Becca Has an Overnight and the Rental Ladies Carry On with the Help of Prosecco: Chapter 20 of "Lady Slipper Farm and the Summer People"

Becca Has an Overnight as the Rental Ladies Carry On with the Help of Prosecco: Chapter 20 of Lady Slipper Farm and the Summer People

Written by Holly Nadler

Becca parked her year-old tan Subaru inside a space of crushed white sea shells, the dug a small Gucci suitcase out of the trunk. It was going on 10 o’clock at night, and these Chilmark woods were dark as the forests in Grimm’s fairy tales. They creeped her out big time.

All of nighttime Chilmark creeped her out. She’d been coming to the island since she was a kid, when Edgartown – quaint captain’s houses and sublime Englishy gardens – was the hub of the social set. It still must serve as someone’s hub, but she had no time or patience to find out whose.

Sometime in the 1990s, the rich and famous and the nouveau chateau crowd had headed for the outer reaches of Up Island, that part of the Vineyard that yielded open fields, far-flung woods, sheep nibbling on dandelions, and crumbling stone walls which, in Becca’s opinion, ought to be broken up with a back-hoe, and plunked far out to sea.

Ted Danson and Mary Steenburgen had started the migration into this spooky part of the Island, perhaps because they honestly favored a pastoral lifestyle. But then anybody who wanted to be Somebody also purchased property in these vast wasted acres, a forty-five minute drive from all the shops and bars and cafes of the Down Island towns.

Becca set up a scream inside her own skull: WHAT WERE THEY THINKING?! She followed that up with a plaintive question: WHEN CAN WE GO BACK?

These reflections carried her along the darker-than-pitch path to Duncan Toomey’s crummy little cabin. As she stood outside his timbered door, she heard the surf pounding down below the cliffs. Why did anyone find this nature-noise comforting? If she had to listen to waves night after night she would get herself some high-quality ear-plugs.

She knocked. She waited. There was no sound of stirring from within the house. She stepped back and scanned the windows, all of them dark. Mother of God!, could the loser be asleep so early? She knocked again, harder this time, with an open palm, bam! bam! bam!

“OPEN UP!” she demanded.

At last, upstairs and directly to the right of the door, a window within one of two matching gables creaked open. The man’s ghastly black bearded and black-maned head poked out.

In a sleepy voice he asked, “Is that the obnoxious woman I shot out of a tree? I’m beginning to wish I’d aimed higher. Coulda just buried you where you fell, and be done with it.”

“Let me in!” she ordered.

“Look, I’ve done all you asked. Took you to that gaudy party, got you patched up at the hospital – “

“And then you split while I was in the examining room!”

 “We were all squared away."

“Oh yeah? Well, what do you think I told them when they asked who popped me?”

“I hope you blamed it on Smoky The Bear. Who else would have spied you up in a tree eavesdropping on party folk?”

“Don’t you dare double-blackmail me!”

“Oh, so we’re doing single blackmail?”

“Darn tootin’! I haven’t reported you yet.”

“I’m grateful. Now goodnight.” He started to close his window.

“I’m staying with you!” she announced.

“I don’t think so.”

“You’re one of those island chumps who keeps his door unlocked, right?”

And before he could answer, she wrenched open the handle-style knob, and let herself into the cabin.

Above the door, Duncan Toomey let out a bellow of despair.

     *  *

Around eight in the morning, the rental ladies assembled in their cramped office overlooking the adorable harbor of Oak Bluffs, now in July wall-to-wall- carpeted with boats. Steeples and towers of Victorian houses rounded out all three sides of the glittering water.

Today the mini-pig Albert toddled in after Mandy. Gwyn and Lori sat at their desks, landline phones jammed to their ears to catch their overnight messages. They liked to tackle problems at the office in the morning, then charge off to deal with their other summer jobs.

At the sight of Mandy, Gwyn put down her phone.

“Kris’s husband’s in the hospital,” she told her, blue eyes behind black-rimmed glasses wide with concern.

“Oh no, why?” asked Mandy. She stood over Gwyn who was already turned out for the day in a vintage frock of sky blue, a black belt cinched at her narrow waist, ears dripping with blue and black pendants. Mandy and Gwyn joined hands. Lori, still on the phone, reached out another hand of commiseration to latch itself onto Mandy’s wrist.

Albert stood under the conjoined women, starting up as if a plum might drop from their new-formed human tree.

Gwyn explained, “He’s had a bunch of bronchial problems since his fall. Last night he couldn’t breathe, and Kris called an ambulance. Turns out he has severe pneumonia. He’s in the ICU.”

Mandy in her mind’s eye saw a tableaux of the Serle family: Two kids, daughter an honors student, son a rising football champ. Small Cape-style house in the suburban woods to the southwest of Edgartown; the poster foursome for a Vineyard year-round family. Yet ever since Kris’s husband had fallen off a roof and broken his neck last October, and their son had started to lose his hearing, the Serles could not catch a break.

