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 her quite a 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 so funny, not only her forgetting his name when she was with him all day but 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 so befuddled that 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.