to change. For starters, Delilah was going to express her true feelings about Andrea.

Or maybe not. The fact of the matter was, Delilah was great at articulating anger in her mind, but in real life she found confrontation difficult and unpleasant. Especially with women. Delilah had never argued with Phoebe or Tess, and she had never overtly argued with Andrea (disagreed strongly, maybe, but Andrea had steamrolled her every time). Delilah had no problem fighting with Jeffrey. All they did was fight! She’d had no problem fighting with Greg, either. They had had a fight the night before he died. A fight that she couldn’t bear to think about.

Delilah was hosting the reception-after-the-reception, which meant the six of them and the four younger kids. She had a bowl of chicken salad, a platter of cold cuts, slices of watermelon, a big bowl of potato chips, and a blender full of stiff daiquiris made from the strawberries she had picked at the farm with the kids. The food was the same as always, the drink was the same, the setting the same—her back deck with the two chaises and the six Adirondack chairs, the croquet wickets set up in the lawn, the mermaid fountain gurgling, the cosmos and snapdragons blooming, butterflies and bumblebees hovering—but of course nothing was the same. Delilah found herself unable to put on music. Music would remind them all of Greg. Would they ever be able to listen to music again? Addison had turned down her offer of a strawberry daiquiri and joined the Chief in drinking Jack Daniels over ice. Addison was already quite drunk. They were all quite drunk, like characters from a Hemingway novel. Andrea was in a chardonnay stupor. Phoebe was nursing a daiquiri, which she had topped off with more rum. Delilah was practically reeling from the daiquiris—in addition, she had had three glasses of pinot gris and (stupidly) a dirty martini at the Westmoor Club. Jeffrey was drinking beer and was probably monitoring how many he’d had over what time period. But upon closer inspection, Addison was the worst of them all. He was muttering nonsense into his drink, his glasses were slipping, his hair—the fringe around the edge of his scalp that he claimed as hair—was mussed. All of his usual Princetonian deportment had flown away like a flock of birds frightened at the sight of him.

“No one’s eating,” Delilah complained. She picked a chip out of the bowl, but couldn’t bring herself to eat it.

“I don’t know why you went to so much trouble,” Andrea said. “We all ate at the reception.”

Or you could say thank you,
Delilah thought. But instead she decided to step on Andrea’s shoulder and go over her head. “Chief, would you like a sandwich?”

“Sure,” the Chief said.

The kids were down in the basement, watching
Cars
for the umpteenth time, despite the fact that it was a beautiful evening and wouldn’t get dark until nine. Delilah had even given them free run of the PlayStation, but they said they didn’t want to play.

“We just want to be quiet, Mom,” said Barney, Delilah’s six-year-old, in a way that killed her.

The usual rules didn’t apply. The world was upside down. Her kids didn’t want to play PlayStation, Addison wasn’t piling Delilah’s chicken salad onto a baguette, there was no music.

Delilah sidled up to Andrea and lowered her voice in a way that indicated intimacy between two women friends. “There’s something I want to talk to you about…”

Andrea was having none of the cuddly stuff. Her eyes, when she turned to Delilah, were bright blue and cutting. Her face was a shiny, impenetrable force field. “What is it?”

“I’d like to take the kids for the summer.”

“The kids?”

“Chloe and Finn.”

“Out of the question.”

Now, see? Who said things like that?

“Hear me out,” Delilah said.

Andrea raised her eyebrows and pursed her lips in a way that made it look like she was whistling. Delilah tried to think back to a time when she had really liked Andrea. Well, when Drew was born, Andrea had come to the house and cleaned and done laundry and roasted a chicken. She had monitored Delilah’s milk flow; she had reached right in and fixed the way Drew was sucking. She had pinched Delilah’s nipple with gentle authority, as if she were a nurse.

Better?
she’d said.

Miraculously, it was better. The nursing didn’t hurt anymore. Drew took in long drafts of milk; Delilah felt her breasts thrumming along like a machine. Better!

Andrea had checked in on Delilah for weeks. She offered to baby-sit so that Delilah and Jeffrey could go out to dinner. She had, Delilah realized, filled the space where Delilah’s mother should have been.

Then there was the kiss, South Beach 2005. They had all been at a dance club in the wee hours, Delilah was drunk on champagne and Andrea on vodka; they had both been eating cashews that they later found out were laced with ecstasy. Andrea and Delilah had been dancing on a stage with poles; it was fun and sexy, and although Delilah had very little memory of the details, she did remember that she had kissed Andrea in front of three hundred writhing bodies, and the kiss had been passionate.

But thinking about that now was only puzzling.

Andrea could be fun; she could be kind and reasonable. Phoebe believed that when you had faith in a person, he or she responded by rising up to meet that faith. Okay, fine: Delilah would test out that theory. She would have faith that Andrea was a reasonable woman who would see that Chloe and Finn should spend the summer here. If Andrea wanted them in September, so be it.

