“She drank five,” Jeffrey said. “And then she—”

“Puked in the dunes,” Andrea said.

“And we took her home and she passed out on the bathroom floor. And when she woke up in the morning, there were tile marks on her face.”

“Yes!” Andrea shouted. She put her hands up in the air. He had scored again.

“And you made her sign that slip of paper,” Jeffrey said.

“Promising she wouldn’t tell my aunt and uncle,” Andrea said. She was laughing, then crying. Sweetly weeping. “Thank you, Peach,” she said. “Goddamn it, thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” he said.

How about the night Tess met Greg? Could Andrea handle that one? She looked dubious, but Jeffrey pointed out that he wasn’t going to be able to tell stories for very long if he couldn’t mention Greg.

“Okay,” she said. Then she cocked her head. “Wait a minute. You weren’t even there that night.”

“I still know the story. I’ve heard it a hundred times. Do you want me to tell it or not?”

“Tell it.”

Girls’ night out, summer 1995. Andrea, Tess, Delilah, Lisa Shumacher, who waitressed with Tess at the RopeWalk that summer, and Karin Poleman, who had taken over the head lifeguard position from Andrea when Andrea got pregnant with Kacy. The girls went to dinner at the Boarding House, they went for drinks at 21 Federal, drinks at the Club Car, drinks at the RopeWalk, where Lisa and Tess, on their night off, were treated like royalty and plied with tequila shots. Then, finally, they went to the Muse to hear this band everyone was talking about called the Velociraptors.

The Velociraptors were five guys who had done a PG year together at the Berkshire School and who had then done separate tours of duty at egregiously preppy colleges like Colgate and Bates and Middlebury, and who had reunited on Nantucket. Greg MacAvoy (Hamilton College) was the lead singer. He was twenty-three years old, he jogged and surfed and lifted weights, he wore a white rope bracelet and a shark’s tooth on a leather choker, he sang while holding a Corona, he sang with his hair in his eyes. He sang “Loving Cup” by the Stones and “Sheena Is a Punk Rocker” by the Ramones, he sang “The Core” by Eric Clap-ton with a hot redhead who tended bar and only came up onstage for that one song. It was well documented that Greg MacAvoy, currently of the Velociraptors (formerly of the garage bands the Porn Stars and Eklipse), could have any woman he wanted. The band house behind the Muse, where the Velociraptors had pretty much taken up residence (though the drummer Beckett Steed’s parents owned a house in Sconset where they technically lived), had a throng of girls teeming around it every night after-hours, like bacteria around a fresh cut. What happened in the band house? Well, pretty much what you’d expect.

On the night in question, Tess was drunk.

“We were all drunk,” Andrea chimed in.

Tess was wearing jeans, flip-flops, a white T-shirt, a green bandanna in her hair, and dangly silver earrings. She and the rest of the girls were dancing right up front; their beers were sitting on the edge of the stage, next to the amplifiers. With all the girls on the dance floor and the promise of yet more girls banging down the door of the band house, what was it about Tess that caught Greg’s attention? The green bandanna? The sparkling earrings? The freckles on her nose or her big blue eyes or her tiny feet with nails painted a color called Cherry Pie?

She knew all the words to “Low Spark of High Heeled Boys.” He noticed that. He smiled at her, winked at her. At the break, he said to his bass player, “Hey, that little Gidget girl is hot.” He dispatched a roadie to speak to her.

“Greg wants to know if you’ll join him in the band house later.”

Roadie asked Tess this in front of all the girls. Roadie offered Tess a cold Corona, a present from Greg. The girls stared, speechless.

Tess said, “The band house? No way.”

Delilah said, “Are you crazy? Every woman on Nantucket wants that guy.”

But Andrea approved of Tess’s answer. Andrea had a baby and a two-year-old at home; she was mother superior. She was drinking and having fun like the rest of them—more than the rest of them—but she did not want to see her beloved younger cousin, Tess, disappear into the opium den/syphilis shack that was the band house.

Tess said no, and Greg was fired up. The hunt was on!

“What did he do to get her?” Andrea scanned Jeffrey’s desk for a piece of paper. She wanted to make a list.

“He tried to find out her last name,” Jeffrey said.

“Failed,” Andrea said.

“He tried to get her phone number.”

“Failed.”

“But then someone told him where she waitressed…”

“He showed up at the RopeWalk with flowers.”

“Didn’t work.”

“The next time he showed up with that CD he made her. With ‘Romeo and Juliet’ by Dire Straits on it.”

“Didn’t work.”

“He ordered the lobster dinner to impress her.”

“It was just like Greg to be so misguided,” Andrea said. “Ordering the lobster was not impressive.”

He asked her out each and every time. Where did she want to go? The Chanticleer? The Wauwinet? Beckett Steed’s parents had a Boston Whaler. Did she want to go out on the Whaler?

“She told him she was afraid of the water,” Andrea said quietly.

Did she want to go on a picnic? Would she meet him for breakfast? Coffee?