Winter Street (6 page)

S
he can’t remember ever being
this stressed out
.

It’s two o’clock. People are coming in five hours, and Ava has fires to put out everywhere she turns.

Including an
actual fire
in her father’s bathtub. He set Mitzi’s roller disco outfit ablaze, complete with headband and wristbands. He was in his bedroom, drinking Wild
Turkey and smoking Camels and posting ungenerous things about Mitzi on Facebook. He is probably experiencing some kind of temporary insanity. Once Ava doused the fire and cleared the smoke, she confiscated the whiskey and the cigarettes—and then she yelled at Kelley as if she were his mother, or her own mother, at which point Kelley collapsed on the bed, blubbering about Mitzi and George, and then about Bart. Bart was going to die, Mitzi had seen it in her crystals, Mitzi had told Kelley, but he hadn’t listened, he hadn’t believed in the crystal reading, but now, he saw she was right: Bart was going to die. Four soldiers had been killed the day before.

Ava still hadn’t heard back from Bart, and her breath caught for a second. She didn’t mention this to her father; the last thing she wanted to do was upset him further. But she also didn’t have time to act as Kelley’s therapist. The best she could do was to pull the shades, bring him a glass of ice water, and tuck him into bed for a nap.

He moaned. “Mitzi’s gone! Her Mrs. Claus dress is hanging in the closet. Take it away, please. We have no Mrs. Claus and no Santa! How can you think about throwing the party without a Santa?”

“I’ll find someone,” Ava said. She grabbed Mitzi’s red dress out of the closet; it was cruel of her to leave it behind. “You know what I’m going to do, Daddy? I’m going to cook a standing rib roast for dinner tomorrow night. And use the pan drippings for Yorkshire pudding.”

Kelley’s expression perked up a little. “You are?”

“I am,” she said, and they shared a moment of glee, thinking about how beef would be cooked at the Winter Street Inn for the first time since they’ve owned it.

Mitzi’s leaving isn’t
all
bad.

Ava took the computer with her when she left the room. Her first order of business was to remedy the Facebook page. The party is on.

Now, she has forty dozen appetizers to prepare—not including dips, not including the cheese board, complete with the salted-almond pinecone. A photograph of the salted-almond pinecone was once featured on the cover of
Nantucket
magazine, and it instantly became a holiday icon. Now, everyone has come to expect it.

Isabelle is helping Ava, but every twenty or thirty minutes, she excuses herself for the bathroom, and once she is gone for so long that Ava goes to check on her, fearing she has walked out (could Ava blame her?), and she hears Isabelle puking in the bathroom. When Isabelle emerges, Ava says, “Are you sick?”

“No, no, no,” Isabelle says. But her normally rosy cheeks are ashen, and she’s perspiring.

“You were vomiting,” Ava says.

“Something I eat,” Isabelle says. “Sushi. From the supermarket.”

“Ew,” Ava says. She has to say, she will be relieved if it’s
food poisoning. The last thing they need is a stomach bug that would systematically mow down the household. That happened once, on Easter a few years back, and since then, Ava hasn’t been able to look at a leg of lamb without wincing.…

“Do you want to lie down?” Ava asks worriedly. “If you’re not feeling well?”

“No, no!” Isabelle says. “I’m fine!”

But she doesn’t look fine, and her insistence that she
is
fine makes Ava think there might be something else going on.

Pregnant?
she wonders.

But despite the fact that Isabelle is pretty and sweet and has an indescribable allure common to many Frenchwomen, she has no boyfriend. She doesn’t ever date—probably because she has no time. She spends every waking hour at the inn.

Then, Ava gets an idea.

The list of things they must accomplish by seven o’clock is long. Hurry hurry hurry. There’s the Christmas Eve party for 150 guests tonight, and Christmas dinner tomorrow. Ava calls to order a standing rib roast. Yes, they have one left, which they can reserve for her. She can come pick it up anytime. That’s good!

But Patrick is mysteriously not coming home, Mitzi has left with George, her father is losing his mind, and now Isabelle is under the weather due to supermarket sushi. How does Ava possibly have a second to think about Nathaniel?
She doesn’t. And yet she thinks about him nonstop, like a stuck note on a piano, E-flat, her least-favorite note.

