CHA PTE R 2
GET TO GOOSE LANE AT six with ground beef, sliced cheddar,I hamburger buns, and a bunch of romaine lettuce for salad in my basket. I’ve biked more than a reasonable number of miles today, and I’ve changed an aristocrat’s tire. If my dad doesn’t have oil and vinegar in his cupboard, I might lose my mind.
I sent Naomi a series of texts from the grocery store: There was a fire. I’m home for the summer. Hilarious story to tell you, unrelated. Come for dinner She said yes with a dozen exclamation points, per normal. She’s leaving Sully and their girls at home, which makes it feel like old times. Naomi runs Whitfield Tees, our local tourist-trap gift shop. She and I spent weeks brainstorming names for the store and landed on this one because we thought it was funny when it was said out loud: Whitfield Tease. Naomi is the kind of hot that actually stops traffic. Throughout my life, I have seen cars slow down to take in the bounty of her. Blond, curvy, with lips that fall into a perfect pout. She trails pheromones wherever she goes, and it’s possible she was a bit of a tease in high school. Like my dad, she makes most of her money in the summer, peddling hoodies and faux mansion artifacts, cheaply made replicas of vases and flatware to remember your mansion tour by.
I turn away from the water, up Goose Lane, so tightly packed with houses that you’d know if your neighbor’s back porch was on fire. I haven’t been to the house yet to assess the fire damage and am a little worried. Ours is white clapboard with a luxuriously oversized but drooping front porch and green shutters gone gray from neglect. If I tackled only the shutters, I could sand and prime and paint them before August. I’ll need to borrow a ladder and see what outdoor paints are on sale at Hubbard’s. The planters at the bottom of the front steps have gone to seed, and Christopher is on the top step, whittling a popsicle stick.
“Dolly!” Christopher says, just as I say, “Pants!” and redirect him inside.
I grab the broom that lives on the porch and start to sweep. This is the first step of tending to this house and, ever since it became mine to care for, I always start here. First the front porch, then the kitchen floor. The dishes, the wiping, the general degunking starting with the refrigerator door. Sheets and towels, up the stepladder to dust the ceiling fan, vacuum, done.
Christopher reappears in the doorway, clad in Big Bird– orange pants that cannot possibly be his. He wraps his arms around me and lifts me off the ground.
“Dolly!” he says, stretching my name into a song the way he always does. “You’re home.” He’s a full head taller than me and soft around the middle from spending his days on this porch. He smells of the same baby shampoo we’ve always used and the butterscotch candies my dad keeps in a mason jar by the sink. For the second time today, time folds in on itself—he is three and perfect, he is eight and broken, he is thirty-six and both of those things at once.
“I am,” I say, and the enormity of my love for him burns my chest. Now that I can feel him safe in my arms, I allow my
mind to take in what might have happened last night if that fire had gone unchecked. My little brother, my dad, my home. He breaks the hug, and I give him a once-over. His hair is wild and needs a cut, though I’m in no position to talk.
His skin looks terrible from all the meds he’s on. They’re mostly antipsychotic drugs that even out his disposition. He suffered a head injury when he and my mom were in a car accident when he was eight. I was eleven and Patsy was ten.
My mom was wearing a seatbelt, he was not.
The Newtons, to the left, are playing polka music. The Goldbergs, to the right, have T-shirts and towels drying on the line. I’m thirty-nine and nothing’s changed. I’m here, at home, with Christopher in my arms. Naomi is coming to hang out. Patsy’s out living her life. The only new thing is Gus, and at thirteen he’s really not that new.
Christopher and I sit on the porch swing and sway gently.
“What’s been going on today?” I ask.
“Not much, just watching my tree.” He looks at it lovingly. “It’s having a great day. And I was thinking about Las Vegas.”
This startles me, but I proceed carefully. “What about?”
“Just about the time Mom took me to Vegas and we met the real Buddha. The one from a thousand years ago, and he blessed me.” Christopher has never been outside the state of Rhode Island.
