It Happens in the Hamptons(10)
And that she did, into the purring Lexus LS sedan her chauffer had waiting for her outside.
Katie took a breath and tried to remember the good folks back at the highway deli. “I’m sorry, can I ask again? How much is this sturdy Townie bike that everyone has?”
“Eight hundred ninety-five dollars,” Harry answered.
“Oh, that’s a lot. I just need a little . . .”
“I’m sorry, you seem like a nice woman, but I can’t give you a deal.” He leaned in. “There’s a Kmart with a very good bike department. I know they have plenty of those Huffy brand bikes. They last years and cost only sixty-nine bucks.” He smiled.
“Thanks,” Katie answered quietly, beginning to understand there were two distinct worlds with two distinct economies out here: one with meatball heroes and one with wasabi tuna Swiss chard wraps. “We only need a bike for this summer. I’ll survive if it isn’t a Townie . . .”
“Mom,” Huck looked up at her and announced loudly, “I don’t like the bikes in this store.”
Katie knelt down on her knees and smiled so hard she could feel her ears pulling backwards. She kissed Huck’s perfect forehead and thought, just maybe, she could alone raise a son with judgment, a gut for instincts, and good taste.
Chapter Seven
The Binary Beachfront
Monday, May 29
“I got four watermelons, a huge tub of Crisco, and nine dozen eggs,” Luke announced as he walked up to the instructors waiting for him at the patch of land between the sand and the public parking lot. “I figured it’s a beach games day.”
“Good move,” Kona answered. “Look at the ocean. Flatter than my third grade girlfriend.”
Memorial Day Monday marked the end of the first weekend of Kona and Luke’s Tide Runners Camp, where dozens of kids would show up and pay one hundred and fifty dollars for three hours of water sports lessons, rain or shine. Their friend Kenny, who worked at the camp part-time, busied himself inflating inner tubes for activities in the bay. “Luke, Kenny, you guys count the kids,” Kona told the instructors he’d assembled that day: men with no official training besides a lifetime in the water. “No waves, no surfing for sure. Slather up the watermelons with the Crisco and we’ll throw them in the water and they can try to hang onto them.”
Tide Runners Camp offered surfing and ocean safety lessons on the Atlantic side, and their two dilapidated motorboats took small groups water-skiing and tubing on the bay side of the parking lot. Three rusted Jet Skis were available for lucky adults over eighteen.
The instructors’ shoddy equipment and mellow surfer demeanor did not translate into reckless behavior. In reality, no one had greater respect for the power of the ocean than these men who battled it every day. And that was a good thing: their clients ranged from age four to seventy, many wanting to try out surfing for the first time.
It was a simple fact as clear as Kona’s ability to “harvest pussy”: the locals respected the power of the ocean and the city people often did not. Their ignorance, hubris, and stupidity would lead them to walk into crushing waves they couldn’t handle, with riptides they couldn’t see. The guys figured their colossal estates weren’t enough to hold them over: these people felt entitled to own Mother Nature as well.
By 9:00 a.m., the parking lot that led up to camp resembled an arms dealer convention in Kuwait City with expensive sedans, SUVs, and two-seater sports cars jamming in and out of tight spots. Kids piled out of the cars dragging wetsuits, plush Frette beach towels, and monogrammed tote bags loaded with coconut water and tubes of seventy-five-dollar Orlane Pure Soin Sun Cream SPF 30.
“Do you know if Alexa will be at camp today? It’s nuts how girls from the city grow up too fast,” Kona told Luke, tying his hair back into a ponytail. “Julia Chase didn’t stop by the shop all weekend that I saw. I was hoping to cop a little feel of something.”
“Julia is your whack concept of who you should be fucking, not mine,” Luke answered. “I haven’t seen her, but I also haven’t been on the lookout for a married mother in a see-through shirt.”
“She usually brings Richie around to buy a T-shirt or some skim milk chick latte next door, but I haven’t seen her since we bolted that lame affair.”
Of course they hadn’t planned on leaving the “Hamptons Festive” cocktail party so early that Saturday night. Unfortunately, the humiliation of a shell-encrusted toothpick rammed into Kona’s hand had forced them to leave without saying goodbye or ever nailing the older guy getting his way with a sixteen-year-old in the sea grass. On the silent ride home, neither man knew what to say to each other, except, “Fuck those people.”