Page 22 of The Hotel Nantucket
When Magda leaves the staff meeting, she chuckles to herself.Does anyone have a secret to share in this safe space?
Magda has secrets but she isn’t fool enough to divulge them to people she’s just met, most of whom aren’t old enough to remember the turn of the millennium. She finds it amusing that their new general manager, a woman well into her thirties, is naive enough to believe that any space is “safe.”
If Magda were going to lead by example and share something, it might have been this: She’s thrilled to be working again. Her tidy and modest routine had grown dull; she was bored and more than once she had checked flights back to St. Thomas. She’d retired from cruise ships for good but there was a new resort opening on Lovango Cay and she thought she might head up housekeeping there. But then she’d heard from Xavier, who told her what he’d done—bought a hotel, sight unseen, on the island where she now lives.
Xavier is like a schoolboy doing handstands and backflips to capture Magda’s attention, only in his case, the acrobatics are displays of his wealth—the way he managed to get the renovation done so quickly, the thousand-dollar bonuses for the staff. And sending the orchids that morning! (Vandas are Magda’s favorite flower, as Xavier well knows.) She’d left them on her desk; if she brought them home, she would be asked all kinds of questions that she had no intention of answering.
Magda slips out of the hotel and climbs into her brand-new Jeep Gladiator, which is part Jeep, part pickup truck, and a convertible to boot. Her brother, William, had given herquitea look when she drove it home from Don Allen Ford; he was certainly wondering how she’d paid for it. She said, “I’ve lived on ships for so long that all I ever dreamed about was a new car, so I splurged.” If he wasn’t exactly satisfied with her explanation, that was his problem.
Magda has errands to do. She stops first at Hatch’s for a fresh bottle of Appleton Estate 21 rum—she constantly seeks out reminders of the Caribbean—and, because she can’t help herself, she also buys a ten-dollar scratch ticket. When she gets back out to her car, she scrapes the silver coating off with a dime from her change purse.
Ha! She’s won five hundred bucks! She’ll go back in to collect it next time.
She considers stopping by Bayberry Properties to see if Fast Eddie has any more listings for her to check out. But she doesn’t like the way Eddie’s sister, Barbie, looks at her, so she decides to send Eddie a text.
Please don’t forget about me, Mr. Pancik,she writes.
To his credit, Eddie responds right away:I could never forget you, Magda! I’ll circle back later this week with a list, as we discussed.
Magda loves William and Ezekiel to pieces but it’s time she got her own place, especially now that it looks like she’s staying.
She has one more errand to run—the Nantucket Meat and Fish Market. Magda wants to get soft-shell crabs; she’ll sauté them in brown butter and serve them with dirty rice and roasted asparagus. The market is pleasantly chilly and smells like coffee; it houses the only Starbucks concession on the island. Magda heads for the bounty of the long, refrigerated butcher case, where she finds impeccable trays of rib eyes, individual beef Wellingtons, steak tips in three different marinades, chicken breasts stuffed with spinach and cheese, plump rainbows of vegetable kebabs, baby back ribs, lamb chops, lobster tails, jumbo shrimp cocktails, cilantro-lime salmon, and swordfish steaks as thick as paperback books. The line at the case is four or five people long but Magda doesn’t mind waiting. It’s the first time she’s stopped moving all day.
The hotel has turned out beautifully, she has to admit; but of course, Xavier never does anything halfway.If you’re not planning on being the best, why do anything at all?Isn’t that what Xavier said the night she met him a million years ago, back when he first bought the cruise line? He’d addressed the staff in the Tropicana theater; everyone had been thrilled, Magda included, because it was an hour of free drinks. Magda can still picture Xavier, upright and self-important in his bespoke suit. That was over thirty years ago now, the night her fortune changed.
Xavier is coming to the island in August. Magda will make sure his suite is spotless.
Just thinking these words makes Magda laugh—which attracts the attention of the young man standing in front of her. He turns around.
“Oh,” he says. “Hey, Ms. English.”
