It Happens in the Hamptons

by Holly Peterson

  In old family photos, she studied George on a college tennis team with championship cups thrust in the air. In another, George with his father, now deceased, at the stern of a sailboat, both looking up at the sail’s tack in the wind. They were ruggedly handsome men. Some of the photos and maps were nailed to the hallway walls an inch apart, others several inches. The mismatched angles all over the hallway jarred Katie’s methodical brain.

  Katie was hardly in a position to tell the Porter family she preferred the clean white lines of the lofty one bedroom in an old Hood River, Oregon mining factory she and Huck had just moved out of. The white Formica shelves had given her possessions a sense of geometric order, all fitting together like Legos.

  After a quick shower, Katie was upbeat about the progress she’d made unpacking. She changed into clean yellow shorts and a T-shirt, and then said to her son, “Honey, let’s bike, look around a little. I want to get out of the cottage before it gets dark and see the town again.”

  “I don’t want to leave, Mom. Now I can’t find the yellow light for the wing, can you . . .”

  “C’mon,” Katie said. “I’m getting excited about living here. They seem to surf more than windsurf from what I can see, but I’ll figure that out. And for you, good news: there’s a really good candy store on Main Street. Let’s go.”

  Her son bolted up and ran out the door to jump on his sixty-nine-dollar Huffy bike. Mother and son steered their new bikes out the driveway and onto a street they didn’t recognize at all.

  Interlude: August Sneak Peek

  The bay constable cast his light across the wake once again to be sure. The waves lapped the nearby shore in a gentle rocking motion that belied the chaotic search for the man.

  Irregular sand bars, a few feet in depth, lightened patches of the bay during the day, but now hid themselves in the monotone inky water. Several officers walked the length of the jetty with searchlights swinging back and forth, illuminating the sharp and shiny rocks for an instant on either side. A Zodiac police raft sped by in the distance.

  Members of the country club last saw the man on the docks late that afternoon. They told police he had had an “animated” discussion with the water sports instructors. Something about renting a Jet Ski with a child, even though the rules about sixteen and under riding on a Jet Ski had been made clear. He wanted a lesson to navigate the channels, the jutting boulders, and the quick changes in depth of the sandy bottom. His caution and foresight made sense, according to the members who had grown up with him. They described a thoughtful man, someone apparently drawn to the order of rules.

  Moments later, the constable radioed back at the two other boats in the water. “An object forty degrees north from the clubhouse,” he said, his walkie-talkie crackling. “Not a buoy for sure. But something’s in the water. I’m going to get a look.”

  He pushed the boat gear into forward and idled closer, a cloud of gasoline fumes stagnant in the humid August night surrounding him.

  Indeed, the underbelly of a Jet Ski now appeared amidst the small waves. And nearby, swaying back and forth, another upturned object: the sole of a soaking wet Gucci loafer.

  Chapter Ten

  Downtime in Town

  On that same Memorial Day, Kona, Luke, and their fellow instructor Kenny demolished their one weekly indulgence, overpriced scoops of blood orange and mint chip gelatos from the fancy Italian café. Today, it served to help calm their collective nerves.

  “Such bullshit, the town board isn’t even open. I don’t get how Bucky could even file the complaint on a holiday,” said Kenny, tightening his eyes with brain freeze from the cold. “I’m sorry guys, I didn’t know he was watching. Mrs. Saltzman just literally threw the cash at me on the beach. I can’t believe he saw . . . I thought he was yelling at you.”

  “He even cited her in the complaint, the nicest camp parent we got. She was just rushing and doesn’t know the rules,” lamented Luke.

  All three men silently scraped the bottom of the gelato cups with their wooden spoons, many more times than the remnants of gelato required, calculating how they could pay rent, mobile phone, and car payments this summer if Bucky succeeded in closing down their camp.

  “I’m going to sweet-talk the clerk,” Luke told them. He played with his cleft chin, pushing the skin together with his index finger and thumb, a nervous habit of his. “Plus, when’s the last time any of us got C.P.R. training? We checked that box on the town forms, but we gotta sign up for a real class, get some certificate . . . wait, whoa, look at that . . .”