“Ah,” I say, and put my arm around him. I will call his doctor tomorrow. Every few years he needs his meds switched up. He gets dreamy, like he’s slipping away. This makes me anxious because I don’t want him to slip away, and also because it’s how my mom left. She never sat us down and said she was leaving. It was more of a slow departure, like when the water’s draining slowly from the bathtub. You
don’t really notice until it’s completely gone and suddenly you’re sitting there, cold.
He’s holding Vic, the long-haired stuffed fox I gave him before I left home for Boston. It usually stays upstairs in his room, so this is also cause for concern. When Mom left, Christopher stopped sleeping. He was nine and had gotten used to soothing himself after the accident by rubbing the ends of her hair while he fell asleep. I figured this out on the third night she was gone when I went in to check on him.
He’d been crying, but he settled down and fell asleep with a chunk of my hair in his hand. I put him to bed this way until I left for Boston at twenty-two and replaced myself with Vic the fox. It took all of five minutes, and I still marvel that this became too much for my mom to give.
I leave him with Vic and head inside for the first time. I find my dad puttering around in the kitchen. “There’s my sweet Dolly blue eyes,” he says.
“Things don’t look too bad here,” I say. The kitchen and the living area make up most of the ground floor. My dad’s bedroom is right off the kitchen, and it will take me no time to change his sheets and tidy that up. A flight of stairs that’s always seemed too close to the refrigerator leads upstairs to Christopher’s room and the one Patsy and I used to share.
Gus stays up there when we visit, which is probably where he is now, relishing some rare alone time in this house. I’ll have the partially burnt sleeping porch out back all to myself.
I drop my groceries on the table and wander out to the sleeping porch to assess the damage. The screens are filthy with soot but seem savable. The wood needs to be sanded and repainted. I’ll need a new mattress and bedding, but the old iron daybed just needs a wipe-down. I can fix this, I think.
I can do it in the mornings before the fish house and after dinner. My grandmother Maud’s old Singer sewing machine
is unharmed in the corner. Entirely made of metal, it’s from the early 1900s, with foot pedals that move the needle up and down. She used to say it was harder to learn than the violin, but once you got it, it was twice as beautiful.
My dad’s watching me from the doorway. “This is all fixable,” I say.
He breathes out a heavy sigh, like he’s been waiting all day for my verdict. “Thank you, darlin’,” he says. “Are you really staying all summer?”
This is a question that produces mixed feelings in my dad.
Like deep, thirty-year-old mixed feelings. I can see it in his eyes and in his unnaturally neutral expression. Like he’s trying to wipe all the preference from his face. He wants me to stay because he needs my help. Managing the house and the store and Christopher is no joke, and until I left for Boston, we divided the load pretty evenly. But he doesn’t want me to stay, because he feels guilty taking my help.
“Yep. I’m here for the summer. Gus wasn’t so excited about the kids who are playing summer baseball anyway, and I was telling him about that lifeguarding camp here. Kim and Layla are going to stop by the apartment to bring in my mail and deal with Fern.” I pull out my phone to show him a picture that he’s seen before. Fern is majestic, hanging in the corner of my living room.
“And you’re telling me that’s all you’re leaving behind?
Mail and a fern?”
“I’ll miss a couple of barbecues. Really, Dad, I’m glad to be here. Gus’s friends have sort of gone off the rails, and he’s been keeping to himself. It’ll be good to air him out a little.” I reach out for his arm. “Really. And I’m glad to work at the store.”
“Okay, well, thank you,” he says. “It’s a relief. I’m not sure I can count on Rikki Clark. Apparently, he joined a
band.” He huffs a sound like following that kind of dream is pure tomfoolery. “Maybe four days a week?”
“Perfect,” I say. “And I can spend the other three on house stuff. The shutters look tired and everything needs grout.”
“Yeah,” my dad says. “If you look close enough, everything around here needs fixing. But maybe it’s time you let some of it go. Maybe you work four days at the fish house and then treat yourself to a little summer rest.”
I laugh. “I’ll rest when I’m dead.” I reach into my bag and pull out my card catalog of Maud’s recipes. “I’ll be baking in the mornings, and if you guys can’t keep up with all the deliciousness, I’ll be forced to sell some at the fish house.”
