The only moment in the movie that Leslee ponders later is Coco slipping and falling off the boat.
Leslee (who, as Coco once acknowledged, is a human being with a point of view) remembers the events happening this way: As news of the fire breaks among guests of the sail, Leslee decides to sneak a couple of drags off a cigarette to steady her nerves (her house is going up in flames; she will have to do the best acting of her life in a moment). She finds Coco at the back of the boat all alone, taking a picture of the sunset. The idea comes to Leslee swiftly: If she pushes Coco off the boat, it will look like Coco is trying to run because she set the fire.
However, before Leslee can decide if she’s actually going to go through with pushing Coco, she hears a splash and watches Coco’s pink-and-white-clad form hit the water. Leslee is stupefied; she very nearly calls for help, but there’s a disorienting moment when Leslee wonders if she did push Coco or if Coco somehow knew Leslee’s intentions and fell in as she tried to avoid being pushed. Yet another part of Leslee wonders if Coco might have… jumped. This is obviously absurd; why would Coco ever jump off the boat?
But then, look how things turned out: Leslee and Bull are ruined and Coco has a blockbuster movie—and Leslee just heard that Warner Bros. has green-lit Rosebush as well. Talk about a clever revenge.
If Leslee didn’t hate Coco so much, she might admire her.
Nantucketers are known for bouncing back from even the most troubling events and by Labor Day weekend, nearly all the uproar caused by the Richardsons has receded into the background. Life, after all, goes on. Eddie Pancik and Addison Wheeler apply for a substantial construction loan from Nantucket Bank to develop Jeanne Jackson’s property out in Tom Nevers. Kacy Kapenash decides to stay on Nantucket for the foreseeable future. She accepts a position at Nantucket Cottage Hospital in labor and delivery, a job that will become especially meaningful in the spring because her brother, Eric, and his girlfriend, Avalon, are expecting a baby in April. Kacy has started dating Stacy Ambrose; if things work out, Kacy might consider moving to Baltimore and taking a job at Johns Hopkins.
Busy Ambrose tells anyone who will listen that Leslee Richardson never made the seventy-five-thousand-dollar donation to her husband’s scholarship fund that she said she did. Busy sounds surprised by this. She sent me a picture of the check!
A space at the Homestead opens up for Glynnie Oakley. She’s placed on the same floor as all her best friends. It’s just like being back in the college dorm, she tells Lamont.
This frees up Lamont to leave the island, at least for the off-season. He and Coco are thinking of Los Angeles. Coco is starting work on a screenplay that might be based on certain real-life events, and Lamont has an interview for the director of sailing position at the Los Angeles Yacht Club.
As Blond Sharon drives home from pickleball, her phone rings with an unfamiliar number, area code 954. Telemarketer, she thinks, but she answers anyway. It’s none other than Lucky Zambrano.
“I submitted your short story to an online literary magazine called Modern Romance,” he says. “It’s grown wildly popular with the TikTok crowd and has nearly half a million subscribers.”
“I’ve heard of it,” Sharon says. “Mo-Ro!” She can’t believe Lucky took the initiative with her piece. Nancy and Willow will be so jealous when they find out. “When will we hear back?”
“I just did,” Lucky says. “They want to publish it, and they’re paying fifteen hundred dollars.”
Fifteen hundred dollars! Sharon nearly drives off the road.
When she gets home, she shares the news with her kids: “Mo-Ro—TikTok-approved—is going to publish my story and I’m getting paid.”
Robert is playing Minecraft and doesn’t look up.
The twins are briefly energized by the mention of TikTok and come over to give Sharon desultory hugs. She knows she shouldn’t expect much more than this. They’re kids; they see her only as their mother.
She calls her sister, Heather, who, although once again in the middle of a desk lunch, whoops with abandon and says, “I’m so proud of you! Am I in it?”
No, Sharon thinks, but I need to talk to a certain someone who is.
