“Did your parents make you apply for this job? Are they trying to teach you some kind of lesson?”
“No, ma’am, it was my idea.”
Young Chadwick Winslow sounds like he’s telling the truth. Magda is intrigued.
“You would be the fourth and final member of our cleaning team, and as…the lacrosse coach at the Episcopal School might have informed you, there is no I in team. You won’t get special treatment because you’re male or because you have a college degree, and there will be no exceptions made because you went to the Chicken Box and are feeling too hungover to clean toilets. I need you here on time and ready to work. This isn’t golf camp, Chadwick. It’s stripping sheets and picking up wet towels and scrubbing shower stalls until they gleam. It’s dealing with other people’s excrement and urine and vomit and blood and semen and hair. I hope you have a strong stomach.”
“I do.”
Well, let’s hope so, Magda thinks, because I need someone today. “I’m going to gamble and offer you the job,” she says. She can’t believe she’s doing this. There’s a 99 percent chance the kid won’t last two weeks. He might not even last two days.
But Magda loves a long shot.
“Thank you,” Chad says. “I won’t let you down.”
“You’ll start right now,” Magda says. “It’s opening day, the rooms are all clean, and that will give me a chance to train you.”
“Now is great!” Chad says. He has at least enough sense to take his blazer off and roll up his sleeves.
“So what did you do?” she asks. “When you messed up?”
“If you don’t mind, I’d rather not say.”
“It’s none of my business,” Magda says. “I was just curious. I happen to believe, Chadwick, that even the biggest disasters can be cleaned up, and I’ll teach you to believe it too.”
Edie Robbins wakes up on the morning of her first day of work on the front desk, checks her phone, and sees the e-mail from Xavier Darling. Yes! she thinks. Yes-yes-yes! Xavier is offering a thousand-dollar bonus per week! And it isn’t a participation trophy! The same employee might win all eighteen weeks of the season!
Edie smells bacon frying. Just like every year on Edie’s first day of school, there will be bacon and eggs for breakfast and Tater Tot Hotdish for dinner. Edie’s mother, Love, is trying to keep everything in their lives the same—even though nothing has been the same since Edie’s father, Vance Robbins, died of a heart attack. Although Love says she’s “doing okay”—she has taken a full-time job at Flowers on Chestnut to “keep busy”—Edie can sense she’s still grieving. This is why Edie decided to spend the summer at home. Also, she had to get away from her ex-boyfriend Graydon.
Edie’s plan is to save as much money as she can over the summer and apply for a job out in the “real world”—New York, S?o Paulo, London, Sydney, Shanghai—in the fall. She has a crippling student-loan payment （the Ivy League wasn’t cheap）， so although her hourly pay is more than she anticipated, an extra thousand dollars would really help.
She will win it, she decides. She’ll win it every week. She is ready to slay!
Edie’s fiercest competition for the prize money will be her partner on the front desk, Alessandra Powell. When Edie arrives at work—nearly ten minutes early—Alessandra is already there, and she has nabbed the more desirable computer, the one closest to the open end of the desk （Edie will have to scoot by Alessandra every time she comes or goes）。
“Good morning, Alessandra!” Edie says brightly.
Alessandra does an oh-so-quick-but-still-noticeable up-and-down of Edie, presses her lips together, and says in a tone that is not cold but also not warm, “Good morning.”
Edie wills herself not to take offense; from what Edie observed at training and during the first staff meeting, Alessandra is standoffish. （Maybe not a mean girl, but maybe not not a mean girl.） That, Edie can deal with. She has a harder time accepting that Alessandra is the front-desk manager. Edie doesn’t understand why there has to be a front-desk manager when there are only two desk people hired so far. Edie realizes that Alessandra is older and has more practical job experience and speaks four languages. But something about Alessandra having the title feels wrong. She just walked in off the street; it’s her first summer on Nantucket; Lizbet doesn’t know her and neither does anyone else on this island.