He called her twice from the road yesterday. But no messages and no text saying he arrived safely, which is a rule they’ve established whenever one of them travels. She must have pissed him off by not answering? Possibly lost him forever, when all she was trying to do was seem elusive? It’s nearly impossible for Ava to seem elusive when her life is so prescribed—school day from eight a.m. to three p.m., and then, over the Christmas holidays, she is chained to the inn.

She doesn’t break down and call him until three o’clock, when she hides in her bedroom. Outside, the sun is getting ready to set.

Nathaniel doesn’t answer his phone, and Ava knows this is exactly what she deserves. She has never been good at playing hard to get—it always backfires—and yet playing easy to get, which has been her strategy from the start, hasn’t worked either. She and Nathaniel have been dating for nearly two years, and there has been no mention of getting married or cohabitating, or even of taking a vacation together, although this is primarily because Nathaniel has no money, and, really, neither does Ava. Their level of commitment is stuck at a six out of ten—this is how Ava thinks of it—with occasional jumps to seven or eight (her birthday in July, when he took her to Topper’s at the Wauwinet and gave her a card that said,
I love you, Ava Quinn
) and occasional setbacks to five or four (like right now—no communication
for twenty-two hours, no text saying,
Got here safely, missing you!
)

It’s not fair! Ava’s ardor for Nathaniel has been cranked to a ten out of ten since the day she met him. He showed up at the Winter Street Inn one day the spring before last to build Mitzi a set of pantry doors. And not just any pantry doors—Mitzi wanted mahogany inlay and a fancy cutout featuring wooden forks and spoons. She had seen similar pantry doors at her friend Kai the Massage Therapist’s house, and Kai had put Mitzi in touch with Nathaniel Oscar, maker of fancy and special pantry doors.

Ava had been the one to answer the door when Nathaniel knocked. For her, it was love at first sight. He wore jeans and a tool belt and a pressed red-and-white striped oxford shirt and a red fleece vest and a faded red visor from Cisco Brewers. When Ava opened the door, he was clenching a pencil between his teeth, which he dropped expertly into his hand so that he could flash a smile at Ava.

“Hi,” he said. “I’m Nathaniel. Are you Mitzi?”

Ava had laughed at that. “I’m
Ava!
” she said. “Ava Quinn?” She thought the name might resonate with him. The Quinn family was pretty famous on Nantucket—because they owned the Winter Street Inn, because they threw the huge Christmas Eve party, because Ava taught school and knew everybody, and Kevin worked at the Bar and knew everybody else, because Bart was in the police blotter two or three times a year for screwing up in spectacular ways,
and because they were all related to Margaret Quinn of the CBS
Evening News.
But Nathaniel just smiled. Ava Quinn was just another pretty girl who opened the door to him and swooned.

She led him to the kitchen and showed him the doorless pantry in question and asked him if he wanted a glass of water or a Coke or a beer.

He lit right up. “I’d love a beer. But only if you’ll join me.”

Ava opened two Whale’s Tales, and then Nathaniel got to work measuring. Ava felt like an idiot just standing around watching him, so she took her beer to the next room and started playing Chopin on the piano. Chopin was show-offy, perfect when trying to make a first impression. She then switched to Beethoven’s “Für Elise,” which he would recognize if he had an ounce of culture at all, and then she sailed into Schubert’s Impromptu in G-flat. By the time she finished, she was perspiring, and Nathaniel was standing in the doorway, wide-eyed with awe.

“Wow,” he said. “You can really play! And the Impromptu is my favorite.”

And Ava thought,
Did he really just say that?

Yes: Nathaniel Oscar, maker of fancy and special pantry doors, was born an aristocrat. He grew up in a family manse on Clapboard Ridge Road in Greenwich, Connecticut, he attended Greenwich Country Day School, then St. George’s, in Newport, then Brown University, then Duke Law School. But the summer before he was to start a job with Sullivan &
Cromwell LLP, he visited Nantucket and decided he never wanted to leave. He apprenticed himself to a genius woodworker named Paul Pitcher, and when Paul died suddenly of a brain aneurysm, Nathaniel took over his business. Paul Pitcher used to listen to classical music in the workshop, Nathaniel said, and the habit stuck.

Nathaniel loved old things, fine things; he used salvaged materials whenever he could. His work was refined and elegant; it was pedigreed and expensive. When Nathaniel delivered the bill for the fancy and special pantry doors, Kelley hollered. But by then, Ava and Nathaniel were dating, and the rest of the family was half in love with him as well. When Margaret visited Nantucket in August, she took Ava and Nathaniel to American Seasons for dinner. Nathaniel told Margaret about spending his junior year abroad in Gambia, where he dug wells and implemented clean-water programs, and Margaret was smitten.

