Page 51 of Swan Song

He pulls up to the dock, and one of the kids working catches his line and wraps it around a cleat. The name of the boat is written in script on the side in glittering letters: Golden Girl.

Sharon removes her flip-flops and accepts Romeo’s hand as she steps down into the boat. She sees an open cooler filled with ice, seltzers, and a bottle of Domaines Ott rosé, which happens to be Sharon’s favorite. There’s a bag of sandwiches from Provisions. Did Romeo read her mind and order her a Turkey Terrific?

“Who’s Golden Girl?” Sharon asks teasingly.

Romeo doesn’t miss a beat. “You are,” he says.

Coco has been on her share of boats, from flat-bottomed pontoons on the Lake of the Ozarks to catamarans in the Virgin Islands, but none of these compare to Decadence, the Aquariva 33. Coco has googled it—the deck is grain-matched maple with twenty layers of varnishing, sanding, polishing. It’s floating elegance.

Coco sets her disintegrating straw bag on the leather banquette in the stern and picks at the strings of her cutoffs. She probably should have taken the afternoon and gone shopping for new clothes. On Monday, Leslee had handed Coco her week’s pay in an envelope: thirty-six crisp hundred-dollar bills.

“Come on up here,” Lamont says, patting the seat next to him. Coco moves up. She’s officially a Bond girl.

“Hold on,” he says. They navigate out of Pocomo Harbor and then he pulls back the throttle and they go flying. There are twin 380 Yanmars hiding beneath the aft; it’s a Lamborghini on the water.

“Woo-hoo!” Coco says, raising her hands over her head. But then they hit the crest of a wave and she’s jolted clear out of her seat. Okay, okay, she thinks. She’ll hold on. She doesn’t want to end up overboard.

Lamont slows down. Coco bumps her thigh against his and he presses back and she thinks, Forget the rule, this is on. This is happening.

They cruise along the north coast of the island. Lamont names each beach and adds some color commentary: Steps is where his mother taught him to swim, 40th Pole is where he went to bonfires in high school. They reach the western tip of the island and Lamont shows Coco Esther’s Island and Smith’s Point. Their thighs are still touching.

People on the beaches wave at them but Coco looks away. She doesn’t want to call attention to herself.

“Where are we going?” she asks. “Do you have a plan?”

“I always have a plan,” he says.

A second later, they’ve left Nantucket behind, but there’s land ahead.

“Another island?” Coco asks.

“Tuckernuck,” Lamont says. It’s privately owned, he says; there are thirty-two houses run by generator. Lamont used to spend one weekend every August at a place called the Tate House—his mother babysat for the children of the caretaker, Barrett Lee, and they worked out a barter. Those Tuckernuck weekends were all about riding a rusty no-speed Schwinn around the sandy roads, surf-casting, grilling striped bass over a fire on the beach, taking rainwater showers.

“I would like that,” Coco says, although who is she kidding? She’s gotten used to six-hundred-thread-count sheets, central air, and four kinds of sparkling water ice cold in the fridge.

Looking at the stars on Tuckernuck, Lamont says, was how he became interested in celestial navigation. “Yes, I know the names of all the constellations. Yes, I can figure out where I am on planet Earth just by looking at the night sky. I am that nerd boy.”

“Well, Nerd Boy, I am Nerd Girl. I can survive in the wilderness for a week with just a workman’s tool and a canvas tarp.”

“Were you a Girl Scout?” he asks.

“No,” she says. “I had parental figures with a weird sense of fun.”

“That’s cool,” he says. “You have layers!”

Coco laughs and feels brave enough to let her hand land lightly on Lamont’s thigh.

He covers her hand with his own just long enough for her to know it’s okay, then he grabs the wheel and directs them to a spit of golden sand.

“I thought you said it was privately owned.”

“All except this beach, which is called Whale Island,” he says. “It’s the only part of Tuckernuck open to boaters. No one is ever here during the week.”

Ten minutes later, they’re lying on a blanket pulled from the cabin of Decadence. Lamont brandishes a couple of champagne flutes—Decadence is the kind of boat that comes with crystal stemware—and Coco slides into bartender mode.

“French Seventy-Fives,” she says. The drink is a relic from the bartending course she took back in Arkansas; she remembers the recipe only because her instructor told the class they would probably never have the occasion to make one. They’re highfalutin, he’d said.

Now here she is, living her best highfalutin life.

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