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“Okay. So we have nine lobsters, six pounds of crayfish, fresh Adams Farm tomatoes for the salad. How many of those?”
Lydia, the Meyer family’s Filipina cook-cum-housekeeper, held up an enormous, groaning burlap sack. “Plenty. Enough to feed an army, Mrs. Lucy.”
“Good. Because we’re going to be an army. Now what else? Beef?”
“Already in the oven, slow-cooking.”
“Fresh bread?”
“Got it.”
“Strawberries? Tonic water for Teddy’s G-and-T? Oh, darn it.” Lucy Meyer clapped a hand dripping in diamonds to her fevered brow. “We’re totally out of gin. I’ll send Arnie into town to get some. Do you think the A&P’s still open?”
“At one o’clock in the afternoon? Yes, Mrs. Lucy. Definitely.” The housekeeper put a reassuring hand on her boss’s arm. Lydia liked working for Mrs. Meyer. “Try to relax. The dinner’s going to be just perfect.”
Lucy Meyer hoped so. She liked things to be perfect, from her dinner parties, to the just-so caramel highlights in her hair, to the updated-every-season soft furnishings of her Martha’s Vineyard summer home. During her childhood, Lucy’s family summered on nearby Nantucket. She remembered her mother’s picnics from those vacations as things of exquisite beauty, from the colorful salads and fresh seafood to the chicly mismatched French chinaware and the crisp white linen cloths thrown over the picnic blankets. As for evening dinners, those were nothing short of spectacular. Lucy remembered long, antique tables, sparkling with cut crystal and the finest silverware. Back then the men all wore tuxes to dinner and the ladies dazzled in chiffon and sequin and silk and lace and jewels. Lucy and her little brother would watch the preparations in awe, before being hustled upstairs to the nursery by their nanny.
Of course, things had changed since the sixties. As an adult, Lucy preferred Martha’s Vineyard over Nantucket, partly because it had more life to it and felt less starched. Everything on the Vineyard was about cookouts and pool parties and sustainable, locally caught seafood. But that didn’t mean an effort shouldn’t be made, especially for Alexia and Teddy’s welcome-back dinner.
Wandering into her huge, vaulted drawing room, Lucy replumped the already perfect cushions on her Ralph Lauren couches and tried to take her housekeeper’s advice.
Relax. It’s just a party. Everything’ll be fine.
How on earth her friend Alexia De Vere coped with the stresses of running a country, Lucy Meyer had no idea. She found running a home quite exhausting enough.
Alexia De Vere’s world was as far removed from Lucy Meyer’s as it was possible to be. But what made the friendship work was that neither woman would have traded her life for the other’s. Lucy loved being a homemaker and a hostess every bit as much as Alexia loved politics and the trappings of power. Both women excelled at what they did. And despite their different lives, they did have some things in common. Both were married to wonderful, supportive husbands who worked in the finance industry. Teddy De Vere was a hedge fund manager, with a niche but lucrative European business. Arnie Meyer was a venture capitalist with stakes in funds across the continental United States as well as in Asia and now the growing Middle Eastern market. The two men had never worked together directly, but they understood each other’s business. From day one they had gotten along like a house on fire.
It was hard to believe that more than twenty years had passed since Arnie Meyer sold the De Veres their summer home. The Gables was a comfortable, midsize property on the edge of the Meyer’s Pilgrim Farm estate, with a pool, a small guesthouse, and an attractive backyard filled with clematis and roses and towering hollyhocks. Arnie and Lucy lived in the much grander “big house,” a spectacular eighteenth-century farm with high ceilings, original wide oak floorboards, and vast, airy rooms filled with light. Alexia and Lucy had both been young mothers when they met, the summer that Teddy bought the Gables. Lucy remembered her first meeting with Alexia as if it were yesterday. Already a British MP, she was clearly extremely ambitious even then. But no one, least of all Lucy Meyer, imagined that her new neighbor would one day reach the dizzying heights of power that she now occupied.
My friend the British home secretary.
Lucy quite literally never got tired of saying it.
Tonight was an extra-special occasion. Not only because Alexia and Teddy were back on the island for the summer after Alexia’s triumphant appointment. But because Michael, their ridiculously good-looking son, was joining them for the first time in many years. Roxie always came out for the summers. Poor girl, she had nothing else to do, and of course, since the accident, she and her father had become pretty much inseparable. But Michael De Vere hadn’t been to the Vineyard since his teens. Lucy Meyer couldn’t help but think how wonderful it would be, how darling and perfect and just wonderful, if Michael De Vere were to fall in love with her daughter, Summer. Then we could all be one, big, happy family.
Lucy’s twenty-two-year-old daughter had recently broken up with her college boyfriend, the dreadful, pompous Chad Bates. (Chad. I mean, really. Who has a perfect little newborn baby boy and calls him Chad?) In Lucy’s book, this meant that Summer was ripe for a new romance. And just imagine if Summer and Michael got married and had babies! Lucy and Alexia could be the doting grannies together.
It could happen. Lucy Meyer could make it happen.
And it all starts tonight.
Michael De Vere sat in the back pew of Grace Church on Woodlawn Avenue, snoring loudly while the congregation sang “Bind Us Together.”
“Wake up!” His sister, Roxie, nudged him in the ribs. “People are staring.”
Michael jerked awake. Immediately a wave of nausea hit him like a punch in the gut. What the hell was he doing here? What madness had possessed him to come, not just to this church full of uptight Episcopalian Americans, but to this island?
He knew the answer, of course. He was here in an effort to appease his father. Teddy had been so furious about Michael dropping out of Oxford that he’d threatened to disinherit him.
“I’ll leave every penny to your sister! Don’t think I won’t!”
But Michael had stood his ground, pressing ahead with his plans for Kingsmere Events and renting office space in Oxford with his friend Tommy. By an incredible stroke of luck they’d immediately landed a huge gig in the Hamptons, organizing a sixtieth birthday party for a billionaire real estate developer on his new Oceano superyacht. Just forty-eight hours ago, Michael had been lying back in a luxury tender with a supermodel under each arm, gazing up at a hundred grand’s worth of fireworks exploding across the East Hampton sky and mentally calculating his profit. (Okay, so perhaps “supermodel” was pushing it. The girls were actually high-class Russian hookers, but they charged like supermodels and looked like goddesses, so who was counting?) The last thing on earth Michael wanted to do the next morning was catch a plane over to sleepy Martha’s Vineyard, the island with the world’s biggest stick up its ass. But Teddy had insisted. “It would mean a lot to your mother if you came out this year.”
For all his apparent independence of spirit, Michael De Vere was devoted to his mother, and to his inheritance. He had no intention of losing either. So here he was, hopelessly hungover, trussed up like a Christmas turkey in a jacket and tie, trying not to puke during the Lord’s Prayer.
At long last the service was over. Michael pushed Roxie’s wheelchair out into the bright sunshine, wincing in pain behind his Ray-Bans.
Alexia slipped a slender arm around his waist. “Are you all right, darling?” she asked. “You don’t look well.”
