How do people breathe in there? he wondered. How did they find room to bring their drinks to their mouths without elbowing someone in the jaw?

He bypassed the Straight Wharf Restaurant, although he liked it there. They served excellent bluefish pâté, and the restaurant attached to the bar was some of the finest dining on Nantucket. But Eddie wouldn’t touch it with a ten-thousand-foot pole this weekend. Even as he passed, he saw two young bucks holding a girl in a white strapless sundress by her ankles over the side of the balcony.

She was screaming, “Put me down! Damn it it, Leo, put me down! I’m going to puke! I’m going to… puke!”

Eddie slowed down to see if the young lady would, in fact, puke, or, better still, if her breasts would pop out of her dress, or if the young bucks would lose their grip on her ankles and drop her headfirst into the bushes.

“I see London, I see France,” one of the bucks said, looking down the girl’s skirt.

“I’m going to puke, Leo!” she screamed. And a split second later, she did, and Eddie checked his watch. Five minutes after two, and the puking had begun.

Eddie headed down to Cru. Cru was upscale; the crowd was marginally older and more monied. Three years earlier, Eddie had happened across the owner of 10 Low Beach Road at the back bar at Cru, and that was where the deal for Eddie to rent the house had been struck.

Do you think you can get fifty K? the owner had asked.

I don’t think I can, Eddie had said. I know I can.

I like the confidence of that statement, the owner had said.

In the back of his mind, Eddie was hoping for similar luck from this outing. He needed something big. Something legal. Financially, he didn’t feel that much different from the girl hanging upside down—desperate, about to lose every shred of dignity.

The deal with DeepWell had gone so smoothly that Barbie had volunteered to call certain other groups renting Low Beach Road and offer the same scenario—five beautiful Russian women, ten thousand per night. Eddie couldn’t believe how ballsy his sister was—he would be terrified to propose the idea to anyone—but he realized that the arrangement sounded better coming from a woman. Eddie had overheard Barbie in action on the phone. She was equal parts Barbara Eden from I Dream of Jeannie—granting these men their wildest wishes—and Israeli special-ops soldier, a person not to be messed with. To Eddie, she said, “If they turn me down, they turn me down. I pretend I never mentioned it.”

But, so far, nobody had turned her down. Every corporate group wanted in. That very evening, a mining concern from West Virginia was checking in, and they were gung-ho for the girls.

And the girls—well, the girls were ecstatic.

Eddie was grateful for the cash, but there was a trade-off. He had chronic heartburn, and it was difficult to sleep at night. He constantly worried that someone was watching him.

But he needed the money. Grace had written a fifteen-thousand-dollar check to the Great Harbor Yacht Club, which had bounced.

“Bounced?” Grace had said when he told her. “What is going on, Eddie? I thought maybe it was Eloise’s fault. I thought it was an administrative glitch.”

He said, “The spec houses are taking all my spare funds, Grace. We might have to take a hiatus year from the yacht club, until I sell them.”

Grace gave him an incredulous look. “You’re telling me we don’t have fifteen grand for the yacht club?”

“That’s what I’m telling you.”

“But when you say the check bounced, it makes it sound like we don’t even have fifteen thousand in our account.”

Eddie cleared his throat. He was not enjoying this conversation one bit. “We do not, presently, have fifteen thousand dollars in our account.”

“How is that possible?” Grace said.

“The spec houses are eating me alive,” Eddie said.

“Can’t you just sell one unfinished?” Grace asked.

“That’s a possibility,” Eddie said. “Or we can be patient and wait until I sell a house.”

“Do you have any irons in the fire?” Grace asked.

He smiled. “Always.”

“Okay,” Grace said. She took a deep breath. “I can survive the summer without the yacht club.”

Eddie was relieved. Occasionally, in anger, he accused Grace of being spoiled because she had grown up with so much money. But the truth was, Grace was as levelheaded a woman as he had ever met. “Thank you for being understanding.”

Grace said, “You still have money to pay Benton, though, right? And Hester Phan?”

“Right,” Eddie said, uncertainly. Hester was the publicist who was supposed to get their garden into a magazine. The only reason Eddie had agreed to sponsor that effort was because he thought the potential article might reflect well on him as a real-estate agent.

The spec houses were in danger. Eddie had taken his cash from DeepWell and paid his plumber and Gerry for half the foundation of number 13.

As for Madeline and Trevor’s money—well, he didn’t know how to handle that situation.

He needed to sell a house.

The beautiful brunette owner of Cru was standing at the podium when Eddie walked in. Eddie had known her since she landed on the island, straight out of the University of Richmond. She greeted him with a nice hug and said, “You’re not going to believe this, Eddie, but I have one stool available at the back bar. Are you alone?”

“I’m alone,” he said, then wondered if he should feel embarrassed by this. Nobody celebrated Figawi alone; it went against the very nature of Figawi, which was all about getting shit-faced en masse and living out stories that no one could ever quite remember but that could be fudged and embellished for years to come. To venture out on Figawi weekend alone screamed loserdom, or so Eddie worried.