It's Hot in the Hamptons Read online

  Dedication

  For women leaping into risk: You change the way the world revolves

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Part I: Summer Breeze Chapter 1: A New Ghost in Town?

  Chapter 2: An Immodest Proposal

  Chapter 3: The Titan Treatment

  Chapter 4: Strange Stroll

  Chapter 5: It’s Très Chaud in the Hamptons

  Chapter 6: Party Prep

  Chapter 7: A Truck Driver Who Is Anything But

  Chapter 8: He Built It, They Showed

  Chapter 9: Free Fall

  Chapter 10: That Briefest Little Touch of a Finger . . .

  Chapter 11: When You Marry for Money, You Work for It Every Day

  Chapter 12: Stuck Together and Rather Happy About It

  Chapter 13: The Citiots Are Here

  Chapter 14: High-End Home Life

  Chapter 15: To Cheat or Not to Cheat: That Is the Question

  Chapter 16: Meanwhile Down the Avenue . . .

  Chapter 17: Not So Cheery at the Clarksons’

  Chapter 18: Kitchen Confrontation . . . or Not

  Chapter 19: Meditation Does Have a Downside

  Part II: Summer Heat Chapter 20: Make It or Break It

  Chapter 21: A Little Surprise “for You”

  Chapter 22: Drop-off and Go

  Chapter 23: The Pleasure Principle

  Chapter 24: Keep Your Mouth Shut and Smile

  Chapter 25: If Only Dogs Could Talk

  Chapter 26: That Certain Je Ne Sais Quoi

  Chapter 27: Fight or Flight?

  Chapter 28: Family-Style Lunch

  Chapter 29: Top 10 Reasons Apple Engineers Want You to Get Caught

  Chapter 30: Miserable Motions

  Part III: Summer Storm Chapter 31: Doomed at Duryea’s

  Chapter 32: I’ll Have the Intravenous Sedative, Sir!

  Chapter 33: No Free Lunch in This World

  Chapter 34: A Not-So-Perfect Perfect Day

  Chapter 35: Secrets Here, There, Everywhere

  Chapter 36: High Tension Ringside

  Chapter 37: Constant Cajoling

  Chapter 38: Trapped at a Trunk Show

  Chapter 39: Barn Blockbuster

  Chapter 40: Focus on the Big and the Little

  Chapter 41: That Dashing Little Binaca Trick

  Chapter 42: Flip-Flopping at the Beach

  Chapter 43: Oyster Fest

  Chapter 44: Paddle Party

  Chapter 45: The Secrets of Silk

  Chapter 46: A Whispering Warning

  Chapter 47: Inside the Marriage Tomb

  Chapter 48: Confessional

  Chapter 49: Horse Show Crescendo

  Part IV: Summer Thunder Chapter 50: And So the World Crumbles

  Chapter 51: Get Your Titties There Fast

  Chapter 52: Horses Don’t Bite, or Do They?

  Chapter 53: So the Ghost Can Walk and Talk After All

  Chapter 54: That Rock

  Chapter 55: The Trio Twists and Turns

  Chapter 56: That Briny Juice Forever

  Chapter 57: Fathers May Not Know Best, but They Know

  Chapter 58: Crouching Tigers

  Chapter 59: Bungling the Bricks

  Chapter 60: I Pronounce You Husband and Wife

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Holly Peterson

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Part I

  Summer Breeze

  Chapter 1

  A New Ghost in Town?

  Thursday before Memorial Day Weekend, Sag Harbor Village

  As Caroline faced a bright blue sky, the heat dispersed the city stress that clung like a relentless hangover to her body. Her father had taught her to appreciate this familiar Hamptons sun. Closing her eyes, feeling its warmth penetrate her skin, she knew it would turn bright orange in summer and dim to bluish-purple with the coolness of fall.

  The scent of fried clams sizzling at the Dock House floated toward her in the breeze. On Sunday mornings after church, Caroline’s father used to take her here to Sag Harbor’s Long Wharf pier. They’d buy two plates of the seafood special and sit on this exact bench, agreeing not to tell Mom they’d eaten before lunch. It was now eleven in the morning, and her empty stomach sent a hunger pang up to her brain. The doors of the Dock House had just opened, revealing a bubbling, claw-foot bathtub filled with meandering lobsters. Caroline stood, unable to resist.

