He heard her, but he wasn’t listening. “Did you?”
“Doesn’t that surprise you?”
Jason changed the channel. Claire resented the TV, all fifty-two bright, chirping inches of it. “A little, I guess.”
“He asked me to cochair the summer gala.”
“What’s that?”
“You know, the Nantucket’s Children thing. The event. The concert. The thing we went to last month.”
At this past year’s gala, while Jason lingered at the back bar with his fishing buddies, Claire had applauded as the two cochairs floated up onto the stage to accept bouquets of flowers. As if they had been named prom queen. As if they had won an Academy Award. Claire had been caught up in the glamour of it all. The mere fact that she had
sat down
for a
civilized lunch
at the yacht club made Claire believe that if she agreed to cochair the summer gala for Nantucket’s Children, her life would be more like that and less like it was now. Claire never ate lunches like the one she had had today. Lunch for her was a sleeve of saltines that she kept in the console of her Honda Pilot and stuffed blindly into her mouth as she picked the kids up from school. If she was at home, lunch was a bowl of cereal that she poured at eleven thirty (it was breakfast
and
lunch), which grew soggy before Claire finished it because the baby cried, or the phone rang, or the crumbs under her feet pushed her past her already-high threshold for filth and yuck and she capitulated and pulled out the vacuum. If Claire agreed to cochair the gala, her life might take on a distinguished quality, the golden glow that accompanied a life devoted to good works. How could she explain this to Jason?
“He asked you to chair it?”
“Cochair it. I’d have help.”
“I hope you said no.”
She stroked Zack’s soft head. “I said yes.”
“Jesus, Claire.”
Was it so wrong? She and Jason had spent the past seven months living in reverence of their own good fortune. Wasn’t it time now to think of others? To raise money for kids whose parents were working themselves sick with three jobs?
“It’s a good cause,” she said.
Jason huffed, turned the volume up. And that, she supposed, was the best she could hope for.
“You’re a complete idiot, Clairsy. A bloody fool.”
This was Siobhan, the next morning on the phone, after Claire had told her,
Lock Dixon asked me to chair the summer gala for Nantucket’s Children, and I capitulated like a soldier without a gun.
“I’m not a fool.”
“You’re too much yourself.”
“Right,” Claire said, losing enthusiasm. “Jason is not amused. Have I made a whopping mistake?”
“Yes,” Siobhan said.
Claire had spent the past twenty hours convincing herself that it was an honor to be asked. “It will be fun.”
“It will be work and stress and heartache like you’ve never known.”
“It’s for a good cause,” Claire said, trying again.
“That sounds rather canned,” Siobhan said. “Tell me something true.”
I did it because Lock asked me,
Claire thought. But that would send Siobhan through the roof. “I couldn’t say no.”
“Bingo. You have no boundaries. Your cells don’t have membranes.”
Correct. This had been a problem since childhood: Claire’s parents had battled constantly; their problems came in thirty flavors. Claire was the only child, she held herself accountable for their misery, and her parents did nothing to dissuade her from this. (Things
had
been different then with child raising.)
She was an easy mark, too easy. She could not say no to Lock Dixon, or anyone else, for that matter.
“I want you to serve on my committee,” Claire said. Siobhan and Carter owned a catering company called Island Fare. They did big events like the Pops concert on Jetties Beach, as well as hundreds of smaller cocktail and dinner parties, lunches, brunches, picnics, and weddings, though they had never catered the summer gala. Claire was asking Siobhan to be on the committee because Siobhan was her best friend, her darling, but right away Claire sensed tension.
“Are you asking me to
cater
the gala?” Siobhan asked. “Or do you expect me to slave with you on it while some other mick gets the job?”
“Oh,” Claire said. Of course, if it were up to her, Siobhan and Carter would cater the event, but Claire didn’t know if being cochair gave her the power to hire anybody, and even if she did have the power, she wasn’t prepared to wield it yet. What if she hired Carter and Siobhan and someone called it nepotism (which, of course, someone would)? Worse still, what if Claire hired Carter and Siobhan and her fellow board members expected a deep discount that Carter and Siobhan either didn’t want or couldn’t afford to provide? God, how awkward! She’d been in charge for five minutes and already she was facing an impossible situation.