“Just for the summer,” Delilah said. “I have the boys at home all day anyway. Finn is in the same camps, the kids are on the same schedule. They’re best friends. I have all the toys, all the books, all the games, inside and out. We have the empty guest room, or they can do air mattresses and sleeping bags on the floor of the boys’ room. Like summer camp. It will be fun.”

“They need to be with family,” Andrea said.

“But you and Ed don’t need two seven-year-olds underfoot all summer. You were just starting to enjoy yourself.”

“It’s safe to say that enjoying myself is a thing of the past,” Andrea said. Her nose reddened and started to run. “It’s over.”

“Let me take them for the summer,” Delilah said. “You’ll see them all the time. Whenever you’re here and any other time you want. Then, at the end of August, we can transition them to your house.”

“One transition and then another?” Andrea said. “It will be too difficult for them. Think of the kids.”

“I am thinking of the kids.”

“You’re thinking of yourself. You want to be the one who swings in on a vine and saves the day by taking in the orphans.”

Delilah’s faith was gone; she was back to anger. “I don’t think of it like that at all. I was thinking of the kids, what would be the most fun for them…”

“Fun?” Andrea said.

“Yes, fun. There’s nothing wrong with fun. They’re
seven,
Andrea.”

“They need to be with family.”

It was time for her big gun. Her sure thing. But first she looked around. Jeffrey and the Chief were out on the deck. Delilah had forgotten about the Chief’s sandwich. She panicked for a second, the panic of a waitress who’d neglected to put in an order. Well, she would get to it in a second. Then she checked on Phoebe and Addison. Phoebe was asleep, stretched out on the sofa—Delilah watched for a second to make sure she was breathing—and Addison was slumped in the club chair, still muttering into his chest like a homeless person on the street.

Delilah said, “Why don’t we ask the kids? See if they’d rather stay with us or with you?”
Ba-boom.
She could almost hear the gun’s report, smell the bitter smoke.

But Andrea did not surrender. She said, “Why don’t we ask ourselves what Tess would have wanted? Would she have wanted the kids to spend even
one night
here?”

Delilah laughed. “Ha!” And busied herself with making the Chief’s sandwich. She was stunned silly by Andrea’s counterattack. Delilah had left herself open for this. Tess did
not
like the kids to spend the night at Delilah’s house. She had always been funny-strange about letting Delilah take the kids at all. Delilah knew that Tess believed the kids ate too much junk at this house (if you called freshly popped popcorn topped with freshly grated Parmesan cheese junk), they played too much Play-Station (though there was a house rule of one hour at a time, two hours if it was inclement weather), they didn’t get enough sleep (at home Chloe and Finn were in bed at six-thirty, a fact Delilah found unfathomable). Tess basically let it be known, without actually saying it, that she did not approve of Delilah’s parenting or the way Delilah ran her household. It was too free-form for Tess; there was too much left to chance. Tess had been extremely vigilant in the parenting department. Delilah had once watched her clean the inside of the twins’ ears with a Q-tip soaked in rubbing alcohol. Tess did not allow the twins to eat food from the school cafeteria. She did not allow PG movies.

But Delilah’s supervision had been okay with Tess—it had been a
complete lifesaver
—whenever Tess was in a jam. When she and Greg had in-service days at school and no one to baby-sit, who did Tess call? Did she call Andrea? No! She called Delilah. Who had Tess called when she and Greg had wanted to go on an anniversary sail, with a possible overnight on the Vineyard? She had called Delilah. Delilah rued her decision to allow Andrea and the Chief to take Chloe and Finn out of here that first night. She should have held on; possession was nine tenths of ownership.

Delilah said, “Let me take them for the summer. Please, Andrea? I’m not interested in a custody battle. I just think—”

Andrea said, “What about your work?”

Delilah smoothed mayonnaise over the Chief’s bread in careful stages, as if she were painting a wall. “What
about
my work?”

“You plan to work four nights a week, work
late,
and then come home and take care of four kids all day?”

Delilah laid down slices of Black Forest ham, Genoa salami, Lorraine Swiss, hothouse tomato and baby mache from the farm, roasted red peppers, a few thinly sliced marinated artichokes. Perfection between two slices of country loaf. Okay, so now Andrea was going to attack Delilah’s job. Why not? Delilah’s job was as embattled as the Gaza Strip. Jeffrey resented it, he thought it was beneath her, he thought it was shabby. Delilah was little more than a glorified hostess in his eyes, her job was nothing more than a flimsy ploy devised to escape the kids and get free drinks at the end of the night. Delilah had stated her case again and again: She had been the dining room manager at the Scarlet Begonia for six years. She held the number-four position, behind Thom and Faith, the owners, and Donaldo, the general manager. She headed the waitstaff, she squared the bills, she tipped out Graham, the bartender, and the Salvadoran busboys. She made the deposit at the bank in the morning. She helped Donaldo sift through ninety or so applications when the college kids arrived in May, and she helped him fire anyone who didn’t work out. The Scarlet Begonia was a vibrant year-round business, it made buckets of money, and Delilah was a crucial part of the team.