Alessandra wants to hug Edie, she is so grateful, but she “doesn’t want to get Edie sick,” and so she just collects her bag and scoots out the doors into the bright and newly confusing world.
23. Full Send
The Brant Point Grill is the restaurant at the White Elephant Hotel and Resort, the Hotel Nantucket’s rival, so it seems like an odd choice for drinks—but Ms. English picked it and who is Chad to argue? The spacious bar has a lot of dark wood and big mirrors and the clientele is older and more sophisticated than in the places Chad frequents （or frequented, in his past life）。 There’s a jazz combo playing in the corner—piano, drums, stand-up bass. Past the bar, Chad can see the elegant dining room, where enormous windows offer a vista of the flat blue sheet of Nantucket harbor, dotted with boats.
Chad has been to the restaurant before with his parents, an Easter brunch one year when Paul and Whitney thought it would be “fun” to visit the island in the off-season, but Chad remembers that he and Leith had been disenchanted by the whole experience—it was cold enough for them to need winter parkas on April 9 and everything was still closed downtown, including the Juice Bar and their yacht club, which was how they’d ended up at the Brant Point Grill.
Ms. English leads Chad to two seats at the long bar, ones that are in front of a mirror, which means that Chad is confronted with the reflection of himself sitting next to his now-fancy boss in a bar.
“What would you like, Long Shot?” Ms. English asks. “Drinks are on me.”
“I can pay,” Chad says.
Ms. English laughs. She motions for the bartender, who hurries over to take their order. “The usual, neat, for me, Brian.”
“Appleton Estate Twenty-One, Magda, you got it,” Brian says with a wink.
They know each other, Chad thinks. Ms. English comes here, to the rival hotel’s restaurant. He supposes it’s better than getting a drink at the Blue Bar, where Ms. English is still sort of at work and where everyone knows her. Another good thing about the Brant Point Grill, he realizes, is that they’re anonymous, surrounded by another hotel’s guests.
“I’ll have a…” Chad is hesitant to order his usual, a vodka soda, because that’s the stereotypical Chad drink. At the long-ago brunch, his parents ordered Bloody Marys, which came extravagantly garnished—one with a lobster tail on a skewer and one with a cheeseburger slider—but Chad doesn’t want to inflate Ms. English’s bar tab with an expensive drink. “A beer,” he says. “Whale’s Tale, if you have it on draft?”
“We do,” Brian says. He sidles away to make the drinks. Although Chad is dying to ask Ms. English the question that’s reverberating through his mind, he knows enough to wait until their drinks have been set before them and they’ve raised their glasses to each other.
“Thank you for inviting me,” Chad says.
“Thank you for coming, Long Shot. This is way overdue.”
Is it? Chad thinks. There’s no time to consider how long Ms. English has been wanting to invite him for drinks, because the urge to know what happened to Bibi is overwhelming.
“So, what…”
“Barbara gave her notice at the beginning of last week,” Ms. English says. “She was accepted at UMass Dartmouth with a scholarship and she’s going to pursue a degree in criminal justice.”
“What?” Chad says. “She is?”
“Yes, how about that! She forwarded me her acceptance e-mail—I fear because she thought I wouldn’t believe her. Her first day of classes was today.”
Bibi wasn’t fired. She didn’t go on the lam looking for Johnny Quarter. She wasn’t bullied by Octavia and Neves （that was a crazy theory）。 She was going to college on a scholarship! Chad is embarrassed to find tears gathering in his eyes—he’s so proud of her!
“Why didn’t she tell me?” Chad says. Mixed in with his emotions is the sting of betrayal. Bibi just walked off the day before like everything was normal. See ya, Long Shot.
“She wanted me to tell you,” Ms. English says. “She was afraid of a messy goodbye, I think. Some people are like that.” Ms. English nudges Chad with her elbow. “And the two of you grew so close this summer!”
“It wasn’t like that,” Chad says. He drinks deeply from his beer. It’s the first drink he’s had since May 22, and it gives him an instant buzz. “We were friends.”
“You were more than friends,” Ms. English says. “You planted that belt in the laundry in order to protect her.”