“You don’t actually have to tell me the whole story. I was just curious. I can guarantee you are the only person in this house who has even heard of Peter Goldberg. That may not seem like a big deal to you, but it’s a big deal to me. The house suddenly feels less . . .”
“Hostile?”
He smiled. “Yeah.”
“Ah, so we’ve agreed on another adjective? That’s two in a row.”
“I guess so. Feels worthy of a celebration.”
“Someone bust out the Veuve.” She scooped up the tomatoes and tossed them into the salad bowl. “In all seriousness, though, I need to get lunch on the table. I didn’t realize you’d be here this early, so I’m a little behind.”
“I’ll get out of your way. I need to say hi to my family anyway.” He took a deep breath and looked toward the pool, where the family and some friends had suddenly appeared. Kathryn, Barb, and Diana were sunning themselves on chaise lounges, and Jim was sitting at a table beneath an umbrella, talking on his phone. “And so it begins.”
Lizzie scattered a handful of toasted pine nuts over the salad and reached for a ripe avocado. “Okay, I really do need to get to work, but now I have to ask you a personal question: Why do you come if it’s always so . . .”
“Tense? Complicated? Stressful?”
“Yeah.”
He shrugged. “Because he’s my dad, and as tricky as our relationship might be, he’s the only one I’ve got. And part of me hopes one of these trips will end with us accepting each other’s life choices and moving on.”
“Let’s hope it’s this trip, then, eh?”
He pressed his hands together and looked at the sky. “Inshallah.”
“Maybe this will be the summer of healing. You and your dad, you and Kathryn, Zoe and . . . everyone, I guess.”
“Ha!” Nate shook his head. “It’ll take more than a summer to heal what’s wrong with Zoe.”
“You never know. People can surprise you.”
“What I mean is . . . Zoe . . . how can I put this . . . She’s not quite—”
“Nate! You’re here.” Kathryn appeared in the pantry, her sunglasses perched atop her head. “You must have left before dawn.”
“Anything to be able to spend more time with you, Kathryn.” He reached in to kiss her cheek.
She pulled away. “Did I overhear you talking about Zoe?”
Nate cleared his throat. “Lizzie was just asking about, you know, family stuff.”
“Let’s not trouble her with all of that, hm-m? She has plenty to keep her busy.” She glanced at her watch. “Lunch at twelve thirty?”
“Sure,” Lizzie said.
“Great. Now, Nate, why don’t you come and say hi to your father.”
She placed her hand on the small of his back and, without even trying to look gentle, pushed him out of the room.
CHAPTER 21
Sunday morning, Lizzie headed to the farmers’ market first thing. From experience, she knew the crowd thickened as the day went by, so she hoped to beat the late-morning crush.
Kathryn had planned a “clambake” dinner party for that evening: ten people and lots of seafood on their terrace overlooking the dunes. Originally she wanted it on the beach but decided that wouldn’t be private enough. The beaches in Avalon were open to anyone with Avalon beach tags, so there was no way to keep interlopers from gaping at the Silvesters’ heaping platters of shellfish and corn.
“And they will stare,” Kathryn said.
Lizzie agreed this was probably true, given how much food Kathryn had requested. The plan was for her, Jim, and four other couples to have drinks at the Avalon Yacht Club and then return to the Silvesters’ house, where a seafood feast would be waiting for them.
“I want everything hot and ready to eat as soon as we get back,” Kathryn said. “After a few drinks at the club, we’ll be hungry. Jim will want to eat at seven o’clock sharp!”
She’d outlined, in great detail, what she wanted the clambake to entail: huge platters of clams, mussels, shrimp, lobsters, and crab legs, mixed in with boiled corn, baby potatoes, and platters of fresh vegetables. Lizzie had suggested also including grilled kielbasa, but Kathryn objected.
“Not with Jim’s cholesterol. He can’t help himself—he’ll eat it even though he knows he shouldn’t! Maybe some chicken sausage instead?”