For the love of Pete,Magda thinks. It’s her long shot. She has a hard time coming up with the boy’s name even though she spent all day with him, showing him how to vacuum in neat rows, how to scrub the oyster-shell tiles with an electric toothbrush. They’d covered a surprising amount of ground, though it was immediately clear the child had never so much as cleared his plate from the dinner table. They still have the laundry to tackle—folding a fitted sheet; will he ever master it? They also need time to go over the sensitive things maids come across—sex toys and props for role-playing, birth control pills, condoms, diaphragms, tubes of lubricant, falsies, and drugs and drug paraphernalia. She doesn’t want him to be shocked.
“Hello…” She can’t for the life of her remember his name. Did she use it today? She must have. Her mind grapples for it the way her hand feels around on her nightstand for her glasses in the dark of the early morning.
“Chad,” he says.
She starts giggling. She can’t help it. She bows her head and chortles into her cleavage, her body rocking with laughter. It’s sofunny,not only her forgetting his name when she waswith him all daybut also the name itself, Chad, when he appears, outwardly anyway, to be precisely that Nantucket type. A Chad named Chad. Magda laughs so hard, her stomach muscles ache and tears leak out of the corners of her eyes. Chad is staring at her, as are a couple of other people in line, which begins to sober her, but then Magda catches a glimpse of Chad’s expression and it’s sobefuddledthat Magda doubles over again. She’s making a ticking noise that doesn’t even sound like laughter, but it’s all she can eke out. She’s probably thirty seconds away from someone calling an ambulance.
Now it’s Chad’s turn to step up to the counter and order. He asks for three Wagyu fillets, and although Magda has known the boy for less than twelve hours, this is exactly what she would have guessed his family eats for dinner. Magda is finally able to catch her breath and compose herself, though little bursts of laughter continue until Chad turns around with his wrapped parcel and smiles uncertainly at her. “See you tomorrow, Ms. English,” he says.
“See you tomorrow, Long Shot,” she says. His smile widens; he can take a little ribbing, and Magda feels a pulse of optimism. She wonders if her gamble might work out after all.
Edie steps out of the meeting and thinks,Is it just me or has this day been three weeks long?She checks her phone.
There’s a Venmo request for five hundred dollars from her ex-boyfriend.
No,Edie thinks.
This feels like a mistake or a joke, but a chill runs through her.
Graydon is out in the parched, cracked desert of Arizona; he accepted the job with Ritz-Carlton at its Dove Mountain property, the job they applied for together and planned to take together. But then things with Graydon got weird and awful and Edie changed her mind about the Ritz and decided to come home instead. Graydon, who by that point wasobsessedwith Edie, asked if he could come to Nantucket too—he said he would live with Edie and her mother, Love—but Edie said she didn’t think that was a good idea. What she meant was that she didn’twantGraydon on Nantucket. What she meant was that she wanted to break up. Edie had assumed she would work at the Beach Club like both her parents had, until her mother offhandedly mentioned that the Hotel Nantucket—which had been an eyesore and a blight throughout Edie’s childhood—was undergoing a rumored thirty-million-dollar renovation. Edie wanted to be part of a team restoring a historic hotel to its former glory. And she would be safe; the waters surrounding the island would be nearly amniotic, protecting her from Graydon.
Except that now, here he is in her Venmo requests.
A couple walks across the lobby, dressed for dinner. Edie has nearly forgotten that there are guests in the hotel other than Kimber Marsh, her children, and their pit bull. It’s the Katzens, Edie thinks, on their way to Cru; they wave as they head out the door. If Edie were playing her A-game, she would walk out with the Katzens, chat them up; after all, she had told Lizbet in her interview that the most important aspect of hospitality was making a connection with each and every guest at the hotel. But she does nothing and says nothing because she has a trash fire on her phone.Five hundred dollars!
She walks home to Sunset Hill, thinking there’s no way she’s going to let Graydon blackmail her. She deletes the Venmo request. He has some nerve!
