Down the hallway was Hayes’s room, with the sailboat wallpaper.

Angie’s room had a pink tulip border, peeling now along the ceiling, and an old Victorian dollhouse. That dollhouse had been here when Laurel and Deacon bought American Paradise; it had belonged to one of the Innsley daughters. Laurel crouched down to study its tiny furniture: a refrigerator that opened to display a dozen eggs in a carton, and a pizza the size of a dime; a grand piano; the white canopy bed in the triangular attic room, the canopy now frosted with dust. Laurel remembered the real estate agent telling her and Deacon that the dollhouse was the most valuable thing in the house, and Laurel had hoped that she and Deacon would someday have a little daughter to enjoy it.

That had never happened-thanks to Belinda.

The next room was narrow and cramped. It was the nursemaid quarters, which had been occupied by a woman named Clara, who had worked for the Innsleys for decades. Laurel would stick Belinda in there.

And finally, at the end of the hall, the “good” guest room-it had an antique luggage rack with embroidered straps, tucked all the way back in the closet, as well as the Eastlake beds and matching mirror-for Scarlett and Ellery, if they showed.

The house was exactly big enough to hold Deacon’s entire, variegated family. What would he have thought about having them all here together? He probably would have grabbed Buck and gone to the bar.

Laurel smiled. Deacon.


She found a linen closet full of sheets, and she ran six sets through the laundry, thinking that the most threadbare ones would go on Belinda’s bed. She made a pilgrimage to the grocery store, where she lost herself among the sunburned, sandy-legged families shopping for bologna and bing cherries and Popsicles. She felt woefully out of place and out of sorts. She was shopping for a family in mourning-did that mean bananas? A whole pineapple or honeydew melon? They had to eat, and dinner that night would be up to her, so Laurel loaded up her cart: coffee, milk, butter, sandwich bread, peanut butter, potato chips, grapes, three zucchini, a bulb of garlic, a box of cherry tomatoes, salad greens. Was Belinda a vegan? Probably. Laurel got a rotisserie chicken, steak, eggs, an expensive block of Parmesan, a stick of expensive Italian salami. She bought frozen garlic bread and pigs in a blanket. The store was freezing cold, and Laurel imagined that this was a sign of Deacon’s disapproval.

Frozen garlic bread? she heard him chiding.

You no longer get a say, she thought, and she headed to the checkout line.


Next, the liquor store. She bought a case of St. Pauli Girl, since Buck was coming, and a case of wine for everyone else-six bottles of the Cloudy Bay sauvignon blanc that she knew Deacon loved, and six bottles of the Luigi Bosca Malbec that Hayes had turned her on to.

She could survive the weekend as long as she was sufficiently armed.


Laurel felt relieved when Buck showed up. He would be able to help her with the unbearable load of her grief. Buck was tall and as lean as ever, his face still boyish, with unclouded green eyes and the vestiges of childhood freckles, his red hair peppered through with some gray, which, for all Laurel knew, had appeared only in the past six weeks. He had come to Nantucket in a suit and tie, which made Laurel chuckle. Buck had been raised in a strict, formal Irish Catholic family on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. His manner was as straight and correct as the grid of city streets he’d grown up on; “laid-back” wasn’t in his lexicon. His only relaxed aspect had been his friendship with Deacon.

Laurel took him immediately out to the back deck. It was raised about three feet over the yard, which consisted of crabgrass and scrub brush. But the views across the island were stunning. The neighbor’s house was modern and flashy now by comparison. It had a swimming pool.

They both looked at the picnic table. This was where Deacon had been sitting when he’d died. He had been watching the sun go down, the tradition that he and Laurel had started eons before. Laurel could picture the exact way he sat: leaning back, legs splayed or one ankle resting on his opposite knee, cigarette in one hand, drink in the other. The drink had been a Diet Coke. He had been so careful about the alcohol and the drugs-but ironically, it hadn’t mattered in the end.

“Let’s sit on the step,” Laurel suggested.

Buck nodded in agreement. He stopped to remove his jacket and folded it neatly over a chair, then he loosened his tie and rolled up his shirtsleeves to the elbow. Laurel didn’t think she had ever seen John Buckley in such a state of undress. She sat down next to him and leaned her head on his shoulder.

Buck pulled her in tight. Laurel had forgotten how good it felt to be held by a man; it had been a while. She was hugged every day by grateful welfare mothers and dozens of children, and she was averaging one date every six months. Her assistant, Sophie, had posted a profile for Laurel on Match.com, but Laurel found the choices underwhelming. She wanted someone both strong and compassionate-compassion was mandatory, in Laurel’s line of work. She wanted someone employed, age appropriate, and full of life. Once she ruled out men whose profile included the words “fantasy football,” there was almost no one left.

“What are we going to do without him?” Laurel asked.

“I’m not sure,” Buck said.

Buck sounded bereft and far away, like a little boy floating down a river on a shoddily built raft. Laurel raised her face to look at him. His eyes were red and filled with tears. Laurel had never seen Buck cry until six weeks earlier; she had never imagined that he was capable of such an act. Deacon, however, had cried all the time. He cried when Hayes was born, he cried when he told Laurel he was leaving her for Belinda Rowe, he cried in 1986 when the Giants won the Super Bowl. He cried when his sister, Stephanie, died of breast cancer, and again four years later when his mother died, even though his mother had abandoned him. Deacon had carried a core of sorrow within him-his father leaving, his mother leaving. Laurel had known this since the first time she talked to him, in the Dobbs Ferry High School cafeteria-he’d been sitting all alone, wearing a Black Sabbath concert T-shirt with a hole in the neck. Laurel had never been able to rid him of his sadness. He became very successful and very popular-he had been nominated for a daytime Emmy; he had cooked for President Bush and then President Obama-but that hadn’t made his demons go away.