“Listen,” Claire said, “you don’t have to—”
“No, no, no, I will.”
“But I can’t promise anything about the catering.”
“That’s okay.”
Claire wasn’t sure, exactly, where that left things. Was Siobhan on the committee? Would she come to the meeting at eight o’clock on Wednesday, September 19? She would not, Claire decided. She would forget about the meeting, and Claire didn’t call to remind her.
So when Claire Danner Crispin reached the top of the narrow staircase of the Elijah Baker House (a grand house, built in 1846 for Elijah Baker, who had made a fortune fashioning ladies’ corsets out of whalebone) and stepped into the office of Nantucket’s Children, she found only . . . Lock Dixon. Lock was sitting behind his desk in a blue pinstripe shirt and a yellow tie, his head bent forward, so that Claire could see the bald spot on top. He was writing on a legal pad, and he didn’t seem to have heard Claire on the stairs (impossible: she was wearing clogs). Rather, he had heard her and simply had yet to acknowledge her. Claire felt self-conscious. She should have called Siobhan and dragged her along, no matter how uncomfortable or unethical it was.
“Lock?” Claire said. “Hi.”
Lock raised his head. He was wearing half spectacles, which he whipped off immediately, as if they were some kind of secret. He smiled at Claire. It was a real smile, it broke his face open, and Claire felt the air in the room crackle, practically, with the power of that smile. It sent an electric current through her heart; it could have brought her back from the dead, that smile.
Claire took the smile as her reward for saying,
Yes, I’d love to. Really, I’d be honored.
When you were a cochair of the summer gala, people were glad to see you walk in the door. Or grateful. Or relieved.
Lock stood up. “Hi, Claire, hi, hi. Here, let me get you a—”
“I’m fine, I’m fine,” she said. “Are we meeting here, or in the . . .”
The Nantucket’s Children office consisted of two rooms divided by a hallway, and at the end of the hallway was a powder room and a small kitchen. One room was the actual office, where Lock worked and where Gavin Andrews, the office manager-bookkeeper, had his desk, and across the hall was the boardroom, which held a large, round table and eight Windsor chairs. Every detail of the Nantucket’s Children office transported one back to the whaling heyday that put Nantucket on the map: the floor was fashioned from 150-year-old pine boards, and the doorways were topped with leaded transom windows. With the old- fashioned charm, however, came old-fashioned conveniences or the lack thereof. The board meetings were stifling in the summer and freezing in the winter, and every time Claire used the powder room, the toilet backed up.
Tonight, however, the office was unusually inviting. Because it was September now, it was dark outside. Through the window at Lock Dixon’s back, Claire could see all the way up Main Street: Nantucket Town was twinkling like a child’s toy village. Lock worked with the light of one desk lamp and the blue glow of his computer. Half a sandwich—turkey, stuffing, and cranberry sauce—sat on white butcher paper on his desk blotter, which meant it was eight o’clock and he had yet to make it home. Claire’s mind flickered to Daphne. If Lock spent every night at the office, did Daphne make dinner for herself? Did she read magazines, take baths, watch TV? Daphne was never quite right in public after her accident, but what about in private? Was she better or worse? Their daughter, Heather, was at boarding school. Andover. It had been a much-debated topic among Claire’s circle of friends: How did Heather Dixon get into the best prep school in the country with solid B grades and an attitude problem? It was field hockey, everyone concluded, and they were probably correct. Heather Dixon was quite an athlete, but Claire believed that Heather Dixon got herself into prep school out of the sheer will to escape her mother. It had killed Lock to see Heather go, and it was odd, too, that he should head a charity called Nantucket’s Children when his own child didn’t really qualify as such. Heather Dixon rarely came back to the island; this past summer, Claire heard, she had attended a camp in Maine.
“Let’s just meet in here,” Lock said. His voice startled Claire. She had been so busy thinking about him, she forgot he was in the room. “It’s cozier.”
Cozier?
Claire thought. She was blushing as Lock pulled a chair up to his desk for her. “Cozier” made it sound like the two of them were about to snuggle under a blanket together. But Lock was right: the office
was
cozy, with the low light and the faint smell of woodsmoke floating in through the cracked window, and the classical music coming from the Bose radio.
