Miles took a red-eye from SFO and landed at Philadelphia Airport on the third Tuesday in May. After picking up his rental, a brand-new silver Porsche 911 Carrera S Cabriolet—because go big or go home, but also go big when you go home—Miles watched the convertible’s roof pack itself into the trunk as he blasted the Prodigal Son playlist he’d curated on the flight. He stepped on the gas and exhaled.
Taking in the Philadelphia skyline from the Girard Point Bridge and grinning as the sports stadiums came into view, Miles ceded the fact that he had a West Coaster’s adventurous spirit but an East Coaster’s loyal heart. He was excited to head home, to be back in the land of Philly sports teams and their insane fans, even if several frayed ends awaited him.
He stopped at a gas station for snacks and did a double take at the woman in line ahead of him—she looked just like his childhood au pair. When Miles entered Yates Academy in kindergarten, Jo hired “Valentina from Argentina” to drive him the thirty minutes each way and insisted they listen to the Spanish tapes she’d purchased. Miles had so resented Valentina, who spoke too quickly in words he didn’t understand, that he’d tried to fire her from the back of his father’s Mercedes. He’d still been in a car seat at the time, and Jo had not been amused when she’d found out. “You’ll thank me someday,” she’d said. “Spanish is the language of the future and you’re a lucky boy to learn it early from a native speaker.” Only now did Miles realize Valentina must have been barely twenty when she’d spent two hours a day driving him to and from school. He had no idea where she was now. The woman in line really was a spitting image of her, but as she’d looked three decades ago—Valentina would be in her fifties now. Nothing crystallized the impossible speed of time more than going home. Miles suddenly felt old and exhausted. He stepped out of line to grab a huge cup of coffee.
Back on the road and feeling the blissful buzz of caffeine hit his system, Miles saw two texts come in. He ignored the one from Chloe who, as planned, had broken up with him but seemed committed to “staying friends.” Miles tapped on the one from Ziggy: ETA? Bev wants to make you lunch. Miles’s mouth curled up into his signature three-quarter smile, a semi-grin that had ruined multiple marriages and ended one engagement. Nothing could be more of a homecoming than a Bev Miller lunch: a turkey sandwich with lettuce, tomato, and spicy mustard on whole-wheat bread, cut on a diagonal, with ruffled Utz chips and a pickle from the Coffee Cow.
Within the hour, he was pulling into the Miller driveway. “You brought the sunshine with you!” Bev exclaimed, holding open the front door with one arm, the other raised in an expectant hug. And here was Ziggy, rushing past her like a dopey dog, galumphing toward Miles with half the body fat he’d had in February.
“Dude,” Miles sputtered, “you look like a lost Hemsworth.”
Ziggy didn’t respond but instead kept grinning as he embraced Miles. “I’m so glad you’re here,” he said in a prolonged bear hug. His voice was thick, on the verge of tears, which didn’t surprise Miles. Ziggy was his father’s son—a sensitive soul, thoughtful, and proof that Miles wasn’t a total sociopath if they’d been best friends for this long.
“Get over here already!” Bev yelped from the porch, stomping her feet. “It’s my turn!” Miles took the steps two at a time to Bev and scooped her up, lifting her off the ground. “You’re finally home!” she squealed. “Do you know how much we’ve missed you?” The last time they had been together was at Zeke’s funeral. Before that brief, heart-wrenching trip, Miles hadn’t visited Sea Point in several years.
He didn’t dare look at Ziggy just then. These Millers made him so emotional, and suddenly Miles’s life on the West Coast felt far away and farcical. The house smelled like fresh laundry that had been hung outside on a line to dry—that crisp, clean scent that had compelled Miles to huff his pillowcase every time he’d slept over.
Walking through the house, Miles noted each mark of beauty, each artistic touch. Bev’s medium was oil paint but her creativity nestled into every crevice, just as it always had. She moved through the world in an ongoing dialogue with nature: windowsills served as blank canvases meant to display a glass vase with a single bud or a robin’s egg rescued from the road, a shed snakeskin, a smooth green rhombus of sea glass. Jo’s home, meanwhile, was filled with art acquired from well-established New York City galleries, professionally framed and hung on the walls by Jon Bon Jovi’s interior decorator. Both mothers were collectors, but what they pocketed, what they treasured, could not have been more different.
With her long, quick-twitch fingers, Bev swept up an ancient brown apothecary bottle from the nearest window ledge and insisted that Miles smell the dried sage.
This felt like home. And yet, sitting down at the kitchen table with the promised lunch before him, Miles felt his stomach lurch. He realized he had subconsciously been waiting to hear Zeke’s heavy boots clunking down the stairs, his arms swinging in his faded flannel shirt, eyes glistening like wet pebbles above that oversize grin dominating his face as he announced, “Oh look! My favorite delinquent.” Rinsing the sandwich down with a glass of milk, Miles forced himself to pretend that Zeke was just out on a job, not gone. He couldn’t lose it in front of Bev.