  Ten minutes later, back on the bench, she dipped a steaming fried clam into too much tartar sauce, which she had pumped into one of three little plastic pots, and crunched on it whole. She studied the boats starting to populate the marina. Even on the water, the traffic was beginning to get clogged.

  Around her on Long Wharf, the echoes of seagulls trumpeted the season she ached for all year. For three solid summer months to come, she’d bite into sturdy and sweet tomatoes like apples, dig bountiful clams out of the bays, and allow the cooling salve of the Atlantic to splash over her body.

  She’d arrived early to meet her friend Annabelle, wanting time to savor the last twenty-four hours of human civility before the unhinged New Yorkers were let out of their pens. The onslaught of those people en masse coming to the Hamptons for the holiday weekend would make moving around her hometown a stressful exercise. They’d sneak into her parking spots just as she was backing in, and honk at her when she didn’t slam the accelerator the millisecond the red light turned to green.

  Caroline had grown up in East Hampton, and reluctantly moved to Manhattan the day after she tied the knot with Eddie on the back lawn of his father’s Elks Club lodge in Southampton. Eddie promised they’d move back home when they were ready to have kids. At the time, Caroline felt reassured her children would fill their growing lungs with the same salty Atlantic mist that had stuck to the windows of her family’s small home on Bluff Road.

  Only, it didn’t work out that way.

  On either side of the pier, several gargantuan yachts with fabric-covered navy bumpers were tied up to cleats. In anticipation of their .001-percenter owners who would board the next day, deckhands struggled as they loaded bulky cases of pink Moët & Chandon and Domaines Ott rosé onto the gangplanks. By late August the previous summer, the New York papers were lamenting the shortage of the most exclusive brands of rosé in liquor stores on the eastern end of Long Island. No fridge on these yachts would dare chill the Montauk-brewed beer that Caroline grew up drinking. Caroline huffed out as she pondered the whole urban lot of summer people, whining about their drought of pink drinks.

  Looking out at the horizon, Caroline thought she recognized a profile on a small boat. A man was motoring a hundred yards out in a beat-up Boston Whaler near the mouth of the harbor. His Yankees baseball cap was tightly secured, and his sunglasses hid his eyes, but she was sure she recognized that nose and that square jaw, though the hair seemed longer. Heartbeats pulsated through her veins and thumped loudly in her ears. It couldn’t be. It would be thirteen years this August since he’d drowned.

  But that profile. Caroline recognized it just as any mother would her own kid’s unique build out in right field. Only, before he’d perished in the roiling sea, Joey Whitten had been her lover, not her son. That profile she knew. Her fingers had lingered on his forehead, nose, and lips so many times. Since their first night together in high school, that was their way as she lay beside him. She’d massage his eyebrows with her index finger, then trace his sweet, soft nose, working her way down to his full lips, until he kissed her finger and grabbed it in his mouth, startling her every time.

  “What the hell is with you?
Hello?” Annabelle poked her shoulder.

  “Nothing is with me.” Caroline grabbed another fried clam, dousing it with lemon.

  “I said hello two times, and twice you didn’t turn around. Your face is stricken with something weird like you saw a ghost.”

  Caroline rubbed the back of her neck. A ghost? The man piloting the Boston Whaler was a perfect Joey Whitten replica. Even his shoulders slung the same.

  “Sorry, I thought I saw something, or, I mean, someone. I just need a moment.”

  Caroline closed her eyes toward the sun, trying to will herself back to reality. She still didn’t know what happened to Joey that day in the currents—no one did—and she couldn’t shake the glorious thought of him returning to the living.