As Lizzie strolled through the market, she scanned the tables for the juiciest tomatoes, the fattest ears of corn, and the greenest sugar snap peas. She wasn’t sure which of Jim and Kathryn’s friends would be joining them, but she knew for certain Nate wasn’t invited to the clambake.
“No children,” Kathryn emphasized at least six times. Considering Nate was in his mid-thirties, Lizzie had trouble thinking of Nate as a “child,” even though technically he would always be Jim’s. It was less of a stretch for Zoe, but she hadn’t returned yet, so Kathryn’s “no children” rule seemed designed specifically to exclude Nate. Lizzie was pretty sure he would gladly take a pass.
On the way back from the market, Lizzie stopped by Avalon Seafood to pick up the shellfish she’d special ordered the day before. She loaded the seafood into a cooler in her trunk and slid back into the driver seat, but when she turned her car back on the gas light illuminated. The tank was nearly empty.
She pulled into the gas station across the street and lowered her window. She glanced out and realized Zoe’s friend Trevor was walking toward her.
“Regular, please,” she said. She avoided making eye contact. She wasn’t in the mood to make small talk with one of Zoe’s friends.
Trevor began filling up the tank, and Lizzie grabbed her phone to occupy her. She decided to load Zoe’s site to see if she’d posted any updates. Sure enough, she’d written a new post this morning, and to Lizzie’s delight, it featured her beet salad. Or, rather, what looked like her beet salad. As she scrolled through, she saw no mention of her name or the fact that she’d developed the recipe.
“Seriously?”
“Sorry—did you say something?” Trevor approached the window.
“No, I was just talking to myself,” Lizzie said.
Trevor hunched over and looked through the window. “Hey . . . don’t I know you?”
Lizzie tried to act surprised. “Oh . . . hi. . . .”
“Wait . . . don’t remind me, I’ve got this.” He stared at Lizzie. “Last week at Jack’s, right?”
“No, the Silvesters’ party,” she said.
“The Silvesters?”
“Zoe’s parents.” She waited for him to acknowledge her, but he just stared at her for a beat. How dumb was this guy? The party was only a week ago.
“Oh-h-h, ri-i-i-i-i-ight,” he finally said. “The cook, right? Sweet party. Food was awesome.”
“Thanks,” Lizzie said. She handed him her debit card.
“I haven’t seen Zoe since the party, actually. I should give her a shout.”
“She hasn’t been around for the past week or so, but I think she’s coming back tonight.”
“Oh, yeah? Where’s she been?”
“Your guess is as good as mine.”
“Zoe, man. She’s so mysterious. Always disappearing and shit.”
“Yeah? I thought that was just from her parents.”
“Nah, she’s always, like, taking off to do her own thing. She’s a fun girl, but you can’t really tie her down. She’s like a free spirit. Only, like, darker.”
“Darker?”
“Maybe not darker. Just, like, complicated. You know?”
Lizzie signed her receipt. “So I’m learning.”
“Definitely tell her I say hey if you see her. I’ll shoot her a text later to see if she wants to hang. And hey, if you’re ever looking to party . . .”
Lizzie offered the least horrified smile she could muster and raised her window. “Thanks,” she said. “I’ll definitely keep that in mind.”
* * *
Lizzie worked at a dizzying pace all day to get everything ready for the cla
mbake. She scrubbed clams, peeled shrimp, debearded mussels, and monitored the lobsters and crabs, which she’d stored in a big tub of water. As soon as she completed one task, she moved on to the next—shucking corn, trimming snap peas, marinating peppers—until she worked her way to the bottom of her To Do list. Even then, there was still so much to do before the Silvesters returned with their friends, and since this was merely a dinner party and not a full-fledged fete, she had only Renata and one or two others to help her.
Renata set the table on the terrace, using a set of nautical-themed china Lizzie had never seen. Was it new? Possibly. Lizzie was still getting used to living with people who had so much money they could buy china on a whim, simply because the pattern fit the theme of a dinner party. When she was growing up, her mom had only one set of everyday dishes, along with the wedding china she occasionally used on holidays. Lizzie knew her mom hated referring to it as “wedding china.” She once heard her tell Aunt Linda, “At this point I should probably call it ‘divorce china’—we certainly broke enough of it in the process.” Lizzie wasn’t exactly sure when all of this breaking happened. She never witnessed any loud, tearful fights where dishes were thrown and shattered, like she’d seen in the movies. But she also knew her parents well enough to suspect such fights happened when Lizzie wasn’t around. For all of their faults, her parents had done a decent job of shielding her from their rancor.