He shakes his head. “Bake all you want, but I’m not putting in another counter. I’m not buying a single new thing for that store. Last debt payment’s in August. I turned off my autopay so I can have the full experience of walking out of that bank debt-free. You can come with me.”
“It’s been a long time coming,” I say, pulling him into a hug. “I’ll let you buy me an ice cream after.”
He gives me the smile of a proud, stubborn man. The kind who’s been underwater for decades but who always wants to be the one to pay for ice cream. I’m happy for him, for us, to finally be out from under the weight of that failed second location.
We head into the kitchen and fall into our rhythm, my dad and me, and now Gus. I sweep the kitchen floor, my dad cleans the lettuce. I take a knife to crumbs that have hardened along the metal rim of our old Formica countertop while Gus makes the hamburger patties and regales my dad with statistics about the Red Sox’s new third baseman, Howie Carver. He has so many thoughts and feelings about the Red Sox and Howie Carver that I relax, knowing the
conversation will never run dry. Christopher is at the table eating Oreos and watching them talk, but he’s not really listening. I’m definitely calling his doctor tomorrow.
My dad and Gus are outside minding the coals on the barbecue when Naomi arrives. She bursts through the door and calls, “Hey-o!,” as she drops her bag on the table. I put down my carrot scraper and cross the room into her arms in almost one movement. Naomi smells like floral shampoo and cotton candy lip balm, just as she has for thirty years.
“Did you really just work a full day hawking T-shirts?” I ask. “You literally look like you stepped out of a salon.”
“Speaking of which,” she says, lifting a piece of my hair and making a yikes face. “You’re starting to look like you’re in a witch costume.”
“One of my students said that exact same thing,” I say, laughing.
“Kindergarteners don’t lie,” she says. “I can’t believe you’re actually staying the whole summer.”
“I haven’t stayed this long in eighteen years,” I say. “It’ll take a sec to get my bearings, Gus too. But I think it’s the right thing.” I gesture with my head to the sleeping porch.
“Is it bad?”
“I need an electrician, but I can fix the rest,” I say, placing a plate of Triscuits and cheddar cheese on the table.
“Well, Keith Bloomfeld came into the store today,” she says, and takes a hunk of cheese. “Which, as you know, is odd. Locals don’t shop for souvenirs. He wandered around the store for ten minutes before he mentioned that he heard you were in town.”
“No,” I say. It falls out of my mouth like a boulder I’d been sucking on.
“No what? No, you can’t find a night to go to Hog Tied for a basket of chicken and some laughs?”
“Yes, that’s the no I mean.”
Naomi steps toward me. “Let me tell you something you don’t know about Keith. He’s a sweet, single guy with rock- hard abs and a Mustang.”
I laugh. “That does sound like one in a million.”
“Think about it.”
“I do not have the bandwidth. Not even for rock-hard abs
and a Mustang.”
“Are you dating anyone at all?”
“Not exactly,” I say, and turn back to scrape carrots.
“Does that mean sort of? There’s a guy and you’re hanging out?”
I turn around and gesture with my scraper. “More like there’s no guy and I’m fine with it. I don’t need the headache or the heartache or actually any of the aches. I’m currently living the ache-free lifestyle.”
“This,” she says. “This is what I’m talking about. You jump to a lot of conclusions about how things are going to turn out with guys you haven’t even met. Mustangs you haven’t even ridden in!”
“And I’m usually right. Even if they’re perfectly fine, they’re going to take up my headspace or, worse, my actual space. I promise you when Gus is grown, I’ll find some kind of companion.”
“You’ve got to stop saying ‘companion.’ I’m picturing you finding your soulmate at the kennel.” It’s possible we’ve had this conversation too many times. “What about a little something fun? Rock-hard abs in the moment?”
“This is my life.” I gesture to the Formica countertops as if getting the gunk out from under the metal rim is my life now. Which, maybe.
“It’s been what? Fourteen years since Niles? And you’re kicking ass at life.” She looks at my hair again and winces.
