Page 47 of Swan Song

“Maybe it drank too much,” Coco says.

Leslee offers a vague smile. “Do you think the skinny-dipping took things a step too far?”

“That was the best part,” Coco says. And it was, right up to the moment Lamont swam away.

“Oh, yes,” Leslee says. “I thought so too.”

Coco’s other tasks are more straightforward but also more frustrating. The first pages of her Moleskine notebook are filled with lists, notes, and instructions; she also keeps a detailed log of her productivity in case Leslee ever asks her to account for her time. On Monday afternoon, Leslee informs Coco that Bull is hosting a breakfast meeting the next day and he’d like coffee, a fruit salad, and a dozen morning buns from Wicked Island Bakery.

“He likes mango in his fruit salad,” Leslee says. “We had it every day on St. John.”

Right, because St. John is a tropical island where mangoes grow on trees, Coco thinks. On Nantucket, thirty miles out in the Atlantic, she has to go to four places before she finds a mango that isn’t as hard as a rock. However, the mango is a breeze compared to the morning buns.

To get the morning buns, Coco has to rise at five thirty in order to be standing in line at six when the bakery opens, and then she learns the limit per customer is six, and no amount of bribery (Coco offered to pay double; she offered a hundred-dollar bill) can persuade the girl behind the counter to give her a dozen.

In the end, this doesn’t matter. The breakfast goes largely uneaten.

On Tuesday night, Kacy texts Coco that Eric had a fishing charter cancel for the following day and he has offered to take Kacy and Coco out on the boat. Coco says: I wish I could but I’m too busy. Kacy texts back: How do two people create so much work?

Coco wonders this as well. On Wednesday morning, she provisions for the household. She buys steak tips and salmon fillets from the Nantucket Meat and Fish Market, then heads down the street to Pip and Anchor for a wedge of Savage cheese (sourced from the von Trapp family farm in Vermont) and a certain organic rosé that Leslee likes. Coco selects tomatoes, lettuce, and herbs from Bartlett’s Farm. (“Don’t you want to use Sea View Farm?” she asked Leslee. “The owners, Jeffrey and Delilah, were at your party.” “Go to Bartlett’s, please,” Leslee said. “As I mentioned, Delilah never thanked me.”) Next it’s off to 167 Raw for bluefish pâté, jumbo shrimp, and a key lime pie. Then Coco heads into town—where finding parking is like an episode of Dude, You’re Screwed—to procure a loaf of sourdough, sliced thin, from Born and Bread. Leslee has requested a growler of Wandering Haze IPA from Cisco Brewers as well as Tanqueray and a bottle of Flor de Caña 18 rum (something else Bull developed a taste for in St. John) from Nantucket Wine and Spirits. Coco rounds out her errands with a trip to the mid-island Stop and Shop (with her cart and her list, she thinks, It’s official—I’m a mom) and a visit to Dan’s Pharmacy, where she picks up prescriptions for Leslee (Ambien, Ativan) and Bull (Viagra, eww).

Coco is about to text Kacy: Today I ran all over hell’s half acre. She realizes she sounds like her mother, deletes this, and writes, Provisioning today required nine different stops! Surely Kacy will think this is hyperbole. It’s not.

When Coco arrives back at Triple Eight with all the goods, she groans: There’s a package waiting by the front door. The UPS and FedEx trucks pull in several times a day (setting off the alarm both coming and going; the chimes are starting to trigger headaches), and Coco is responsible for opening the packages, saving the return slips, and breaking down the boxes. She layers them in the back of Baby like some kind of cardboard mille-feuille awaiting her next trip to the dump out in Madaket, twenty-five minutes away.

Most of the packages are clothes for Leslee from places like Cult Gaia, Rat and Boa, Retrofête. Others are linens and home goods, some from Serena and Lily, some from Ban Ban Studio in LA. But this box, she sees, has been shipped from Italy. It’s marked PERISHABLE. Coco imagines a craggy chunk of Parmesan, a loop of exotic salume, a whole black truffle. But once Coco gets the box—along with all her other bags and packages—upstairs, she slices through the top and finds a wooden crate filled with straw and, nestled within the straw, a dozen limoni. Lemons.

“My Amalfi lemons!” Leslee cries. She lifts one out of the box with cupped hands as though it’s a baby chick. She holds it out for Coco to see, to smell. It’s the roundest, most fragrant lemon Coco has ever seen or smelled. It’s a lemon worthy of a van Gogh painting. Each lemon is swaddled in a little white jacket.

“These are the best lemons in the world,” Leslee says. “The most flavorful. The juiciest.”

“Will you use them in a recipe?” Coco asks, though she has yet to see Leslee cook. The provisioning and specialty ingredients are all for Bull—he’ll grill up the steak tips for lunch, cut the salmon into tartare for a late-afternoon snack. Leslee eats sourdough toast, sometimes with a slice of tomato on top, sometimes with the Savage cheese from Pip and Anchor. Bull and Leslee go out for dinner every single night. But maybe the arrival of the Amalfi lemons warrants an evening at home—a scampi with the shrimp Coco bought, perhaps?

“They’re to display,” Leslee says. She disrobes the lemons, places them artfully in a white ceramic bowl, and sets the bowl on the kitchen island.

Coco checks the packing slip. One dozen Amalfi lemons cost Leslee two hundred and twenty-four euros, plus sixty euros in shipping. Two hundred and eighty-four euros for lemons that—if Coco has to guess—will sit in that bowl until they soften and grow spots of green mold.

This gives Coco pause. She thinks of her mother, Georgi, slicing Black Forest ham behind the deli counter at Harps. Georgi’s job is not glamorous, but at least it has a purpose. Then Coco thinks of schoolteachers, police officers, brain surgeons, fishermen, accounts receivable staff, customer-service reps, public defenders, third-shift factory workers, and bus drivers. What would they make of a woman who spends two hundred and eighty-four euros on lemons just because they look pretty on the counter? Coco has often been appalled by the waste in this house—Leslee wants things just to have them; most of the food never gets eaten, half the outfits never get worn—but this is the first time Coco wants to speak up.

But… she has become seduced by the luxuries of her new life—waking up in her king bed, driving Baby down the Polpis Road, ordering lobster salad sandwiches from Something Natural. Instead of making a big deal about the lemons, she decides, she will express her disapproval by leaving the kitchen without putting the groceries away. Leslee has two hands; she can do it.

Coco says, “I’ll take these prescriptions down to your bathroom.”

Leslee isn’t listening. She’s too busy fondling her lemons.

Downstairs, before she puts away the prescriptions, Coco pops into the library, which has become her refuge. She finished A Spark of Light by Jodi Picoult last night and is ready for something new. She pulls out Pachinko by Min Jin Lee, which she has long wanted to read.

As she’s heading down the hall to the primary suite, she hears Bull shouting. Coco nearly drops the book and the bag of pills.

“We should goddamned well be grandfathered in!” This is followed by more profanity—and then what sounds like Bull’s phone hitting the wall.

Coco hesitates, terrified that Bull is going to storm out of his office and realize she heard him. But she’s where she’s supposed to be, doing what she’s supposed to be doing. She keeps going, averting her eyes as she passes Bull’s office; she can see the door is ajar.

“Coco!” Bull calls. His voice sounds improbably cheerful.

She backs up a few steps and pokes her head in. “Hi?”

“Come on in,” he says. “Sit down.”

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