“We should set up a vigil at the hospital,” said Mandy.

At their backs, the screen door clacked open. They turned their heads to see a woman enter their rental bat-cave. In her forties and clad in tennis whites, she had a tanned, haggard face. Her white-blond hair was pulled back with a barrette at the nape of the neck.

Without preamble, she asked, “Which one of you is Kris?”

“None of us,” said Lori, putting down her phone. “What can we do for you?”

“I’m renting the Sherman house,” she said grimly.

All three women beamed. This particular mansion facing the Sound was a favorite of the agents’ although “There ‘splaining to do,” as Lori had once put it in a dead ringer of Ricky Ricardo’s voice.

Priced at $12,000 a week, the house was preserved in all its High Victorian luster. It had eight bedrooms, five and a half baths, parlors front and back, and a billiards room that took up the whole of the third floor. The only funky aspect of the house, for prospective tenants, was that the place was decked out, from the top down, with the most dauntingly Gothic of antique furniture, from massive highboys carved with black ebony gargoyles to tear-shaped lamp-shades dripping with beads. 

Mandy described it to future tenants as “Harry Potter-inspired.” Lori called it, “All-out Queen Victoria,” and Kris and Gwyn said, merely, “It’s loaded with antiques from the 1860s.” To each other in the privacy of the office, they vied for full disclosure. Lori once remarked, “It makes ya think Frank Langella as Dracula is reaching out a hand from behind a tapestry with, ya know, long green fingernails.”

But that wasn’t what brought the woman to the bunker. She informed them, in a voice of high dudgeon, “Kris told me I could seat all twenty guests who are invited for my husband’s birthday. She assured me there was sufficient china and flatware for twenty, but nowhere can I find enough napkins. There are only eight cloth napkins! I’ve looked in every cabinet, every drawer in the kitchen, the pantry and the dining room! Eight! And they don’t even match!”

Lori made a high keening noise that meant she was close to losing it with laughter. She jumped up and grabbed her bag.

“I just realized we’re out of Prosecco! For later this afternoon, I mean!”

And she was gone, the screen door blamming behind her.

Mandy and Gwyn moved closer to one another, staring at the woman. Mandy knew Gwyn was thinking precisely what she was: Why can’t this person go out and buy her own damn napkins?

Gwyn cleared her throat. “There’s, ah, Mary’s Linen Shop just up a quarter-of-a-block on Circuit.”

The woman was indignant. “I expect you to provide the napkins! My entire rental was planned around my husband’s birthday party!”

Behind the woman, the door creaked open again. Kris had arrived. There was something halting, almost decrepit in her walk, as she moved around from behind the woman.

Her tired face was white as sheet-rock. Her eyes were puffy, scarlet; she’d been crying. Now she held bunched fists to her cheeks as if forcing back fresh tears. She tottered towards her friends, then delivered her news:

“He’s dead!” she wailed, and she began to sob. “He-he-he didn’t make it! He’s gone! My Eddie’s gone!”

Mandy and Gwyn flew to their friend and bunched their arms around her. All three wept together, Kris’s shoulders heaving with her sobs. At knee-level, Albert joined them, pointing his flat pink disk of a nose against Mandy’s blue cotton trousers.

After long minutes, they began to disengage, wiping their faces with their fingers, Kris snuffling loudly, a fountain of tears still streaming down her cheeks. 

At their backs they heard a discrete cough. Mandy, Kris and Gwyn turned, shocked to see their visitor still there in the office.

She asked the stricken woman, “Are you Kris?” 

“Y-yes,” replied Kris as she stared uncomprehending at the intruder.

“I’m renting the Sherman house. There are only eight napkins and I need twenty.”

All three rental women stared in horror.

Kris gulped out, eyes still flooding tears, “W-w-wha-what?”

“I need twelve more napkins. No, scratch that! I need twenty napkins that match!”

Gwyn blurted out, “Can somebody shoot her?”

Mandy said, “No guns in the office. A prophylactic policy.”

Once again the screen door swung open and this time slammed shut mightily. Lori had arrived back from Our Market with a heavy-looking paper bag in both arms.

“I’ve got the loot!” she cried. “Four bottles! I thought it might be a Prosecco morning! I bought grapefruit juice so we can justify drinking at – “ she squinted at her watch, “—at eight forty-seven in the morning!” She cast a glance at the visitor. “Oh, hello again,” then ignored her as she trundled her bag to their communal table which doubled as Kris’s desk, the one situated closest to the window on the harbor.

Click here for earlier chapters of Lady Slipper Farm and the Summer People, and check back Monday for Chapter 21.