The High Season(36)

    “Mind if we run an errand before we go back?” Lucas asked her. “It’s on the way.”

To Doe, an errand meant picking up toothpaste or dry cleaning, but Lucas drove to a semi-industrial section north of the highway and pulled into the parking lot of a storage unit company.

He sat behind the wheel, not getting out.

“What is it?” she asked.

“It’s a big fucking pain in the ass,” he said. “My nightmare dead mother.”

“That sounds like something I’d stream with popcorn.”

“It’s beyond.”

Simone Fischer Clay. Doe had looked her up. A poet. Beautiful. Peter’s second wife. An alcoholic who moved to Italy and drowned. Maybe suicide. Lucas had gone to boarding school—more than one—and had bounced among Simone and Peter and Adeline during his childhood. In the summers he’d been on European bicycle trips and sailing trips and pre-college programs at fancy universities. It was sad in that way that the childhood of a rich kid can seem lonely, but you still have to think, Wow, I wish I had that.

“She packed up the Sag Harbor house and left stuff here,” he said. “Just a couple of boxes I think. She sold everything else. I just want to stop getting the fucking bill.”

He rubbed his eyes and kept his hand there. Fantastic. The guy was about to cry like a…well, like a guy who can’t help crying even with a girl in the car. How many cocktails had he had? She didn’t know him well enough to go through this kind of drama. Not in her job description. But when he took his hand away she was relieved to see his eyes weren’t all misty. They were as sharp and pale as ever.

    “You can wait in the car,” he said, opening the door.

“That’s okay. I’ll give you a hand.”

She followed him while he checked in and borrowed a hand truck. He led her down a hallway of blue doors. He hesitated again, holding the key in the lock. And just like that, looking at his hand on the knob, not turning, she wanted to leave. Nausea twisted her stomach. She tried to catch her breath, like she’d been knocked off a stool and had hit the ground hard.

She was back in that hot hallway, her hand on the knob, counting breaths, afraid to turn it.

She had to do it when Shane died. Shari couldn’t deal. Clean out his room, his pajamas still with his smell, his Finding Nemo sheets. It’s your fault so you have to do it I’m his mother nobody can expect me to do it you do it and don’t let me see anything

She’d been eleven.

“Hey,” she said. “I know this is rough.” It was the first real thing she’d said to him. She knew how to order his coffee—cortado, extra hot—but she didn’t know anything about what he felt until now.

“You have no fucking idea,” he said, and pushed open the door.

The room was the size of Doe’s garage apartment, pretty much, but there were only three boxes sitting on the ground. The tape was loose, and Lucas opened one, then another, cursing steadily.

He held up a frying pan, then a pale-peach silk nightgown. “Can you believe this shit? It’s full of crap. Dish towels. Poetry books. Jesus. What was she thinking?” He balled up the nightgown and tossed it back in the box, then kicked it. “Thanks, Mom. You fucking cunt.”

Doe hovered by the door. She did not interrupt if a man was in a rage. She’d learned that the hard way, like most women. She let Lucas stack the three boxes on the hand truck by himself.

    It started to sprinkle rain as they emerged. “Great,” Lucas snarled. “Now it’s fucking raining.” He shoved the boxes into the back of the Jeep. She waited in the car while he returned the hand truck and the key, still scowling like a little boy.

Which he was. A little boy with car keys.

He got back in the car and reached under the seat. He took a swig from a flask.

“Let me drive,” she said.

He didn’t answer, just took another long swallow, his throat working.

“Look, you’re upset, you want a drink, fine,” she said. “But let me drive.”

“I’m not fucking upset, okay?”

“I’m getting out, then,” she said. “I’ll get an Uber.” But she didn’t know if they had Uber out here, or even where she was.

He stepped on the gas. Driving fast, driving like an idiot in afternoon traffic, passing people on the Sag Harbor Turnpike, driving on the shoulder, hitting the brakes like a jerk.

“My parents,” he said. “What a fucking pair. My father, most famous artist of his generation, right? Guess what he left me? Shit nada squat. My mother gets half of what he had, and she spends every fucking dime in ten years. He leaves me nothing until I’m thirty, like I’m a kid. I get an allowance from Adeline. And a fucking American car.”

Oh, poor you, she wanted to say. You went to Brown, your stepmom bought you an apartment and gave you a job. “It’s only eight years away,” she said.

“But it’s mine!” he screamed. “Not Adeline’s!” He slammed the steering wheel. “I’m not a fucking child!”

Arguable, but. “Lucas, cut this the fuck out,” Doe said. “I mean it. You just passed a Ferrari, for crap’s sake.” She knew she was scared, because she was talking in her Florida voice.