Page 11 of What August Heard
She blinked. “Sorry?”
“At the gala. What’s your role?”
“I—” She shifted in her chair. “I look pretty. I socialize. I make sure the guests feel welcomed and have a good time.”
“And the event itself? The logistics, the vendors, the program?”
“That’s what the event management team is for, Fletcher. That’s their job.”
“Right.”
“Socializing is also work,” she said, and her voice had an edge now. “Looking the part and making people feel comfortable,that’s what gets them to open their checkbooks. That’s real work. That’s why the gala raises what it raises every year.”
I looked back at the water.
I thought about August. I thought about what Callie had told me three months ago, mentioned once and casually, like it wasn’t the kind of thing that would stick in my head and refuse to leave. August drove to the children’s cancer ward every morning. Not once a week. Every morning. She brought her best roses, the ones she could have sold at the market for good money, and she donated it to the ward so they could replace yesterday’s flowers on each child’s bedside table with fresh ones. She had been doing it for over a year.
All the while paying her rent in installments.
I looked at Margaux.
Then I looked at the sandcastle.
Callie had walked down to the water with her lemonade, leaving me and Margaux to our conversation, which I knew she had heard every word of. She glanced at me once before she left. I knew that glance. It was the one she’d been giving me recently and that meant why are you doing this?
A little boy walked past our chairs. He was maybe four, five years old, wearing a tiny bucket hat and swim trunks with cartoon fish on them. He was walking very carefully, carrying a plastic cup of water in both hands, absolutely focused on not spilling it.
“Oh my god,” Margaux said under her breath. “Who dressed that child? Those trunks are—”
“Margaux.”
She stopped.
“Get a life,” I said. I put my margarita down on the armrest. “I mean that. A real one. Not the gala, not the Instagram, not the commentary. An actual life where you find something you give a damn about that isn’t what other people are wearing.”
Her face went very still.
“I was joking,” she said.
“You weren’t.”
I stood up.
She didn’t say anything else. I walked down to the sand.
Poppy saw me coming and pointed her stick at the empty patch of sand on August’s other side. “You can work on the east wing,” she said. “It needs reinforcement. It keeps falling.”
“What’s the east wing?”
“That side.” She pointed. “It needs to be wider at the base. August keeps making it too narrow.”
“I make it narrow because it looks more elegant,” August said.
“It looks more collapsed,” Poppy said.
I sat down in the sand. August was right next to me, close enough that I could see the freckle below her left ear that she didn’t know existed because she couldn’t see it without a mirror and two specific angles. I knew because I had catalogued it approximately two years ago and had been unable to un-catalogue it since.
She was wearing a yellow top and cutoff shorts, and she had sand on both elbows and a smear of it across her left cheek, and she looked like the beach was something she had always been a part of, like the water and the sky.