Marry him!
she told Ava.

And Ava said,
I’m trying!

She had lured Nathaniel in with her piano playing and then got him even closer with her stories of the kids at school. He loved kids, although he didn’t seem to be in any hurry for his own. But somewhere along the way, they stalled, or Ava did. She doesn’t remember anything going wrong, and they never fought—mostly because Ava tried really, really hard to be agreeable—but after they had been dating eight or nine months, Ava noticed Nathaniel seeking a little more
personal space. He went out some nights with guys on his crew, he took a Greyhound bus trip to Seattle to see “friends from prep school,” and there was no mention of Ava flying out to meet him. And then, in October, he told Ava about his reconnection with the dreaded Kirsten Cabot, which corresponded exactly with Kirsten’s impending divorce from a friend of Nathaniel’s named Bimal, who was Indian, had a British accent, was fantastically wealthy, and was a very nice guy besides, according to Nathaniel. Ava wished that Nathaniel had reconnected with Bimal instead of Kirsten, although she wasn’t at all surprised that Kirsten had reached out to Nathaniel. Nathaniel was the One Who Got Away to every one of his ex-girlfriends. What could be more romantic than a man who had eschewed corporate law for a life doing custom woodwork on Nantucket Island?

Ava told herself not to feel jealous of Kirsten Cabot. After all, Nathaniel was up front about the reconnection on Facebook; it wasn’t like he was hiding anything. Ava, however, found herself stalking Kirsten Cabot on Facebook and Twitter. Kirsten owned an upscale clothing boutique in Greenwich Village called Choice, and Ava visited the Choice Facebook page and even “liked” it. There were photos of Kirsten on the Facebook page, and in every single one, she looked beautiful. Ava spent long minutes staring at the photos, enlarging them, minimizing them, trying to make Kirsten look less beautiful. Wasn’t her smile too wide, too toothy? Wasn’t her ass a little square? No, that wasn’t a
winning strategy—Kirsten was drop-dead gorgeous, stunning, a knockout. She was the kind of woman men stared at, turned their heads for. Hot.

At that moment, Ava’s cell phone rings. The screen says NO.

It’s Nathaniel.

NO,
she thinks. She shouldn’t answer.

But she just called him. She can’t pretend that she’s now suddenly unavailable.

“Hello?” she says.

“Ava?”

“Uh-huh?”

“Did you call?”

“Yes,” she says. “I wanted to make sure you made it there safely.”

“Oh,” he says. “Yeah, of course I did.”

“Okay,” she says.

Long pause.

He says, “So, how’s your holiday?”

Where to begin? The stark truth overwhelms her. To tell him about her family quite literally
falling apart
will be such a turnoff, he might never come back to her. She wants to tell him something happy, something fabulous.

“I’m headed to the airport,” she says.

“You
are?
” he says.

“I’m flying to Boston,” Ava says. “And then my mom is taking me to Maui for a few days.”

Throat clearing. He gets flustered any time he remembers she is Margaret Quinn’s daughter.

“When did this come about?” he asks.

“This morning,” Ava says. “We’re staying at the Four Seasons.”

“You
are?
” he says. “When are you coming back?”

“Next week sometime?” she says. “I can’t remember, exactly.”

“Oh,” he says, and she knows that, somehow, she’s reached him. She says, “What are
you
doing?”

“We’re headed to the Cabots’ for cocktails,” he says.

Ava takes a second to digest this, then feels like she’s been one-upped. She
has
been one-upped, of course, because she’s
not
headed to the Four Seasons in Maui with her famous mother. She is headed back to the Winter Street Inn kitchen to make the salted-almond pinecone. And later, she will be banging out “Jingle Bells” on the piano while 150 voices sing along off-key, making Ava want to cry.

She is stuck here, like a partridge in a flipping pear tree.

“What’s going on at the Cabots’?” she asks.

“Kirsten’s parents have a little cocktail thing every year. It’s lots of drinking, basically, and then we order pizza and cheesesteaks from the Pizza Post. Same since I was a kid.”

“I can relate,” Ava says. She wonders how many people will complain because there is no punch bowl with Mitzi’s god-awful Cider of a Thousand Cloves.