Chapter 10.

11.

“Mister Frank! Mister Frank!”

Abigail was squawking at the top of her lungs. I turned and found her waiting at the end of the buffet line, hopping up and down and waving her short arms without a trace of self-consciousness. For some reason she was dressed in a furry blue bodysuit, an elaborate costume that zippered up the middle. There was a hood with pointy blue ears and big googly eyes. She looked like a monster from Sesame Street . I hurried over and told her to please stop shouting.

“What are you wearing?”

“I’m Stitch!”

“What’s Stitch?”

“From the movie.”

Tammy came walking over with an enormous frozen pi?a colada. “ Lilo and Stitch , Frankie. It’s a cartoon.”

Abigail pulled the hood over her head so I could witness the costume in all its glory. “Miss Tammy bought it for me. It’s pajamas!”

“Then why are you wearing them now? Do you see anyone else wearing pajamas?”

“Oh, Frankie, she looks adorable. Now do the voice, Abby. Say something in his weird alien language.”

Abigail screwed up her face and then sang nonsense lyrics in a squeaky high-pitched falsetto, like she’d just sucked in a lungful of helium. My sister exploded with laughter, spilling pi?a colada over the rim of her glass and drawing more stares. But since I’d made a promise to be cool about Abigail, I just smiled politely and then coaxed the child into the buffet line.

“Let’s not repeat what happened at lunch, okay? You’ve got to take small servings. Pace yourself. You can always come back for seconds.” She didn’t hear a word of this. First she reached for the dinner rolls—three of them. Followed by an enormous scoop of mashed potatoes and two mini corn on the cobs. “Okay, see, you’re doing it again. You’re taking too much. You’ve already filled your whole plate.”

I looked to Tammy for support, but she was chatting with the woman waiting behind us, talking about the secret to making a good mac and cheese (“panko breadcrumbs”). Abigail reached for a pair of tongs and started poking through a tray of chicken piccata, in search of the perfect cutlet. “Mister Frank, are there bones in these?”

“You don’t have room. Come back for it later.”

“What if they run out?”

“They won’t run out.”

“How do you know?”

I knew because no person in their right mind would choose a chicken cutlet over prime rib or a fresh New England crab cake, which is what I intended to eat. “Just keep moving.”

Instead she pinched the tongs and dragged out an enormous cutlet that dripped lemon-caper sauce all over the table. She tried plopping it onto her mashed potatoes but it immediately tumbled off the side of her plate. I wasn’t fast enough to catch it and the chicken landed on the grass between my shoes.

“You see! Didn’t I just say—”

Tammy put a hand on my shoulder. “Easy, Frankie.”

“I told her this would happen.”

We’d brought the buffet line to a halt and I ordered Abigail to pick up the cutlet. She stared down at the grass and shook her head. In a very soft voice, she said, “I don’t want it anymore.”

“Doesn’t matter. Pick it up.”

Abigail shrank away from the chicken, like she was suddenly afraid of it. “I can’t,” she whispered. “I don’t want to touch it.”

Now everyone in line was staring at us so I had to reach down and pick it up myself. I put it on my plate because I couldn’t let it go to waste, not with all the people watching. “Keep moving,” I told Abigail. “Let’s go find a table. This is ridiculous.”

“Hang on,” my sister called, and then she grabbed the last two crab cakes—one for herself and one for Abigail. “So she’ll get some protein.”

Tammy explained that she’d already saved seats for us and led us across the lawn. I assumed we’d be eating dinner with Maggie and Aidan and Aidan’s parents. But the only people waiting at our table were Gerry Levinson and a woman in a sleeveless red dress. She was young—probably even younger than Maggie—and very attractive, with an impressive figure and a startling display of cleavage.

Gerry slowly rose to his feet and welcomed us to the table. “Hello again, Frank. This is my wife, Sierra.”

I thought this was the start of a joke, but Sierra reached out to shake my hand and I spotted many large glittering diamonds on her ring finger. “So nice to meet you,” she said, with a syrupy accent that was straight out of Gone with the Wind . “You must be so excited for Maggie.”

I didn’t know how to respond. What do you say to a beautiful woman in the prime of her youth who shackles herself to a shrunken elderly lawyer with skin like grilled cheese? As a couple, they looked unnatural, a freakish mutation of human biology. “Are you a lawyer, too?”

“Me?” She laughed. “No, I don’t do anything.”

“You’re a writer,” Gerry said. “Don’t belittle yourself, Sierra. You’re writing a children’s book.”

“I’m a writer,” she said with a shrug. “I’m writing a children’s book.”

“You’re looking at the next J. K. Rowling,” Gerry explained. “We’ve tested the first five pages on my grandchildren and they love it. They can’t wait for the next installment.”

“Market research!” Tammy said. “That’s very smart, Gerry. No wonder you’re such a good lawyer.”

Apparently my sister had already introduced herself to Gerry and Sierra and she’d accepted their relationship at face value, because she was happy to sit down and chatter away. She asked questions about Osprey Cove and Capaciti and everyone’s role in the company while I forced myself to finish my dinner—to eat the chicken piccata that I hadn’t even wanted. Under no circumstances was I going to throw a perfectly good chicken cutlet into the trash. There were little green specks all over the top, and I couldn’t tell if they were chives or scallions or pieces of fresh-cut lawn. I just forked food into my mouth and tried not to think about it.

The jazz trio played one standard after another: “Moon River” and “Come Fly with Me” and “The Girl from Ipanema.” Gerry told some hacky lawyer jokes, and Tammy and Sierra laughed at all of them. As the sun set over Lake Wyndham and dropped behind the mountains, I watched Maggie circulating through the party, moving from table to table to welcome her guests. She was a natural hostess and clearly admired by everyone.

But there was no sign of Aidan. And no sign of Gwendolyn, either. Maybe just a coincidence, but I didn’t think so.

Eventually a waitress came around and lit the candles in the center of our table, revealing a daddy longlegs perched beside my water glass. I swatted it away before Abigail noticed. She’d brought her wedding etiquette book to dinner and now she was resting her face on the table and using one eye to reread her favorite pages.

“Always nice to see a child reading,” Gerry observed, and Tammy assured him that Abigail was a huge bookworm, that she soaked up knowledge like a sponge. “Watch this,” she said. “Hey, Abby, what are the five longest rivers in Europe?”

Abigail answered without raising her head. “Volga, Danube, Ural, Dnieper, and Don River.”

Gerry used his phone to double-check the answer and held up the screen in astonishment. “Son of a gun!”

“Give her a harder one,” Sierra said. “How about Asia?”

Abigail didn’t miss a beat. “Yangtze, Yellow, Mekong, Lena, and Irtysh.”

“She’s faster than my Alexa speaker,” Tammy said proudly. “I told her she needs to go on Jeopardy! and make some money. She knows every state capital, every US president, and every animated Disney movie since Snow White .”

“That’s extraordinary!” Gerry said. “Maybe you should come work for Errol Gardner, Abigail. What do you say? Would you like to join the Capaciti team after you graduate from college?”

She just turned the page of her book and shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe. We’ll see.”

And for the first time all day, I was grateful Abigail had joined us. I felt like leaning across the table and giving her buggy little head a kiss.