“Generally. I want to see you swept off your feet.”
My childhood princess fantasy flashes in my mind, swept away by the gentle man and the white horse she gets to keep. “Life’s swept me away plenty, Naomi. Not a big fan of it.”
She doesn’t say anything, which is the true beauty of old friends. She was there when my mom left. She was there when I found out I was pregnant with Gus. She came for the month I was on bedrest and stayed a week after he was born. She held him while I cried in the shower. If anyone understands why I don’t want to set myself up to be abandoned again, it’s Naomi.
“Speaking of you doing every goddamn thing around here, what’s going on with Patsy?” she asks.
I laugh. “She’s good. Busy with work and kids and stuff.”
“And you here with all your free time,” she says, and here we go. I never argue on this point, because God knows I agree. But it’s a circular discussion because Patsy’s not interested in pitching in. And sometimes it’s easier to take care of things than it is to ask for help.
I grab two beers from the fridge. “I can’t help it if I’m so great at everything,” I say with a bow. “And speaking of which.” I reach into my back pocket and grab Stewart Whitfield’s handkerchief as a prop for the story I’ve been dying to tell her.
She recognizes the monogram immediately. “Holy shit.
Where did you get that?”
This is going to be even more fun than I thought. Naomi has a very short fuse for excitement, and nothing excites her like the Whitfields. “Oh, just from my pal Stewart. When I stopped to change his tire.”
“Get. Out.” She grabs the scraper from my hand to garner my full attention. “Start from the beginning. Where
was he? What was he wearing? Did you smell him? Was this the first actual contact outside the fish house? Sorry. Just talk.” She pulls a chair from the table and sits.
“I knew you’d ask, so I checked—he smells like leather and freshly cut grass. The backs of his hands are tan, and he has strong-looking wrists. I’m guessing tennis.” She’s leaning in to my details, and I swear this was worth the trouble of changing his tire. “He was on the side of the road out by Eight Oaks and I was on my bike. He was in a blazer and sort of acted like I worked for him. He even offered to pay
me.”
“How much?”
“I said no.”
Naomi nods approvingly. “Is he still ridiculously handsome? It’s been years since I’ve seen him in person. He looked good in that engagement photo, sort of brooding.”
“Definitely still handsome.” I’m not going to mention his neck. Or the reckless electricity that comes off his skin. “But get this: Audrey Mills dumped him for a Yankee.”
“Gross,” Naomi says. Then, with horror on her face, she says, “Please tell me you didn’t bring up striking him out.
Total boner killer.”
“What? There was no. Eww.”
Naomi’s laughing at how easily she’s gotten me flustered when Christopher calls, “Dolly!” from the front porch.
I turn to the window and see Gavin McCumber, the fire chief, walking up our front steps.
I open the door to let him in and give him a few seconds to run his eyes up and down Naomi. I honestly don’t blame him. “Naomi,” he says, removing his hat. “Hi, Dolly.”
“Hi,” I say. “Thank you for responding so fast last night.”
“It was no problem, barely a fire at all,” he says. “Looked like an isolated electrical problem.”
“Doesn’t look too bad back there,” I say. “I think I can sand and paint it, and no one will ever know.”
“Yes, I’m sure you can,” he says. “But I wanted to talk to your dad about the roof.” Our roof is original to the house, making it about eighty years old. Because I can’t really see it, it’s the one thing in this house I don’t worry about. “We were up on ladders last night, checking the roof for embers.
There were none, which is good, but the roof is shot. Water’s gotten in, there’s rot and visible mold. The whole thing is going to need to be replaced.” I should have known. The only real problems that ever materialize are the ones I haven’t thought of.
“My dad’s outside. Barbecuing,” I say. As if this will somehow stop this line of conversation: He’s busy so you can’t give him bad news. Instinctively, I finger the ten-dollar tip in my pocket.
Naomi asks because I don’t dare. “How much would that cost?”
“This size house? With the mold cleanup, I’d guess about fifty grand.”
I laugh a hard laugh. “Yeah, I’m not sure the house is
worth that.”
“Of course it is,” says Naomi.
