ninety-eight degrees, and many in the small army assembled to feed and entertain the Hollands’ guests had begun to wilt under the pitiless sun. An assistant to the chef’s subcontractor for the wood-burning ovens had fainted at his station, knocking his head on an ice chest and requiring removal to an air-conditioned bedroom at the back of the house. Trying to manage both her boss and the party, Lauren had set Glenda up on a couch in the library, where she could receive emissaries from the feuding vendors without either standing up or entering the furnace of the outdoors until both were absolutely necessary. The band claimed the caterer had done them out of electricity and the florist warned that if the technician sent by the air-conditioning firm to replace the traumatized driver didn’t figure out how to operate the machinery soon her creations would wither and die. These, at least, were people in Glenda’s employ. The fire marshal was another matter. While he’d kindly expedited her request for a permit for the show, upon inspection and discussion with the nephew in charge he had determined that the barge from which the fireworks were to be launched was floating at an insufficient distance from the shore of the pond, which would now need to be ringed with flame-retardant tarps.
“My God,” Glenda exclaimed, sunken into the corner of the couch. “Have you no mercy? Can’t you see what’s going on out there? Flame tarps? Where in creation do you expect me to find those? Not to mention the fact that they sound hideously ugly. Couldn’t we just give it a miss?”
The man, a stolid, bearded fellow in white shirt and epaulets glanced wearily at Lauren, who started searching her phone for the town manager’s number.
“If you only knew what it took me to retain that young man. When I think of what I paid him. He could send his firstborn to college. I’m begging you,” she said, managing another sip of her drink. “We did invite you, didn’t we? You and your wife?”
Once Lauren had led the marshal from the room, Glenda decided that, all in all, the best thing might be to nap.
DOWN IN THE FIELD, a high schooler in red vest and bow tie pointed Evelyn Jones along an aisle of luxury sedans, and up against a barbed-wire fence. She applied her lipstick in the rearview mirror and then made her way through the parked cars toward a crowd of guests bottlenecked at the gate, where some kind of checkpoint had been set up.
“Glenda’s gone too far this time,” a silver-haired lady in front of her said to her husband, as security guards body-scanned each invitee with their metal-detecting wands. “Who does she think we are? Militants?”
“Believe me,” the man ahead of her said, “there are people out there planning things. This here makes a good deal of sense.” Evelyn recognized him from the newspaper: the head of State Street, lately plagued by kidnapping threats. Farther along, various bank employees and their spouses feasted their eyes on the chairman’s estate, unfazed by the precautions. She supposed she was one of the few who wondered if she’d be allowed to pass. But they did let her through and she proceeded along the path to a set of long folding tables staffed by a team of severe-looking, young blond women who wielded their pens and clipboards like guardians of an auction for qualified buyers only, ready in an instant to lose those winning, welcoming smiles and halt the riffraff in their tracks. One of them beamed an extra beam as she checked Evelyn’s name off the list and handed her a place card, her visage replete with that secret liberal pleasure of being given the chance to be kind and nondiscriminatory to a black person.
Up on the main lawn a waiter in a white jacket, sweat running down his face, offered her a glass from a tray of sparkling wines. Guests had already begun to roll up their sleeves and mop their brows with cocktail napkins. She strolled to the open end of the square formed by the back of the house and the two circus-scale tents and from there looked down the far side of the hill to a pond where several men in a rowboat were making their way toward a floating dock.
She’d known when Fanning routed her an invitation to the party not to expect barbecue in the backyard. But this was something else.