“Everything okay?” Coco asks.
He shakes his head. “We didn’t get into the Field and Oar Club.”
That’s why the world is ending? Coco thinks. Spare me.
Leslee doesn’t come out of her room at all on Thursday; Coco reads on the curvy white sofa in the party room, listening for signs of life downstairs. She gets a text from Kacy asking if Coco can go to the Chief’s retirement dinner. Coco is surprised at how happy the text makes her. Time is a miracle worker; Coco’s feelings about the selfies have mellowed. But before Coco can say she’ll go, she has to check with Leslee. Can I let you know? she texts back. It’s crazy around here right now.
Friday, Bull leaves the house in the G-Wagon, and when he gets home, Coco is unpacking yet another wooden crate stuffed with straw that cushions yet another dozen Amalfi lemons.
“Those should cheer Leslee up,” he says and Coco checks to see if he’s kidding. “Listen, will you keep an eye on her, please? I have to travel for the next few days—a car is coming to get me in a minute.”
Coco wants to tell him he can’t just pawn his pathetic excuse for a wife off on her while he gets a hot-stone massage in Ubud. “When will you be back?”
“Tuesday night,” he says. “I’m sorry. This situation in Indo is proving to be a sticky wicket.” He claps Coco on the shoulder like they’re best mates.
Leslee doesn’t emerge from her room on Friday. What is she doing about food? Coco wonders. When Lamont sneaks up to her apartment early Saturday, Coco fully expects him to tell her that he’s taking Leslee out on the boat. Coco steels herself for this news, but he says he hasn’t heard from her.
Coco waits until noon and then taps on Leslee’s door. “Hey,” she calls into the dark bedroom. “Can I bring you anything?”
“Go away,” Leslee says.
Oh, how Coco would love to take these words to heart so she can go out onto the beach and read, but she can’t let Leslee continue her hunger strike. She thinks back to her own worst story: the time she stole money from the diner in Rosebush. Coco arrived in the pinkish-gray light before sunrise, let herself in with the keys Garth had entrusted her with, opened the register, and took what was there. She was pulling money out of the safe when Garth walked in and caught her. He could have called the police or fired her, but instead, he said, “Are you really that desperate to get out of this town?” And when she nodded, tears of shame rolling down her face, he made her breakfast.
Coco preheats the oven, lines a baking sheet with tinfoil, pulls out the waffle iron and gets it smoking hot, beats eggs with some heavy cream. She melts butter in a pan.
Twenty minutes later, she has scrambled eggs, a tray of bacon, and—thanks to some wizard on Instagram—golden hash-brown waffles. She’s about to take a plate down to the primary suite when she hears a shuffling on the stairs. It’s Leslee—or, maybe more accurately, the woman who used to be Leslee. Her skin is the color of putty; her hair is straight and frizzled at the ends; she’s wearing a pair of hideous purple drawstring shorts and one of Bull’s undershirts.
“I smelled bacon,” she says.
Coco sets the plate down at the kitchen island. She pours Leslee a cup of black coffee and a glass of ice water.
Leslee digs into the food with such naked appetite that it feels almost indecent to watch her. She shoves a bite of one of the hash-brown waffles in her mouth, then mumbles something, and Coco pulls ketchup from the fridge. As Leslee is shoveling in the eggs, Coco toasts two pieces of sourdough, butters them, then replenishes Leslee’s eggs. Half a pound of bacon is consumed in seconds. Leslee eats every bite of food down to the bread crusts, which she swipes through the remaining ketchup. She finishes the coffee and the water and burps.
Leslee’s eyes, which resemble small dull pebbles in their swollen sockets, fill with tears. “Thank you.”
“Bull told me about the Field and Oar. I’m sorry, I know how much you wanted to join.”
“I can’t believe we didn’t get in,” Leslee says. “I just don’t understand it.”
You don’t? Coco thinks. Leslee masterminded all the debauchery at Triple Eight this summer; she shamelessly flirted with Lamont, with Benton Coe, with Romeo, and with the freaking chief of police! Everyone has been keeping receipts.