As Lizzie chopped and sliced and minced, she thought again about her parents and the fact that she hadn’t heard from either in a while. When it came to her dad, that was nothing particularly new. Ever since the divorce, their relationship had been . . . well, complicated. She knew much of that was her own doing. At nine years old, she was too young to understand the complexities of marriage—that sometimes a tragedy can bring two people together, but other times it can tear them apart, and when the latter happens there’s often no way to fix it. She understood that now, but twenty-one years ago all she knew was that her dad moved out and moved in with someone else and started a new family. No matter how many times he told her he loved her and she would always be his number one girl, she still felt passed over. He’d chosen another family over hers, and it burned.
Initially, Lizzie was the one who encouraged the distance between them. On the weekends she was supposed to visit him, she’d pretend she was sick or choose an activity like going to the movies so that she wouldn’t have to talk to him. But as she got older and he became increasingly busy with his new wife and kids, he stopped trying to win Lizzie back. That, too, felt like a betrayal. She knew now that wasn’t entirely fair. She was the one who’d pushed him away for years. But part of her felt that if she were really his number one girl he would have fought for her, and he didn’t. So their phone calls and visits grew more infrequent, and now they spoke a handful of times a year, usually on big occasions like birthdays and holidays or major events like presidential elections or the Olympics. Lizzie noted that he’d called more often when she’d had a show on the Food Network, which could have been a coincidence, but part of her felt that he, like everyone else, lost interest when she was no longer a hot commodity.
Her mom, however, had become even more important to Lizzie in the years following the divorce. Ryan had been dead for more than five years when her dad left, so it was just her and her mom, and often Lizzie felt as if it were them against the world.
“You’re the most important thing in my life, you know that?” her mom would say, and Lizzie felt the same way. Even when Lizzie was living a high-flying life in New York, she spoke to her mom on the phone almost daily and they were always texting and e-mailing each other. But ever since Lizzie started working for the Silvesters, their communication had been less frequent, and uncharacteristically, that was mostly her mom’s fault. Lizzie had called and texted and e-mailed, and although her mom had responded to a few of those attempts, she hadn’t to all, and when she did reply her tone was a little strange. Was something wrong? Lizzie began to suspect it might be. She’d been meaning to write Aunt Linda to make sure everything was okay, and as she blanched the snap peas in one of the Silvesters’ stainless-steel pots she made a mental note to do so once the clambake was over.
Time seemed to race onward, until it was nearly six thirty. The Silvesters and their friends would return in about half an hour, which meant that was all the time Lizzie had to get everything on the table. Using four of the six burners on the Silvesters’ cooktop, Lizzie layered the potatoes, sausage, and shellfish atop a pile of sautéed onions and leeks, dousing each pot in a healthy shower of white wine. The mélange steamed beneath tittering lids while Lizzie used a fifth burner to bring a big pot of water to boil for the corn. Renata ferried platters of heirloom tomatoes and snap pea salad to the table, and once the corn and seafood finished cooking she helped Lizzie scoop everything into huge wooden bowls with twine handles. When they laid the last bowl on the table, Lizzie looked at the clock and noted the time: 7:00 on the nose. She’d nailed it.
“The smell!” Renata said, smiling. “So good. Kathryn will be thrilled.”
“I couldn’t have done it without you. The table looks amazing.”
It did—worthy of a splashy spread in a lifestyle magazine. The table was covered in a blue-and-white-striped tablecloth with shells and starfish scattered across it, and linen napkins cinched with rope napkin rings sat atop the nautical china. There were rustic wooden bowls heaving with shellfish, lanterns filled with flickering candles, and a miniature sailboat perched in the middle of the table. Lizzie tried to be humble, but she thought she and Renata deserved a standing ovation.