  Three faces and three pairs of eyes slowly moved in unison from left to right, following the woman and her son on the sidewalk across the street, as if they were watching a slow lob in a tennis match.

  “Who is that?” Luke asked, flying his hands in the air. It was the first time he’d allowed himself any tumescent stirring since Simone’s demolition of every fiber in his soul. Something about this woman’s gait, her delicate femininity, the way she’d just knelt and brushed her son’s face made his stomach ache with a need to know her. “Very, very pretty.”

  The town was mostly empty at this hour. The last of the urban throngs had left in a long line of vehicles snaking west up the main Route 27 out of the Hamptons. For those unfortunate city folks not owning a personal aircraft, all conversations centered on the quality of the beach day and the best time to beat the traffic on the Long Island Expressway back to Manhattan.

  Of course, one notch better than not having to panic about when to pile into one’s plush sedan was not having to leave the beach at all. At treasured times like this, the lucky ones who lived full-time in the Hamptons all collectively took one big, deep sigh like Cheshire cats.

  The guys were sitting outside the Sun Spot Surf Shop in town, smack in the center of Main Street, where their usual bench tended to be command central of a large crew of locals who shared a kinship born in the ocean. Behind them, young men and women, teens to late thirties, talked in small groups outside the shop, many of them employed by Kona and Luke at some point during the summer. The older guys grabbed private-lesson clients after work, many holding regular jobs as carpenters or landscapers, but were often able to convince their bosses to give them leeway in summer to seek other income. People around here had the same mutual understanding that the rushing waterfall of summer cash was something to grab at while they could, and when they could.

  “Down, boy,” said Kona, patting Luke’s head. “I see you finally got some blood flow back to the tip of that little penis of yours. You over your post traumatic stress of Simone leaving you?” He hit Luke’s head this time, and Luke stopped short of shooting him a nasty look. He didn’t like being teased about something too real. “Anything, jump on a whale, if it gets Simone out of your brain . . .” Kona couldn’t help himself. He added, “Of course, you’re never going to grip an ass like that again.”

  “Enough with Simone,” Kenny ordered. Kenny had grown up on the rough side of the tracks in nearby Flanders, and was known as one of the most able fishermen and strongest surfers on Long Island. He had inherited his family’s landscaping company, which was a glorified way of saying that he owned four John Deere lawn mowers with chronic mechanical issues, and worked part-time for the camp when he could. He added, “Simone’s a whore. A mean one. Move the fuck on, Luke. Go for that woman in yellow shorts with the kid you haven’t stopped watching. I like her flow. She seems, I don’t know, not advertising that she’s hot, but still game.”

  Kenny’s protective love for this crew on the bench was the real reason he strayed from his John Deere lawn mowers on the sprawling lawns; he was hell-bent on making sure no shithead rich kid died on his friends’ watch. And, besides, what the hell, he could skip out on work for private surf lessons or camp when he wanted: his clients only spoke to him or his illegal day laborers to say, “Keep the noise down out there, guys!”

  “She looks game, but not as game as Julia Chase,” said Kona. “This is the summer I’m gonna do it. Take
notes, boys.”

  “Never gonna happen. Julia is playing you to make her husband jealous,” said Kenny. “Stay away.”

  “She was here earlier; she sat here. Said she wanted a wakeboard lesson, something about firming up her thighs, which she then massaged. On the inside. I’m telling you, she wants the dick.”

  The men turned their attention from Kona’s delusions to the woman strolling down the street just in front of them, a brunette in her late twenties or early thirties, with a round beautiful face, pale skin, bright red lips, and clear green eyes.

  “I’m going to talk to her,” answered Luke. “Or, at least try . . .”

  “I’d move on that,” Kenny advised. “She looks like Snow White in the flesh. Jesus, closer up, she is really pretty.”

  The woman wore tight, straight-legged, yellow shorts that were tattered at the ends and hit her mid-thigh. On her feet were flat white Top-Sider sneakers, now gray with age, and a Portland Trailblazer’s T-shirt on her slender frame. Her thick brown hair fell in a bob just above her shoulders. The child with her, a young boy of about eight or so, had a blond bowl cut, chubby cheeks and thighs, and was stomping his new sneakers to make tiny red lights on the soles go on and off. She was hunched over, guiding his bike by the little handlebars.

