Everyone wanted tokayakthe inlet, but Caroline needed a little alone time, so she spread a towel out on the dock and read her book, Palmer Preston’sTarbox.Preston had worked forThe New Yorkerbefore he moved to Greenhead in the 1960s with the idea that the salt air would help his psoriasis. He and his wife bought a house on High Street, the Polly Dole House, and from there created the masterworks that would win him every literary prize in America. As Caroline read, a black baseball cap shielding her face, she found herself fantasizing about the interviews she might give when her own first book came out. “Palmer Preston has always been a huge inspiration for me, and it was such an honor to receive his Greenhead fellowship, to breathe the same air he did.”
In the afternoon,Colin and RJ emerged from the cabin with stories about a dive bar with a live band, a white-bearded man everyone called Santa, and their unfortunate decision to eat some of the red pickled eggs the bar sold for a dollar.
“Babe, I don’t think it’s the eggs making you feel so rough,” teased Fran. “I think it’s the twenty beers.”
“But I had to drink the beers to kill the E. coli from the eggs!” RJ protested, and Colin looked sort of green.
Caroline and Van played croquet with Eben and Max, they made grilled cheese with tomato and avocado, and then they all took a walk along the shoreline, winding down the cliffs and across some distant relative’s property to a rocky beach where they swam out to a diving platform and sunned themselves like seals.
That night theygrilledchicken and corn on the cob wrapped in tin foil. Everyone had strong opinions on how corn was best cooked; boiled, steamed, or grilled in the husks. One of the real perils of New England in the summer, Caroline was learning, was the risk of dying of annoyance over how often people talked about corn. After dinner the others stayed up to play poker, but Caroline retreated to bed with her laptop to write. She slept deeply, the sounds of the porch less ominous than they had been the first night, and when she woke the sun was up and she could hear people moving around the cabin.
As she padded barefoot down the hall toward the kitchen, she saw something on the floor and yelped in surprise, “Oh, gross.”
RJ came out of his room and looked at the mess on the floor. “Lady had an accident.” He went to the kitchen, grabbed a paper towel, and scooped it up, dropping it in the toilet and flushing.
“Are you supposed to flush paper towels?” Caroline asked doubtfully.
“Strong Maine pipes,” RJ said, and shrugged.
He was wrong.The toilet was irrevocably clogged, and the more Van tinkered with it, removing the top and attacking it with a rubberplunger, the closer it came to overflowing. He finally turned off the water and called a plumber.
“Bad news,” he reported. “He can’t come until tomorrow, so it looks like we’re peeing in the woods until then.” He turned to the girls apologetically. “I can take you over to one of the other houses and we can ask to use their bathroom if any of you’d like?”
It was gallant, but Caroline was not being introduced to a potential future relative like that. She borrowed Van’s keys and drove to the coffee shop in town. In exchange for their facilities, Caroline bought fancy coffees for everyone in the house, teetering back to Van’s Subaru with two cardboard trays balanced in her hands. The Subaru was a little harder to drive than Caroline’s own car, and she gripped the steering wheel as though traversing flooded streets or heavy rain. She made it back to the house fine, but when she went to park along the edge of the driveway, she saw that someone had left the trunk of an SUV open and a kayak was sticking out the back. She nosed the car carefully behind it, but quickly realized the rear of her car was sticking out too far to let anyone pass. She reversed into the road and tried again, pulling up next to the SUV and attempting to parallel park. As she crept carefully backward, she heard Lady barking, running out the front door. Caroline meant to stomp the brake, but instead hit the gas and launched the car back with a terrible thump and a squeak. Had she killed Lady? Her heart was in her throat. But then she saw Lady zipping out into the lawn, barking her head off. Thank God. She had struck a tree.
The whole thing was deeply humiliating. The entire group came out to see what Caroline had done, Van climbing in the driver’s seat to move the car forward off the tree, Eben inspecting the ugly scratch on the car, and Van’s grandmother—having materialized to bring them fresh towels—running her hand along the trunk of the tree, shakingher head with visible distress. The tree was, apparently, fifty years old, and even though it looked no different or more special than any of the other dozen trees along the driveway, a treasured part of the property. It wouldn’t die, but it was, as Van’s grandmother kept repeating, “permanently disfigured.”
After an appropriatemourning time,Eben convinced everyone to go on a sail. The boat couldn’t fit nine, so Caroline and Van volunteered to stay back. Van wanted to make a chicken-wire compost bin for the garden and Caroline agreed to help. After the disastrous morning it felt like a kind of penance, like the time her mother had caught her smoking and had her spend an entire morning picking litter in the park.
“I’m so sorry about your car,” Caroline apologized again as they worked. Van had given Caroline thick gloves to hold the mesh in place while he used his fingers to carefully tie the wire to wooden posts. It was hot and she wanted to pull her hair into a ponytail but couldn’t with the gloves. “You take such good care of it and then I go and crash into a tree.”
“It’s a dent. They can hammer it out in an hour.” Van shrugged like it was really no big deal and somehow his kindness made her feel even worse.
“I bet Bailey never dented your car,” she said quietly.
“What does Bailey have to do with this?”
“I don’t know.” Tears sprang unexpectedly to her eyes. “I’m sure it’s in my head, but I just feel like everyone has been comparing us all weekend. Talking about her pregnancy and who the dog likes better.”
“Hey.” Van stopped working and put his arms around her. Carolineflapped her big gloved hands against her sides helplessly. “Nobody cares who Lady likes better. What matters is who I like.”
“I know.” Caroline felt like an idiot. “It’s just that I am bad at paddleboarding. At all sports, really. And your grandmother hates me. And Bailey’s so beautiful. And you have so much shared history. She knows things about you that I don’t. It’s weird.”
“Caroline.” He ducked his head and looked Caroline in the eyes. “Bailey is great, I’m so glad she’s my friend, but it’s not romantic between us. Honestly, she’s really funny, but half the time we’re together we’re just bullshitting, having these nonsense conversations about, like, who from high school is getting divorced, or the difference between Delta-8 gummies and Delta-9. It’s not a deep connection.”
“Okay.” Caroline pushed her hair up off her sweaty neck. “Remember, I don’t want to be in the middle.”
“There is no middle. It’s you and me.” Van looked at her seriously and Caroline leaned in to kiss him. She believed him. On some level Caroline could tell that Van and Bailey were different creatures. Bailey was a leopard, beautiful and cunning and glamorous, while Van was a Border collie, the smartest, most loyal dog, the kind who was happiest when he got a lot of exercise and was assigned tasks.
“But whatisthe difference between Delta-8 and Delta-9?” Caroline joked.
“I’m glad you asked.” Van grinned. “So, it’s mainly about where they bind on the carbon atom chain…”
Did you survive the ritual new-girlfriend hazing by his friends?asked Nina
Yeah, it was chill
Did they make you do fraternity stuff like chug a beer and wear a blindfold?