“Okay, but my dad doesn’t have the money. We can work around it. Replace parts of the roof as they fail.” Just when he was about to get out of debt, here we go again.
“You can’t,” Gavin says. I turn to the fridge and offer him a beer. He holds up a hand to decline. “The thing is, Dolly, now that I know about it, and I know it’s not safe here, or at least it won’t be soon, I have to report it. And if it’s not fixed this place could be condemned.”
“No,” I say. I turn to Naomi. I want her to make a joke about how I’ve misunderstood, how I’m a worrywart. The
furrow of her brow tells me I’ve heard correctly. I shove a rich man’s handkerchief deep into my back pocket. “No.
They can’t. Christopher can’t leave, this is his home. My dad’s. No.”
“There’s the hero of the day,” my dad says, framed in the open front door of the house he was raised in. He puts down the hamburger tray and shakes Gavin’s hand. “Did you want a beer? Stay for dinner.” He turns and hugs Naomi, who is sparkling thirty percent less than usual.
Gavin gives me a look that lets me know it’s on me. “Dad, Gavin found a lot of damage to the roof last night and says we need to replace it.”
My dad shakes his head. “It’s always something. Here’s hoping we get the contract for the Starlight Gala this year.”
“It’s fifty thousand dollars,” I tell him.
“Oh,” he says. He’s still smiling, but there’s a crack in it now. It’s the cracked smile he used to give us when he told us our mother would be back in a few weeks. “That’s a lot of lobster tails.”
We don’t talk about it at dinner, because our lack of fifty grand feels more personal to my dad than it does to me. He’s had just one failed venture, but he lives it every day because of how long he’s been stuck under the debt. He peppers Naomi with questions about the store and her girls.
When Christopher and Gus have gone upstairs and Naomi has left, we sit down at the kitchen table. “Meeting of the ringmasters?” he says.
I smile. “Yep, I think we should call one to order.” When I was thirteen and my mom had been gone for a year, we had the first of these meetings. Patsy needed a costume for something at school and Christopher had developed a habit of wandering around the neighborhood in the evening. My dad was managing the store and us full-time, even though I’d
taken over the housekeeping and most of the cooking. “This place is a circus,” he’d said, dragging Christopher home by the arm and discovering me at the sewing machine, trying to make a pillowcase into a skirt. I told him the circus needs ringmasters, and we needed to get more organized about things. He smiled, both sad and relieved. I think I became an adult in both of our eyes that day.
“I don’t have the money to fix it,” he says now. “And before you say something crazy, neither do you, and neither of us is going into debt to fix this old place.”
“Then what? You can’t stay here if the house is condemned.”
“Would it be so bad if we had to move?” my dad asks.
“Yes,” I say. “It would be so bad.” It would shake Christopher to his core. His routine is everything to him and he is the guardian of his tree out front, the maple that he watches year in and year out through the seasons. And this is Maud’s house, the house my dad grew up in. The one she moved out of and gave my parents as a wedding gift, much to my mother’s horror. It’s also my home, the place that held us together after Mom left. The home where I’ve tended to my people. The place where we grew because of the food I cooked, the schedules I ran, the sheets I washed. It’s the frog song and the leafy view out of Patsy’s and my bedroom window. “Yes,” I say again. “It would be so bad.”
“Chris and I could get an apartment in town. Two bedrooms and a bathroom. A circus of two.” He smiles.
“Works just fine for you and Gus.”
“Gus is a kid, and he’s going to grow up and leave. This is the Brick home. You were born here. Grandma Maud taught me how to bake here. Christopher’s whole life revolves around sitting on the porch. He’s connected here.”
“Doll. You’re not his mother. He’s my responsibility.”
I raise my eyes from my tea. “He’s also mine.” I’ve been taking care of Christopher his entire life. Even before the accident I knew he needed an extra set of eyes on him.
He shakes his head. “Let me think about this. Talk to friends. Maybe even talk to the bank. But one thing I know is I’m not letting this be your problem. You’ve given up too much.”
“I’ve given up nothing, Dad. This is my home too.”
