The market is part farmstand and part gourmet food store: a classic Hamptons dichotomy. The low-slung building is white and pretty, with a forest green awning on one end and large white cotton umbrellas standing sentinel over the picnic tables out front. Inside, strands of tiny globe lights criss-cross from the wooden rafters. The cool cement floor is painted a dusty moss green. Tables hold baskets of produce: shiny purple fairytale eggplant the size of your thumb, knobby heirloom tomatoes striped red and orange, bunches of carrots—still streaked with dirt from the ground—propped up at jaunty angles.
Read moreDOUBLE STREUSEL COFFEE CAKE
It’s only 10 AM when she gets back to the apartment, but there’s music coming from the end of the hallway. It’s Martha and the Vandellas, which means Hadley’s in a particularly good mood, because Motown is her happy music (followed by reggaeton and anything by the Rolling Stones). She drops her keys with a clang in the glazed ceramic Astier de Villatte bowl that sits on their entryway table and sits down on the rattan bench to untie her shoes and peel off her socks.
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Today she’s eating lunch. Tuna salad again. The breeze is riffling the tops of the trees. Two yards over, the neighbors are painting. Steve, the husband, leans a ladder against the side of the house and it sways and clanks menacingly.
She takes another bite, chewing slowly, and watches out of the corner of her eye as Steve bends over to pick up a paintbrush, then straightens. Steve is a salt-of-the-earth type. He grew up in Harwich, out on the Cape, where his dad ran a boat repair shop and his mom raised him along with three brothers: rowdy, ruddy-cheeked boys who all settled nearby after high school and immediately set about having children. Sometimes they come to visit. She’s met them all separately but still can’t tell them apart in their sameness. They’re all broad-shouldered, with the weatherbeaten skin of someone who grew up on the water.
Read moreFRENCH TOAST LAYER CAKE
The sun is watery but strong, filtering down through the canopy of dogwoods that marks the boundary between their lawn and the neighbors’. She sets her laptop down carefully on the patio table. A bowl of sliced plums, ice cold and just on the firm side of ripe, sits next to a glass of fizzy salted lemonade. The lemonade is something she picked up in college: Her sophomore year roommate in college had been dating a chemical engineer named Atid who’d grown up in Thailand.
Read moreCARAMELIZED ONION FOCACCIA
The sky overhead is awash in pastel colors, as if someone had taken to it with a paintbrush and over-enthusiastically daubed on broad watery brushstrokes.
This is her absolute favorite time of day: just after a sweaty run and a shower, but before cocktails or dinner, when the entire world seems to be taking a breath before nightfall. It’s not dusk that she loves, but the minutes just before it, when the sun is considering its descent but hasn’t begun, when the day is on the precipice of turning off the light but remains bright.
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