The cookie crumbled slightly under her touch, leaving a spray of dust across the table between them. Adam picked up a second one from the plate, turning it around in his hand. It was thin and flat and as wide as his broad hand with the crinkled look of a very good molasses cookie. It was chewy and crisp at the same time—the slip of paper under the plate had no description other than reading simply miso, brown butter, rice flour. The other lines were equally intriguing: graham flour, rum, thyme and candied fennel, tahini, caramel.
“So, how do you know this guy again?” she asked. Adam collected friends at an impressive clip; he seemed to run into someone he knows everywhere they go.
Just the other night, they were sprawled on the lawn for an outdoor jazz concert on the Greenway, three picnic blankets spread out between eight of them. Hadley was there with Mack, who’d contributed a bottle of wine. “We just got this in at the wine bar. I think it’s one of my favorites I’ve had in the past year,” Mack had said. “It’s a Cannonau and rather plummy, actually, but interesting. It comes from a tiny vineyard in Sardinia. Young winemaker. Doing quite cool things really.”
Only Mack, with his sun-bleached hair and crinkly smile and broad Australian accent, could say things like rather plummy and not sound absolutely asinine.
Adam had leaned across the blanket, dangerously close to tipping over a bowl of slow-roasted onion dip sprinkled with paprika that Sienna had made, to take the bottle, turning it around to look at the label.
“Oh yeah,” he’d said. “So funny, I went to summer camp with this guy, the winemaker.”
Typical Adam.
“Ben and I used to surf together. For a British guy, he’s not half bad. I met him the summer I was living in California, when I was trying out that start-up. He was working in the kitchen at Commis and we both used to surf Stinson Beach in the mornings with a bunch of the same guys. Anyway, we’ve stayed close and now that we’re both in town we hang out pretty often.”
Again, typical Adam. She and Adam spent so much time together that she assumed she’d know anyone in his close orbit, but then she’d remember that his close orbit was about fifty times the size of hers.
“Try the bread!” he urged, nudging a slice closer to her and pulling the cookie plate back for himself.
She took a bite: It was startling, like an optical illusion—it looked like an ordinary slice of bread, toasted with a light swipe of butter. But it tasted like a potato chip. Exactly like a potato chip. She frowned slightly, took another bite, frowned some more. The bread was squishy and soft, the interior as pillowy as Wonderbread. The edges, however, were shiny with a crunchy, salty crust. She looked up and he was grinning at her. “Wild, right? Ben’s incredible. Seriously. Everything he makes is incredible.”
“What even is this?” she asks through another mouthful.
“You can ask Ben yourself,” he glances down at his watch. “His shift is almost finished and he said he’ll come straight out to meet us so we can head to the marina. But I call it potato chip bread, for obvious reasons.”
Ben Killion, Adam’s friend who was now the baker behind one of Boston’s newest and most talked-about restaurant, had grown up in London with a childhood so idyllic it might as well have been a scene from a novel, spending his winters tromping around the British countryside at his family’s stone cottage in the Cotswolds and his summers at their seaside compound in Biarritz. Ben’s parents were the sort who wore tweed unironically and used words like beastly and yonks. They own two aging Labradors and their house is filled with the intriguing knickknackery of the very posh: tiny silver mustard pots, a tarnished pewter match striker, rows of muddy gumboots in the foyer, a thick block of basil-scented Wavertree & London soap, a frayed tea towel concealing a handful of tiny raspberries picked that morning from the hedge behind the garden shed.
A moment later, Ben appears. “Hey mate,” he says, reaching down to clap Adam on his shoulder.
Mate? she thinks incredulously. He seriously says mate? Ben Killion fit the definition of the words “British chap” so perfectly that it was almost laughable. He had a crooked smile, tousled sandy curls, and an accent she’ll later find out is the poshest of posh, though he tries to hide that by softening some of his clipped tones, letting the words slide out gently, tumbling over one another as if he couldn’t really be bothered whether or not he was heard.
She wouldn’t develop a crush on Ben Killion. That was the plot point every other woman would step into because how could you not? She preferred to think that she was immune to that sort of unoriginal emotion, assuming she was the kind of person who would be drawn to someone like Adam: funny, cuttingly smart, endearingly shy. Having a crush on Ben Killion was like saying you liked the Beatles or read Jodi Picoult novels—too obvious, too predictable.
Ben glances at the table. “You got everything!” he said cheerfully. “Favorites?”
“The bread,” she gushes, feeling like an overly enthusiastic teenager. “So good!”
They make their way out of the restaurant and into the street where the sticky, humid warmth hangs heavily in the air, even this late in the afternoon. Cars are lined up at the stoplights, honking occasionally, the sun starting to make its slow, syrupy descent towards the horizon.
The walk to the marina takes them down Cambridge Street and up Sudbury Street, past Faneuil Hall and the public market, the sidewalks clogged with people commuting home or heading to sit outside at the restaurant and cafe tables that spill onto the street all summer, like the city heaved a too-hot breath and exhaled the interiors in a jumble out of doors.
