Elin Hilderbrand - Here’s to Us

Beat the frosting on medium to high speed until it’s thick and creamy and fluffy, about 3 to 4 minutes. If it becomes too runny, add more powdered sugar, ½ cup at a time. If it becomes too thick, add in more champagne 1 tablespoon at a time. Once the cake cools, frost it!

CHAMPAGNE CANDIED STRAWBERRIES

1½ cups sugar

¼ cup water

⅔ cup champagne

1 pint strawberries, hulled, some sliced, some kept whole

Place the sugar, water, and champagne in a saucepan over medium heat. Whisk constantly until the sugar dissolves and the mixture starts to simmer, then cook for 2 minutes. Add the strawberries to the mixture and simmer for 2 to 3 minutes. Remove the strawberries with a slotted spoon and place them in a bowl-they will be sticky! Additionally, you can store the strawberries in their syrup in the fridge until you’re ready to serve the cake. I like to keep the syrup for drizzling and serve the strawberries on the side of the cake.

When she heard the hammering, she hurried to the window. JP’s silver Jeep was in the driveway. He was downstairs, fixing the wonky board on the porch, just as he’d promised. At least he was reliable.

Unlike Joel Tersigni.

Angie pulled on clothes and headed downstairs.

The sun was in her eyes as she opened the door. “Good morning,” she said. “Coffee?”

JP was on his knees on the porch with a jigsaw and a toolbox, a baseball hat on backward, his Blues Brothers sunglasses resting on the railing. Angie hadn’t noticed his eyes before. They were brown-not deep brown like Angie’s, but more like a reddish brown. He grinned at her. “I’d love some.”

“You’re here awfully early,” she said.

“I have ranger duties today,” he said. “But you were right: this board is an orthopedist’s dream.”

Angie nearly told JP that there was no point in fixing the board, or anything else, because they were going to lose the house. But JP didn’t need to know about the miserable inner workings of the Thorpe family. He thought Deacon was a superhero; Deacon would remain a superhero.

Angie headed to the kitchen for coffee; she hadn’t been able to eat anything after the conversation with Dory the day before, but she had set up the coffee because it was the one thing she couldn’t live without. A house was a house was a house, she thought. People lost houses all the time, just like her mother had said. She could live without this house.

But she couldn’t look at the door frame where she and Hayes and Ellery had all been measured. She wondered if the new owners of the house would paint over the hash marks or keep them. She took three deep breaths, then headed out to the porch with the coffee.

Just as she was about to step outside, Belinda descended the stairs.

This is not happening, Angie thought. It had been a long time since Angie had woken up in the same house as her mother, but she recalled that one of Belinda Rowe’s trademark behaviors was sleeping in.

Apparently not today, however. Maybe the hammering had woken her, although she didn’t appear disgruntled, merely a bit disoriented. She was in her white lace nightgown and white silk robe, and she had her sleep mask pushed off her face; it rested messily in her famous strawberry-blond hair. She had washed off her makeup. Angie was always surprised at how regular her mother looked with clean skin.

“Good morning, darling,” Belinda said.

“Good morning,” Angie said. “There’s coffee.”

“Wonderful,” Belinda said, but instead of heading into the kitchen, she followed Angie out the front door, onto the porch. “Oh, hello,” she said to JP, who was still on his knees. “No wonder I was dreaming about a giant woodpecker.”

Angie rolled her eyes. JP jumped to his feet and offered Belinda his hand. “I’m JP Clarke,” he said. “I was a friend of Deacon’s.”

“Hello, JP,” Belinda said. “I’m Angie’s mother.”

Angie hadn’t heard Belinda introduce herself as “Angie’s mother” in more than ten years, since Angie was a student at Chapin. She had to admit, she was almost flattered that Belinda had identified herself as such. She just as easily could have said, I’m Belinda Rowe, and let JP think: Academy Award-winning actress, former face of Chanel, and cover girl of Vogue (five times), Vanity Fair (twice), and Time magazine (in character, as Vietnamese heroine Mai Hanh).