  Annabelle rubbed Caroline’s shoulders, and a series of pricey, tricolor gold Sidney Garber rolling bracelets jangled down her arm. The two friends had met on a hideous yellow couch outside Mrs. Blanchard’s office at The Episcopal School, each with daughters who were having what the director euphemistically called a “challenging separation” from their mothers. Caroline and Annabelle bonded about raising painfully shy girls, and their mutual, prickly annoyance at the competitive moms in their class. Those women, yammering after drop-off over espresso at Via Quadronno, had spawned correctly adjusted children clad in smocked dresses and silly yodeling outfits as if they were von Trapps.

  “What on earth is on your mind, honey?” Annabelle asked, sitting on the bench and turning to her friend. “Either tell me or let’s take a walk into town to get it out of your head.”

  “Nothing at all, let’s go. I need to polish off a project for a client before they arrive tomorrow, you know, shells, some poufs, knickknacks,” Caroline answered absently. “But you’re right, and I do have to get my mind off something weird.”

  In the far distance, the Boston Whaler slipped out of view behind the jetty. Caroline assured herself that it was the heat of the summer sun that had resurrected visions of Joey Whitten. Or perhaps the fried clams had triggered a Proustian food memory that transported Joey from the past to the present.

  “You’re spacing out for sure,” Annabelle said, interrupting her thoughts. “Let’s get your client’s final touches bought in town, then lunch, then go check on my horses. Over some good rosé you can tell me what’s going on in your head.”

  “Nothing’s going on . . . I just love this view,” Caroline hedged. Annabelle would think a Joey sighting was nuts. She continued, “I’d bring boyfriends here or friends, and we’d eat all the delicious food from that lobster shack.” Caroline smoothed her hand along the wood. “Just sitting here with the clams gets me remembering sometimes. The menu and the taste haven’t changed for, like, thirty years.”

  Annabelle wouldn’t approve of fried anything for lunch in the same way she didn’t approve of Caroline taking the 6 train down Lexington Avenue. What about all the crazies down there in those filthy subways? Don’t you know about them? They’ll push you onto the tracks!

  Caroline didn’t care which food choices her friend approved. Before she stood, determined to forget about the Boston Whaler, she dipped the last large clam into the third plastic pot of tartar sauce she’d demolished and chomped on it whole.

  Chapter 2

  An Immodest Proposal

  “Before we go into town, let me focus your wandering mind on something a tad more captivating,” Annabelle offered, brushing her corn silk hair off her face and turning toward the sun.

  “I know that tone.” Caroline stood up from the bench and threw the plastic food container into the garbage near the pier’s edge. “You want me to do something I don’t want to do.”

  “Please, I know you’ll resist at first.” Annabelle took her Tom Ford sunglasses off her eyes and folded them into a case in her bag. “Just breathe deeply, like in those yoga classes you hate so much.”

  Caroline let out a half-assed yoga exhalation and wiped her sticky fingers with a towelette. She stood before Annabelle, arms crossed, the corners of her lips lifting into a teeny smile. “Shoot.”

  “An affair,” Annabelle declared.

  “An affair,” Caroline answered, incredulously. “I assume you aren’t talking about a party, not a charity affair.”

  “You know I’m not. It’s summer. ’Tis the season. And I’m very serious.”

  “You have something to get off your chest? You’re not leaving that fabulous Arthur of yours?”

  “I’ll never leave him, you know that.”

  “Of course I do. Go on.”

  “And I have nothing to admit,” Annabelle answered. “Not yet.”

  “Not yet . . .” Caroline nodded. She saw where this was going. She closed her eyes and turned to face that familiar sun again, not wanting to focus on her wearisome marriage today. Her father was up there somewhere; the man who never really approved of Eddie, even after he found so much success in Manhattan.

  “We need it,” Annabelle announced. “Both our husbands have splurged on extracurriculars, and it’s time for us to stop stewing and act. See what it feels like to be with someone else. Look at it this way: at the very least, an affair will inform you.”

  “Inform me—interesting justification.”

  “An affair is a step to the breakup of your marriage, if there is one on the horizon. If not, well, at least you’ve done what Eddie has and won’t care so much.”

  “Well, as of now, I’m still married. And, yes, Eddie did, but I wouldn’t . . . it’s not me.”

  “Oh really?” Annabelle prodded. “You almost did it once with an artist on some design job.”

