Winter Street (4 page)

I
t’s twenty after one in the morning when Isabelle pulls up behind the Bar in her little Ford pickup, a vehicle that has come to define her. Kevin sees the maroon Ranger through the back window, and his blood quickens.

Isabelle has never swung by the Bar to see him before; she’s always been convinced it’s “
trop dangereux,
” that someone might “
découvrir
”—find out they’re seeing each other. Since their relationship began six months ago, Isabelle has been dead set on absolute secrecy, as though they’re involved in international espionage. She’s convinced that if Kelley and Mitzi find out, they’ll fire her. They hired her to teach them French (which she’s failed miserably at, but only because Kelley and Mitzi are too busy to learn) and to run the daily operations of the inn (which means cleaning the rooms, doing laundry, and cooking), but if she loses her job, it’s back to France—specifically, Montpellier, where her father is unemployed and her mother is depressed.

Montpellier isn’t Paris and it’s not the Riviera, it’s not cafés and cobblestone streets and fat chefs and friendly dogs. It’s a city, she says, like New Haven, but without Yale. Like Hartford, but without insurance. (The only place in the U.S. that Isabelle has visited other than Nantucket is Connecticut.) She came to the States to work as an au pair for a family named the Salingers, in Glastonbury, and they brought her to Nantucket for the summer. She loved the island so much that when her time with the Salingers was over, she returned, even though her visa had expired. She originally got a job cleaning houses for a Brazilian woman, but then she met Mitzi at yoga class, and Mitzi—who had a soft spot for orphans and strays—invited Isabelle home and gave her a better job and a room at the inn.

Isabelle and Kevin are madly in love—madly! For Kevin, it’s difficult to keep the secret; he doesn’t see the point. He has explained to Isabelle a hundred times that his parents will be happy for them, and especially for him, Kevin, who has had such lousy luck with love.

It’s a good sign that Isabelle feels safe enough to show up at the Bar tonight. Of course, in the past twenty-four hours, everything has changed.

Kevin locks up the Bar and strolls out to Isabelle’s driver’s side window, his parka zipped to his chin, his Patriots sideline hat pulled down, his hands stuffed into his jeans pockets. He wants a cigarette. Normally, they would share one.

She looks pale and sick. He can’t
believe
how happy he is.

“So…,” she says, “
ton père
is a… mess.”

“Is he?” Kevin says.

“You do not sound like you
care,
” Isabelle says.

“I guess it hasn’t sunk in,” Kevin says. “Mitzi left.”

“Left with George,” Isabelle says. “Packed two valises,
c’est tout
. I wonder about
ses couteaux…
her… knives? She treated those knives
comme des enfants,
but I think she’s leaving them?”

“She’s upset about Bart,” Kevin says.

“Well, yes,” Isabelle says. “
Évidemment.
Her only child
est à la guerre
.”

Kevin experiences a rush of envy, along with annoyance. Bart joined the Marines after a string of spectacular screwups, and now he’s an instant hero. The way Isabelle talks about Bart with such reverence really irritates Kevin. She didn’t know him before. Bart is the same kid who stole three cases of beer and half a dozen bottles of Jim Beam out of the Bar while Kevin was working and then proceeded to get drunk with his moronic friends and do donuts on the airport runway until he crashed into the fence, breaking Lance Steppen’s femur and totaling the two-year-old LR3 he had borrowed from Kelley and Mitzi without asking.

“I don’t think it’s that dangerous over there anymore,” Kevin says.

“Four soldiers today,” Isabelle says.
“Morts.”

“Dead?” Kevin says.
“Really?”
He doesn’t follow the news except for ESPN SportsCenter, but he knows Isabelle
watches his mother every night at six o’clock, along with the rest of the country. Four soldiers killed—but that will never be Bart. Dad and Mitzi can worry all they want, but Bart has always led a charmed existence, and Kevin knows it will stay this way. Bart’s Humvee might roll over a land mine planted by rebel forces outside Sangin, but Bart will do a double somersault and land on his feet, unharmed.

“Yes,” Isabelle says. “Anyway, your father is walking in the house like a ghost, not talking, just floating and staring, picking up the sugar bowl, then setting it down. Opening the cabinet that holds
les plats de Noël,
then closing it. Mitzi did not prepare for the soiree tomorrow night. She must have been planning this and assuming Kelley would cancel. So I have been all day preparing hors d’oeuvres. I am going to order cookies from the bake shop. Your father says in secret that Mitzi’s cookies are…”

“Inedible,” Kevin says. He has a flashback to being a teenager, he and Patrick dropping Mitzi’s gingerbread men from their third-story bedroom window. They never broke, never even cracked. “So, is the party still on, then?” Kevin has a hard time imagining the Christmas Eve party happening without Mitzi. She’s always the mistress of ceremonies, in her short Mrs. Claus dress—red velour with white fur trim—and her high black-suede boots. Mrs. Claus to George’s Santa Claus—Kevin gets it now. He can’t believe his father has been so completely cuckolded.