She drives down to the Steamship just as the noon boat starts loading. She hears her name and sees Busy Ambrose sticking her head out the window of her Subaru. She beckons Sharon over. “Your boyfriend is so influential. I was number one hundred and seventy-seven on the standby list, but Romeo pulled some strings and got me on!”
Sharon waves goodbye to Busy—“Have a nice fall, see you at Christmas Stroll!”—and waits until Romeo has loaded all the vehicles (packed to the tippy-tops with tennis rackets, boogie boards, buckets of candy from Force Five, golden retrievers, and sunburned children in need of haircuts) onto the ferry.
When he’s finished, Sharon lowers her sunglasses and says, “You let Busy on the boat after all?”
“I wanted to get rid of her,” he says with a wink. He gathers Sharon in a bear hug. “To what do I owe this honor?”
Sharon beams. “My short story is getting published in Modern Romance,” she says. “They’re paying me fifteen hundred dollars.”
Romeo picks Sharon up and swings her around. “I’m taking you out to dinner tonight.”
“And then maybe karaoke?” she says.
Romeo kisses her nose. “Of course. I’ll come get you at seven.”
As Sharon pulls out of the Steamship parking lot, she notices the bench where she first spied Coco and Kacy getting off the ferry. She’s so glad she abandoned Coco and Kacy as her characters, because who can keep track of all that drama?
Sharon is going to stick to love stories.
42. Your One Wild and Precious Life
The weekend after Labor Day, the entire island turns out at the Oystercatcher for Chief Ed Kapenash’s retirement bash. The Chief’s family is there—his wife, Andrea; Eric and the newly pregnant Avalon; his daughter, Kacy, and her date, Stacy Ambrose; and Chloe and Finn, back from their summers abroad.
“What’d we miss?” Chloe asks.
“Trust me,” Eric says, “you don’t want to know.”
Carson Quinboro is behind the bar slinging glasses of frozen rosé and Mount Gay and tonics; she fetches the Chief a can of ice-cold Whale’s Tale. There’s a huge raw bar with local oysters and cherrystones; servers pass sliders, fried chicken sandwiches, fish tacos. The band, Cranberry Alarm Clock, plays as the sun begins its descent.
Ed isn’t used to this much attention. For the past thirty-five years, whenever he walked into a party, the chatter and laughter stopped. What Ed would like to tell everyone is that he never judged the citizens of this island; he merely tried to keep them safe. He likes a stiff drink and a good dirty joke as much as the next person. He’s far from perfect.
Ed looks around and realizes he’s surrounded by stories. Fast Eddie and Grace are in attendance, which reminds the Chief of when he had to call the FBI because he suspected Eddie was running a prostitution ring out in Sconset (he was right). When the Chief gets a second beer from Carson Quinboro, he thinks about how the poor girl lost her mother, Vivian Howe, in a hit-and-run accident on Kingsley Road. The tragic stories are the ones that come to mind first—when Penny Alistair drove her Jeep off the end of Hummock Pond Road; when Meredith Delinn was hiding out in Tom Nevers and someone left a dead seal on her front porch; when Chloe and Finn’s parents, Greg and Tess MacAvoy, drowned in a sailing accident—but Ed chooses to focus on resilience. Look, for example, at Coco and Lamont. They’ve seemingly recovered from their strange and eventful summer working for the Richardsons. Right now, they’re sitting in Adirondack chairs next to Kacy, who is holding hands with Busy Ambrose’s daughter, Stacy.
Ed feels a hand on his back and turns to see Zara Washington on the arm of Joe DeSantis, the owner of the Nickel sandwich shop downtown. The last unofficial piece of advice the Chief gave Zara was where to get the best lunch, and he apparently did a nifty bit of matchmaking in the process (Dabney Kimball Beech would be proud).
“This is a nice party, Ed,” Zara says. “Everyone on this island really loves you. I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to fill your shoes.”
“You’re going to be a huge success, Chief Washington,” Ed says. “This is an island of good people—everyone in the community shows up for one another.”
“Amen to that,” Joe says.