“It’s nice to meet you,” JP said. “I’m sorry for the ruckus. I wanted to get here first thing this morning to fix the board before somebody hurt themselves.”

“Thank you,” Belinda said. “I assure you, that would have been me. I brought very impractical shoes.”

This caused both JP and Angie to stare at Belinda’s feet, which were bare. Her toenails were painted baby blue.

Angie handed JP his coffee, which he accepted gratefully. Angie said, “There’s coffee in the kitchen, Mother.”

“So, JP, do you live on Nantucket year-round?” Belinda asked.

“I do,” he said. “I’m the ranger out at Coatue.”

“Now that’s interesting,” Belinda said.

“It is if you like nature,” JP said.

“My mother doesn’t like nature,” Angie said.

“I like nature, darling,” Belinda said. “So what does a ranger do, exactly?”

“I’m half-policeman, half-conservationist,” JP said. “On the one hand, I keep track of the tourists. Make sure they stay in the designated areas, help people who get stuck in the sand. On the other hand, I keep track of the wildlife. I count plover eggs and report seal and shark sightings. I get a fair amount of fishing in, and some clamming.”

“And then what do you do in the off-season?” Belinda asked.

“Mother,” Angie said.

“I tutor middle and high school students in math,” JP said. “I was a math major at MIT.”

“Oh my goodness!” Belinda said.

“Before I dropped out,” JP said. “I liked my classes, but I hated the city. I missed Nantucket, so I moved back after first semester junior year. The tutoring gives me time to do what I really love. In the fall, I scallop, and come November, I hunt.”

“My husband hunts!” Belinda cried out.

“Bow or shotgun?” JP asked.

Belinda’s shoulders sagged. “I have no idea,” she said. “He keeps a hunting cabin in Tennessee. But I don’t know what animals he shoots or how he shoots them.”

Angie shook her head. Her mother sounded like a simpleton. She said, “There’s coffee inside, Mother.”

“Yes,” Belinda said. “I heard you the first two times.”

“It’s probably only a matter of hours before the paparazzi discover you’re here,” Angie said. “You might not want to stand on the porch in your nightgown.”

“It was nice to meet you, Angie’s mother,” JP said.

“And you…!” Belinda said. Her voice dropped off a cliff, and it became clear that she had already forgotten his name. She disappeared inside, and JP got back to work.

Angie sat behind him on the top step and gazed at the water.

“How are you doing?” JP asked.

She was about to say “fine,” but then she thought, Why lie?

“Been better,” she said.

He hammered the new board into place with such force that the vibration traveled up Angie’s butt and jarred her teeth.

“I’m almost done here,” JP said. “Then, if you’re free, I can take you on a little field trip.”

“Field trip?” Angie said.

“It’ll get your mind off things,” JP said.

“I thought you had ranger duties,” Angie said.

“I do,” JP said. “But this will only take an hour or so, then I’ll bring you back.”

“But no people?” Angie said. “I can’t do people.”

“No people,” JP said.

As soon as they climbed in the Jeep and backed out of the driveway, Angie felt the heady rush of escape.

“I’m sorry about my mother,” she said.

“You don’t have to apologize.”

“We don’t get along,” Angie said. “I was much closer with my father.”

“He used to talk about you all the time,” JP said.

“Did he?” Angie said. She wanted to ask what Deacon had said, but the question got caught in her throat, and before she knew it, she was crying again. She thought it might be embarrassing to break down in front of a near perfect stranger, but she was beyond caring what anyone thought of her. There had been only two people who mattered-Deacon and Joel-and both of them had left her.

“Hey,” JP said. He reached into the backseat of the Jeep and pulled out a clean, folded white T-shirt. The front of the shirt had a black oval with the word BOX written inside. Angie stared at it through her tears.

“The Box,” she said. It was the greatest dive bar in the civilized world, and yet all she could think of were the rainy days that she and Deacon had spent in the dark grottiness shooting pool, drinking really cold beer, and playing songs on the jukebox. As with everything else on Nantucket, there was tradition: Angie always started out playing “Beast of Burden,” and then Deacon played “Fool in the Rain.”