Now that she was a cochair, maybe she would have more calm and quiet hours like this. This office—its architectural detail and distinguished period furnishings combining to convey a scholarly air, a well-heeled doing-of-noble-works—stood in direct opposition to the scene Claire had left at home. At home, there had been dinner to make: tacos, her only home run, and late corn from the farm and a green salad with ranch dressing, which she had painstakingly made from scratch (fresh herbs picked from the garden, onion finely minced). Jason, as ever, wandered in the door with five minutes to spare, smelling of Newport Menthols, and the kids jumped into his arms and tackled him. How could Claire deny them his attentions? This was his time of day. She could not interrupt routine just because she had a
meeting.
Hence Claire was left to shuttle everything from the kitchen to the dining room table, trying not to look like she was hurrying. Jason ended his roughhousing session by picking Zack up and putting him in his high chair, which was helpful because when Claire tried to do this, Zack pitched a fit. Dinner went well, which meant there were only sixty or seventy reminders to eat up, and Claire stood immediately after grace and buttered corn for the girls, got up twice to refill milk, and then, when she sat down again, spooned pureed carrots into Zack’s mouth, which was an exercise in one step forward, two steps back. Zack had not yet gotten the hang of eating solids. He pushed most of the food back out of his mouth with his tongue; it dribbled down his bib or landed on the tray of his high chair, where he liked to put his hands in it. Claire, in an attempt to create an environment of art appreciation for her children, made references to Jackson Pollock. Jack the Dripper, Zack the Dripper. But the kids were, for the most part, grossed out. J.D. (at nine, Claire’s eldest) called Zack “the mental patient.” Claire hated when J.D. used that term, not because Zack was old enough to understand it, but because it echoed Claire’s private fears.
There’s something wrong with him.
Sitting in the office, Claire realized she was starving. With all that had happened during dinnertime, she hadn’t had a second to eat her own food.
Lock noticed Claire staring at the uneaten half of his sandwich. “Are you hungry?” he said. “Do you want . . . I don’t know if it’s rude to offer someone your leftovers, but I haven’t touched this half, I swear. Would you like it?”
“No, no,” Claire said quickly. “I ate at home.”
“Oh,” Lock said. “Right. Of course. Well, how about some wine, then?”
“Wine?” Claire said. At home, Jason would be dealing with bedtime. This normally went like clockwork: Bath for the younger three while J.D. finished his homework, then a shower for J.D. Then stories for the girls and Zack, which worked if Jason remembered to give Zack a bottle. The bottle had to go into the microwave for thirty seconds. Would Jason know this? She should have reminded him; she should have written it down. Claire eyed the phone on Lock’s desk. She should call home and check on things. Of course Pan, the Thai au pair who had come to live with them after Zack was born, was in the house, too, but Pan rarely came out of her room at night. Still, if Jason got into a jam, he would go to Pan and she would prep Zack’s bottle and rock him to sleep.
“I’d love a glass of wine,” Claire said.
One of the good things about being cochair of the summer gala and attending evening meetings, Claire thought, was that Jason would get more hands-on time with the kids.
“Wonderful,” Lock said. He disappeared into the hallway and came back with two glasses dangling from his fingers and a chilled bottle of white.
Very strange,
Claire thought.
Wine in the office.
Lock held up the bottle to her like a sommelier. “This is a viognier. It’s a white from the Rhône valley. It’s my favorite varietal.”
“Is it?” Claire said.
“My wife finds it too tart. Too lemony. But I love its brightness.” He poured Claire a glass and she took a sip. Wine, like classical music, was one of those things Claire wanted to learn more about. She had tried to interest Jason in a wine-tasting class offered through the Community School, but he’d refused on the grounds that he never drank wine, only beer. This wine was bright, it was grassy—should she say that word “grassy,” or would she sound like a complete ass? She wanted to make Lock happy (she could hear Siobhan shouting,
No boundaries!
), and hence she declared, “I love it.”
“You do?”
“I love it. It tastes like a meadow.”
Another smile from Lock. She had spent the past five years certain that he hated her, blamed her—but here he was, smiling! It warmed her to the pit of her stomach.