He watches Ms. English climb out of the Gladiator.
He comes to a stop and nearly calls to her. His Range Rover is hidden by the tall decorative grasses around the mailbox. What is Ms. English doing at number 133?
A dude wearing a panama hat and a wheat-colored linen suit comes out of the house and shakes Ms. English’s hand. He holds open the door and she steps inside.
Chad takes a beat to absorb this. Ms. English must be interviewing to clean number 133. A side hustle.
Chad drives off, feeling queasy—and the worst is yet to come.
When Chad pulls into his own driveway, he sees his father’s Jaguar.
He finds Paul Winslow on the back porch in a rattan chair, sunglasses perched on top of his bald head, eyes closed, gin and tonic on the table next to him. He’s dressed in shorts, a polo shirt, and Top-Siders, which is what he wears all summer long except when they go out for dinner; for that, Paul favors pants printed with whales, lobsters, or flamingos. Chad gets it—his father works in the pressure-cooker environment of venture capital, and these six weeks are his time to relax. If Paul lets off steam by wearing flamingo pants, fine. He deserves to enjoy the things his money has bought—the pool, their private beach, the view of Nantucket Sound.
Chad doesn’t hear anyone else in the house and he realizes his mother’s Lexus wasn’t in the driveway. He takes a step backward and Paul’s eyes open.
“Hey, hey, hey, son!” Paul says, rising to his feet and offering a hand as though Chad is a client. “I’ve been waiting for you. Where’ve you been?”
“Hey, Dad,” Chad says. He feels like a bluefish gutted with a gaff. What he wouldn’t give to wriggle free of this moment. “Where are Mom and Leith?”
“They’re at the salon,” Paul says, “getting gussied up for dinner.”
Dinner, Chad thinks. In the garden at the Chanticleer, which is their tradition the first night Paul arrives on island. Chad completely spaced about it. He can’t believe things in their family have just gone back to normal after what happened in May, but maybe enough time has passed that they all feel they can just move on—or his parents do. Leith will hate him forever, he’s pretty sure.
“I was at work, actually,” Chad says. “I got a job at the Hotel Nantucket, cleaning rooms.”
His father’s face shows no surprise, so Chad’s mother must have prepped him. Paul sits and extends a hand to indicate that Chad should take the seat next to his. “Let’s talk that through for a minute, shall we?” Paul’s tone of voice has switched to executive mode, and seeing no option, Chad sits. “Can I get you a beer, son?”
“No, thank you.”
Paul chuckles. “Don’t tell me you’re on the wagon. If your mother and I thought you needed rehab, we would have sent you to rehab.”
“No,” Chad says, though he hasn’t had a drink since that fateful night. “But I’m all set for right now.”
Paul sits in a pose of introspection, leaning forward in the chair, elbows on his knees, fingers tented, head bent. “So what I’m hearing you say is that you got a job.”
“Yes,” Chad says. “At the Hotel Nantucket, cleaning rooms. I work for the head of housekeeping, Ms. English, who’s an extremely cool person. There are three girls—women, I mean—on the crew with me. They all live on the Cape and commute over and back every day, so, because the boats weren’t running earlier today, it was just Ms. English and me, which is why I’m late. I usually finish around five.”
Paul nods along to all this, a signal that he’s listening. “I just closed a five-billion-dollar deal. Do you have any idea why I work so hard, Chadwick?”
Chad isn’t sure how to answer. His father’s not brokering peace in the Middle East or curing childhood cancer or teaching undergraduates the novels of Toni Morrison. He’s betting on the success of ideas, technology, natural resources. Every once in a while, this does the world some good; his firm buys a pharmaceutical company that brings out an important drug or backs a fledgling company that does something to improve people’s lives. But mostly, Chad understands, Paul is playing a game on an exclusive field, which results in a lot of winning. A lot of money. “Because you like it?” Chad says.
This elicits a patronizing laugh. “I do it to provide for you and your sister and your mother.” Paul raises an arm theatrically. “I didn’t grow up with any of this.”
Right, Chad knows. His father comes from a regular background, though not one as impoverished as he might like people to believe. He grew up in a split-level house in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania, which is close to the Main Line but pointedly not on it. It was Chad’s mother, Whitney, who had the sterling pedigree—an estate in St. David’s, private school at Baldwin, a father who was a managing partner at Rawle and Henderson, the definition of a Philadelphia lawyer. Paul met Whitney at Smokey Joe’s bar on Route 30 when she was at Bryn Mawr and Paul was a scholarship student at Haverford. It was Whitney’s father who helped Paul get into the business school at Wharton and then introduced him to the gentlemen at the Brandywine Group.