“Oui,”
Isabelle says. She frowns at him, and then she dissolves into tears.

He wipes her chin with his thumb. “Don’t cry,” he says. “Please don’t cry. It’s happy. It’s good.”

“I do not know what to do!” Isabelle says.

“Hey,” he says. “I’m going to help you.”

“I do not know what help you are thinking of,” Isabelle says. “I might be sent home, Kevin. With our baby.”

Just the word, “baby,” lights Kevin up. A baby, his baby, his and Isabelle’s baby.

She cries into her open palms. Kevin understands what he has to do. He has to ask her to marry him. He should get down on one knee right here in the parking lot. It would change everything. Her tears would dry up immediately.

But…

Many thoughts collide in his mind.

Propose! Ask Isabelle Beaulieu to be his wife! She is
so beautiful,
with her long blond hair, and she is so sweet and kind, hardworking and humble. In six months, his ardor for her has doubled and quadrupled. When he is at the Bar and she is at the inn, he thinks about her nonstop.

But…

He’s scared. Scared and scarred. There might as well be stitches in a jagged ring around his heart.

He has heard enough platitudes and received enough “words of wisdom” in regard to Norah Vale to last several
lifetimes.
It wasn’t meant to be; It’s for the best; They’re all bitches; Love stinks.
Nothing makes his anguish over what happened with Norah any better. She broke his heart, trashed his dreams, and left him flat broke. She walked away with nine years of his life, ruined his chances for a college degree—twice—and demolished his faith in humankind.

No more women,
he vowed.

Then along came Isabelle. The second he saw her smile, the instant he heard her lightly accented voice, he was a goner.

News of the baby, delivered first thing that morning, in a note slipped under his bedroom door, made him whoop like a rodeo cowboy.

“My family will be happy,” he says. “We’ll just tell everyone the truth: we fell in love, and now we’re pregnant.”

She cries harder, and Kevin climbs into the passenger side and pulls her into his lap.

A baby,
he thinks.

He strokes her hair, and his heart soars. “We’ll keep living at the inn,” he says. “Just until we get on our feet. Maybe Dad will let us take the family suite on the third floor.”

“But what if I get sent back?” Isabelle says. “It is always a danger! And now that I am…”

“It’s okay,” Kevin says. “That’s not going to happen. I’ll make sure of it.”

“How?” Isabelle says.

He wants to say it. He nearly says it.

But.

C
hristmas Eve morning, she receives a text from Drake:
All in.

A wave of relief, followed by excitement. Margaret had been steeling herself for a cancellation from him; she always likes to keep her expectations low to avoid disappointment—but Hawaii will be far superior with Drake along.

Buoyed by this good news, she packs four bikinis, two cover-ups, five sundresses, her straw hat, a copy of Donna Tartt’s
The Goldfinch,
which she’s been meaning to read for months—and then, because it
is
Christmas, she carefully packs the paper angel that Ava made in second-grade Sunday school, back when Christmas was Christmas, back when Margaret was a mother instead of a national icon.

She calls Kelley and gets his voice mail. Then she calls Ava and gets her voice mail. The only people in America who don’t take Margaret Quinn’s calls are her own family. She thinks about calling the inn, but for some reason this intimidates her—probably because every other time she’s called that number, Mitzi has answered, and, as is to be expected, Mitzi does not appreciate hearing Margaret Quinn’s famous voice on the other end of the line. Now, though, Mitzi is gone (can this be true, really?), but even so, Margaret won’t call the inn. It’s Christmas Eve, and Kelley must be running at capacity, plus throwing that
enormous party. If anyone needs Margaret, she supposes they will call.

After she packs, she brews an espresso and sits down at her computer. There are twelve more soldiers dead in Afghanistan. There is some kind of backlash or new order taking action; the U.S. has lost more soldiers in one week than we have since 2004. Margaret’s heart clenches as she scans the list. Not Bart.

How do Kelley and Mitzi live like this?

She calls Kelley again, and again gets his voice mail.

I
n the morning, he is awakened by a pounding on the front door. His head feels like a crumbling plaster cast of a head. It is both heavy and empty, filled with rocks and something that sloshes like liquid. The bottle of vodka has rolled under the coffee table; the pills are lined up on the glass surface. Ten pills left, which means he took only three. His stomach squelches; whoever is at the door is insistent.

