The Identicals(14)

“Candace,” Tabitha says. “Hi.” Just looking at Candace, with her grosgrain-ribbon headband and her coltish legs, makes Tabitha feel, like ten thousand straight pins to the heart, the ways she has failed as a parent. “Can you make sure nobody leaves, please? I need to find Ainsley.”

Candace nods; her expression tells Tabitha that she is used to being the responsible one among her peers. Is it wrong to treat Candace as a second adult? Probably, but Tabitha can’t fret about that now. She races down the stairs.



The door to Ainsley’s room is open, putting her unmade rat’s nest of a bed on display along with the piles of clothes—many of them Eleanor Roxie-Frost originals—strewn all over the floor. At first Tabitha thinks Ainsley has run away, and Tabitha panics. Then Tabitha notices the closed door of her own bedroom. She tries the knob: locked.

No, Tabitha thinks. This is not happening.

She pounds on the door with the flat of her hand. “Ainsley!” she screams. “Ainsley!” She places her ear against the door. She can’t tell if she hears rustling or if the noise is simply her brain scrambling for purchase. Would it not be bad enough if Ainsley and Teddy were having sex in Ainsley’s room? Does it have to be the horror show of them screwing in Tabitha’s room? In Tabitha’s bed, which hasn’t been used for carnal purposes since Valentine’s Day, which was the last time Tabitha slept with Ramsay?

She pounds again, then the door opens, and Tabitha nearly slaps her hand against Teddy’s face.

“Ms. Frost,” he says in his country-and-western-star accent. He looks shocked. “I thought you were Emma.”

Teddy is bare-chested, but he has jeans on, and Tabitha can see the waistband of his boxers sticking out of the top of his jeans. His red hair is messy, and he’s flushed. He has clearly just had his way with Tabitha’s daughter, but Tabitha can’t hate him. Teddy is sweet; Teddy is polite—she notices that he called her Ms. Frost—and Teddy is the victim of some pretty tough circumstances. He and his parents lived in Oklahoma City, but there was a fire at the Nestlé Purina factory, and Teddy’s father, a captain with the OCFD, was killed.

That is why Tabitha likes Teddy: Teddy has lost someone.

Teddy’s mother subsequently fell apart and tried to take her own life. She is now at a psychiatric hospital in Tulsa, and Teddy was shipped to his only other living relative—his father’s brother, Graham Elquot, who is a scalloper here on Nantucket. In the summertime, when scalloping season is suspended, Graham works as a raw bar shucker for all the fancy cocktail parties. Tabitha saw him in action over Memorial Day weekend at the Figawi tent, but she didn’t have the courage to introduce herself as Ainsley’s mother.

Behind Teddy, the room is shadowy.

“Get your clothes on, Teddy,” Tabitha says. “Are you sober?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Teddy says, and Tabitha believes him.

“I want you to drive some kids home. You take half, and Candace will take half.”

Teddy nods.

“Send Ainsley out, please,” Tabitha says.



Her daughter emerges thirty seconds later wearing a vintage Janet Russo sundress of Tabitha’s. She has had sex in Tabitha’s bed, raided Tabitha’s closet, and turned the living room into a Jersey Shore arcade. Tabitha worries that Ainsley will be defiant, but she looks ashamed. Actually that might be overstating it. She looks mildly contrite.

“You said midnight at the earliest,” Ainsley says. “I planned on having everyone out and everything cleaned up by then.”

“As if that makes it okay,” Tabitha says.

“Please,” Ainsley says. “Please don’t be a buzzkill.”



Candace takes half the kids—including Emma—home in Emma’s Range Rover, and Teddy takes the rest of the kids home in his uncle’s truck. Tabitha tells Ainsley she’s not going to bed until the upstairs is spotless. There are rings on the Stephen Swift table that will never come out.

“Do you have any idea how much money this table cost me?” Tabitha asks. Then, before Ainsley can answer, she says, “Twenty thousand dollars.”

“Do you ever listen to yourself, Tabitha?” Ainsley says. “You are so materialistic.”

Do you ever listen to yourself? Tabitha thinks. You sound like a privileged, entitled snot.

“Do not,” Tabitha says, “call me that.”

“Why not?” Ainsley says. “Emma calls her father by his first name.”

“It shouldn’t be your aspiration to be like Emma,” Tabitha says. “That girl is bad news. Always has been, always will be.”

“Always has been, always will be,” Ainsley says in a high, mocking tone. “You’re so judgmental.”

Tabitha is about to say that she’s supposed to be judgmental where Ainsley is concerned, because how else will Ainsley figure out what’s acceptable behavior and what’s not? But this will no doubt end up sparking angry responses, coming one after another like an endless string of firecrackers.

Tabitha lets it go.



They get the table returned to its usual place, moving it together, which feels sort of okay—thirty seconds of a common goal. Tabitha empties the ashtrays and tosses out the roaches. She and Ainsley throw the beer cans in the recycling pile.