Demeter was nearly always drunk at work, but because Nell and Coop and Zeus had nothing to compare her behavior to, she seemed completely normal to them. The alcohol made Demeter work faster and with a smile. She put on her iPod and danced as she clipped back roses in Sconset; every day was a party. If she and Nell were working in close proximity, they would banter back and forth, and it didn’t take long for this banter to develop into real conversation. Soon Demeter was hearing about Nell’s problems. Nell was in love with her boyfriend’s roommate. The obvious answer to this conundrum was for Nell to break up with the boyfriend, but she was afraid that if she did, she would never see the boyfriend’s roommate again. Demeter took Nell’s quandary very seriously and, after a few swigs from her special water bottle, came up with some reasonable-sounding advice: Nell should break up with the boyfriend as soon as possible, otherwise the roommate would get the idea that the two of them were in a committed relationship. Get out first, Demeter said, and worry about arranging a meet-up with the roommate second. Time should pass, Demeter said. A week or two. And then Nell should plan to “bump into” the roommate on neutral turf.
“Yes!” Nell said. “That’s perfect! You’re a genius, Demi!”
So many things about these exchanges pleased Demeter. She felt like a bona fide relationship guru, even though she had never been on a proper date herself. She liked how Nell had started calling her Demi, as in Demi Moore, which in itself was a much sexier name than Demeter Castle. Plus, Demeter had never had a nickname other than “Meter,” which was what kids had called her in preschool. Now she was “Demi.” Coop and Zeus and Kerry all started calling her Demi too. And finally, Nell was the first friend that Demeter had ever made on her own rather than through connections of her parents.
Nell told Demeter things about the guys on their crew. Coop was a stoner, she said: he and a few guys from other landscaping teams got high before each workday, then again at lunch, and then again at the end of the workday. Zeus had a wife and five daughters back in El Salvador, but he regularly went to the Muse on weekend nights to hit on women. Demeter promised to keep these tidbits of information “in the vault”-a phrase always accompanied by a gesture of locking her lips. Demeter had no one to tell, but just knowing these things gave her a certain comfort. Everyone had secrets. She was hardly alone, and her sins were hardly the worst.
The other benefit to Demeter’s drinking all day was that she had effectively lost her appetite. She packed a banana for breakfast but never ate it. She sat with Nell during their lunch break, and while Nell ate her tofu and raisins out of a Tupperware container (a lunch that Demeter found revolting), Demeter drank her special water, and when Nell asked her why she wasn’t eating, she just said she’d had a “huge breakfast.” Coop and Zeus usually ran down to the strip to get a burger and fries or tacos and pizza, and though they sometimes returned with a paper sleeve of waffle fries or a slice of pizza that they couldn’t finish, Demeter wasn’t the least bit tempted. She was flying high, reaching for her sugarless spearmint gum.
If anything, Demeter hated it when the workday was over. They knocked off at three-thirty, at which point Nell and Coop generally headed to the beach for a swim. They started asking Demeter to join them, but there was still the bathing suit issue, so she always said no thanks, maybe another time.
On good days, her mother wasn’t home, and Demeter was able to walk into the house and tuck whatever bottle she’d stolen that day into her closet. She was able to safely fill her special water bottle with vodka, tonic, and a squeeze of lime juice. Occasionally she nibbled on rice cakes or saltines, but more often the sun and the fresh air and the alcohol conspired against her, and once she saw the soft pillows and duvet of her bed, all she wanted to do was nap; sometimes she even slept straight through until morning. There had been three days when she had actually gone all day without eating a single thing-and for the first time in her life, she could tell she was losing weight. She refused to get on a scale to prove this, but the waist of her cargo shorts became loose. And from being outside all day she had gotten quite a tan on her face and her arms and her legs, and the blond streak in her hair was growing lighter, and she felt about fifty times more attractive than she had in recent memory.
Of course, there were afternoons when Demeter got home from work and her mother was home-in the kitchen mixing up a potato salad or marinating steaks-and Demeter knew that there was no way she would be able to get out of sitting down to dinner. On these evenings she swigged heavily from the whiskey bottle in her stash, and then she brushed her teeth and gargled and chewed wintergreen gum until her mother called her to the table. Acting sober was far more difficult with her parents because, unlike her new friends from work, Lynne and Al Castle knew their daughter and would detect aberrant behavior. Demeter had to watch herself. She had to focus on what her parents were saying, she had to formulate reasonable answers to their seven hundred questions, she had to keep from laughing at how pathetically clueless they were.
Then came the conversation of July 25.
Lynne: “What did you do at work today, honey?”
Demeter: “Um, I don’t know. Let me think.” The days tended to blend together, and sometimes they visited as many as six properties in a day. Often it was just easier to make things up to tell her mother. “We were on Lily Street. And West Chester. I did window boxes.”
Lynne: “Window boxes! That sounds much better than weeding!”
Demeter (nodding): “Much better!” Of course, in reality, Demeter would never be allowed to touch anyone’s window boxes. Zeus did all of the containers, including window boxes, and he was very territorial about his work. But Lynne would never know this, and look how happy it had made her to think that her daughter, who only three weeks before had been dangerously close to being sent to some sort of juvenile prison, was now responsible for the beautiful window boxes that everyone admired so much when driving down Lily Street!
Demeter ate four bites of steak and half a plate of green salad. No potato salad, though her mother tried to force it on her three times. Demeter loved her mother’s potato salad, but she didn’t want food to interfere with her lovely state of intoxication. Everything was hazy and dreamlike, a colorful collage that she could take her time pondering. Her father stared at her a little too long at one point, and Demeter cleared her throat and took a long sip of her water. Did he suspect she’d been drinking? Maybe, but even if he did, he would never say anything. To say something would be to open a can of worms, one that would break her mother’s heart and disrupt the domestic bliss that the Castle household was famous for.
Lynne: “Oh, I forgot to tell you! Mrs. Kingsley called. She wants to know if you can babysit on Saturday night.”
Demeter chewed her steak into mush. She hadn’t yet reached the point where she excused herself to go to the bathroom and then did a shot of vodka in the middle of dinner, but she was tempted to do that now. Her father’s gaze was relentless; Demeter couldn’t bring herself to meet his eyes. He for certain knew that she had been in possession of a bottle of Jim Beam on the night of the accident, but did he know that she had lifted it from the Kingsleys’ house? Did anyone know that? If Mrs. Kingsley had called to ask Demeter to babysit, then she must not have heard any rumors, or else not cross-checked any rumors she had heard with a survey of her liquor cabinet.