  “I thought about it with that artist. I almost kissed him in a kitchen, Annabelle,” Caroline corrected. “And I didn’t. But he was great-looking, so I wasn’t wrong to at least look at him twice.” Caroline remembered he had cornered her against the fridge, his fingers brushing her hair back in the most sexual way.

  “You’re overdue, that guy was pre-kids, right?” Annabelle asked.

  “Yeah, like ten years ago. It was right when I first suspected Eddie. I think I was about a month pregnant with Gigi. I locked myself in the bathroom after the artist in question almost kissed me, and I literally talked to myself in the mirror, ‘Don’t do this. Don’t go there.’ And I didn’t. Eddie and I went to therapy, and I confronted him about straying, telling him to cool it. So, one: that doesn’t count. And two: since it doesn’t, your point is moot.”

  “My point is you came close at least once.”

  Annabelle, six inches taller than Caroline, stood up and put her hands on her friend’s shoulders for that added domination she loved. “Somewhere between, what, two and however many (maybe six?) women later on your husband’s scorecard, and you’re not super pissed you haven’t?”

  Caroline opened the last package of chowder crackers and threw them at the seagulls one by one. She vowed to take the heat off herself and put some on her friend. “You always overlooked Arthur’s affairs; you always said you were going to forget that one French colleague, that masseuse and, instead, focus on the fact that he’s the most attentive gentleman out there . . . which, I do agree, he is. So what’s changed?”

  “Emotions evolve. I feel resentment building,” Annabelle answered, pursing her lips, and sitting back down on the bench, elegantly crossing her grasshopper-long legs.

  Caroline shielded her eyes with both hands from the harsh sun to look at her statuesque friend. “And how do you factor in breaking a vow, an emotional tornado, and the daunting logistics of the thing?” Eddie deserved it, but one image struck at her heart: his expression if he found out. His plentiful cheeks would sag and deflate; tears would flow. There had to be a better way to leave, without hurting him so much. Part of Caroline wanted to be friends with Eddie, good co-parents, but no longer his partner. An affair was not a productive way to get there. “You’re giving me that condescending look.”

  “What look?”

  “That look I hate: that same look you give me when you dare me to do t
hings I have no desire, or, frankly, the ability to do.”

  “My what’s-wrong-with-you look?”

  “Not everyone was a ski and tennis team captain at Dartmouth, Annabelle. I skied down that black diamond mogul run and almost broke several limbs.”

  “You want this.”

  “Says who?” Caroline asked.

  “And sorry to fuck with your splendid memories of that cold Vermont trip, but you never made it down that black diamond run on actual skis: you shuffled down the sides of the slope on your butt.” She placed her arm on the back of the bench triumphantly.

  From day one in nursery school, Caroline found Annabelle von Tattenbach (née Digby) to be an exception and an enigma: a snotty newspaper heiress, but cool; loaded, but defiantly real; an ice queen, but emotionally present. Annabelle not only kept Caroline guessing but also kept her honest with herself, which she found she needed more and more these days. Annabelle was the best friend she’d always yearned for, in a form she’d never imagined possible.

  “Even trying to return one of your tennis serves isn’t fun for me and, metaphorically, you could say, this is the same: making me handle something I can’t handle. I don’t gracefully swan dive into daring waters like you do. And, besides, Eddie couldn’t take it.”

  “Would you stop always giving that bully his way before yours?”

  “I don’t always . . .”

  “You do always. You know that. Take care of yourself for once,” Annabelle answered. “It’s simple. We both agree to sleep with someone else this summer. Someone safe, of course, but, nonetheless, someone else.”

  Caroline tossed her Diet Coke can into the recycling bin before adding, “Finding someone safe is modern fairy-tale bullshit.”

  “By the end of summer, you need to decide if you are staying and I, well, I need to decide how I’m going to stay,” Annabelle added sternly.

  “That’s the only thing you’ve said today that makes sense.” She walked a few paces toward the edge of the pier now, free from Annabelle’s spell casting. Looking out for that long-gone Boston Whaler, Caroline flung her purse over her shoulder with a little extra force. Resisting this woman was almost impossible once she got going.