“Oh.” Coco had expected Leslee to say he was with his trainer or in town picking up breakfast. “How long will he be away?”
“He has stops in Bali, Lombok, and Irian Jaya, then a big meeting in Jakarta. They’re trying to pass all this new legislation, which would be very bad for Bull’s business, but I doubt it will ever come to fruition.” Leslee winks. “I told Bull he had to get his ass home by Saturday. We can’t let work get in the way of our social life.”
“Obviously not!” Coco says. She’s been here fifteen minutes and already she feels like she needs a shower.
Leslee leads Coco through yet another door into what turns out to be the at-home gym, complete with side-by-side Pelotons, a treadmill, and a full rack of free weights; the room smells like the rubber floor and is as cold as a meat locker. Then Leslee says, “Time to get down to business.” Coco follows her along the hall and they enter a tiny jewel-box library with a fireplace made entirely out of seashells. This could look cutesy and crafty but here it’s a work of art, a showpiece that belongs in a magazine. Coco immediately spies some of her favorite titles on the shelves—This Is How It Always Is, Beautiful Children, Luster.
“Are these your books?” Coco asks. She plucks Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff off the shelf. “How much did you love this?”
Leslee stares at her blankly and Coco puts the book back. Okay, never mind. The books must have come with the house too.
Leslee sits behind an antique escritoire and invites Coco to take the chaise in front of the fireplace.
“I have some things for you,” Leslee says. She hands Coco a white paper shopping bag from, yes, Murray’s Toggery. Coco pulls out a stack of peony-pink polo shirts, size small. Beneath the shirts are several pairs of white linen shorts. Coco blinks. She has never worn shorts made of anything other than denim. She has never voluntarily worn a polo shirt.
“I’m sorry about the uniform,” Leslee says. “It was Bull’s idea. He feels… well, he wants our household staff to wear uniforms. So people know who you are.”
Coco is no stranger to jobs that require uniforms. She had to wear a green gingham dress and a white apron when she worked at Grumpy Garth’s Diner. But for some reason, Coco is caught off guard. She assumed her own clothes would be fine (though who is she kidding; they wouldn’t have been fine at all). While they were standing in Leslee’s closet, Coco had a brief fantasy that Leslee was going to invite her to borrow anything she wanted—after all, Leslee has more clothes than a person could wear in a lifetime. Coco supposes it’s the phrases household staff and so people know who you are that irk her. But what did she expect? She works for the Richardsons; she isn’t their friend.
Leslee pulls a Moleskine notebook from the escritoire’s drawer and hands it to Coco. The moss-green cover is embossed with the initials CC. “I didn’t know your middle name.”
“It’s Marie,” Coco says. She accepts the notebook—the monogram is a thoughtful touch. Leslee hands Coco a slender box that turns out to hold a Montblanc pen.
“Your database,” Leslee says. “Bull and I are hopelessly old-fashioned. We love pen and paper.”
Coco appreciates the heft of the pen; it is, she thinks, a writer’s pen. The gifts have improved her mood.
“Write everything down, please,” Leslee says. “Take notes, make observations, create lists, and check things off. Understood?”
“Understood,” Coco says. “Do you have forms for me to fill out?”
“Forms?”
“Like a W-two?” Coco says. “For my paycheck?”
“No,” Leslee says. “This is a cash job.”
Coco nods slowly, considering this. Part of her is, naturally, thrilled. Cash! But another part of her worries about the IRS. Will they come after her for tax evasion? If Kacy were sitting here acting as Coco’s counsel or conscience, she would disapprove. If the Richardsons aren’t paying Coco properly, how can she be sure they’ll treat her properly? They could, in theory, fire her at a moment’s notice, and she would have no recourse. Does their failing to play by the rules with her salary indicate more widespread improprieties? Everything from the at-home bar to the mahogany deck of the Aquariva appears slick and glossy, but are the underpinnings rotten?
Coco fears that the answer is yes. She’s about to open her mouth to protest when Leslee says, “I know Bull told you thirty-five dollars an hour back in St. John but we’ve decided that the complex and discreet nature of this job deserves a more robust salary, so we’re bumping it up to fifty dollars an hour.”
Coco feels faint. She immediately thinks of her favorite line from the movie Blue Jasmine: “It’s not the money, it’s the money.”
It’s the money, Coco thinks.
“I’d like you to start each day at eight,” Leslee says. “Mornings will typically be busy with errands, afternoons a little lighter. We’ll ask you to work in the evenings when we entertain, and for that, we’ll bump you to time and a half.”
Seventy-five dollars an hour! Coco struggles to keep a straight face, though the imaginary Kacy sitting next to her would like Leslee to clarify what she means by “complex and discreet.”
“A cleaning team will come on Mondays and Fridays,” Leslee says. “But we’ll need you to do light housekeeping. You’ll make our bed every morning, fold our pajamas, put dirty clothes in either the hamper or the dry-cleaning bag. You’ll set up an autopay account at the dry cleaner; I’ll give you my card to do that. You’ll take care of all the provisioning: groceries, produce, alcohol, pharmacy, bakery, florist. You’ll make our dinner reservations—and we always like to have a plan B, because our mood or the weather might change—you’ll pick up our mail from our post office box, open our packages, and make regular trips to the dump with the cardboard because apparently our trash service won’t collect it.”
Coco is madly scribbling in her new notebook: Make bed, pajamas, dry cleaning, alarm code 888, cardboard. But in her head, there’s a different kind of scribbling: Make the Richardsons’ bed? Fold their pajamas? Eww! They’re two grown adults; can’t they fold their own pajamas, and haven’t they heard that making the bed when you wake up is one of the habits of highly successful people?
“Which days will I have off?” Coco asks.
Leslee glances up. “You know, you remind me of myself when I was your age.”
“Seriously?” Coco says. She takes in Leslee’s polished countenance, her ease in this giant, beautiful home on the water. Coco thinks about the house she grew up in: vinyl siding the color of margarine, wall-to-wall carpet, the pond out back with its skin of green algae.
“Seriously,” Leslee says. She studies Coco’s face as though searching for something—traces of her younger self, perhaps. Coco is so unsettled that she forgets what they were just talking about. Something important… it was…
“Days off?” Coco says. The imaginary Kacy sitting next to her approves. Stand up for yourself!
“You won’t have any days off, per se,” Leslee says. “After all, we don’t take days off from living. But I assure you, you’ll have plenty of downtime. You can lie on the beach here, I’m having a hot tub installed in the new garden—”
“I’ll be free to leave the property, though, right?” Coco has a vision of herself chained to Triple Eight like the Rawleys’ Doberman back in Rosebush. “I’d like to see my friends.”
“You’ve made friends here already?” Leslee says. “Are we talking about ‘Susan Geraghty, the librarian’?” She uses air quotes and Coco breaks into a light sweat. Does Leslee know that Ms. Geraghty never set foot on Nantucket?
“I’m friends with Kacy Kapenash,” Coco says. “Her father is the chief of police.”
“How funny!” Leslee says. “I had lunch with her mother yesterday.” She pauses. “How well do you know the Kapenashes?”
“I’ve been staying with them this past week.”
Leslee’s perfectly shaped eyebrows rise almost imperceptibly. “You have?”
There’s a knock on the library door. “Entrez!” Leslee calls out like a character in a play.