The dark thought that had been haunting him since February, since Ziggy had called him sobbing, curled up in Miles’s chest and burrowed. He was a bad person for thinking it, even if he never said it. Why Zeke? Why not his own deadbeat dad?
Miles took a deep breath, inhaling the lemon Pine-Sol Bev used to clean the kitchen counters. These smells were as transportive as any psychedelic drug. He felt the singular peace he’d always experienced between these walls and also the twinge of guilt that accompanied being here and feeling this way when his own childhood home was across town in West Sea Point.
“Care for another?” Bev asked, already halfway out of her seat and reaching for the loaf of bread.
Miles looked at Ziggy. “Wanna go halfsies?”
In sixth grade, Ziggy and Miles had met at a pickup ice hockey game on the frozen duck pond in East Sea Point, just a few blocks from Ziggy’s house. It had been a snow day and, after the game, as Miles waited for that year’s au pair to show while hail pelted his bare head, Ziggy had asked if he wanted to walk back to his house.
Removing his sweat-soaked pads in the hallway for the first time of millions, Miles heard the Rolling Stones blasting from the kitchen, where Bev was cursing the sensitive smoke detector on the ceiling and waving a broom at it. He followed Ziggy, who dutifully stirred the chili on the stove, and called his mom to tell her he’d be having dinner with a friend from hockey. “Sure, honey,” Jo had said, distracted. “Just let Paulina know when you want to be picked up.” Miles hung up, wondering if he’d ever want to be picked up as Bev asked him to set the table. Miles still remembered how grateful he’d been to have a task, how folding those napkins gave him a place in the Miller family. At his own home, Rene the housekeeper did everything and forbade him from sitting in the kitchen while she cooked. After that first Miller dinner, Zeke had scooped four bowls of mint chocolate chip ice cream, and Ziggy had asked Miles the best question one sixth grader can ask of another: “Want to sleep over?”
When Miles was growing up, the ongoing drama at the Hoffman house—his father’s erratic disappearances, his brother’s penchant for school suspensions—resulted in Miles’s fondest memories taking place at the Millers’. In the kitchen now, Miles admired Bev’s paintings hanging on the far wall. She used to rotate them every few months, but these were the same ones he had seen in February after Zeke’s funeral. Ziggy had said that Bev had stopped painting, but Miles hadn’t believed him until now.
“That’s my favorite,” Miles said, pointing with his sandwich to the smallest canvas across from him. Bev mustered a weary smile. At first, the painting appeared abstract, a half-moon of blue, narrow bars of gray over a swatch of pink, with a yellow background filling in the rest. But any local knew it was an off-center close-up of a table setting at the Wharf—the blue the plate, the gray the fork tines, the swatch of pink the cloth napkin and the yellow the Wharf’s signature yellow linen tablecloth. Every artist in town sold paintings of the Wharf, scenes of the busy dining room, or the crowded Jetty Bar, or the line of chefs in their funny chef hats and checkered pants, but only Bev had thought to zoom in like this, to make a familiar scene both strange and intimate, engaging with the observer, waiting for the click of recognition that might never come.
“Take it,” Bev said, opening the refrigerator door.
Miles looked at Ziggy, who gave him a “this is what it’s been like” look.
“I’m serious,” Bev added. “But really we should give it to your mother, don’t you think?”
Miles shrugged and bit into his second sandwich to buy time. “Probably, yeah. That would be nice. Besides, I want a fresh Beverly Miller.”
Bev made something of a squawking noise while Ziggy beamed, the corners of his eyes crinkling so that Miles knew he’d said something genuinely funny.
“What? It’s a reasonable request. Every clown-around knows about the old Beverly Millers, all the priceless canvases that stay priceless because you won’t sell them.”
Bev patted his shoulder and kissed the top of his head before he stood up to pour himself more milk. “I haven’t been painting,” she said, and now, up close, Miles saw all the new lines in her face, the bruise-colored bags under her eyes, the prominent silver threads above her ears.
“Yeah, that’s the word on the street,” Miles said, reaching his arm around her and pulling her in for a hug. Ziggy shook his head from across the table, biting down on a grin that crept out all the same because he knew exactly what Miles was trying to do. “But I have so many people I need to impress, so could you just consider painting something new for me? Maybe one of all the cute new lifeguards in their blue two-piece Speedos?”
“You’ve always understood my aesthetic better than anyone,” Bev said dryly, her words muffled by Miles’s gigantic arm still wrapped around her. A client had once told him that he didn’t give bear hugs so much as anaconda squeezes. “In other news,” Bev said, switching the subject, “did Ziggy tell you about his father’s ridiculous last request?”