Boats are lined up on the docks in tidy rows, loosely arranged by size. Sleek yachts bob gently in the water next to wooden sailboats, their wayward ropes clanking noisily against the tall masts. A matte charcoal gray Mangusta yacht takes up half of one entire pier; a small fleet of agile-looking deckhands in crisp white polos swarmed its exterior, polishing the trim and buffing the shiny wooden deck. Adam cranes his neck to read the name: Serenity, out of Antibes, France. Ben laughs at another boat just beyond, upon which an older couple sat drinking a bottle of wine. “What’s funny?” Adam asks. “The name! Best I’ve seen,” he says, pointing out the words Tax Sea-vasion painted in blue on the white hull.
Following Adam, they take a left down the maze of docks, then jump down onto a smaller one that jiggles precariously beneath their feet, heading to the very end. Jack Mayhew stands on the deck of a sailboat, his hand held aloft in a wave.
She doesn’t know anything about boats, but even she can tell that this one is impressive. The sail is tightly furled around the tall black mast, and Jack turns and begins to tug at one of the ropes that is flapping loosely in the evening breeze.
The hull of the boat—a Marblehead 22—is a gorgeous polished crimson color with a subtle line etched around the top. It bears the classic lines of a wooden sailboat, but as Jack begins to explain to Ben, it’s actually cold-molded red cedar coated with epoxy resin for maximum performance. “Sails like a dream,” she hears Jack say.
A trim, fit man in his late forties stands on the next boat over, leaning forward with his hands on the railing to talk to Jack. “Marblehead?” he asks. He has dark, close-cropped hair with a streak of silver at the temples. He’s wearing broken-in leather boat shoes and a pair of faded khaki shorts with a pale blue t-shirt, the words Vineyard Cup emblazoned on the right-hand side.
Jack nods his assent.
“Those guys are out of Boothbay, right?” the man asks, referring to the company, Samoset Boatworks, run out of Maine by a master boatbuilder.
Jack nods again. The man gestures at the length of the boat, and then up at the mast.
“Wishbone boom?” he says.
“Yep,” Jack responds.
“I hear they’re great. No reefing with those, huh?”
Jack launches enthusiastically into the details of the technical specifications of the boat. While they talk about overhang and counter transoms, she glances around. Adam has already boarded the boat, opened the Yeti cooler sitting on the bridge, and cracked open a beer. He hands her one, the can invitingly cold against her skin. The label is a swirl of hand-painted neon pink and blues with the words Tryna Drip DIPA emblazoned across the front. Adam taps his can, “This is the beer I was telling you about, the one we had at Sully’s wedding that was so good. It’s a double IPA though so, you know..” he trails off and winks at her.
“Go easy? You think I can’t handle my alcohol?” she jokes.
“I know you can’t handle your alcohol, so yes, go easy.”
The afternoon is easing into that lazy hour where time hangs teasingly in the balance between day and evening, as if the day were a ball someone tossed up high and it remained suspended for one brief moment at the top of its arc before the slow, steady swoop downwards.
What she never told Jack is that she grew up sailing. Her mother’s family owned a house on the shore of Lake Michigan, a mile’s drive from the tiny, picturesque town of Saugatuck. The four siblings—her mother and the three brothers—shared summers there, overlapping their vacations as the years passed and their families expanded. It was all very casual and chaotic, one family starting to pack their car as the other arrived, cousins sharing floor space and bunk beds, sand pooling at the bottom of the showers, someone’s wet bathing suit discovered days later tangled in a ball behind the washing machine.
In the mornings, people would slowly emerge from their respectives beds and couches and corners. Some people—her aunt Meryl and her oldest cousin Hilary who was studying linguistics at Brown—got up early. They’d make coffee, sending the smell wafting through the house, and leave for a run, coming back bright-eyed and jaunty before half the house was even awake. It didn’t matter who belonged to whom: Everyone just operated communally. If Sally, the littlest cousin, toddled into the kitchen alone then someone would fix her a bowl of Cheerios doused in cream and place her on a stool with a spoon. Someone would make toast, someone else would scramble an entire carton of eggs. If they were lucky, her uncle Sterling would ride his rusted blue Schwinn over to Pennyroyal Provisions and pick up a box of cheese danishes or lemon cream donuts.
The days passed in a flurry of activity: paddleball games at the beach, sailing regattas every Sunday, hours and hours of swimming, cocktails and rowdy hours of Charades in the evening. On rainy days, they’d do puzzles on the low wooden coffee table or curl up reading books in the hammock on the porch, the pages of every novel damp with the humidity that hung in the air. Her memories of lake weeks were a parade of flavors: lunches of apple juice slightly hot from the sun and sticky with condensation from the cooler, peanut-butter-and-fluff sandwiches gritty with sand, sour cherry pie doused in thick cream the color of straw, her aunt’s Cobb salad nachos crisped under the broiler—crumbled bacon, hunks of fresh tomato, creamy avocado, generous handfuls of blue cheese.
Sailing was mandatory at the lake house. A familiarity with boats was a given, like learning to ride a bike or shuck an ear of corn. Even the smallest cousins knew intrinsically how to tilt their body against the shifting surface of a boat’s deck or duck below the boom when it began its slow, heavy swing in the wind. They were all sailors, but she was one of the best. “A real talent on the water,” her grandfather would brag, grinning, to anyone who watched her claim first place in a regatta for the tenth time in a summer.
