They bodysurf in the waves for well over an hour, then they collapse on their towels and nap in the sun. When they wake up, the light has mellowed, and the water sparkles.

“Here it is,” Jack says. “The golden hour.”

They sit in silence for a few minutes. Deacon has never experienced a golden hour before, but he has been to church once, with his friend Emilio’s family, and this feels sort of the same, peaceful and holy. In his life in the city, he watches too much TV, and he and Emilio and Hector set off bottle rockets in the alleys behind Stuy Town. Jack walks off down the beach, and Deacon senses that he wants to be alone, so Deacon goes to the water’s edge and finds a perfectly formed clamshell with a swirl of marbleized blue on the inside. He’ll take it home, he decides. He will keep it forever.

He throws rocks into the ocean until Jack returns with a dreamy, faraway look on his face. Deacon wonders if he is thinking about his French girlfriend, Claire.

“What do you say we start heading back?” Jack says. “I have to return the jeep by six.”

Deacon nods, but his heart is heavy. He doesn’t want to leave. The remainder of the day is shadowed by melancholy. They drive back into town, roll the jeep over the cobblestone streets, return it to the rental place. It has cost Jack forty dollars, which seems like a fortune.

On the wharf, Jack buys an order of fried clams, two lobster rolls, and two chocolate milk shakes. Deacon and his father eat their feast on the top deck of the ferry as the sun sets, dappling the water pink and gold. Jack hums some amalgam of “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart” and “Afternoon Delight.”

“Now, that was a perfect day with my son,” Jack says. “What do you say we go downstairs so you can get some rest?”

Deacon nearly protests. He wants to stay outside and watch the lights of Nantucket fade until they disappear, but the breeze picks up, and Deacon shivers. He follows his father downstairs, where they secure a section of bench. Jack rolls up the two striped towels-there was never a doubt in Deacon’s mind that Jack would keep them; he’s thrifty that way-and places them on one end of the bench for Deacon as a pillow.

“Thank you,” Deacon whispers.

He tries with all his might to stay awake, but the gentle rocking of the boat is like that of a cradle, and he feels himself succumbing. His eyelids grow heavy and eventually drop like anchors. Deacon knows somehow that more than just one perfect day with his father is ending. It’s as though he can see the future: a week later, Jack will leave his family for good, taking the last scraps of Deacon’s childhood with him. There is nothing either of them can do to stop it.

BUCK

John Buckley had performed some astonishing feats in his thirty years as an agent, but nothing compared to the miracle of assembling Deacon Thorpe’s entire family at the house on Nantucket so that they could spread Deacon’s ashes and discuss the troubling state of his affairs.

Buck realized he should be parsimonious with his self-congratulation. He hadn’t gathered the entire family. Scarlett had stubbornly chosen to remain in Savannah, where she would stay, Buck supposed, until she realized the money was all gone. At some point in the near future, Buck assumed, she would look down, like Wile E. Coyote in the old cartoons, believing himself to be standing on solid ground but seeing nothing below him but thin air. They were sure to hear from her then.


Six weeks had passed, but John Buckley still couldn’t believe that his first-ever client and his best friend, Deacon Thorpe-the most famous chef in America-was dead.

On May 6, a call had come to Buck’s cell phone from an unfamiliar number, and, since Deacon had been incommunicado for nearly forty-eight hours, John Buckley took the call, thinking it might be his friend. He was in a chair at the Colonel’s, the last old-time barbershop in New York City, where cell phones were expressly not allowed.

Buck knew he would never be granted an appointment with Sal Sciosia (the colonel, Battle of Khe Sanh, Vietnam) again if he took the call, but he had no choice.

An unfamiliar number could have meant anything. Most likely: Deacon had gone on another bender, even though he had promised, he had sworn, he had practically pricked his index finger and matched it with Buck’s own in a solemn vow, that he would never again have an episode like the one two weeks earlier. That rager had most likely cost Deacon his marriage. Scarlett had withdrawn Ellery from La Petit Ecole, one of the most prestigious private schools in New York City, and taken her down to Savannah, leaving Deacon contrite and chastened, a new passenger on the wagon.

But people were going to act exactly like themselves. If Buck had learned one thing from thirty years of agenting, it was this. Now this call would either be from the NYPD or from the bartender at McCoy’s, where Deacon had passed out facedown on his tab.

Buck had to answer.

“Hello.”

“Mr. Buckley?” a voice of authority said. “My name is Ed Kapenash. I’m the chief of police in Nantucket, Massachusetts.”

