Anna Pitoniak - Necessary People

“Nana?” Stella squinted. “Oh, Nana, you didn’t have to stay up for us.”

“Don’t be silly, my dear,” her grandmother said. She was a petite woman, dressed in slacks and a cardigan and a string of pearls, her silver hair neatly bobbed. I shivered, still in the cotton dress I’d worn to work that day. It was August, but it felt more like fall.

“Nice to see you again, Violet.” Mrs. Bradley smelled like lily of the valley as she brushed a dry cheek against mine. “You haven’t changed a bit.”

“Oh,” I said. “Thank you.”

Inside, the house was as I remembered it: grand but relaxed, with dark wood floors and white walls. There were family photos everywhere, Oliver and Stella in Kodachrome, ancestors in faded sepia. The property was set far down the driveway, at the tip of a peninsula, surrounded by water on three sides, the neighbors invisible. The house sat atop a prow of land, the lawn sloping down toward the rocky beach. As we passed through the wide living room into the kitchen, the windows were open to the night air and the roar of the ocean.

It was inherently elegant in a way that made Anne and Thomas’s home in Rye look overdone. Anne, I had gathered, didn’t particularly enjoy spending time with her mother-in-law. Stella’s parents had their own beach house in Watch Hill, but the Bradley grandparents insisted that each branch of the family spend at least a week at the Maine compound, adhering to strict rituals of tennis matches and cocktail hours and dinner parties. The elder Mrs. Bradley was a far better Wasp than Anne would ever be, and this made Anne insecure.

“Did my parents already go to bed?” Stella asked.

“They were tired,” Mrs. Bradley said, placing a loaf of bread on the kitchen counter. “Did you eat? You look thin, Stella. Your mother doesn’t feed you enough.”

“My mother doesn’t feed me at all.” Stella laughed. “That’s Violet’s job now.”

“Oh?” Mrs. Bradley said, pulling a serrated bread knife from the knife block.

“Violet’s a great cook,” Stella said. “Among her many talents.”

“She is?” Mrs. Bradley said, with a faint smile that suggested of course she is, just look at her. “Well, Violet. You must cook for us sometime.”

After Mrs. Bradley had fixed us chicken salad sandwiches (awfully dry, without mayonnaise or mustard) and said good night, Stella opened the refrigerator. “Aha,” she said, holding up two bottles of beer. “Let’s go eat outside.”

As we left behind the radius of light that spilled from the living room windows onto the lawn, the night was dark and clear. The grass, when we sat down on it, was parched and spiky. Mrs. Bradley had said it was one of the driest summers on record.

“God,” Stella said, leaning back on her elbows and kicking off her sandals. “Aren’t you so fucking happy to be away from that office?”

“I suppose,” I said.

Stella laughed. “ I suppose, ” she said, in a singsongy voice.

“What?”

“You’re so serious. Loosen up, Vi, we’re on vacation.”

Stella pulled a joint from her pocket. As she sparked the lighter and raised a questioning eyebrow at me, I shook my head.

“I’m okay,” I said.

“Miss Goody Two-Shoes,” she said. “Here, take it.”

“No, really.” I pushed her hand away. “It’ll just put me to sleep.”

She shrugged and took a long inhale. “Your loss, loser.”

My phone buzzed against my leg: an e-mail from a senior producer, about a segment I’d been working on. I was typing a response when Stella reached over and grabbed the phone, tossing it on the grass between us.

“Hey!” I said. “That was work.”

“No phones at meals. Nana’s house, Nana’s rules.”

“Does your dad know about this rule? I bet you ten dollars we come down for breakfast tomorrow and he’s already glued to it.”

“Rude, Violet.”

“I bet you a hundred dollars.”

“Look,” she said, pulling out her own phone and dropping it next to mine. “Even though you’re being very snarky—here. A show of good faith.”

“Fine,” I said.

“Fine,” she said. After a second, she started giggling.

“How high are you?” I said.

“I got it from some skeeze at the gas station,” Stella said. “It’s probably laced.”

We lay on our backs for what felt like a long time. In Maine there was no light pollution, and the sky was bright with stars, so regular and dense that it looked like a dark colander studded with thousands of holes. There was silence, except for the roar of the ocean and the occasional rasp of Stella’s lighter.

My phone vibrated again. I couldn’t resist, and sat up to see what it was. The screen was alight with a text message from Jamie. I was reaching for it when Stella grabbed it first. That’s when I realized it wasn’t my phone—it was hers.

She curled over the phone, her body angled away from me.

“Jamie’s texting you?” I said.

“He’s funny,” she said. The light from the screen illuminated her smile.

“What is it?”

But she was standing up, sliding her feet back into her sandals. She bit her lip, then pushed a button and held the phone up to her ear. “I’ll see you in the morning,” she called back over her shoulder. “Take the guest room at the end of the hall.”

“What about you?” I said.

She was already halfway back to the house. “Hey!” she said, her voice clear and sweet. Then she was laughing. “Yeah, I know. I know.”

Her voice faded into the distance. A knot formed in my stomach. Jamie and Stella were texting each other? They were calling each other? After midnight on a Friday? I had always assumed that Jamie disliked Stella, that their friendship only existed because they had me in common. But lately I’d been working harder than ever, determined to stay at least a step ahead of Stella in the KCN hierarchy. I’d been spending less time with both of them.

I started to gather the dishes. Stella had left behind her beer bottle, her plate with her half-eaten sandwich. Her joint, too. It was smoldering where she’d dropped it, the grass around it starting to smoke. The orange glow of the ember was like a firefly trapped in the darkness, a dangerous remnant of Stella’s routine carelessness.

For a second, I thought about leaving it there. Maybe the flame would catch, ripping across the bone-dry lawn toward the Bradley compound. A horrible, magnificent inferno. A lesson to her. If I kept cleaning up her mistakes, Stella would never learn.

The days in Maine felt expansive. I’d wake without an alarm, the guest bedroom flooded with sunlight. Stella aside, the Bradley clan were chipper morning people, eating breakfast on the porch and chatting while they read the Wall Street Journal. Breakfast, like every meal, was a civilized affair. A glass bowl of fruit salad, a silver pot of coffee, scones and muffins baked that morning by Louisa, their efficient housekeeper.

Stella would wander downstairs in late morning. We’d go for a swim off the end of the dock, or we’d play tennis on the Bradley’s court, or we’d take the boat to the next town over. Occasionally we ran into someone Stella knew, locals Stella had befriended in previous summers. “Tenth grade,” she said, waving as she reversed the engine and we pulled away from the gas station dock. The manager of the marina waved back, beaming at her. “I blew him in the back of his car.”

“Really?” I said. He was scruffy and potbellied, and definitively not her type.

She put on her sunglasses. “He sold me coke. It was a fun summer.”

In the afternoons, we’d return to the house for a late lunch and then fall asleep reading on the shady porch, the thrillers and spy novels that lined the Bradleys’ bookshelves. As the day faded, we’d go for another swim. Mrs. Bradley had us gather for cocktails at 6:30 p.m. precisely. We had to be showered and dressed. The housekeeper would have dinner waiting for us afterward.