“It’s been declined.”
Coco smiles indulgently. “Would you try it again?”
The girl feeds the chip into the reader. “Declined again. Do you have another card?”
Coco has only her own card and some cash, her own personal money. The total is a hundred and twenty-six dollars (for tomatoes, corn, eggs, and lilies!). There’s no way Coco is paying for this. She wonders if Leslee blocked Sea View Farm on her credit card because she hates Delilah so much. Is that a thing you can do? There are three people behind Coco in line, and she has two choices: use her own money or humiliate herself by putting everything back. This, she thinks, is karma pinching her for her hubris.
Just buy it, she thinks. The lilies will look pretty on the counter and they’ll smell nice; who cares if they cost ninety dollars? (Coco cares. It’s not the money, it’s the money.)
“I’m sorry,” she says. “I think I should just…” She remembers the young mothers she used to see at Harps in Rosebush, asking the cashier to take off the six-pack of Mountain Dew (We don’t need it) and the clementines (I’m not even sure how they got in my cart) when they spent more than they had on them. Coco feels the heat of the other customers’ gazes at her back.
“Coco?”
Coco turns to see Delilah approaching. Which makes the situation a thousand times more awkward. Now Coco will have to suck it up and pay.
“Is there a problem?” Delilah asks.
“Her card—” the teenager says.
“My card,” Coco says, “I mean Leslee’s card was declined. But it’s fine, I have cash of my own, I’ll just—”
Delilah waves a hand. “Put it on my house charge,” she tells the teenager.
“Oh, no, you don’t have—”
“Coco, please,” Delilah says. “I’m just so happy to see you somewhere other than Triple Eight.”
Coco takes her bag and the lilies. Delilah strolls with her to where Baby is parked. Coco says, “Thank you, I’m sorry. The card being declined was… unexpected.”
Delilah winks. “Leslee probably forgot to pay her bill because she’s been so busy getting everyone on the island stinking drunk.” She peers in the passenger window at the other parcels. “Do you ever splurge on treats for yourself?” she asks. “Because I know I would.”
Coco lays the lilies across the seat and puts on her new sunglasses; she finally upgraded from the pink plastic pair she’d found at her bar. The new pair has polarized lenses that turn the whole world a clear, sparkling blue. “For myself?” Coco says, as though the idea never occurred to her.
Coco has one last errand—to fill Baby’s tank with gas. Baby takes premium unleaded, which on Nantucket is a mind-blowing five dollars and sixty-five cents a gallon. But Coco doesn’t get to spend ninety-five dollars on three-quarters of a tank of gas because, once again, Leslee’s card is declined.
When Coco gets home, she finds Leslee in the library seated at the escritoire with—Coco blinks—two fingers of bourbon in front of her (it’s a quarter past eleven) and her checkbook out.
“Hey,” Coco says. She waves the card. “This was declined a couple of times this morning.”
Leslee glances up. “Ridiculous.”
Right, Coco thinks. Except it’s not.
“It was declined at the farm. I had the girl try it twice.” Coco will obviously not mention Delilah. “Then it was declined at the gas station.”
“Well, I don’t know what to tell you, and Bull’s not here.”
“He’s not?” Coco says. “Did he go on a business trip again?”
“New York,” she says. “Or DC. I can’t remember which. He’s meeting with lawyers about god knows what. He’ll be back tonight.”
“Do you want to look at your account online and see what the problem is?” Coco asks. “I can help you.”
Leslee sips the bourbon. “No, I do not want to look at my account online,” she says. She tears a check from the checkbook. “I have to pay Benton before he sues us.”
There are two other checks on the desk, one made out to Tiffin Academy for a hundred thousand dollars and one made out to the Francis Ambrose Memorial Scholarship Fund for seventy-five thousand. Leslee takes pictures of each check on her phone.
“Would you like me to mail those?” Coco asks.
Leslee rips up both checks and lets the pieces float into the wastebasket. “No, I would not.” She glances up at Coco impatiently. “Anything else?”
“What should I do about the card?”
“I have no idea, Coco,” Leslee says, picking up Benton’s check, which is still in one piece. “I have to deliver this so that he’ll finish the garden so I can have my hot-tub party.” She throws back the rest of the bourbon. “I need to go.”
The next morning, Coco and Lamont eat the juicy, sweet Rainier cherries in bed. “Elite cherries,” Lamont says. “The Amalfi lemons of cherries,” Coco says. She’s been considering getting a tattoo of an Amalfi lemon on her inner wrist.
“Do you think Bull and Leslee have money problems?” Coco asks.
“You’re kidding, right?” Lamont says.
Coco tells him about the credit card (Leslee gave Coco a new card from something called ANZ, an Australian bank). Then she tells him about Leslee taking pictures of the two donation checks before ripping them up.
“I don’t pretend to understand why Leslee does what she does,” Lamont says. “And you probably shouldn’t try either.” He holds a cherry between his teeth and Coco leans in to take a nibble. Juice dribbles down her chin, leaving golden drops on her white sheets, but in the next second, the cherry is devoured and she’s kissing Lamont and who cares about the sheets and who cares about Leslee?
In the days following, Benton Coe’s crew work around the clock on the circular garden. (Twice, they arrive so early that they almost catch Lamont leaving Coco’s apartment.) The progress they make in just a few days blows Coco’s mind. She feels like she’s on the sofa with her mother watching an episode of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. Where are you, Ty Pennington? she wonders.
Leslee invites Coco for the big reveal and tells her to close her eyes. Leslee must not realize Coco can see straight down into the garden from her apartment.
