“And what’s it been that fucked with you this evening, Mr. Squire?” Brigid said.
Lance laughed again. “Mrs. Squire.” He took another long drink.
“I expect that’s as it’s meant to be,” Brigid said.
“Hmm.” Lance snorted. “Yeah, guess so.”
The seagull knocked the chip to the porch, hopped down behind it. Peck peck peck.
“Ever been married, beautiful?” he asked suddenly.
She laughed at that. “I’m just nineteen.”
Unfazed, he said, “So was I.”
“Nineteen? When you were married?”
He nodded. “Lorna was seventeen . . . prettiest girl you ever saw.”
“Is she still, then?” Brigid asked.
“Sure,” he said. “Lorna,” he said, as if introducing them.
“I haven’t had the pleasure,” she told him.
He wrinkled his brow. “You’re kind of a bitchy little thing, aren’t you?”
“What?” she said. “Why? What’ve I done?”
“What, me? Who, me?”
“And I’d begun to think you weren’t such a bollix as they’ve made you out to be.”
“What the fuck’s that?”
“Bollix? An arsehole,” she said.
“Well, you’d be wrong about that,” he told her.
“I suppose I would, wouldn’t I?” She drank the rest of her whiskey down and reached for the bottle.
“Should I fuck him up a little for you? Your college boy? He’s the one you’re pissed at? Should I fuck him around some for you?” Lance offered.
“No,” she said. “Grand of you to offer, all the same.”
“No problem.” There was another pause. “You like it when they treat you wrong?” he asked.
Brigid let out a soft snort. “I bloody must, mustn’t I?”
Some quiet, sipping.
“What’s happened between you and your wife?” she asked.
“Oh, married woes,” he said, as though she wouldn’t understand.
“I see: you’ll ask the questions, but you won’t stoop to answer them then, will you?”
Lance was flustered, suddenly afraid she might get up and leave. “No no no no no,” he said. “No, you got me wrong.”
“Oh I do, do I?”
“What do you want to know? I’ll tell you. You tell me what you want to know.” He waited. “Come on, you ask me. Anything you want to know.”
Brigid considered. “Do you cheat on your wife, Mr. Squire?”
Lance paused before answering. “I do not,” he told her.
“Hmm,” she said.
“What’s that mean?”
“That’s the truth, is it?”
“Do I look like I’m lying?”
She fixed her stare on him. “You always rather look as though you’re lying.”
“Nothing new,” he said, dejected. “You’re nothing new, sweetheart. That’s nothing, nothing, nothing new to me in the world.”
“Hmm,” Brigid said again. “Why’s that?”
“Why’s what?”
“Why’s it you always look as though you’re lying?”
“Couldn’t tell you.” He pouted out his lower lip and shook his head slowly.
“Couldn’t or wouldn’t?” she asked, but all he did was laugh.
“You wouldn’t believe I was telling the truth anyway, would you?”
Now she laughed. “You claim you’ll not cheat on your wife,” she repeated, a detective taking inventory of the facts. “Yet you look on me as though you surely would . . .” It was not something she’d have said sober, and she knew it. Her ego was talking, nursing bruises.
Lance laughed uncomfortably. “Just wishing . . .”
“Wishing, are you?”
“Wishing,” he said, “wishing things were different . . . that everything was different . . .” he trailed off, then snapped back to attention. “You’re a nice girl,” he told her. “You’re a real nice girl.”
“I’m not all that nice of a girl,” she corrected him.
“Oh, you’re a nice girl . . . You don’t even know how nice of a girl you are.”
“If you’d be so kind as to tell that to the fucking college boy . . .”
He raised his glass. “To the fucking college boy.”
“To fucking the college boy, cheers,” she said, and he laughed, and they clinked and drank.
A car came up the beach road, its headlights cutting the night between water and Lodge. It slowed and turned into the Lodge’s driveway. Headlights disappeared, doors slammed. Brigid and Lance looked to the stairs. Peg was herding the kids, who stumbled before her as if they’d been awoken from sleep. When Peg looked up and saw Brigid, she started. Then her gaze fell to Lance and she froze, disapproval washing across her face. “Hel—hello.”
Lance’s eyes went to Squee, nearly asleep on his feet, and everything about Lance changed. The fuddled man drinking with Brigid on the porch receded, his confusion replaced by anger. He addressed his son. “Where the hell do you think you’ve been?”
Peg’s jaw set firmly. “We’ve taken the children for an ice cream,” she said, a thousand curses held under her tongue, which she’d never speak aloud. Even to Lance Squire.
“Your mother’s probably worried sick,” Lance accused Squee. He didn’t so much as acknowledge Peg’s presence. Jeremy stood by ineffectually. Lance said to Squee: “You didn’t even think about telling your mother where you were at, now, did you?”
“My mom said it was OK,” said Mia, who was standing beside Squee looking spooked, as if she’d had a bad dream and couldn’t shake the fear.
Lance fixed his stare on the little girl. “Did I ask what your mother said?”
No tears came to Mia’s eyes just then, though they were surely only delayed by shock.
“You get home,” Lance told Squee. “Now.”
No one moved. Then Peg spoke, finding her voice before the rest of them. It seemed likely that Jeremy might never speak again. Peg looked to her dumbstruck beau, her tone leveled by fury. “Take Mia to her mother, won’t you?” she said. “I’ll walk Squee up the hill.” And she turned without waiting for Jeremy’s response, touched Mia’s shoulder by way of good night, pivoted Squee around with her other hand, and led him away from the porch without another word.
There was no one in the cabin when Squee got there. He looked out the window and watched Peg walk away toward the staff house. Then he went to his room, prying off his sneakers and stepping out of them as he walked. They made a little trail to his bedroom door, which he closed firmly and locked. In his clothes, which were dirty and sweaty from a day of work outside, his hands and chin sticky with Chocolate Chocolate Chip, Squee climbed into his unmade bed, pulled the covers over him, and shut his eyes so hard against tears that he succeeded in stopping them from coming at all.
Six
AS FODDER BLAZES STORED ABOVE THE BYRE
On November 18, 1926, a fire swept through the massive Osprey Lodge and burned the three-hundred-room hotel to the ground. No one was injured, as the Lodge was closed for the season. Reconstruction began optimistically in 1928, but was halted by the stock market crash of 1929. A skeleton of the new hotel stood in half-erected ruin until the great hurricane of ’38 wiped it off the map entirely.
—FRANK PERCIVAL, A History of Osprey Island
IN 1939, WHEN BUDDY CHIZEK was eleven years old, his father, a tightfisted yet entrepreneurial Texan, happened upon Osprey in the course of some business dealings and saw right away the opportunity to be had. He bought up the site of the old Lodge, the waterfront, beach, and hillside, and built a hundred-room hotel, more modest than its predecessors. Just up the hill, by the tennis courts and swimming pool, Charles Chizek commissioned the construction of a fleet of family cabins, nestled among the oaks and pines. The Depression was over, and he foresaw an America of renewed hope, familial dedication, and newfound appreciation for the simpler things in life: badminton with the children, five o’clock cocktails on the terrace, morning coffee percolating in your very own kitchenette.