It’s federal marshals,
he thinks. He won’t answer, he won’t confess, he won’t surrender. He won’t leave the house; they’ll have to storm him like a SWAT team if they want to get
him. He is grateful now that Jen decided to leave with the kids; she wouldn’t take this well at all—a stranger on the front step, pounding on their door, attracting the attention of the neighbors.

And yet, he misses Jen. He needs her. If she were here, she would go to the door and tell whoever it is to GO AWAY. She can be formidable; Patrick can’t imagine anyone intimidating her. Also, Patrick misses the kids—the shooting and helicopter noises of their video games, their screaming and yelling and fighting, their sweet, funky boy smell of sweat and grass and pancake syrup.

Still, the knocking.

Patrick thinks about standing up the way some people think about climbing Mount Everest. Can it be done? He moves his legs to the floor; that much goes okay. The more difficult task is raising his head and torso.
Ohhhhhkay.
He gets to his feet and hobbles over to the picture window.

At the front door is a man in uniform. Patrick hides behind the Christmas tree and thinks:
I’m going to jail.

The man keeps knocking. He has no intention of going away; Patrick can’t escape his fate. Patrick descends the stairs and says, “Who is it?”

“Blahblahblah office,” the man says.

Patrick cracks the door, aware that he is still wearing his suit from the day before—minus his tie, his jacket, and his shoes.

“Can I help you?” he asks.

“Patrick Quinn?”

Patrick nods. The man is about fifty-five, plump, and silver haired. Patrick can take him in a fight, he thinks.

The man starts handing Patrick boxes. Patrick is confused. The man is wearing a uniform, vaguely militaristic, but the packages he’s giving Patrick seem like regular packages. Patrick tries to focus on the labels—he really needs his glasses, he’s so dreadfully hungover—but he makes out
CBS Studios,
and the relief he feels nearly causes him to levitate.

United States Postal Service.
These are Christmas gifts, sent to the kids from Margaret. Every year Margaret has her assistant, Darcy, order gifts using some incredible service that always selects the perfect gift for each boy.

“And this,” the postal worker says, “requires a signature.” He hands Patrick a small cube of a box with luxurious weight. It’s caviar from Petrossian, his mother’s gift each year to him and Jen. Normally, they eat it on New Year’s Eve.

Patrick scribbles his name on the clipboard. He wants to kiss the mailman.

“Thank you!” he shouts. His voice is so loud that the mailman’s head snaps back. His voice is so loud, it echoes across the Common.

The mailman retreats down the steps, and Patrick moves all the packages inside and carries the box with the caviar up to the kitchen. He hopes they have eggs. He is going to scramble them all and dump the caviar on top. It will be his breakfast, and Jen’s punishment for leaving.

His cell phone rings, but Patrick ignores it.
That
will be Jen, he is certain. But she’s the one who left with his kids two days before Christmas, so let her wonder.

Then the house phone rings. Definitely Jen. Patrick finds eight eggs in the fridge and cracks them all in a stainless steel bowl, trying not to dwell on how the sound of the eggs cracking mimics the pain in his head. He adds cream, and salt and pepper; he butters a frying pan. How many times this year has he actually
cooked
in this kitchen? He can’t remember any. Jen does the cooking, and she does it perfectly. Everything she makes is fresh and seasonal. She practically reads his mind. On nights he wants roast chicken with her buttery mashed potatoes, there’s roast chicken. On nights he wants Cobb salad with grilled lobster, there it is. They have cheese fondue on Valentine’s Day, beef and broccoli stir-fry for the Chinese New Year. He misses Jen! He wonders if something bad will happen if he eats the caviar on the wrong day. Well, something bad has
already
happened, which is why he’s doing this.

The eggs sizzle. Patrick grabs a wooden spoon. The eggs have to be soft and creamy; otherwise they will not be suitable for this quality of caviar.

Ava and Kevin think he and Jen are food snobs. Kevin’s favorite food is the ACK Mack pizza from Sophie T’s—located across the street from the Bar—and if it’s a day old, so much the better.

The house phone rings again. Jen is desperate. Patrick
likes that at first—he likes the idea of his wife regretting her decision to leave and calling to beg his forgiveness. He moves the eggs around in the pan like an artist dabbing paint on a canvas. He will tell Jen he is about to eat the caviar.

“Hello?” he says.

“Patrick?” a voice says. It’s Gary Grimstead. “Man, I need you to sit down.”