“Thanks to Sam.” She smiles. “I’m reading for two plays when I get back from Portugal.”
“You’rereading?Gertie Sanger is auditioning?”
She shrugs. “I told my agent I want to audition, to make sure whatever I take on is the right next step. You know we all get to a point where we could stop working. You’ve been there for yearsand years now. But we want to keep going anyway. I want to pick exactly the right project. So I’m taking my time, and auditioning, and really checking out who and what is involved in anything I’m considering.”
“What are the plays?”
“One is a new one by Tracy Letts at Second Stage. I haven’t read it yet. One is a Broadway revival ofThe Cherry Orchard.”
“Ah,” he says. “Good old Chekhov. Madame Ranevskaya?”
“Yes.”
He nods slowly. “I can see it. I vote for the Chekhov.” (Sam, he thinks, would make a perfect Anya. He wonders what kind of strings he’d have to pull to get her considered for that. Probably the strings he’d have to pull hardest, come to think of it, would be with Sam herself.) “Nothing against Letts, but I loveThe Cherry Orchard. And I’m always up for a revival.”
“I know you are.” She smiles, a wide, open, guileless smile, and this time it doesn’t look like she’s holding anything back. This time it looks like it’s all there in front of him, every piece of her, vulnerable and exposed, like a dog offering its tender belly to the world. “I am too,” she says. “I really am always up for a revival.” She leans over and kisses him on the cheek, and he understands from the way her lips do not linger that this is where they will stop. They’ll see each other, of course. Their circles will always overlap. But here, in a bedroom in a borrowed house: here’s where their story ends.
“I think we should toast to new beginnings,” she says. “Stay right here.” She leaves the bedroom, and when she returns she’s carrying the Rhum Clément 1952 and two glasses.
“Are we going toopen this?” asks Timothy.
“We can’t fly with it! We’ll have a little taste now, just a tiny one, and we’ll finish the rest when the show’s run is over. We’ll share it only with our favorite people. Sam can have a little.”
“I suppose Amy can have asmallglass,” concedes Timothy. He’s kidding, of course. Amy can have as much as she wants.
Gertie opens the bottle and pours them each a tiny bit. “Cheers,” she says.
“‘I do love nothing in the world so well as you: Is not that strange?’” he says. Benedick’s line. He clinks his glass lightly against Gertie’s. She clinks back.
“‘As strange as the thing I know not,’” she says. Beatrice’s.
Sam
The plan is that Alexa will drive Sam, Gertie, and Timothy, along with their luggage, to the ferry in Floyd’s Wagoneer, then drive the car back, lock up the house, and take an Uber to the ferry herself. Sam knows she should have told them the night before, when they formulated the plan, to save Alexa the extra trip. But she couldn’t bring herself to, not yet.
“Why don’t we all just take an Uber?” she suggests now, on departure day, when Alexa arrives at the house after checking out of her room at the Hotel Manisses. “Then Alexa doesn’t have to backtrack.”
“The only Ubers I’ve found on this island are sedans,” says Gertie. “I couldn’t fit a third of my luggage in a sedan.”
“I don’t mind,” says Alexa. “This is literally what I get paid for. Assisting.”
“You’re notmyassistant,” says Sam.
“True,” says Alexa. “But I think you’re grandfathered in.”
“Wouldn’t I be uncledin?” Sam asks before going into her bedroom and shutting the door. Humor can be an excellent tool for deflection. What she’s deflecting from is the fact that her suitcase isn’t packed, her bed isn’t stripped, her sheets aren’t piled up in the laundry room to make things easier for the housecleaner. In fact, Sam is going to clean the house herself, top to bottom,soup to nuts, head to tail. That’s the arrangement she worked out with Floyd Barringer, in exchange for staying in the house through Labor Day. Riley’s mom, Holly, helped her find an off-season rental that begins the Tuesday after the holiday, an adorable two-bedroom condo on Ocean Ave, in the same building as The Cracked Mug. When next summer comes Sam will have to find somewhere else to live, or she’ll have to absorb a dramatic increase in rent, as the condo rents weekly in the season. But for this time of year, for this time in her life, it’s perfect. When Holly first showed it to her, and when Sam peeked in the tiny second bedroom, she found it decorated nautically, with a navy-blue bedspread, brass knobs on the dresser, and a blue-and-gold decorative pillow withseas the dayembroidered in fancy script.
“I’ll take it,” she told Holly. “I’m ready to seas all of the days.”
“Chop chop!” hollers Uncle Timmy now, in his loud director voice. He’s in the kitchen, but Sam can hear him all the way downstairs, in the bedroom. “Gertie? You ready? Sam? Let’s goooooo. Let’s pack up the car. I don’t want to miss that ferry.”
Sam cannot, after all, stand the suspense of having a secret nobody else knows. When she hears Gertie making a commotion by the front door, readying her luggage, she emerges from her bedroom and announces, “I’m not going.”
“What?” Gertie turns around, her eyes inscrutable behind big dark glasses, her hair suitably glamorous. “I’m sorry, what’d you say, Sammy?”
“I’m not going,” says Sam. “I’m staying here.”
Timothy, returning from bringing a load to the car, fills the doorway. He’s squinting from the sun, and lines are radiating from the corners of his eyes. “What do you mean? In Floyd’s house?”