She’d flush red and duck her head. Sailing didn’t feel like an accolade she’d earned, but rather a skill as automatic as braiding her hair or shimmying up the red maple tree in the lawn or running down stairs. Can’t everyone do this?, she’d think, as she’d ease the tiller leeward and shift her weight as the boom swung around and she began to tack, the sail luffing briefly in the breeze before catching with a satisfying whuufff sound, stretching taut against the wind, and sending the boat cruising ahead.
Standing here on the dock with Jack triggers the sensation of being on the boat in Michigan so specifically and vividly that she almost has to glance down to remember that she is, in fact, not a fourteen-year-old in faded red nylon shorts and scuffed Converse sneakers, the ones with Will MacLaren’s name scribbled on the side after a short-lived romance from March to May of her sixth grade year. (She’d tried in vain to rub off the ink but it stubbornly persisted, his scrawled name taunting her until she finally colored over it with three hearts and a Joni Mitchell quote reading we are stardust we are golden from her favorite song Woodstock. She wrote out the second half of the line — and we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden — on the other shoe.)
If she closes her eyes for a minute, it’s easy to imagine that when she opens them she’ll see the blue green of Lake Michigan stretched out in front of her instead of the Boston Harbor and the slate-dark waters of the Massachusetts Bay beyond. That instead of Jack reaching up towards the sail of the Marblehead, fussing with the clew, it would be her cousin Bennett, who was almost as good a sailor as she was, leaning one foot against the dock as she untied a cleat hitch to free the boat, her bleached blond ponytail dusting the top of her navy polo shirt.
Bennett was very, very pretty but entirely disinterested in anything related to her looks: All summer long she wore some variation of the same outfit: a blue or white pique polo and chino shorts that hit at her mid-thigh. Her sisters teased her, saying she looked like a waiter at a yacht club. Bennett didn’t care. She liked sailing and books and playing ultimate frisbee. She didn’t seem to realize the arresting effect of her physical appearance: a combination of her long limbs and her delicate upturned nose with its spray of freckles and her gray-blue eyes. This was a quality that would continue for the rest of her life—she was equal parts oblivious and indifferent to being beautiful.
If she were with Bennett, they’d take out one of the smaller boats: a Sunfish or a Capri 14. They’d sail south towards Benton Harbor, past the old lighthouse at Oval Beach. When they’d drop the boat back at the marina, they’d secure the knots then sit cross-legged on the warm wooden dock in their bathing suits. Bennett would unpack a cooler. Bennett’s mother Sally was renowned for her picnics: smoked turkey sandwiches on thick-cut multigrain bread with sage mayonnaise and homemade cherry chutney. Tiny new potatoes tossed with green goddess dressing and hunks of ricotta salata cheese. Brown sugar cookies studded with M&Ms, the centers pliant and chewy, the edges crisp and golden.
They’d eat, the sun waning and drenching the coast in that super-saturated golden hour light. Afterwards, her cousin Johnny would pull his ancient Wagoneer into the dirt parking lot just west of the docks, leaning on the horn and whooping at them from his rolled-down window. Usually he’d have a friend in the passenger seat. The car always smelled faintly of salt water and strongly of pot.
Johnny would drive them back to the house. Most of his friends ignored them altogether, instead turning up the music loudly and acting like they didn’t exist. Only Liam, her favorite of Johnny’s friends, would turn around to talk to them, teasing them good-naturedly and asking about sailing. She still, years later, blushed slightly when she thought about Liam.
Brown Butter Brown Sugar M&M Cookies
170g (12 tablespoons) unsalted butter
280g (2 1/3 cups) all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon salt
3/4 teaspoon baking soda
213g (1 cup) light brown sugar
50g (1/2 cup) granulated sugar
2 eggs
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1 1/2 cups M&Ms
Preheat the oven to 425 degrees F.
Melt the butter in a large skillet or saucepan over medium heat. Once melted, continue to cook—swirling the pan occasionally—until the butter begins to turn a light amber brown and smells nutty (you’ll notice the butter foam and then the foam will subside).
Carefully pour the butter into a heatproof bowl and let it cool slightly.
While the butter cools, whisk together the flour, salt, and baking soda.
In a separate bowl, whisk the butter with the sugars until mostly smooth. Add the eggs, one at a time, whisking between each addition.
Add the vanilla, then add the dry ingredients and mix until just combined.
Fold in the M&Ms.
Scoop balls of dough (as large or small as you like, just keep them uniform in size so that they cook evenly) onto parchment-lined baking sheets, leaving plenty of room between each as they will spread.
For medium-to-large cookies, bake for about 8 to 10 minutes, or until very slightly golden brown. Remove from the oven — the cookies will look a bit underbaked still, that’s fine.
While still very hot, tap the top of each cookie with a spoon to press it down and give it a rumpled “bakery-style” appearance (optional step but fun!).
Let the cookies cool on the rack for about 5 minutes, until sturdy enough to transfer to a wire rack to finish cooling.