Miles shot Ziggy a questioning look.
“I still can’t believe it,” Bev continued. “He up and dies on me, and then it turns out he’s pulled this whole stunt in the will about a party on the ferry. AND THEN!” Bev looked at Ziggy, who was examining the black crud under his fingernails, before returning her gaze to Miles. “I get to the second paragraph on the Wawa receipt, where Zeke’s requested a full-blown re-creation of the Rock the Boat party, just like the one we met on a hundred million years ago, so that everyone can find their soulmate somewhere between Sea Point and Delaware.”
“He thought it would be a nice tribute,” Ziggy offered quietly.
In the silence that followed, Bev looked at Ziggy, Ziggy looked at Miles, and Miles looked out the kitchen window, preoccupied with Bev’s garden shed. “I know you don’t want to hear this, except that you do,” Miles finally said. “I find it Notebook-level romantic, what he did. He’s basically saying that his biggest accomplishment was meeting you on that ferry, what, thirty-seven years ago?”
Bev nodded soberly while Ziggy slouched deep into his chair. For the first time in years, Miles felt he was in the right place, doing the right thing.
“Speaking of boats,” Miles said, nodding out the window before looking at Ziggy, “you have time for a quick trip?”
Leaning against Bev’s shed and covered in a blue tarp visible from the kitchen window rested the red canoe Zeke, Ziggy, and Miles had built the summer after sixth grade. Ice hockey may have brought the boys together, but it was their weekend canoe trips that bridged the rift of attending different middle schools. Thanks to Zeke’s vigilance over the years, the canoe was still in perfect condition.
“I can’t go today,” Ziggy said, blowing out a defeated sigh. At Miles’s indignant gape, he explained that he was already behind—he needed to keep working on the man cave at Daffodil Cottage and, more pressing, Jenna at the yoga studio had texted him multiple times in the last hour about replacing a showerhead.
“She needs a plumber to do that?” Bev asked.
“Definitely not, and I told Jenna that, but she insisted.” Since the start of his dead dad diet, Ziggy couldn’t help but notice that Jenna Lobiak’s yoga studio was suddenly always in need of his assistance, which was funny, since Jenna Lobiak had ignored him his entire life. Turning to the Sea Point Prince, Ziggy asked, “Mi-guy, come with? I can give you the books too.”
“Why don’t we just FaceTime Jenna on the way?” Miles riffed, knowing Jenna had always loved him. The thought of seeing Zeke’s handwriting made his stomach lurch. He wasn’t ready to dive headfirst into decoding financial records. “I’ll tell her I kidnapped you—or do it when we get back? I’ve got to be at the Wharf by six for dinner with Jo.”
They both knew Jenna would be far happier to receive a FaceTime call from Miles Hoffman than a new showerhead. As Ziggy mulled it over, Miles stood up and loaded their sandwich plates into the dishwasher.
“I can’t,” Ziggy decided. “I’ve got to get to Daffodil Cottage if I ever want to get paid. Let’s go tomorrow—that way we won’t have all these time constraints.”
“The only constraint here is you,” Miles joked, before rubbing his hands together with excitement. “All right, party people,” he announced. “I think it’s time we start painting some new paintings and getting the canoe back out on the water where she belongs.”
Ziggy grinned the adorable grin he’d always had, only now, Miles admired, Ziggy’s dimples were deeper and his eyes bigger, almost bluer, as they shone in his slimmer face. “You’ve been home an hour,” Ziggy mused, “and already you’re making demands.”
With the same lightning quickness that had earned him First Team All-Ivy every year at Princeton, Miles thrust his arm around Ziggy’s neck and put his best friend in a headlock. “That’s right!” Miles yelled as Ziggy yelped, littermates reunited. “Get used to it, Zig—the Sea Point Prince is back, baby!”
Like any coastal town that historically served as a port for sailors and fishermen, Sea Point’s most popular resort had a bordelloed past. Before it became the Wharf, even before it was Skip’s, the original structure had no sign out front but was referred to as Frank’s by those in the know. After Jo bought Skip’s for a song in the early ’80s, she spent the next ten years culling investors from her Wharton network to spend nearly $20 million on rehab. By the mid-’90s, the Wharf was pristine, with the exception of four rooms.
The Wharf’s business offices above the kitchen were in Frank’s original rooms—still with numbers on each door—that had been rented by the hour early in the twentieth century. During every stage of renovation, Jo insisted that these four rooms not only remain but be preserved. No matter how many times the ghosts made her jump, she liked the physical evidence of what came before her: the wallpaper with its peeling rosebuds, the black stains on the ceiling from wall tapers burning too high, the wide floorboards that creaked like bedsprings, the spirit of a drowned sailor’s angry bride who roamed the hallways, opening and closing doors at odd hours looking for her husband, but only when Jo was up there alone.
