“The island,” says Gertie. “And then the world.” She pauses. “So you’ll ask? You’ll definitely ask Amy?”
“I’ll ask. But it’s not going to be easy,” he warns. “Not with Sam living here.”
“What?” Gertie does an actor-y version of delighted surprise, a palm to each cheek. “Sam’sliving here? Here in this house? I thought she was in New York, doing that TikTok thing! I’ve watched some of her videos! She’s delightful. They had this dog in the house, Murphy, and they used to do this thing where Murphy, well, everyone called him Murph, but anyway, whereMurph—”
Timothy cuts off the rest of the sentence; he doesn’t want to hear it. “Yeah. TikTok didn’t work out, I guess.” Timothy can feelhis face pull into a sour position with the wordTikTok. Sam was such a talented young actress. His work inTo Kill a Mockingbirdwith Sam playing Scout to his Atticus is still the performance he’s most proud of in his career. Not because of the Tony! (But that didn’t hurt.) If Amy had let her stick it out afterMy Three Daughterswas canceled, he knows Sam would have made it. Really made it. Instead she spends her time crafting silly videos of who knows what, a dog named Murphy apparently, nicknameMurph, or puckering at the camera, talking about herclothesor hernailsor hernightclubbing activities.Not using even an ounce of her God-given talent.
“Why didn’t it work out?” asks Gertie, with real interest. Gertie and Sam had become quite close during Sam’s year in California. Gertie managed to occupy a space somewhere between de facto mother and very cool aunt. After the Disney show got canceled, Sam had cried on Gertie’s shoulder, and Gertie had smoothed Sam’s hair off her face and told her all of her own terrible rejection stories, like the time she lost the lead inLegally Blondeto Reese Witherspoon. She’d had callback after callback after callback, all for naught. “Hollywood can suck your soul one day and nourish it the next,” Gertie had told Sam.
Thatprobably pissed Amy off too, that Gertie had known how to comfort Sam in exactly the right way, and Amy hadn’t. (So many things pissed Amy off, especially when their mother, Rose, was sick.) Timothy knows that when he and Gertie divorced, Gertie was nearly as sad to have Sam out of her life as she was to have Timothy gone. Probably a bit sadder, if he’s being honest with himself.
“I don’t know what happened. She didn’t say, she just said she’d decided to come back home, she needed a break, but then home felt sort of suffocating after just two weeks—”
“Shocker,” says Gertie. “Nobody wants to live with their parents at that age!” She pinches the bridge of her nose between herfingers and says, “Well, maybe it would make Amy feel closer to Sam if—”
Gertie’s cell rings, and as she answers it she mouthsSorryto Timothy and walks back into the house. Timothy follows her down the stairs to the bedroom level. “Hi, Holly. Yes. No, I get it. I do. It’s not your fault—sure, sure. I understand. Okay. Yes. Please do. I’ll let my manager know. No, you don’t need to call her. I’ll take care of it. My assistant is on vacation... yup, sure. I appreciate that.” She hangs up and fixes Timothy with her megawatt smile. “That was Holly the Realtor. My first local contact! She was like, ‘I can’t believe I’m talking to Gertie Sanger!’”
“She said that?”
“Well, no,” admits Gertie. “But she might have thought it. Do you think you know her? Holly the Realtor?”
“No, I don’t know Holly the Realtor, Gertie. I lived here hundreds of years ago. There are many, many people I don’t know on Block Island.”
“They all knowyouthough!”
“Maybe,” he says modestly. Probably, he thinks.
“Would you mind bringing my suitcase in, sweetheart? It’s just out on the front steps. It didn’t quite make it in.” She’s now opening the doors to the bedrooms one by one. “Which one are you sleeping in? Oh, wait, I can tell of course. This is the primary. En suite bathroom. You still haven’t learned how to make your bed, have you?”
Suitcase? Timothy thinks.
“I went to see this woman Holly this morning about my housing because Blake said the production was going through a local Realtor,” explains Gertie. “Blake said I was all set. But Holly didn’t have a house for me! Some sort of oversight. Like I said, Blake isn’t really a details guy. She was going to make some more calls while I came over here. Unfortunately, none of her calls panned out.Apparently everything on this island books up by November, if not before. There are literallyno available houses.”
“So what are you going to do?” asks Timothy. He knows, of course, what Gertie is going to do. He heard it in the wordsuitcase.
“That woman, Holly, was very sweet. She asked me if I’d consider sharing a house with another cast member, if something came through. I had to tell her no. I mean, I’m not going toshare a house.”She smiles again. “Unless it’s with you, of course, Timothy.”
There it is, thinks Timothy. He supposes this is as close to a polite request as he’s going to get. He has a sudden memory of Gertie’s beautiful face, swollen from crying, outraged and bewildered, the day she moved out for good.You’re the very worst person in the world, Timothy, she’d said.Because when you break someone’s heart you do it so gently. I wish you’d straight up be an asshole about it, like every other man.
“And Sam,” he reminds her now.
“And Sam!” Gertie cries. “Of course. Which room do you think Sam will want? Do you think she’ll mind the two twins?Ican’t sleep in a twin, that’s for sure. You know how I whip myself into a frenzy in the night. I’d fall right off.”
“I remember.” Oh, how he remembers! His heart hurts with the remembering.
Gertie opens the door to the next bedroom. “Ooooh, wait, nobody has to sleep in a twin, this one’s also got a queen. So that’s three queens, the twins, your king. Look, Timothy, with the windows way up high that look like portholes? It’s just like being on a ship! Remember that cruise we took through the Greek Isles on Scorsese’s yacht? And there was that awful storm...?”
Yes, Timothy remembers the Greek Isles; he remembers Scorsese’s yacht; he remembers the storm; he remembers (there is a heat that rises to his face now, thinking about it) how he and Gertie, absolutely smashed on excellent Metaxa, whiled away the hours of the storm in their stateroom.
“Did you get a chance to grab that suitcase?”
“Getting it now.” Timothy opens the front door. Suitcase, it could be noted, is an inadequate, almost quaint word for this thing, which looks more like a steamer trunk from the first-class cabins of theTitanic—heavy, and fit for a long, long ocean voyage. As he lifts the top part of the suitcase (thank goodness, the thing has wheels on the bottom), he can feel himself giving in: to Gertie’s needs, to her charms, to her feigned helplessness, perfected from two solid decades of bending the world to her whims. Trying to hold your ground against Gertie, he knows, is like a piece of tissue paper trying to hold its ground against a wall of water. He delivers the case to her bedroom—already it’s her bedroom!—and she sits on the edge of the bed, bouncing once or twice, half excited little kid, half sober furniture tester.
“Ohhh, I can’twaitto see Sammy. We’re going to have so much fun together! It’s been so long, for all of us. We’re going to be like a small dysfunctional family on an extended vacation. Is she old enough to drink yet?”
“Not legally,” says Timothy. “But I can’t remember the last time that stopped a nineteen-year-old.”
“Right!” says Gertie. “Didn’t stopmeat nineteen. At nineteen I was in my second year at Juilliard, going to that bar on Seventy-second... what was that bar called? I can’t remember. There was always ice in the bathroom sinks for some reason. First place I ever drank tequila. When will Sammy be here?”