“Nantucket?” Buck said. Deacon owned a huge, ramshackle summer cottage on Nantucket called American Paradise, a name that Buck secretly considered ironic. “Is Deacon there?” His voice conveyed more impatience than he wanted it to, and probably not the full respect due to a chief of police. “Sir?”

“Yours was the number we found on his phone listed under his emergency contact,” the chief said. “I take it you’re a friend…? Of Deacon Thorpe’s?”

“His agent,” Buck said. And then, sighing, he added, “And yes, his best friend. Is he in jail?” Deacon had never gotten into any kind of trouble while on Nantucket, not in all these years-but as far as Deacon was concerned, there was a first time for everything.

“No, Mr. Buckley,” the chief said. “He’s not in jail.”


Buck had walked out of the Colonel’s half-shaven.

His best friend of thirty years was dead.

“Massive coronary,” the chief said. “An island man named JP Clarke found him early this morning and phoned it in. But the M.E. put the time of death about twelve hours earlier-so maybe seven or eight o’clock last night.”

“Had he been drinking?” Buck asked. “Doing drugs?”

“He was slumped over at the table on the back deck with a Diet Coke,” the chief said. “And there were four cigarette butts in the ashtray. No drugs that we found, although the M.E. is going to issue a tox report. You have my condolences. My wife was a big fan of the show. She made that clam dip for every Patriots game.”

Condolences, Buck had thought. That belonged on Deacon’s Stupid Word List. What did it even mean?

“I’ll leave it to you, then, to contact the family?” the chief asked.

Buck closed his eyes and thought: Laurel, Hayes, Belinda, Angie, Scarlett, Ellery.

“Yes,” Buck said.

“And you’ll handle the remains?”

“I’ll handle… yes, I’ll handle everything,” Buck said.

Massive coronary, Buck thought. Diet Coke and four cigarettes. It was the cigarettes that had done it in the end, Buck guessed. He had told Deacon… but now was no time to indulge his inner surgeon general. Deacon was gone. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t right.

“Thank you, Chief,” Buck said. “For letting me know.”

“Well,” the chief said, “unfortunately, that’s my job. My thoughts to the family.”

Buck hung up and watched his arm shoot into the air. A taxi put on its blinker and pulled over. Everything was the same in the world, but then again it was different. Deacon Thorpe was dead.


The death had been devastating enough, but as the executor of Deacon’s estate, Buck was then required to delve into the paperwork that inevitably followed. He started with the obvious: Deacon’s will. He had left the restaurant to his daughter Angie, which made sense, although Harv would continue to run it for the foreseeable future. And Deacon had left his other major asset-the house on Nantucket-to the three women he had been married to, Laurel Thorpe, Belinda Rowe, and Scarlett Oliver, to be owned in thirds, with time split in a fair and just manner, as determined by the executor.

Great, Buck thought.

As Buck sifted through Deacon’s marriage certificates to Laurel, to Belinda, to Scarlett; the divorce agreements from Laurel and from Belinda; the deed to the Nantucket house, which turned out to be encumbered with three mortgages and two liens; the LLC paperwork for Deacon’s four-star restaurant, the Board Room, in midtown Manhattan; the contracts with ABC (ancient, defunct) and the Food Network; and his bank and brokerage statements, he’d been thrown into a tailspin. All Buck could think was, This has to be wrong. He rummaged through every drawer of Deacon’s desk at the restaurant and meticulously checked the apartment on Hudson Street, a task much more easily accomplished without Scarlett around. Every piece of paper Buck found served to make the situation worse. It was like a game of good news, bad news, except this version was called bad news, worse news.

Deacon hadn’t paid any of the three mortgages on the Nantucket house in six months, and he was three months behind on the rent for his apartment on Hudson Street. Where had all of Deacon’s money gone? Buck found a canceled check for a hundred thousand dollars made out to Skinny4Life. Skinny4Life? Buck thought. A hundred large? This sounded like one of Scarlett’s “projects”; there had been the purses made by the cooperative of women in Gambia and, after that, an organic, vegan cosmetic company that absconded with fifty thousand of Deacon’s dollars before going belly-up. Before Scarlett decided she wanted to go into “business,” she had studied photography. Deacon had spent a small fortune sending her to University College downtown-which, Buck had pointed out numerous times, was neither a university nor a college. Deacon had built Scarlett a state-of-the-art darkroom in the apartment and bought her cameras and computers and scanners and printers, the collective price of which could have paid for a Rolls-Royce with a full-time chauffeur. All of the equipment now sat dormant behind a locked door.