Golden Girl(64)

Carson sidles her way toward them to say hi but then stops halfway because what if he doesn’t remember her? It’s too loud to explain who she is and she’ll end up making a fool of herself, which isn’t at all appealing when her night has been so bad already. She should go home. But what’s at home? Nothing. She needs another beer. She heads for the bar; it’s easier moving away from the stage than toward it, but when she tries to step around one guy, he moves in front of her, and when she tries to go the other way, he does too. Funny.

She bares her teeth at him.

“Carson,” he says.

It’s what’s-his-face from the Field and Oar.

“Marshall,” she says. “The Duck.”

He grins. He’s lovely to look at, the same way a baby or a puppy is, although here in the Box with his Cisco Brewers T-shirt and his hat on backward over his golden curls and a little scruff on his cheeks—he must have had the day off because the Field and Oar doesn’t tolerate facial hair—he’s more attractive than the last two times she’s seen him. Look at you, Marshall. She thinks about having a night of good, old-fashioned fun with Marshall the Duck. They can dance, make out, drive to the Strip for a slice, go down to the Public Way by the Galley to skinny-dip and then have sex on the beach.

This would be so refreshing. So clean. So exactly the kind of night Carson should be having at the age of twenty-one.

Should she do it?

“Let me buy you a drink,” she says.

“All set,” he says, holding up a Miller Lite.

At that second, a little blonde in a Lilly Pulitzer shift dress grabs Marshall’s hand. “Let’s dance.” She turns and sees Carson. “Hey, boo,” she says and Carson resists the urge to smack her. “Sorry, he’s mine tonight.”

Marshall shrugs and lets the pipsqueak pull him through the crowd.

Carson has no right to feel rejected—Marshall asked her out; she turned him down and threw away his number—but she does. He was looking good and felt exactly like what she needed, and she lost him to a blond chew toy.

She waits a second to see if Marshall will come back. When he doesn’t, she turns to leave. Some guy grabs her ass on the way out and Carson is so dejected, she can’t even be bothered to hiss at him.



Back in her Jeep, she checks her phone. Nothing from Zach. He’s definitely sleeping. Well, he needs to wake up. She texts again: WYD? There’s no response. There isn’t going to be a response; he’s asleep. He won’t answer his cell and she can’t call the house.

She decides to do a drive-by; it’s on her way home. She eases around the small rotary, on the lookout for the police. The way her night is going, she’ll probably get pulled over and given a Breathalyzer. She takes Hooper Farm down to Parker and turns right off Parker onto Gray Avenue. The Bridgeman house is set back from the road about a hundred yards. It’s gambrel-style and has a detached garage with a small apartment upstairs, where Zach’s son, Peter, now lives. Peter is away at camp. He’s been going since he was eight years old, and now he’s the head counselor. Zach says that Peter fits in at the camp in a way he never fit in at Nantucket High School. Carson has heard way too much about the trials and tribulations of raising a teenager, considering that Carson is practically one herself.

She pulls over into the parking spot of the deserted horse barn across the street. From here, she has a clear view of the house, which is dark except for the porch light and a light over the garage door. Carson is tempted to knock on the front door or throw pebbles at Zach’s window. She looks at her phone again. Nothing.

The heart is a lonely hunter, she thinks. Her namesake, Carson McCullers, had at least that much right.

She leans back in her seat and closes her eyes. What is she doing? And how, oh, how, did she get here?

The affair started the previous November. Carson enrolled in a bartending class in South Boston. She would stay in Savannah’s town house in Back Bay; Savannah was doing fieldwork for her charity in Dakar, so Carson would have the place to herself. She had recently turned twenty-one and was ready for city life. She planned to run along the Charles, grab coffee from Thinking Cup, choose a museum or an outing for each afternoon, go to her bartending class, then eat out every night. She made a list of restaurants: Pammy’s, Mistral, Area Four.

She was flying from Nantucket to Boston on Cape Air on a nine-person Cessna. Zach Bridgeman was also on her flight. When Carson saw him in the terminal, she waved and he waved back and smiled. She wondered if she had to go over and say hello or if she could just sit down and get lost in her music. The Bridgemans—Zach, Pamela, Peter—were now related to Carson through Willa. Seeing Zach was like seeing a distant uncle or a cousin twice removed.

She thought it was good luck when she was assigned the seat behind Zach on the plane because there would be no need for conversation. As they were boarding the plane, they exhausted their only topic of conversation—where they were going. Zach was going to an air traffic control conference at the Boston Harbor Hotel. (“Oooh,” Carson said, genuinely impressed. “Fancy.”) Carson told Zach that she was taking a bartending class and staying in Savannah’s town house on Marlborough Street. (“I should have been a bartender at some point,” Zach said. “That has always felt like something I missed.”) Carson was reminded then that Zach was friendly and kind. Carson steered clear of Pamela because she could be confrontational and negative. She likely would have told Carson to go back to school, get her degree, and make something of herself.