Read Online Recipe for a Happy Life: A Novel by Brenda Janowitz - Free Book Online Page B

equipped with its own en suite bathroom. And that’s not including the servant’s quarters, which are under the hull (not a part of the tour) and house a staff of eight.
    Close quarters? The bedrooms on this yacht are bigger than the bedroom in my Manhattan apartment. Still, I humor him, since that’s what I imagine my grandmother would do in this situation.
    “Have you been out here all summer?” I ask as we approach the bow. We’re pulling out of the harbor, so it’s fun to be at the front of the boat. It’s set up with two lounge chairs (outfitted with towels monogrammed with Zelda May and neck rolls that simply have a Z ), so we each lie down on a chair.
    “We started the summer in Cape Cod,” he says. “And then we docked in Nantucket for a bit before coming down here. In a week or so, we’re going to double back to hit the Vineyard and then Newport. We like to be in Newport at the end of the summer to hit the boating show.”
    I’m dying to know if these guys work—I assume Harold is retired—but I can’t seem to formulate a way to ask that doesn’t sound judgmental. Probably because I want to know so that I can judge them.
    “That’s amazing, you and your brothers can get so much time off,” I say.
    “Yeah,” he says, “when you work for yourself, you can set your own schedule. You must know what I mean, right?”
    Of course he assumes that I know what he means. We’re out on a yacht on a Wednesday. And now we are out on the open sea, without a care in the world.
    “Actually, I’m a lawyer. I don’t work for myself. I work for a firm in Manhattan.”
    I’m not sure why I’m so intent on explaining that I work for a living, emphasizing why we are different.
    After all, I do work as a lawyer, but I have the luxury of living debt-free due to my grandmother’s largesse: she paid for all of my schooling from Pearce straight through to law school. Technically, I’m not a trust-fund baby since my mother refused to ever let my grandmother set up a trust fund for me, but what’s the difference? She’s paid vast sums of money over the years to make sure I could live debt-free. She even made the down payment on my apartment.
    But still, it feels different.
    “My grandfather said you were staying out here all summer,” he asks, clearly confused.
    “I am.”
    “So you’re not working right now,” he says.
    “It’s complicated.”
    “My life is complicated, too,” he says, giving me a wink. “My brothers and I don’t actually work for ourselves, per se. We live off our trust funds.”
    I furrow my brow. Clearly, he thinks that I’m a trust-fund baby, too.
    “Oh, no, it’s not like that,” he says, allaying my fears. I breathe out a sigh of relief. “We’re not blowing through them like some of the morons you see out here. No, we just live off the dividends.”
    Dividends? His trust fund is so large that he doesn’t even need to dip into it. He can live large off the mere dividends. I can barely process this information.
    “Is that what you do?” he asks me.
    I say yes just to end the conversation. Trey points out parts of Connecticut we can see from the boat and I start wondering exactly how long this day cruise is going to last. Maybe I should have pled seasickness to keep us docked in their slip? I hear footsteps coming from the starboard side of the boat.
    “Excuse me, please,” one of the staff members says. She’s wearing the yacht’s uniform: khaki short shorts along with a polo monogrammed with Zelda May with her name embroidered under it: Inga. Her long blond hair is braided into two pigtails. “It’s time for lunch, if that’s okay with you.”
    “Fine,” Trey says. “Grab me a Sam Adams Summer Ale and meet me at the table with it.”
    “Of course, Mr. Pennington,” she says.
    “Do you want anything?” he asks me.
    “Oh, okay,” I say. “May I please have a glass of white wine?”
    “Certainly.”
    “I like a girl who drinks during the day,” Trey