“Yep,” JP said. “You can feel free to blow your nose on the shirt.”

She did just that. The T-shirt was soft and smelled like pine soap.

She said, “I feel bad defiling your T-shirt.”

JP said, “I feel bad I don’t have any tissues. I can wash the shirt.” He took a right onto the Wauwinet Road, and Angie rested her head against the seat and tried to drink in the scenery. The land was a little lusher here than elsewhere on the island, with tall deciduous trees casting leafy shadows over the road. They passed the artist colony’s barn, they passed the sailboats bobbing in Polpis Harbor, they passed Squam Swamp, home to the three-mile nature trail where Angie used to hunt for salamanders and frogs when she was young. Eventually, they cruised past the gatehouse operated by the Trustees of Reservations. JP waved at the woman manning the gatehouse and called out, “Hey, Maggie!”

JP shifted the Jeep into four-wheel drive as they headed out the sandy road that led to Coatue and Great Point. The landscape changed to wild, windswept beach and eel grass, with Coskata Pond on the left and the forever-blue ocean on the right.

“I forgot how unspoiled this place is,” Angie said.

“You live in Manhattan?” JP said.

She nodded. “I have a studio on East Seventy-Third Street. Technically, that’s the Upper East Side, but my apartment is just a square room with a bed and a sofa. My mother threatened to send her decorator, but I managed to hold her off.”

“Good for you,” JP said. “I’m not much of a city person, as I told your mom.”

“It’s about as different from this as a place can get,” Angie said.

JP pulled up to a small, shingled cottage with a covered porch. “Here it is,” he said. “My own square room with a bed and a sofa. Minus the sofa.”

“Yeah, but look at your view,” Angie said. The cottage was set in a sandy clearing that overlooked the slender, five-pointed arm of sand that was Coatue and the placid blue oval of Coskata Pond, which was ringed by tall grass and cattails. In the distance, Angie could pick out the Nantucket skyline-the church steeples and the mansions of Orange Street.

JP hopped out, and Angie followed him, albeit somewhat reluctantly. She wasn’t sure what kind of field trip this was supposed to be. Angie wondered if JP was just one more typical male, preying on a girl who had absolutely no defenses left. He noticed she was lagging behind.

“This isn’t what you’re thinking,” he said. “I swear. We don’t even have to go inside.”

“I’ll take a peek,” she said. She climbed the step to the porch, where JP kept a clam rake leaning against the railing and a wire clam basket filled with shoes-work boots, flip-flops, Chuck Taylors. A pair of board shorts flapped on a makeshift clothesline.

“Would you like some sun tea?” JP asked. “Brewed fresh this morning.”

“You brewed tea and you came out to our house to fix the porch?”

“Sun rises at quarter to five,” JP said. “And a dutiful ranger rises with it. I even had time to cast my fly rod a few times in the pond.” JP stepped into the cottage, and Angie poked her head in. Bed, as promised, table stacked with math textbooks and topped with a copy of Peterson’s Field Guide to Eastern Birds, and a galley kitchen. There was a cast-iron frying pan on the stove and row of mason jars on a shelf over the sink. JP took two glass jars, filled them with ice, then poured in the sun tea and added a fat wedge of lime to each. He noticed Angie checking the place out.

“It’s primitive,” he said. “Sort of like summer camp. There’s a half bath behind that door and an outdoor shower off the back.”

“What else do you need?” Angie asked. She had always envisioned Joel and Dory’s house on Rosebrook Road in New Canaan as grandiose-with a circular driveway and white pillars and a swimming pool out back with a waterfall. Joel and Dory’s bedroom would have a pencil-post bed, she supposed, that was sheathed in ten-thousand-thread-count linens; there would be a sunken Jacuzzi tub in the master bath. Something had to be keeping Joel there, something that was more desirable than Angie’s body and her love.