I didn’t know what that meant, but I didn’t like the way he said it—like he had access to inside information, like he knew her so much better than I ever could. And all of that was probably true, I reminded myself: After all, Doc belonged here, had grown up spending summers on this jagged shoreline same as the rest of them. I could only ever hope to be a guest.
“Whatever you say, man,” I told him finally, hobbling up the front steps of August House with as much dignity as I could muster. “I’ll see you around.”
“Yeah, Linden,” Doc said. “You will.”
Back inside the house, I limped into the empty kitchen, digging a bag of peas out of the freezer and slapping them onto my ankle. I was still staring sulkily out the window twenty minutes later when Birdie let herself in through the sliding door, a couple of canvas grocery totes slung over her sturdy shoulders.
“Good lord, Linden,” she said, eyes wide across the kitchen island, “you scared me.” Then, before I could apologize, she motioned to my leg. “War wound?” she asked.
I sighed, easing the peas off my red, chilly ankle. “Something like that.”
Birdie nodded, setting the bags down on the marble countertop and heading toward the coffeemaker—then looking back at me, eyebrows lifted, when she realized I’d already made a pot.
“I helped myself,” I admitted, raising my mug in her direction. The coffee cups at August House were the wide, brightly colored enamel kind, all of them monogrammed with a blocky uppercaseKand a little bespoke doodle of the house itself. “I hope that’s okay.”
Something approaching a smile crossed Birdie’s no-nonsense face. “I like self-sufficiency in a young person,” she said. “Or an old person, for that matter.”
“That’s what my mom always says,” I told her before I could think better of it, easing myself up off the stool and staggering across the kitchen to help her unload the groceries. “She’s the housekeeper for a family back in Cambridge.”
I watched the surprise flicker over Birdie’s face in the moment before she turned to set a jug of organic milk in the fridge. “Is thatso?”
“Uh.” I cleared my throat, immediately filled with deep and scalding regret at my own disclosure and wishing for the millionth time that I knew how to quiet the constant low-grade hum of shame around who I was and where I came from. “Yup.” I thought of my mom, who’d spent the last seventeen years cobbling together an income so I could pay for shit like cleats and uniforms and whose own life would have had a significantly different trajectory had I not come along in the first place:Small behavior,I reminded myself grimly, and plunked a bunch of bananas into a giant bowl on the counter.
Thankfully, Birdie didn’t seem to have any interest in unpacking my various childhood neuroses. “So, Linden,” she said, setting a wide cast-iron skillet on the stove and reaching for an onion; Iwatched as she chopped it and a red bell pepper into tiny, uniform pieces, her movements practiced and precise. “Is this your first time on the Vineyard?”
“Pretty much,” I said, deciding to spare her the story of my mom’s doomed ex-boyfriend. I pulled the last few groceries from the bags, then hung the empties on the hook in the pantry.
“Are you liking it so far?”
“I am.” I sat back down at the island. “I mean, I guess it’s been a little intense—with everything that happened the other night, you know?”
Birdie tossed the vegetables into the pan with some butter. “I do know.” She added a generous amount of salt and pepper, then plucked a bowl from the cupboard and opened a carton of giant brown eggs. “It’s a terrible thing,” she allowed.
I hadn’t actually been fishing for intel—Well, why the heck not?I could hear Holiday ask—but something about the tone of Birdie’s voice caught my attention. All at once I remembered something my mom had told me once, about nobody knowing a family’s secrets quite like their housekeeper. “The night of the party,” I began, trying to sound as offhanded as humanly possible. “I mean, I’m assuming you know we had a party.”
Birdie finished whisking the eggs and poured them into the skillet with a noisy sizzle, then turned to look at me with a gimlet eye. “I might have guessed at something like that, yes.”
“Might have guessed something like what?” asked a deep voice behind me. I whirled around, heart pounding, as Wells shuffled sleepily into the kitchen.