“Busy explained what happened at the membership meeting,” Leslee says. “Sharon voted against me. People told me to watch out for her, you know. And then Phoebe voted against me.”
“Phoebe?” Coco says with genuine surprise.
“I told her I’d donated a hundred thousand dollars to Tiffin Academy so they’d let in her son. I chose her as my pickleball partner even though she sucks so bad she shouldn’t even be let on the court. I invited her boring friends to all my parties—except for Delilah at the end.”
Coco thinks about the check to Tiffin Academy that Leslee ripped up and threw away. She told Phoebe she’d donated, but had she actually donated?
“We did everything right,” Leslee says. “But everywhere we go, we fit in for a little while and then people shun us. Why?”
Because you aren’t genuine? Coco thinks. Because everything with you is transactional? Because you’re an egregious social climber?
“Bull tells me I shouldn’t care. Easy for him to say—he’s consumed with his work. He’s always traveling, trying to keep his business from going down the toilet.” Leslee taps her phone. “Come look.”
Reluctantly, Coco positions herself behind Leslee’s shoulder so she can see the screen. There’s an article in the New York Times with the headline “Indonesia to Ban Single-Use Plastics (But Is It Too Late?).”
Leslee shows Coco the photographs that accompany the article. In a simple wooden hut on stilts over murky green water, a brown child pokes his head out a glassless window. Below the house, in the water, is—Coco enlarges the image because she can’t quite believe what she’s seeing—trash. Plastic bottles, hundreds, thousands of them. Leslee scrolls through picture after picture: flotillas of plastic bottles on rivers, clogging up canals, washing up on beaches. One picture shows a mountain of plastic bottles against a backdrop of verdant rice paddies. In another, a majestic white long-legged bird—an egret or a heron—picks its way among bottles floating in the reeds.
“I’ve been with Bull on his trips overseas,” Leslee says. “It made me sick, seeing all the pollution. These new regulations are good for the Earth, but they’ll ruin us.”
“Ruin?” Coco says, thinking, What does that mean, exactly?
Leslee winds her hair around her forearm. “Bull’s doing battle with the IRS now. They claim he owes millions in back taxes, which he’s fighting since he makes most of his money overseas, but I think he hired a disreputable accountant, someone who tries to work the loopholes, which is fine until you get hanged.”
“What about the movies he invests in?” Coco asks. “Do they make you money?”
“Ha!” Leslee says. “They’ve all lost money. The production business is a sinkhole for cash.” She sniffs. “But Bull loves seeing his name in the credits. Whatever. We were still okay, since Bull’s bev company has always been gangbusters—Indonesia has a population of two hundred and seventy million, not to mention all the tourists—but now it won’t be legal for Bull to do business there. He’s talking about pivoting to aluminum or paper containers, but we own plastics factories, Coco. Bottling plants.”
This, Coco thinks, is what Bull meant by a sticky wicket.
“He has some real estate venture cooking that he claims will bring in some cash, but who knows how long that will take? Bull is a flagrant risk-taker, a shark jumper. And you know what? Every gambler loses at some point. I’ve only been with Bull when he’s winning. I don’t know what I’ll do if he loses everything.” She turns off her phone and the offensive images disappear. “Maybe I’ll kill him. Switch out a cyanide pill for his Viagra. He’s color-blind, you know”—Coco thinks of standing with Bull in the laundry room during the Pink and White Party: Would you please help me pick something out?—“so he’d never be able to tell.” Leslee holds Coco’s gaze for a second, then bursts out laughing. “I’m kidding!” She hugs Coco, then starts crying in her arms. Leslee’s words are muffled by Coco’s shoulder but she hears “So nice having another woman around” and “Didn’t want to belong to that la-di-da club anyway.”
When Leslee finally pulls away, Coco rips some paper towels off the roll so Leslee can mop her face.
“Thank you for listening,” Leslee says.
Coco nods. Leslee isn’t going to kill Bull. She’s just really sad. For perhaps the first time, Coco sees Leslee Richardson as a human being with a point of view. They’re having a moment, Coco thinks, and no one is more surprised than she is.
