Just as they walked through the entrance to the vast kitchen, a small Mexican-Indian woman, whom Juan had sometimes seen when he brought the weekly laundry to the laundromat at the end of Main Street in Sag Harbor, passed out towels to the men. She laid more towels on the floor as she told them to gather around the tall chairs that surrounded the kitchen’s central marble-surfaced island. On that table were silver urns and china cups and plates with cookies and cake. The men took their seats, towels draped over their shoulders and heads like shawls.
When Joan Richardson removed her slicker and handed it to Leanna to be hung in what she called the mud room, Juan and the other men-all of them acting demure and ill at ease and shy-saw that she was beautiful. Blue eyes, blonde hair, full breasts, slim legs in slacks. And she was kind, Juan thought. She instinctively appeared to know that Juan-by far the tallest, the one who most calmly looked at her, the obvious leader of the smaller dark men around him-knew more English and would interpret for her.
She said, “I should have called Golden this morning and asked him not to bring you all here. I heard it would rain. I guess I hoped for the best.”
“It’s okay,” Juan answered. He didn’t know her name. He never knew the names of the people at the houses where he worked. The small, tasteful signs at the entrances to the long driveways in East Hampton, Sagaponack, and Southampton had the numbers and names of the streets and roads, never the names of the owners. “We get wet all the time.”
“Go ahead, have your coffee. Leanna? Can we also give them tea?”
“Nobody drinks tea, Mrs. We drink coffee.”
“My name is Joan.” She began pouring hot coffee into cups and pointed to the milk and sugar in ceramic bowls. “And my husband’s name is Brad.”
“He’s nice. Nobody ever gave us soda before.”
“Really? I’m surprised. No one ever? Brad’s thoughtful.”
Juan wasn’t sure he knew the meaning of “thoughtful.” He was sure that the other men noticed that this blonde woman with the dazzling smile was spending a great deal of time talking to handsome, black-haired Juan Suarez. He knew he would later take merciless ribbing from them.
Joan asked, “Where do you all live?”
Juan hesitated. Like the others at the table-and like every illegal immigrant he knew-Juan was leery about that question. It was men in uniforms or suits who always asked the question, and no one ever answered it accurately. He said, “Hampton Bays.”
Hampton Bays was twenty miles to the west, a far less attractive, working class area of the legendary Hamptons. In fact, Juan lived in a rundown ranch house with at least ten other men, women, and children in the desolate woods along the Sag Harbor-Bridgehampton Turnpike, the ancient road that for more than two hundred years had been the place where generations of local black families lived in frail, ramshackle houses.
Joan Richardson, regretting the question, recognized the evasion. She smiled and changed the subject. “I don’t know your name.”
“Juan.”
“What about the others?”
Juan hesitated. For the most part he knew these men by names that were Spanish words referring to parts of their bodies or their habits: Victor the Pineapple, Julio the Dick. Juan told her that three of the other men were named Juan as well. “Like John,” he said. “John and Juan. They’re the same. Lots of men are Juan.”
She laughed. It was a gutsy, big laugh for such a slim woman. Then she asked, “Do you always work together?”
“No, it depends on who gets picked.”
“Gets picked? That doesn’t sound fair.”
“It’s okay. It’s the way it is.”
More than an hour passed before Tom Golden, running through the sheets of rain without an umbrella, came through the kitchen door. He glanced first at the cowed Mexican men. Clearly he’d expected to find them still in the rain under the tarpaulin on the open trailer. When the storm started he had been three miles away in Amagansett, where another, more skilled crew was working on the renovation of several interior rooms.
Tom Golden had never imagined that Joan Richardson or any of his elite, moneyed customers would let a yard crew into the house because of rain. His orders were that they never wander away from the truck or the specific work areas he assigned them. There was the detritus of mud and leaves, footprints and puddles of water, spread over the marble floor. Wind gusts pelted rain against the seaward-facing windows.
Ignoring the watchful men, Tom said, “God, Mrs. Richardson, I’m sorry for this.” He waved his muscular, hairy arm in the direction of the men. They were now quiet, expectant, watchful, like children about to be disciplined at school.
“Why so?” she asked.
“They’ve made a mess in here. The leaves, the dirt.”
“I asked them to come in. Brad thought it was a good idea, too.”
For the first time, Juan glanced down a long hallway, at the end of which was a room with glass walls where Brad Richardson sat at a gleaming computer terminal. He was leaning backward in a wooden swivel chair, speaking into a cell phone. He waved and smiled at his wife and the other people in the kitchen. He continued with his conversation.
“I’ve told them, Mrs. Richardson, that in bad weather they should stay in the truck until I get there.”
She laughed. “Tom, you’re a busy man, obviously. You’ve been gone for more than an hour since it started raining. They’d be drowned by now.”
“It didn’t start raining where I was until fifteen minutes ago.”
She laughed again, that full-throated laugh: “Were you in bed with the sheets over your head?”
“I was at a job in Amagansett, over on the Montauk side. Must have taken the rain longer to get further west. Weather travels west to east out here.”
“Is that so?” Joan Richardson asked. “What a surprise.” She looked directly at him. Dumb bastard, she thought, and then said: “But no harm, no foul. They’ve enjoyed their cookies and coffee. And Juan is a wonderful translator.”
Juan’s full head of black hair was still wet, almost gleaming, curling over the collar of his sweatshirt, as though he’d been swimming. He was taller than Tom Golden by at least a head. His arms, covered with sleek black hair, were even more muscular than Tom’s. Juan had the exhausted, happy look of a Spanish tennis champion who had just won a tournament, and Tom Golden looked like an entitled fraternity boy from Ohio State.
“Juan’s a talented guy,” Tom said. “The pick of the litter.”
Joan Richardson rolled her striking blue eyes upward. “The pick of the litter?” She feigned a shudder of disgust. Then she said, “Brad thinks that maybe we better call it a day. He’s been on calls to Europe all morning, but he said a few minutes ago that the day is a washout for these men. You’d better get them home. If it clears up tomorrow, Brad said, come back, or wait another day or two. It’s your call.”
He saw that he had annoyed Joan Richardson. He didn’t want to lose the Richardsons as customers. They were his most important clients by far. He ranked his customers by their status on Google. Brad Richardson was not only one of the richest men in the world, he was influential in other ways as well. He wrote articles on economics and politics for the Op-Ed page of the New York Times and the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal. He recently had lead articles in two editions of the New York Review of Books. Tom recognized that all of this was a really big deaclass="underline" Brad was not only immensely wealthy, he was emerging as an intellectual, a man of ideas and vision. There were news articles that said Brad Richardson was high on the President’s list to be the next Secretary of the Treasury.
But Brad’s wife was even more of a presence on the Internet. She was the golden daughter of George Cabot, who still reigned, at 77, as the bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, presiding as a liberal icon over the National Cathedral, and of Catherine Bybee, once an actress who before her marriage in the 1980s was called the Grace Kelly of the Reagan era. And Joan over the last five years had become legendary for running the Richardson Foundation, a charity that funded relief for hundreds of thousands of displaced children who were refugees from wars in Syria, Somalia, and South Sudan. A cover story in Elle ranked her with Melinda Gates as the leading female philanthropist in the world. In the picture of her on the cover of Elle she was depicted as what she was in real life: blonde, striking, elegant, smiling, a woman who loved life.