In her office overlooking the ocean, Jo had shoved her desk into the corner where a bed had once been, rust etched into the rosebuds. Women had been marketed within these walls and now a woman was here, making the deals, cutting the checks, deciding what happened next. The men had had their time.
“You’re late,” Jo said, her eyes still squinting at the spreadsheets on her computer screen.
“Sorry,” Miles apologized, combing his wet hair back before hugging his mother. He would have been on time if he hadn’t showered, but then he would have smelled like Jenna Lobiak, and he couldn’t see Jo smelling like desperation. Jenna had been a good palate cleanser after two years with Chloe, the carnal page break he’d needed before the next chapter in his romantic life. “I ran some work errands with Ziggy.”
“Of course you did. Are you hungry?”
Miles nodded and they descended the narrow staircase, waving to the staff as they cut through the kitchen. A nervous teenager tripped over his own feet as he led them to a back corner table of the dining room. Beyond their window, moonlight glittered off the ocean.
“What a view,” Miles admired, pretending to read the menu since he already knew he’d order the Surf & Turf—another palate cleanser after two years of Chloe’s veganism. “The staff seems extra scared of you these days. Are you still on that cannibal diet?”
“Very funny. That old sous-chef had to go. And can I just say”—Jo began, folding her hands as Miles held his breath and waited for the onslaught of criticism, the repeated assertion that she’d made up her mind about the future of the Wharf—“it’s so nice to see your face in this dining room. I know it’s you who just arrived and yet, honestly”—Miles did a double take as she dabbed her eye with her napkin, the gallery of diamonds and sapphires decorating her fingers catching the candlelight—“being with you here, well, it feels like a homecoming for me.”
Spilman arrived just then, the Wharf’s general manager. “I don’t want to interrupt, but I thought bubbles would be an appropriate way to celebrate Miles’s return,” he said, displaying the French label before muffling the pop of the cork with the dexterous mastery of a professional assassin. Miles stood up to greet him with a hug, as much to demonstrate his love for his favorite Steve Buscemi look-alike as to relish how uncomfortable it made poor Spilman. The general manager seemed better suited for a life as a Beefeater than a human fire extinguisher, which is what GMs were, if they were good at their job. Spilman was excellent at his job.
“Cheers to you, my Miles,” Jo said. “Welcome home, honeybear.” The nickname would have been heartwarming if Miles didn’t know for a fact that Jo also called her contractor honeybear—and her fishmonger, and her hostesses when she couldn’t recall their names.
“And cheers to you, Mother dearest,” Miles said, playing along. “The Wharf has never looked so good.”
“Wharflandia,” Jo corrected. “It’s Wharflandia until Memorial Day Weekend. The hot tubs are open until then.”
“You don’t say,” Miles said, beaming at Jo as he took his first sip. “Well, I should probably experience those firsthand, for R & D, of course.”
Jo laughed as she hailed a server and ordered their appetizers. “It’s always been my dream to have you take over,” she said. “And then I realized my dream shouldn’t dictate your life. I’m trying to set you free. You get that, don’t you?”
“But I want to learn,” Miles asserted, maintaining eye contact. “I came back, didn’t I?”
Jo looked down at her lap and twirled the rings on her fingers, a tell that only Miles knew. It was her trick for resisting the impulse to cry—she’d learned early on that the all-male board did not respect her tears. “Mom?”
“I don’t want to get my hopes up,” Jo said to her lap, “only to have you disappoint me.” Miles balked but said nothing. It was unfair, though not new, that, because his father and brother were disasters, Miles was expected to compensate for their bad behavior. Jo looked up from twisting her rings and smiled at him through wet eyes. “Let me guess: the Surf and Turf.”
“Oh yeah,” Miles said, sighing it all out and reaching for his glass. “I’ve only been thinking about it for the past ten years,” he confessed, smiling sheepishly. Jo let out a genuine laugh and reached over to pat her son’s hand.
“Explore Wharflandia and see what you think,” Jo offered. Miles nodded and said he’d love to. From the West Coast, it was easy to forget the kinship he shared with his mother, but up close, Miles took pride in their parallels, how they could keep up with each other as they swung from subject to subject like monkey bars. Jo and Miles cackled with their eyes closed over a second bottle of Bordeaux as they finished their steaks and did impressions of the long-dead family cat, Marbles, who’d suffered an unfortunate underbite in addition to being severely cross-eyed.
“No, no,” Jo gasped, “it was worse than that,” and Miles stuck out his bottom teeth even more until mother and son were both doubled over and causing a bit of a scene. In spite of themselves, Jo and Miles luxuriated in each other’s company. They relaxed into who they were as the dining room looked on with envy at the Sea Point royals catching up in the back corner of their past, present, and future.