So much for trying to get the inside scoop in secret. “That Iwas the one who finished all the Cookie Crisp,” I replied quickly. “I was just apologizing to Birdie for eating all your food.”
“Yeah, you’re a fuckin’ freeloader,” Wells agreed, reaching up and scratching one bare, tan shoulder. I couldn’t tell if he was kidding or not, but his words stung. It was something I was perpetually conscious of back at school: the casual way Jasper threw down a credit card for the entire table whenever we went to dinner off-campus, and how I could never quite afford to do the same.
I didn’t answer, watching as Wells opened the fridge and poured himself a glass of orange juice. He drank the whole thing in one long gulp, the muscles in his throat moving in a way that reminded me of a snake eating a field mouse. He set the glass down on the counter, then strolled out of the kitchen in the direction of the patio. “Birdie,” he called over his shoulder, “make some bacon too, will you?” He winked at her, obnoxious. “And can you do it the way I like it this time?”
I was quiet for a moment once he was gone, watching as Birdie slid the frittata into the oven and set a timer. Then I got up and put my mug in the dishwasher, doubling back at the last second and sticking Wells’s glass in there too.
Birdie caught me doing it, nodding at the gesture. “Thank you,” she said softly.
“No problem,” I told her, then: “Howdoeshe like his bacon, exactly?” I couldn’t help but ask. “Like, with fourteen-karat gold dust sprinkled on it, or…?”
Birdie pressed her lips together, but it didn’t quite tamp down her smile. “This might be hard to believe,” she told me conspiratorially, “but he’s not even the worst one.”
I grinned back at her, torn between vague queasiness at the fact that I had used a combination of my mom’s job and basic manners to nation-build with the Kendricks’ housekeeper and satisfaction that, apparently, it had worked. “Who’s the worst one?” I asked, wanting to know and not wanting to in equal amounts.
“Now,thatI’ll never tell.” Birdie opened the refrigerator and pulled out a package of bacon, plucked a pair of scissors from a drawer. “One thing I will say for Wells,” she continued, arranging the strips in neat rows on a couple of sheet pans, “is that he’s been coming and going so much this summer I’ve barely seen him. I don’t know what that boy is doing sneaking out at all hours, but I certainly don’t mind one less bed to make in the morning.”
I whirled around to stare at her so fast I whacked my ankle on the corner of the island. “Um, what about the other night?” I asked, too busy trying not to swear at the fresh pain squealing up my shin to be particularly casual about the question. “The night of the party, I mean. Did you wind up making his bed the morning after that?”
Birdie looked at me a little oddly, but in the end she just shook her head. “No,” she said slowly, “I guess I didn’t.” Her eyes narrowed then, like possibly I wasn’t the only one who suddenly regretted their own candor in this conversation. “Why do you ask?”
Eliza’s footsteps echoed down the stairs before I could come up with an answer; pretty soon the rest of the Kendricks had trickled in behind her, the kitchen filling with the clinking of coffee cups and the clang of Keb’ Mo’ on the Sonos. I joked around with Jasper and smiled at Eliza over a bowl of freshly sliced fruit, but all the while my mind was reeling: if Birdie was telling the truth—and there was no reason to think she wasn’t—Wells hadn’t slept in his bed the night of Greg’s accident.
Which, of course, begged the obvious question: Where the fuck had he been?
The timer went off on the oven a few minutes later, and I was following the Kendricks out onto the patio to eat when Birdie laid one firm hand on my arm. “Linden,” she said quietly, tugging me backward and away from the others. “Before you go.”
My breath caught. For a moment I was sure she was about to tell me something else about Wells, or backpedal entirely and say she’d made a mistake, or warn me to be careful, but instead she just turned back to the freezer and dug out a bright blue ice pack.
“Next time,” she said, handing it over before plucking the bag of now-melted veg off the counter and tossing it back into the drawer, “don’t use my peas.”
