Page 41 of 28 Summers
Mallory’s eyebrows shoot up. Wow.
“She’s your friend,” Fifi says. “I want to know her.”
“Oh, right,” Leland says. “Like you wanted to know Pilar.”
“Pilar was a mistake,” Fifi says. “Anyway, Mallory is straight.”
“Iwas straight until I met you!” Leland says. “Every woman is straight until she meets you. And Mallory is particularly suggestible. Easily swayed. I told you that before we got here. She’s a follower—”
“I think you might be wrong about that. She has spunk. She’s uncomplicated, maybe, but she’s hardly a doormat. She reads—”
“She reads what people tell her to read,” Leland says. “The entire time we lived in New York, she borrowed a book as soon as I was finished with it.”
“The point is, she’s harmless,” Fifi says. “And she’s nice. You should try being nice sometime—”
“Ha!” Leland says. “If I were nice one day, you’d leave me the next—”
“Oh, do shut up,Leland,” Fifi says. The name on Fifi’s tongue sounds like a taunt, probably conveying Fifi’s disdain for her lover’s WASPy-ness.
“Youshut up!” Leland says.
Suddenly they start kissing, and then Leland’s mouth travels down to Fifi’s breast. Mallory is trembling with rage and humiliation and other feelings she’s probably toouncomplicatedandniceto identify.
“Hey, is anyone awake?” Mallory yells through the screen. She stamps her sandy sneakers against the welcome mat to give them a moment to compose themselves, and by the time she steps inside, Leland is standing at the counter pretending to inspect the platter of muffins. Fifi has disappeared into the bedroom.
“Hey,” Leland says, her voice wavering ever so slightly. “How was the run?”
“It was…nice,” Mallory says, hitting the word with a sledgehammer. “So, listen, I’ve had a change of plans. You guys are on your own today and probably tonight as well.”
“Change of plans?”
“Yes,” Mallory says. “And unfortunately, I’m taking the car, but there are two bikes, or you can call a taxi. The numbers are listed in the phone book.”
“Mal,” Leland says. She knows, or suspects, that Mallory overheard, and now she’ll backpedal, apologize, or, worst of all, downplay what she said and try to persuade Mallory that she meant something else.
“Forget that,” Mallory says. “I’ll bike. You two can take the Blazer.”
“Mallory.”
But Mallory is having none of it. She goes into the bathroom, grabs a towel, and heads for the outdoor shower.
An hour later, Mallory is sitting at the bar at the Summer House pool drinking a Hokey Pokey, which was purchased for her by the man sitting next to her, Bayer Burkhart. The name Bayer, he tells her, is spelled like the aspirin, but he pronounces it like the animal that he sort of resembles. He’s a burly guy with a dark beard. He asked Mallory if he could buy her a drink and she said yes, a Hokey Pokey, because her sole intention was to get drunk. She wondered if this counted as being suggestible. What she was…was easy to get along with. Unlike some people.
“I’m easy to get along with,” Mallory says once she has sucked down her Hokey Pokey. “Unlike some people.”
“Cheers to that,” Bayer says. “Looks like someone needs another drink.”
Isolde and Oliver don’t work at the Summer House anymore and neither does Apple—she’s back at the camp for girls in North Carolina this summer—so Mallory is anonymous, which feels wonderful. Bayer seems to have the exact same goal as Mallory: To drink the afternoon away and tell the complete stranger on the next stool all his troubles because he doesn’t know her and she doesn’t know him but we are all human and therefore can offer empathy and an unbiased opinion.
“So,” Bayer says. “Who are you?”
Mallory, she says, though she doesn’t reveal her last name in case Bayer is a serial killer. She’s the daughter of an accountant and a housewife; she grew up in Baltimore, lived in New York City briefly until her aunt Greta died and left Mallory her cottage on the south shore and a modest sum of money, at which point Mallory moved to the island permanently and now she’s an English teacher at Nantucket High School.
“Now for the real question,” Bayer says. “Why are you drinking all alone in the middle of the day?”
“Two reasons,” Mallory says. “One is I have houseguests. My best friend from growing up and her lover, also a woman, who is famous. I can’t tell you who she is…” Mallory pauses and studies Bayer more closely. Does he look like a person who reads? He has intelligent-seeming brown eyes and he’s wearing a polo shirt and a Breitling watch with a blue face (expensive, she knows). “Do you read?”
“Mostly nonfiction,” Bayer says. “And biographies. My favorite book of all time isOctober 1964by David Halberstam.”
