Sara Benincasa - Great

“I’m not saying it was their fault, Naomi, darling,” my mother said testily.

We were all silent for a moment.

“Well,” Mom said brightly, “it’s time we got ourselves to bed. We should be able to sleep through the night this year. No kids next door.” She leaned forward to peck Mrs. Fairweather near the cheek, and then began to clamber out of the SUV.

“Who is staying there this year?” Delilah asked with mild interest.

“Just some young woman, as far as I can tell,” my mother said. “She has a cleaning service come in every week, and the florist is over every few days. When I got here in May, she had an interior decorating service over for a full week. I can’t imagine any owners would let her redecorate if they knew about it.”

“Maybe she’s doing it in secret,” Jeff suggested. “That would be a very East Hampton sort of crime.”

“Like wearing white after Labor Day,” I said.

“Or not going to a top-tier university,” Jeff added.

“Oh, you two,” Delilah said. She giggled mischievously.

“We should hang out sometime, if you want,” Jeff said in a low voice as the adults chattered to one another. “I’m a pretty nice guy. Really.”

I looked at him and cocked an eyebrow. “We’ll see,” I said. He grinned at me, and I had to admit, he looked really good.

I got out of the car, and we waved goodbye as Teddy tore off.

Once the car was out of view, my mother and I stood outside the front door and looked at each other. Neither one of us was particularly pleased with what she saw.

“I’m going to bed,” she said abruptly. “Do you need anything?” Now that no one else was around, she had dispensed with the doting mother act.

“I’m just going to hang out here for a bit,” I said. “Stretch my legs.”

“Be careful. Don’t wander or get lost.”

“Mom, this is like the safest place in the entire world. Nothing bad ever happens in the Hamptons.”

“Okay, okay,” she said with a sigh. “I forget that you know everything. Just remember to lock the door behind you when you come in. You’ve got your key, right? I’ll take your suitcases in.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“Don’t go on some kind of artistic walk through the yards and scare the neighbors,” she said. “The last thing I need is for you to get arrested for trespassing.”

“What the hell is an ‘artistic walk’?” I asked.

“You know what I mean,” Mom said with a sigh.

She gave me a dry kiss on the forehead and took my suitcases into the house. I stood and watched her go. She turned off the front porch light and the front walkway lights, leaving me suddenly awash in near-total darkness. And aside from the dramatic spotlights on the river pool, the enormous house next door had not one light on, either. As my eyes adjusted to the dark, the almost-full moon cast enough glow to allow me to wander without too much trouble.

On impulse, I took off my Docs and socks and dropped them on the front porch. It was summertime, and that meant I could go barefoot, building up the resistance on my feet until I could walk on even a hot sidewalk without wincing. I’ve always liked going barefoot in the Hamptons. It’s so clean that you don’t need to fear stepping on a needle or in dog crap like you do in Chicago. And it made me feel vaguely scandalous. When I get away from my mother for a solo journey in town, I’ll slip off my flip-flops and put them in my beach bag, wandering down the sidewalk “just like some kind of dirty hippie,” as my mother once said in disgust when she caught me. I don’t care, though. I’m a Chicagoan through and through, which means I instinctively shed clothes (not in a whorish way) every time the temperature passes sixty degrees. So my feet get a little more sun. So what?

If moonburn were a thing, the tops of my feet would’ve been fried that night. The moon seemed to glow brighter and brighter with each step I took, acting like a giant lantern in the sky. I walked around the side of the house and watched the moonlight sparkle on the water through the trees.

Something strange caught my eye, an unusual light from an unusual spot. It was tiny, and at first I thought I’d imagined it, but I hadn’t—it was a pinprick of green, and it was coming from some inscrutable spot on the back deck of the castle house, in an area shadowed by one of the big turrets. It seemed to hover in midair, and for reasons I can’t quite explain, I crept closer to the neighboring yard than I ever had before. I got so close, in fact, that I managed to make out the shape of a person cradling whatever it was that glowed green.

Then, all of a sudden, light flooded the person’s face, and I realized it was a she. And what’s more, she had just snapped open a laptop. The green light had come from the charging dock on the laptop, where a power adapter was plugged in. I could see now that the adapter cord ran to an outdoor outlet on the castle’s deck, and she had set the laptop down on a small table before her.

I felt a little stupid, but my embarrassment was soon overwhelmed by fascination with what I beheld. The girl was beautiful, with a white-blond bob and blunt-cut bangs that glowed in the light of the computer. Her big, thick-lashed eyes were trained intently on the screen, which I couldn’t see from my vantage point. She had high, prominent cheekbones and full lips. She was so ethereally thin that she looked as if she might blow away in the light evening breeze and turn into a firefly, or a star. She could’ve passed for a teen angel, or maybe a fairy. Illuminated as she was by the computer screen, she didn’t look entirely of this world.

Maybe it was because she didn’t seem real, but I actually thought about talking to her. It would’ve been completely out of character for me, and chances are I would’ve just freaked her out, probably, and then had to hide from her scornful gaze every time I sat on my mother’s deck. She didn’t look like the type who could generate scorn, but if she was anything like every other girl I’d met during my East Hampton summers, scorn was her second-favorite feeling, after boredom. Instead I stood, frozen and silent, and watched, for what must have been several minutes, as she read and typed on the computer.

Then she did something I’ll never forget. The girl stood up, facing the lake. The white light from the laptop screen lent her face an unearthly glow from below as she stretched out her arms toward the twinkling houselights in the distance. She held it for a long moment, like some kind of yoga pose, just reaching and reaching for something I couldn’t identify. Then, after what seemed like hours, she scooped up the laptop and went into the house, leaving me alone in the moon-drenched yard. I lingered for a moment, listening to the sound of the spring peepers and other frogs calling to one another from the muddy banks of Georgica Pond. I turned back toward my mother’s house. I knew it was time for me to go inside, too.

Skags and I have an issue with the term “brunch,” as in, we think it’s stupid. I mean, if you’re having a meal and it’s in the a.m., that’s breakfast. If you’re having a meal and it’s in the p.m., that’s lunch (or dinner, if it’s after 5 p.m.) I don’t care what you eat. French toast at 1 p.m.? Lunch! Hot pastrami sandwich at 6 a.m.? Breakfast.

Naturally, my mother loves brunch.

I will say that the woman can cook. By the time I got up at 10 a.m., she already had a spread laid out on the table on the back deck—popovers, strawberry-flavored butter, mixed berries, scrambled egg whites with local (of course) goat cheese and fresh-squeezed orange juice. She’d done it all herself in the space of about thirty minutes, probably less. She may fall short of the mothering ideal in most regards, but when it comes to whipping up a fantastic meal, she’s just about perfect.