“Later today. She’s going to text me when she gets on the ferry.”
“Perfect!” Gertie is off the bed now, kneeling beside her steamer trunk/suitcase. She rummages for a while, flinging pieces of clothing out and onto the floor, until she pulls out a sleek black box. “Speaking of drinking,” she says. She rests the box on the bed, as carefully as you’d rest a sleeping child, and opens it to reveal a slender clear bottle filled with amber liquid and woundround with thin cords that evoke a string bikini. “Look what I have!” she says. “It was a good luck gift from Blake.”
Timothy does a double take. “Rhum Clément 1952?” Nowaythere’s nothing between Blake and Gertie. That particular year, he knows, sells for over one thousand dollars a bottle. You wouldn’t give it to just anyone.
Not that he cares if there’s something between Blake and Gertie. He and Gertie haven’t been an item for years. He doesn’t care, right? Of course not.
He turns the bottle over with reverence, looking for the number. Each bottle of Clément 1952 is individually numbered. Timothy has tried this rum only once in his life, on a trip to Martinique with Gertie a decade ago. Dry, woody, hints of spice and fruit. Really exceptional.
“I think he was going with some sort of an island theme,” says Gertie.
“Martinique is in the Caribbean,” mutters Timothy. “We’re in New England.”
“And he’s getting into the rum business,” Gertie adds.
Timothy would like to meet this Blake, so he can take his measure. But Blake told Gertie that he won’t be coming to the island until opening night. Too busy, who knows with what. Probably playing with his money!
“Why’s this Holly person calling you about this?” asks Timothy. “Where’s Janelle?”
“Janelle is on her honeymoon,” says Gertie. “I promised myself I wouldn’t bother her. Where’syourassistant? Taylor, right?”
Timothy doesn’t want to admit how quickly he’s gone through assistants. “Taylor got a better offer.”
“Aw, come on. A better offer than working foryou?”
“Ha. Believe it or not, yes. Better offer than working with me. She wants to do stand-up so she got a job at a comedy club. They’ll let her go on twice a month but she has to bartend full-time to doit.” This isn’t exactly true. Taylor does want to do stand-up, but she left because she found Timothy’s “energy” to be “negative more often than it was positive” and she wanted a “warmer working environment.”
In his head, he suggested that she get a job stoking the fire in a pizza oven—will that be warm enough for you, Taylor? But only in his head. Out loud he wished her luck and bought her avery generousStarbucks gift card. She was constantly sucking some kind of caffeinated concoction through a reusable metal straw and reminding him to reduce his dependence on Amazon. Then he’d hired Alexa, who’d moved out from Massachusetts practically alone, only a previously estranged father to help her, and who brought in any delivery packages without a word of admonition, quietly breaking down the boxes for recycling.
Gertie looks longingly at the bottle of rum. “I’ll tuck this away, and we’ll bring it out on a special occasion! Maybe after opening night. If all goes well.” She chews her thumbnail and sits back down on the bed, looking up at Timothy. “Do you think all will go well?”
“Of course it will,” says Timothy. He shoves his doubts where nobody can see them, but he has to wonder: A big Hollywood star shows up without housing? What else is going to go wrong?
“Timothy. I really think you should call Amy sooner rather than later. I think you should lock it down.”
“I’ll call her tomorrow,” he finds himself saying. Gertie squeals. “But just to reiterate, she can’t find out the money is coming from me. Promise?”
“Ipromise,” says Gertie. “I double and triple promise.” Gertie claps her hands together in that childlike way she has; it’s a habit that has always made her seem much younger than her age, a habit both enduring and endearing. “Now that that’s settled—”
“I wouldn’t call itsettledyet. I still have to ask her.”
“I consider it settled. I have faith in you, and in Amy. So, nowthat that’s settled, what do you want to show me? What’s the next jewel in Floyd’s crown?”
In for a penny, thinks Timothy, in for at least ten pounds. “Well,” he says. “I guess you should see the stairs that lead down the cliff and to the beach.”
Gertie snaps her fingers suddenly, a little close for comfort to Timothy’s startled ears. “Malachy’s!That’sthe bar we used to go to at Juilliard.”
She wraps her arms around Timothy and squeezes him hard, and he tries not to breathe in her very particular scent, and he definitely tries not to smell her hair, and if anyone asks it wasn’t on purpose that both of those things happened.
Amy
On Monday Amy is sitting at her kitchen table, her laptop open in front of her, making her to-do list for the summer. Not so muchather feet asonher feet is Kona, one paw wrapped possessively around Amy’s ankle, snout between her insteps. Every now and then Kona sighs and shifts and rearranges his snout, which is warm and dry and surprisingly pleasant on the foot.
Amy’s Summer List:
Plant heirloom tomatoes (do not let them die this year)
Teach Kona how to roll over
