Page 46 of Old Money
Why?I wonder. But that’s for later. For now I have reading to do.
I sit in the parking lot for over an hour, the car and my laptop growing uncomfortably hot. It’s nearly ten thirty when my phone rings.
“Alice, where are you?”
“Jamie? I’m just— Where areyou?”
There’s a loud, metallic clatter in the background, and someone starts shouting.
“Here!” he barks. “Everyone is here but you!”
The person shouting in the background shouts something about “goddamn salad tongs” and I realize Jamie is in the clubhouse kitchen.
“Right but—yesterday,” I begin, unsure if he can hear me over the racket. “I thought I was fired.”
“What? No. But you are extremely fucking late,” Jamie replies. “Can you be here before eleven?”
I slump back in my seat, fiddling with the touchpad on my laptop. Can’t I just be fired for a day?
“I’m actually out on an errand,” I say. “I’d have to go home first. I’m not in dress code.”
“What are you wearing?” he counters. “I mean—it doesn’t matter. If you’re wearing clothes and in the tristate area, please come to work as soon as you can.”
My computer wheezes, exhausted and overheated. I give up.
“Okay, yeah,” I sigh, ejecting the thumb drive and closing the laptop. “But what’s going on?”
“I don’t have time, Alice. Can you please just get here, and bring a pound of lemons?”
“What?”
Jamie’s voice is muffled for a moment, and all I hear is the muted cacophony around him.
“Sorry,” he says. “Ten pounds of lemons. I have to go.”
***
I catch on quickly once I’m at the club. The member lot is packed with cars, and half the golf carts are gone. Crossing the staff lot, I can hear the thwack of tennis balls—at least two gamesgoing—and the distant shriek of kids at the pool. There’s a tinge of grease in the air—the snack bar is getting a jump on things. An hour from now, a throng of wet, ravenous children will line up for burgers and curly fries. And their parents will be drinking in earnest. Hence, the lemons.
Jamie calls this “The Descent.” It’s the unknowable day when high season truly begins. Jamie explained it to me a few days in: the early days of summer are typically quiet, with maybe a dozen members on-site at any given time. And then, suddenly, they arrive en masse—usually on a Thursday, sometime in late June.
“Like Thanksgiving,” he’d said. “Except you don’t know the day in advance. And there are never any leftovers. And no one says, ‘thank you.’ ”
I get it now. Coming through the boot room, I can already hear how full the clubhouse is. I head to the kitchen first, sacks of lemons swinging from each hand.
“Hello?” I say, pushing the door open with my shoulder. The kitchen is as chaotic as it sounded.
“Thank God,” says a sweating line cook, diving for one of the bags. “The rest go to the grill.”
I take the back way, using the staff hall. The gallery would be faster, but I’m in shorts, sneakers and a wrinkled pink shirt. The only dress-code violations I’m not breaking is the no-pockets rule. I stashed the thumb drive in my bra, too nervous to leave it in the car, though now I’m just nervous that it’ll fall out.
“Alice!” a voice calls behind me. “Wait up!”
Jamie jogs toward me, with Cory in tow. I drop my hand to my side, perching the lemons on my hip in an awkwardly casual pose. Jamie doesn’t notice—all he sees are lemons.
“Thanks,” he says, taking the bag and handing it to Cory.
“Grill. Go,” he orders. Cory nods and marches onward like a soldier to the front.
