Beach Wedding(9)

But I was already inside, tearing off my clothes, running toward the shower.

“What are you up to now?” my mother, Rosemarie, called in her Northern Irish accent from the living room, where she was doing the ironing while watching an old black-and-white war movie.

“Work!” I yelled as I turned on the shower in the hall bathroom. “Nick’s outside. Tom was supposed to help him at a catering job. Nick needs my help.”

“He’s going to take you?” I heard my mom say. “Wow, he must be desperate.”

“Gee, Mom, thanks,” I said and slammed the door.

In three minutes flat, I was out of the shower and in front of my dresser mirror in my Reservoir Dogs outfit, putting a little gel in my cropped sandy hair that I’d gotten cut a few days before.

I looked at my slate blue eyes just like my dad’s. I had a kind of stubble thing going on, so I didn’t bother shaving.

I can pass for twenty, I thought.

Maybe.

Then I heard the Caddy’s horn honk, and I flew out the door.



11

My Sunday has just taken one heck of a turn, I thought with a smile as I sat back in the soft leather passenger seat of Nick’s bouncing and gliding black Cadillac.

“So, where we going?” I said just as we got onto the Montauk Highway.

“Shut up,” Nick said as he spun the wheel and we pulled into the lot of Beachhouse Liquors and Spirits.

“Hey, isn’t this Denny Milton’s liquor store?” I said.

“Get the wax out of your ears. Don’t you say a damn word, you hear me?” Nick said as he wove the Caddy around back into the loading area.

Denny’s store manager, some tall long-haired old pothead named Alex, was at the low concrete loading dock’s back door, waiting for us as Nick pulled to a hard stop.

“Hey, who’s the kid? I thought you said Tom was helping you,” the hippie said in greeting.

“It’s his brother,” Nick said as we hopped out.

“No, it isn’t. I know his brother, Mickey. I busted him for fake IDs all last summer.”

“Hello? Tom’s Irish, remember? This is his other brother.”

“You’ve got to be kidding. How old is he?”

“Nineteen,” Nick lied.

“Nineteen, my ass,” Alex said. “Denny know about this?”

“What the hell do you think?” Nick said in an awed subdued way that suggested he wouldn’t dare to breathe without Denny’s go-ahead.

“Okay. Whatever,” Alex said, handing him a clipboard. “As long as Denny knows.”

Nick mounted the concrete steps in a single bound and grabbed a hand truck and then passed me another.

“Yeah, screw Denny,” Nick said to me under his breath as we went through a doorway into the hot, dim storage room. “What Denny doesn’t know won’t hurt him.”

Going off the clipboard, we quickly started loading up the Caddy and the liquor store’s beat-up delivery van with boxes of booze.

I started to wonder what kind of party this would be as we did four and then five full hand truck runs back and forth from the storage room to the vehicles. In minutes, I was sweating my ass off again.

But even after we humped out about thirty heavy cases, we weren’t done. Nick led me back into the storage room’s walk-in cooler and we rolled out not one but two ice-cold barrels of fun courtesy of the Heineken company.

After we laboriously got everything up into the van, Alex came back out and carefully double-checked all the boxes off the clipboard to see that we hadn’t tossed in a few extra cases on a five-fingered discount.

As Alex finally went back inside and closed the door, Nick looked at me and then at the van and the Caddy, trying to decide.

He finally fished out his Caddy keys from his black jeans and reluctantly handed them to me.

“We’re heading over to Meadow Lane, okay, moron?” he said. “You follow me. Very, very carefully. Because if you put one little scratch on her—”



12

A minute later, after I slipped on a pair of Ray-Bans I found in the glove box, I was out on the Montauk Highway, rolling in Nick’s booze-filled Caddy, looking around for anyone I knew to hopefully see how incredibly cool I suddenly was.

Because of this, I was a tad late to see Nick’s brake lights on the liquor van ahead, and the Caddy’s brakes shrieked as I slammed a foot down on them just in time.

I smiled sheepishly at Nick staring at me in the van’s side-view mirror with a look like he was about to come out swinging.

I got this, I mouthed at him as I gave him a calm thumbs-up.

We got on Halsey Neck Road and then made a left onto Meadow Lane’s beach road and began driving by the money-green high hedges. A couple of miles north, we slowed behind a small traffic jam of cars as a truck, a massive 18-wheeler, tried to pull in through one of the narrow hedge gates.

The driver was having some issues. He was going back and forth, trying to figure out how to get his big rig through the hedge wall and down the slope of the seashell drive without flipping the whole thing over.

As we waited, Nick got out of the van and came over.

“Hey, dummy,” he said as he took the Ray-Bans off me. “You didn’t crack it up. Or at least not yet. Good job.”

“What’s up with the tractor trailer?” I said as I looked beyond the hedge we were parked beside. “Wait a second. Whose house is this? No! Is this...? No...! The Glass House?”