  Luke felt a gentle pat on his shoulder. He looked up and saw his stepfather, Frank. “You making so much from camp you can afford that fancy Italian gelatin?” Frank asked, never a fan of extravagance. He was the owner of the small-sized, but consistently successful, Forrester Plumbing.

  “It’s gelato, Dad.” It had been a long weekend handling a bunch of bratty kids on a boat that tanked out every fifteen minutes.

  “Excuse me? You need a ten-dollar cup of gelatin?”

  “Never mind, it’s just, I don’t know, a little treat after a big day.” It was hard for Luke to yell at Frank, a man who’d married Luke’s young mother when he was two, replacing a father who’d left the moment she got pregnant. Fifteen years after her death in the ocean during Luke’s teen years, Frank was still hell-bent on guiding the boy he’d raised.

  “You don’t need that. Why don’t you come home? I got plenty of vanilla in the fridge—we can watch the game?”

  “All good, Dad, another time,” Luke answered, as he continued to follow the woman.

  Luke hated thinking about Frank alone at nights, but what could he do? His mother had been gone for more than a decade now, and Frank still hadn’t found anyone to fall in love with.

  Luke had been with Kona at a skateboard park in Riverhead in Luke’s tenth grade year when Frank had yanked them off the ramps and physically thrown them into his pickup. Driving eighty miles an hour back to the boat docks, Frank delivered the news that Luke’s mom had gone missing in the currents. She and the girls took a boat out that seemingly clear Saturday in September before the storm came in. Frank and Kona spent seven days and nights searching the waters for her. Luke stayed with an aunt at home, too terrified to leave his room. They kept looking, not even giving up when the local Coast Guard turned the search from “search and rescue” to the dreaded “search and recovery” mission for bodies. When Kona, crestfallen, relented to Frank’s wishes and gave up the search after ten days, he also vowed to spend his life watching Luke’s back.

  “C’mon Luke. Kenny’s right,” Kona cajoled. “That woman is hot in a way Simone isn’t. Look at her. She’s way cooler, more confident.”

  Luke didn’t love the guys all ganging up on him about his obsession with Simone over the past year, but they had a point: he needed to step out of the fog.

  “She’s not from here. I would’a seen her,” answered Frank. “She’s got some beautiful legs, I tell ya. Luke, she looks like a nice girl, a few years younger than you. You oughtta go introduce yourself. Go, c’mon.”

  “I think she’s from the city,” remarked Kona. “She’s got style that isn’t from here. Got money. Playing it down, though.”

  The guys let that settle, and considered Kona’s observations because he did play women better than any of them. But this night, like most nights, Kona was dead wrong about the facts.

  “I’m going to go watch the Mets game at home,” Frank said, wiping the gray strands down on his balding head, then placing his hands on his portly hips. “If she’s from the city, you guys stay far away. Those women are only trouble. I’ve told you . . . Kona, you especially, stay away from those married moms. You’re gonna get your ass whipped by a husband one of these days if you keep at it.”

  Frank, sixty-eight years old and set in his ways, did not believe in fraternizing with city people under any circumstances other than payment for work fairly done. Luke’s mom had gotten tangled up with a city person long ago in a messy situation, and Frank was not one to forgive or forget.

  “Dad. Please. We’ve all heard it, like seven hundred times you’ve warned us.”

  “I happen to be right. Your mother, God rest her soul, would want me to keep you away from them. But I’ll shut up only because I got a game to watch. You dopes waste your hard-earned cash on overpriced Jell-O and go solve the world’s problems,” Frank said, massaging Luke’s shoulders warmly. “Dinner this week, son?”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  As Frank walked to his pickup truck, Luke felt bad for dismissing the man who’d always been kinder to him than anyone. But only for so long, as the woman came into their crosshairs again. “I know we’ve never seen her.”

  Luke watched the woman as she meandered through town, coming in and out of the shops. A few times he stood up from the bench to feign a stretch and make sure he kept a hold on her exact coordinates.

