Beach Wedding(23)

“And?” she said.

“What do you mean, and?” I said, looking out at the water.

She didn’t say anything. But I knew what she meant. I still wasn’t done with the story. I still hadn’t told the hardest part.

The Aftermath.

I sighed.

“After my dad lost the trial, pretty much the entire Village of Southampton turned on my family. We had always worked in the village. My mom part-time at the library, me at the country club, Tom at the biggest restaurant in town as a waiter. Erin had babysat half the kids in town, and Mickey and Finn had always worked at Grogan’s, the ice cream shop next to the movie theater. We knew everybody, and everybody knew us. Or at least we had thought so. But we had thought wrong because every single one of us was almost immediately fired.”

“No. All of you? What! You’ve got to be kidding me. They actually shunned you? Like a collective shunning?” Viv said.

“Yep. Small towns are small towns even if everybody is loaded. And the Suttons’ pockets were the deepest of all. My mom’s hours were cut down to hardly anything. My summer application at the country club, which had always been a formality, was returned by mail with a form rejection letter. As was Tom’s and Mickey’s and Finn’s applications at their jobs. Oh, they had excuses. Too many staff this year, business was slow, yada yada. But it was a punishment.”

“That’s unbelievably cruel.”

“And it wasn’t just our jobs either. I got along with pretty much everybody. The kids at the country club, the surfers, the summer New York City kids. But all of a sudden around town, people I used to say hello to walked past without acknowledging my existence. And Mickey got really screwed. He wanted to go to West Point. It was his lifelong dream, and he had the grades and was on the baseball and basketball teams. He was just waiting on our local congressman’s letter of recommendation. It never came.”

“They needed to rub your noses in it,” Viv said.

“That’s exactly what they were doing. Worst of all, my dad got fired. After the trial, my dad’s boss lost the election for district attorney, and the new jerk who came in gave him the boot. He’d worked there for fifteen years—was the best lawyer there—and they turned on him. He got a new job that he hated as a real-estate lawyer, but we all started to worry about him.

“He’d never been a teetotaler, but after work, he was coming home later and later. Sometimes his MG would be parked on the lawn. And bottles of Jameson were starting to appear beside his PBR empties in the garage. He thought he had just been doing his job, seeking justice. That at the very worst, the blowback would end with him. He never realized that they would come after us as well. He felt he had done it to us. Failed to protect us.”

I felt Viv’s hand on the back of my neck as I looked out at the water. A large wave was breaking. When it crashed and fell, it landed so hard I could feel the rumble of it through the sand.

“I was coming in the front door when I saw Erin on the phone,” I said.

“I saw her red face, the pain and the tears on it, and immediately, a chill went down my spine. I finally got it out from her that Dad had gone fishing and there had been an accident at Flying Point Beach, and I flew out the door.

“I borrowed my neighbor’s car, and when I got to the beach, I saw all the Village of Southampton police four-by-fours and the ambulances. I saw the pontoon police boat in the water and several cops in the surf struggling with something.”

My wife leaned in, hugging me now.

“As I tried to get around a cop who was stiff-arming me to keep me back, like in a dream or something, Tom was suddenly there beside me. He punched the cop with a quick loud pop to his jaw, and then we were in the surf with the cops. That’s when I saw my dad.”

“Oh, Terry,” Viv said as she cried into my shoulder.

“He was in his clothes, soaked, and his skin was all wrong. He looked bloated. There was a huge bruise at his left temple. His blue eyes were open, but they were lifeless. He wasn’t moving. I remember the pontoon’s outboard whirring like crazy to keep the boat steady in the choppy surf, and Tom rushing in to grab Dad’s legs to bring him ashore.”

I took a breath and swallowed hard, just wanting to get to the end.

“Tom went under the surf then, and when he popped up, I could see the despair in his face. I wrapped my arms around him. Can you imagine? Your big brother? His heart was ripping in two. Both of our hearts. ‘Somebody, please help us,’ he kept sobbing in my ear.”

I held my wife tighter.

“But nobody helped us, Viv. Nobody. The waves just kept hitting us and the blazing sun just kept burning down.”



33

An hour later, we were back in our room. Lunch was already over, but the incredibly awesome staff, seeing that we had missed it, had made us up a picnic basket, brimming with sandwiches and treats and juice packs and sparkling water.

We were just finishing up when Viv and I noticed an itinerary sheet being slipped under the door to our suite.

Instead of black tie and tails for dinner, tonight was going to be jean jackets and shorts. There was a huge Fourth of July fireworks display in Montauk scheduled for 9:00 p.m., and Tom, ever the outrageous host, had arranged for a party bus to escort the lot of us to dinner at a famous outdoor lobster joint in East Hampton and then on to the festivities like we were all going to the prom.