“He loved you,” Laurel said to Buck. “He was lucky to have a friend like you.”

“He loved you,” Buck said. “I will never understand why he left you.”

“That’s very sweet of you to say, Buck,” Laurel said.

“I’m serious,” Buck said. “If he hadn’t been my best friend, I would have snapped you up myself.”

Laurel laughed a little, but when she turned her eyes to Buck, his expression was earnest. He leaned in, and Laurel thought for a moment that he might kiss her, the way that a man kisses a woman.

“Hello?”

What? Laurel thought. No. She pulled away from Buck and stood up. “Wait a minute. I think…?”

“Hello? Hello?”

Laurel heard clomping footsteps in the house, and an instant later, a woman in a giant straw hat and cat-eye sunglasses popped out onto the deck.

Belinda.

Laurel had known she was on her way, but still, she felt woefully unprepared for the shock of seeing her.

Buck stood up and turned around. “Hello, Belinda,” he said.

Belinda took a deep, dramatic breath, and then she started to sob. Here she was, then: the woman who had stolen Laurel’s husband, and this house, and her summers, and her happiness. Laurel had spent years and years hating Belinda, until eventually the hate faded into contempt and then distaste and then, finally, indifference.

I don’t care about her, Laurel told herself. She has lost the power to hurt me. She is no longer able to make me feel worthless and unloved and ugly and clumsy. But, watching Belinda cry, Laurel felt a surge of the old rage. She was older and wiser now, though. She had been to college and graduate school; she had built a worthwhile career in which she made real differences in people’s lives. She could control her emotions. She could be the bigger person.

Grace, she thought. What she needed here was grace.

“Hello, Belinda,” she said.


Intermezzo: Deacon and Laurel, Part I

Jack Thorpe leaves for work on August 21, 1976-it will end up being the hottest, most unpleasant day of the summer, not only for the Thorpe family but for everyone in the city-and he never comes home. The manager at Sardi’s, a man named Fitzy, says Jack’s work duds are hanging in his locker, as usual. Fitzy says, He probably just went on a bender. Give him a few days.

Deacon’s mother, Priscilla, goes on a rampage through every one of Jack’s known haunts: the White Horse Tavern, Milano’s, 169, Blarney Stone. Nobody has seen him. After twenty-four hours, Priscilla calls the police to report a missing person. An officer named Murphy comes to the apartment and asks Priscilla a lot of questions about Jack’s routine and habits. He asks about drug and alcohol use, and Priscilla says, “He’s a beer and whiskey man, always has been,” and Officer Murphy nods as if he approves. Officer Murphy asks if Jack had been acting strangely. Any changes of behavior? Deacon watches the lightbulb come on over his mother’s head.

“He took a trip with my son last week,” Priscilla says. She narrows her red, watery eyes at Deacon; she’s been doing a lot of crying, more crying than Deacon would have expected. “Where did you go, again?”

“Nantucket Island,” Deacon says.

“What did you do on Nantucket Island?” the officer asks.

Deacon shrugs. He’s afraid that if he describes it, it will sound regular and nothing like the unforgettable day it was. “Had lunch,” he says. “Went swimming.”

“Do you think that your father had plans to return to… Nantucket Island?” Officer Murphy asks.

“No,” Deacon says. He’s pretty sure Deacon is anywhere but Nantucket. He’s pretty sure the purpose of the trip was to see it one last time before… well, before what, Deacon doesn’t know.

A second day passes, then a third. By the end of the week, Priscilla has procured a prescription bottle filled with Valium. Deacon steals eight pills, then three more. He takes the first pill before bedtime and falls into a dreamless sleep. He takes the second pill a few mornings later, after his mother leaves for her waitressing shift at the South Street Seaport. The pill slows everything down. It gives Deacon a relaxed but powerful feeling, almost as if he’s levitating.

Wow, he thinks. With Valium, every hour is the golden hour.

He steals five more.


The following year, 1977, Priscilla meets a man named Kirk Inglehart and announces that she’s moving with him to Bermuda and that Deacon and Stephanie are being shipped up to Dobbs Ferry to live with Auntie Ro. The Valium pills, of course, are long-gone, but Deacon has picked up three shifts a week working as the trash boy at Sardi’s-Fitzy, the manager, felt sorry for him once it was evident that Jack wasn’t coming back-and in the dregs of the kitchen, there are all kinds of drugs: pot, angel dust, whip-its, as well as dented cans of warm Schlitz. Deacon says yes to everything.


His first day of school in Dobbs Ferry is the Tuesday after Labor Day; he is a freshman. He wears jeans and a ratty Black Sabbath T-shirt that he bought down on Canal Street for fifty cents. He loves Black Sabbath, although he’s never come close to seeing them or anyone else in concert. His auntie Ro takes umbrage at the shirt. She went shopping and bought him a nice blue Izod, but Deacon refuses to put it on.

He says, “I will never wear a shirt with a collar.” He doesn’t mention the yellow shirt with a collar that his father wore to Nantucket. The thought of it pains him and makes him long for the big, fat joint that Bub and Marcos, the dishwashers at Sardi’s, gave him as a parting gift.

Auntie Ro must sense something, because she capitulates quickly. “Suit yourself,” she says.

Having a big, fat joint tucked away in his top dresser drawer makes going to a brand-new school, where he knows no one, bearable. He is able to ignore the dirty looks; the raised eyebrows because his hair is too long and nobody has taught him to shave, so he has a shadowy mustache; the shoulder bump from a guy so huge, he must be the entire offensive line for the football team. Deacon’s new teachers talk, they pass out something called a syllabus (what a stupid word!): English, world history, algebra. Deacon hates school. He dreams about finding a secluded spot along the Hudson and toking up.