  As the moonlight bore down on the abandoned town, the conversation between the Tide Runners instructors bounced between topics big and small: the height of the waves heading in (measured by buoys far out at sea that could predict), how they would get the city families, possibly even Jake Chase, to help fight the town board to secure the camp’s very existence this summer, and, most animatedly, who would be paying the thirty-dollar June fee for the Porn Hub password they all shared.

  Several minutes later, the woman in yellow walked right in front of them. “One shark necklace,” she said to her son. “Just don’t ask me to find another Lego piece. I beg you.”

  Watching her as she passed into the store, Luke stood up. The Sun Spot Surf Shop behind their bench was the guy’s version of a general store, a homegrown establishment that offered beach shovels for a reasonable eight bucks, and Coppertone spray for four. All the kids from Manhattan coveted the graphic T-shirts, skateboards, and surfer gear sold inside. The store was one of the few places in town frequented by locals and city people alike. Locals appreciated the fair pricing, and city people would stumble in, relenting to their children, to see how regular folks across America shopped. If she even cared to enter, this woman had more than an ounce of cool, Luke was willing to hope.

  “She looks kind of settled, maybe married,” cautioned Kenny, as Luke walked away from the group toward her. “Jesus, I hope you don’t land another psychotic woman. But I didn’t see a ring.”

  Neither did I, Luke thought to himself and he walked in behind her casually as if, at 7:00 p.m., he had a sudden need to buy a tube of zinc oxide.

  Chapter Eleven

  Surf Shop Shenanigans

  Katie Doyle knew the guys were checking her out, and she noticed that the best-looking of the bunch followed her inside. She smiled to herself, biting the outside of her lip to hide any trace of the inconvenient flutter he caused. His cool manner attracted her, as did his unruly, dark chocolate hair. She knew she had a weakness for messy, and found it daring compared to her fastidious nature.

  She decided to focus on a small gift for Huck rather than flirt back. George would be arriving the following weekend, and there was no need to complicate her carefully crafted summer plan. She liked the sudden quiet ambiance with the New York people apparently gone for a workweek in Manhattan.

  Inside the Sun Spot Surf Shop,
summer goods swelled out of the cramped shelves. Huck touched everything he could, the graphic T-shirts with the coveted new york sunshine brand blazoned across them, the boxes of inflatable pool rafts piled to the ceiling (swans to sit on, half pizza slices with holes for drinks to lie on, donuts to curl into), surfboards—some short, some sky high—lined up vertically, boogie boards wrapped in plastic, Go-Pro cameras, and other mechanical gadgets designed to make any child salivate.

  Katie could sense the guy near her, tracing her steps around the store. He looked her age, maybe a tad older, early thirties. His upright posture signified a self-assured person, but the way he followed her from afar also read careful, with an air of kindness. Just what the doctor ordered after the hell she’d been through this past spring with her mother dying.

  Huck tugged hard at her shirt from behind. “Mom, we really need a drone.”

  “Honey, I promised candy. Possibly a shark tooth necklace. We came into town to explore, and buy one small thing. Remember, explore was the plan.”

  With all the water sports paraphernalia in the shop, Katie imagined herself windsurfing on the bays in the Hamptons, boom in hand, sea spray in her face. It all made her desperate to get summer going already. Katie had discovered the soothing salt water of the Atlantic for the first time this morning. Dunking her body in had felt positively baptismal, as salt water always washed the demons away. She’d found salvation all year back home in Cascade Locks—a windsurf mecca, with the winds blowing into the gorge from the Pacific, her heavy wetsuit keeping her warm in forty-five-degree water.

  The Sun Spot store was even messier than the cottage, but she was excited to shake up their senses with the new sights, sounds, tastes, and even aromas in the Hamptons. This morning she’d inhaled humid, salty fog rather than the dry Pacific Northwest air. For lunch, Huck had scarfed down his first plate of fried clams from a truck by the sea. Katie chose a lobster roll. She couldn’t remember if she’d ever eaten lobster on a hot dog bun. As they biked around the back lanes of Southampton, Katie had yelled back at Huck, “Even the light is different out here! Look how the thick trees make these streets all shaded even in the middle of the day.” Katie and Huck were used to the blinding sun on the open lavender field outside her Hood River door, reflecting off the snow-capped peaks of the largest mountain range in America.