Beach Wedding(35)

My wife laid her spoon down on the nightstand with a click.

“I will,” Viv said finally. “On one condition, Terry.”

“Name it.”

“You promise that after this vacation, you’ll take me on vacation.”



46

I was a little bit beyond a mile past the main drag of Amagansett on the Montauk Highway when I hit my clicker and pulled into a drive beside what looked like an abandoned farm stand. The noon heat rolled in as I zipped down my window and took a look around. It took me a minute to see that there was a dirt road leading to a field behind it, and I followed it past some fruit trees and a small cornfield, and then I saw the main building.

It looked like an old rambling clapboard country house you’d find somewhere in the middle of Iowa, but then when I got a little closer, I could see the sparkling bay and the shoreline right behind it.

I parked in the almost completely empty lot to the left of the restaurant and walked toward the bayside entrance. Along the path outside, I could see the tables on a terrace that overlooked a little fountain-filled English flower garden set up along the shore.

I stopped for a moment and looked out at the sweeping water view. The scenic property had to be worth a not-so-small fortune.

Inside, the dining room took up almost the entirety of the house’s bottom floor. Everything was crisp and clean and white, white wainscoting and white tables with white and pale purple flowers on them.

A busboy I met led me into the kitchen. And at the other side of it, through the doorway of a cluttered closet-like office, I spotted my old friend and coworker Courtney Frazier with her back to me, talking on the phone.

Marvin Heller had been right. She certainly was a looker. Tall and blonde and blue-eyed. Even after all this time, she was still as pretty as I remembered.

To say that I had been at one point in my adolescent life infatuated with Courtney Frazier would not have been far off the mark. Every young male at the country club, from the caddies to the lifeguards to the country club kids, and even some of their creepier fathers, was smitten with Courtney Frazier sitting there up on her lifeguard chair, swinging her whistle.

It was pure fantasy all right. She saw me as a kind of little brother. She’d call me “Little Rourke” all the time at work even though I was a full lifeguard just like her.

I’d actually entered a club tennis tournament in her honor. The staff wasn’t even really allowed to participate, but I’d seen that some jerk named Graham Ericson, whom Courtney was rumored to be dating, was on the sign-up board, so I put my name right under his.

It was only when we were put head-to-head in the first round that people told me to get ready to be destroyed because Graham Ericson, some Rob Lowe look-alike, was actually on the Junior tour.

He destroyed me all right. In almost straight sets. Almost.

I’ll never forget the two games I took off him. He didn’t expect that. No one did. I remember people mumbling when it happened in the first set. And then more people came over to watch, including Courtney.

I couldn’t serve for my life, but I had played with my brothers and could hit back pretty hard, especially with my forehand. The first game I took from Graham, he smashed at the net with his racket. The second game I took, he actually tomahawked it into the fence and screamed.

When he did that, I looked over and made lingering eye contact with Courtney. I remembered she had looked back at me sort of shocked and touched. Or at least maybe. It never led to anything, of course, but she knew what I was doing. At least I fantasized that she did for the rest of that summer.

When Courtney suddenly put down the phone and turned in her chair, a look of surprised joy shot across her pretty face as our eyes met. A calendar came loose off the door as she leapt up.

“Terry!” she said as she gave me an unexpectedly huge hug. “Terry Rourke, you’re back!”



47

The water view off the restaurant’s back terrace was even more amazing than the one in the front. Under our outside table’s umbrella, a sea breeze softly rang my water and wine glasses together with a musical chime as I took another bite of my lemon chicken.

“This place you guys have is incredible,” I said to Courtney, sitting across from me. “I remember your dad’s steak house was awesome, but this is, wow, another level.”

Courtney smiled.

“Yeah, we lucked out. My husband, JJ, is a chef and he was burning out commuting into the city. My dad knew the old lady, Mrs. Korkowski, who was selling. There were all these huge bids, but she sold to us because we assured her we were going to keep the farm going.”

I nodded, knowing my local history. The Hamptons was mainly an Irish and Polish farming community before the 1970s, when Wall Street people found it and started buying up everything. My father had actually moved out here from the Bronx, having loved the wonderful weekends and summers he spent on his uncle’s farm in Bridge Hampton.

“Special Agent Farmer Courtney,” I said. “Life’s pretty funny, isn’t it?”

“You’re telling me, Terry Rourke. Here he sits, the Roger Federer of the Hampton Bays, all grown up.”

“You bet,” I said, sipping the white wine, which was even better than the chicken. “And when I’m not scoring from the baseline and kissing the Wimbledon trophy, I’m in Philly central booking with a collar. And you’re a Fed because...? Let me guess. They have a really good lap pool down in Quantico?”