“So I guess they’ll be here any minute . . . ?” Lizzie was trying not to sound worried, but she couldn’t help it. Kathryn had been adamant that the meal be ready at 7:00, but it was now five past and she and her guests were nowhere to be found.
“Yes. I’m sure,” Renata said. But there was doubt in her voice.
Lizzie’s heartbeat quickened. “They wouldn’t . . . I mean, Kathryn is usually punctual, right?”
“Yes.” A beat. “Usually.”
“What do you mean . . . usually?”
“Most of the time. On occasion . . .” She trailed off.
“On occasion what?”
Renata took her time, as if choosing her words very carefully. “On occasion, when she is at the club, she gets talking and . . . well, things can get a bit . . . delayed.”
“How delayed?”
Renata shrugged. “It depends. As I said, it’s only on occasion.”
“But she specifically said she wanted everything hot and ready to eat at seven o’clock sharp.”
“Yes. Of course. And I’m sure they will be here very soon.”
But something in Renata’s voice said otherwise, and as Lizzie watched the steam pour off the heaping platters of food she had a sinking feeling the evening was about to take a very unpleasant turn.
CHAPTER 22
Thirty minutes passed. Then another fifteen. By the time fifty minutes had elapsed, Lizzie wanted to vomit.
“Where are they?” she cried. She held a hand over the shellfish. No steam. Nothing. Was it even safe to let shellfish sit out like this? Probably not. Great, she thought. Not only will everything be cold; they’ll also get food poisoning.
“Help me take everything back inside,” she told Renata.
Renata looked at her watch. “They could be here any minute.”
“They could also be another hour, at which point nothing will be edible. At least now I can salvage some of this. Though, to be honest, I’m not sure how.”
“Can’t you reheat it?”
“Shellfish?” Lizzie ran her eyes over the perfectly arranged pile of lobsters, shrimp, clams, and crabs. She wanted to cry. “No. It’d be rubbery and disgusting.”
“Oh. Oh, dear.” Renata pressed her hands to her cheeks. “Then what will you do?”
“I don’t know. Just help me carry the platters inside, and I’ll figure something out.”
Renata helped her shuttle the bowls and platters back into the house, laying the seafood, corn, and tomatoes on the counter in the butler’s pantry. Lizzie stuck the snap pea salad in the refrigerator and turned around to face the surfeit of food. She blinked back tears.
“Perfect,” she said, holding her head in her hands.
“Ah, so this is where all the food is.”
Lizzie looked over her shoulder and saw Nate standing in the doorway. She couldn’t even muster a smile.
“Whoa, if looks could kill . . .”
“Not now,” Lizzie said. She wasn’t in the mood for banter.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean . . . I was just hungry and came looking—”
“If you are going to ask me to make you a pizza right now, I honestly might start crying.”
“I wasn’t. But now that you mention it . . .”
Lizzie felt the blood rush to her face. “Seriously?”
Nate raised his hands apologetically. “No—I was kidding. But apparently the joke didn’t land.”
“Not even a little.”
“Apologies.” He glanced at the food on the counter. “What’s the problem? Everything looks great.”
“Too bad it’s all cold.”
“Cold? Why?”
“Because Kathryn told me to have everything ready at seven o’clock sharp and it’s now eight.”
Nate shook his head. “Classic.”
“Classic? As in this happens a lot?”
“Not this specifically. More like . . . Kathryn lives in Kathryn land and doesn’t always think about how her actions impact others.”
“Well, this time it’s going to affect her because she isn’t going to have any dinner.”
“Sure she will. Assuming you want to keep your job for the rest of the summer—which, by the way, I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t.”
“No, I do.” She took a deep breath. “I just don’t see how I can save this sorry excuse for a clambake.”
“I wouldn’t call it a ‘sorry excuse’—”
“It wasn’t an hour ago. An hour ago, it was perfect. But now? It’s basically a pile of room temperature seafood that, in a few more minutes, will be borderline dangerous to eat.”
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