Free The Cold Blue Blood by David Handler

wanted. He brought out two pieces of art, some dishes and pots and pans, bedding and linens, the stereo and television that they’d bought for Fire Island. Mitch’s super gladly helped him load it all into the Studey. He liked Mitch. Mitch was the only tenant who gave him free tickets to Broadway musicals.
    Mitch needed a bed. He bought one from a mattress outlet in Westbrook. The rest he scavenged. He found a rocker and kitchen table in Dolly’s barn. A beat-up little rowboat worked as a coffee table with a storm window fitted atop it. A steamer trunk served as a nightstand. He bought a comfortably worn armchair for ten dollars at a tag sale in town. Also a set of gallantly hideous bright yellow kitchen chairs.
    At the town dump he found a fine old raised panel oak door which he mounted on sawhorses to serve as his desk. Actually, the dump was a picker’s paradise. He almost always came back from there with more than he took in—a pair of shell-back aluminum garden chairs, lamps, bookcases. And he was generally in very good company. Mitch rubbed shoulders with a former mayor of New York City, a Tony Award—winning actress and a bestselling author of children’s books at the dump. They, too, were picking.
    He put in long, hard days outfitting his new cottage. For nourishment he feasted on prodigious quantities of his famous American Chop Suey. His recipe was a closely guarded secret: one large jar of Ragu, one pound of ground beef, one box of spaghetti, an onion, a green pepper and a package of frozen mixed vegetables. Garlic salt to taste. Maisie had pronounced it dog food and refused to eat it. Mitch could survive on it for several days straight. The nights were still cool on Big Sister. After dinner, he would make a fire in the fireplace and stretch out with a pint of Häagen-Dazs Vanilla Swiss Almond and a spoon, gazing at it. He would fall into bed early, lulled to sleep by the hard work and the rhythm of the water slapping gently against the rocks outside his little cottage. He had not slept so soundly in months. The bright morning sunlight would awaken him well before seven. The Fisher’s Island Ferry was already making its return trip to New London. The fishermen and sailors were already out. He would stand at the living room window, breathing in the clean sea air and watching them, the slanted early-morning light on the water reminding him of Edward Hopper’s Maine seacoast paintings.
    He liked to walk the island’s rocky little beach in the morning, particularly when the tide was out. He rolled up his pants and slogged his way barefoot through the tidal pools, marveling at the diversity of life forms to be found there. Sargassum, Irish moss, bright green sea lettuce. Crabs and oysters. Orange-beaked oyster catchers, terns and cormorants. Geese flew right overhead in V-formation, honking loudly.
    And he liked to observe his fellow islanders as they went about their lives of vigorous and accomplished leisure. Frequently, as dusk approached, he would sit out on a lawn chair and watch them—competing on the island’s tennis court or returning home to the dock from a sail, sunburned and exhilarated. For Mitch, watching from his front-row seat, these bluebloods were as exotic as the characters in a Merchant-Ivory movie. There was handsome young Evan, Dolly and Bud’s son, who drove a Porsche 911 and shared the stone lighthouse-keeper’s cottage with Jamie, an older man. Those two spent a lot of time together on their boat. There was Bud and his very hot young wife, Mandy, a tall, athletic blonde with good legs who drove a vintage MGA and regularly destroyed the lawyer on the tennis court. One afternoon, they had a croquet party on their lawn. Their guests arrived in white flannels. The men wore straw boaters on their heads. The sounds of laughter and the clinking of glasses wafted across the island toward Mitch like bubbles on a current of warm air. There was Dolly’s mysterious brother, Redfield, who left