The middle-aged couple stepped up to the plate, and she could almost see the woman shrink back when she got a load of Alexa’s megawatt smile. They each ordered the Ringer, which was a milkshake topped by a doughnut. If she weren’t forced to serve it, Alexa wouldn’t touch the Ringer with a pole of any length; doughnuts didn’t do it for her. Her boyfriend, Tyler, could take down four maple bacons from Angry Donuts in a single sitting. Watching him do this always made Alexa feel a little queasy.
The man put a hand to his retreating hairline and smiled back at Alexa. He was wearing a brick-red Newburyport T-shirt he probably picked up at Richdale, near the postcards and the penny candy. Alexa would bet her toe ring that in high school he was a solid B student with a not-quite-pretty girlfriend everyone referred to as “sweet.”
“This place,” she said to her coworker, Hannah, once the couple disappeared with their trillion-calorie bombs. What she didn’t have time to say, because she was busy scooping, was, is so freaking homogenous that sometimes I want to throw up. She couldn’t wait to shake the dust of this town from her Granada oiled leather Birkenstocks.
“We’re low on napkins, Amazon,” said Hannah severely.
Alexa rolled her eyes. She had acquired her name seventeen years ago, almost eighteen, could she help it if the world’s biggest online retailer had only recently understood its allure? She dispatched the next family and now she could see that the person after that was her mother. Alexa sighed. Attached to her mother, as usual, was her little sister, Morgan.
“Hey,” said Morgan.
“Hey, Morgan. Mom. How was surf camp?”
“Good,” said Morgan morosely.
“Annoying,” said Alexa’s mother. “Somebody backed into my car in the lot. So that’s a whole thing I’m going to have to deal with.”
Alexa’s mother would not order the Ringer, and a touch of imaginary lactose intolerance would also steer her away from Alexa’s favorite flavor, Moose Tracks, in which Alexa occasionally indulged. Rebecca would go for a raspberry sorbet, small, in a cup, no toppings, or she would have nothing at all. Morgan, who was eleven and built like a collection of paper straws stitched together with dental floss, would get chocolate with rainbow sprinkles, and she wouldn’t finish it, but she would insist on taking it home. Alexa’s mother would cover the leftover portion with aluminum foil and stick it in the freezer, and eventually Alexa would throw it away. Morgan would never notice or inquire after it. Predictable.
Alexa’s mother slipped an extra five into the tip jar, which Alexa found unnecessary, and as predictable as the ice cream order, but sweet nonetheless. She smiled.
It was on their way back to the car that the unpredictable thing happened: Morgan stubbed her toe on the parking dividers made out of driftwood and shrieked. Alexa’s mother left her phone on the counter to hurry to Morgan, because God forbid Morgan should be uncomfortable for an eighth of a second. The phone beeped and out of habit Alexa glanced at it: most beeping phones in Alexa’s orbit were beeping for her.
But no. On her mother’s phone was a text from an unknown local number, which was a surprise, because her mother’s in-town social network reached far and wide, like the tentacles of an octopus, and anyone Rebecca deemed worth communicating with she had surely put in as a contact. Before she could stop herself, Alexa was reading the text.
Thanks for the talk today. When can I see you again?
Alexa took several seconds to process this.
Her mother left Morgan sitting at a picnic table and retrieved her cell phone, glancing sharply at Alexa after she looked at the screen, obviously to see if she’d been caught. Alexa made sure her face was a smooth mask. But: was that a tiny smile playing at the edges of her mother’s mouth when she read the message? Oh, ugh. Alexa’s mother was forty-four years old. Certainly past her prime. Double, triple ugh.
Rebecca slipped the phone into her handbag and indicated with her head that Morgan should move toward the car, stubbed toe or not.
“Bye, Alexa,” whispered Morgan.
“Bye, Morgan,” said Alexa. She spoke louder than she needed to, making up for Morgan’s fragile voice. Morgan had always looked like she was scared of her shadow’s shadow, but that had gotten worse since Peter. How in the world was this child supposed to survive middle school in the fall? Alexa should take Morgan on as a project, but she wasn’t sure she had the bandwidth. Even so, she made a mental note to talk to Rebecca about Morgan’s social media activity. Morgan was at a vulnerable age. Too much of a presence could be damaging, but too little could be damaging as well, and Morgan had a remarkably undeveloped sense of self-preservation.
“Bye, honey!” chirped Rebecca. She was holding her sorbet in one hand and struggling to get the keys to the (dented, Alexa now saw) Acura out of her bag with the other. Alexa tried not to look at the Colby College sticker sitting proudly in the rear window; it made her stomach churn.
“Bye, Mom.” Alexa’s voice mirrored her mother’s in tone but inside she was slowly dying of horror. Her mother possibly had a paramour. Reason number 472 Alexa couldn’t wait to get the hell out of this town, and not to the far reaches of Maine, either, where Uggs and Patagonia passed for fashion and keg parties for entertainment. No, Alexa had her sights set west and south from there, all the way from Newburyport to the City of Angels itself.
4.
Sherri
There were five words that later Sherri believed altered for her the course of the rest of the summer. It happened when she was picking up Katie from a playdate at Taylor Kearney’s house. The Kearney family lived down a road off Merrimac Street that led to the river; until Sherri punched the address into Waze she didn’t even know there were streets and houses down there. She had a lot to learn about her new town.
The house was an expanded bungalow with a four-car garage off to the side. In back, close to the water, were a gorgeous tiled pool and a sweeping green lawn that rolled gently down to a private dock. At the end of the dock was a motor boat. Sherri didn’t know enough about boats to know the size or what kind of hull or motors it had, but her sense of the boat was one of quiet opulence. Emphasis on quiet. She was getting used to the way a lot of the wealth in Massachusetts was hidden down streets like this, behind stone walls or fences, more whisper than scream. In Sherri’s old life, when people had money you knew it. When Sherri had money, everyone knew it. Other people saw to that.
The girls were still splashing around in the pool, so Sherri let herself in the wrought-iron gate. Taylor’s mother, Brooke, was stretched out on a lounge chair, reading the newest Elin Hilderbrand novel. She sat up when Sherri came in and shielded her eyes from the sun with a hand. Katie waved at Sherri and then resumed the handstand contest she and Taylor were having. Good luck to Taylor, thought Sherri. Katie could hold her breath all day long, and into the night.
“Hi, girls!” she said cheerfully, the way she thought a normal mother in a normal situation might.
“Drink?” said Brooke. She unwound herself from the chair. She was wearing, very well, Sherri decided, a small black bikini with a strap over one shoulder. A drink? Sherri glanced at her watch. It was 2:30 in the afternoon. She hesitated, and before she had a chance to decide, Brooke had disappeared into a pool house that Sherri had just noticed and, once returned, was pressing a cold glass of rosé into her hands.