CHA PTE R 34
HE RIVER STONES WERE A pain in the ass to find,” Izzy says,“T letting herself into my kitchen. “But they’re being delivered here this afternoon. Windows and lumber come in the morning.”
It’s Friday morning, six days since I’ve heard Stewart’s voice. I pull a tray of banana muffins out of the oven and place them on a trivet in front of my dad, who leans in and gives them a sniff.
“Good morning,” I say. “And what are you talking about?”
Izzy’s been paid in full. Fifty-one thousand dollars in the end, and I have nine thousand in the bank. Won’t keep me warm at night.
“Oh crap,” my dad says, just as Izzy says, “The sleeping
porch.”
“They broke up,” he says.
“Jackass,” she says. “Well, it’s paid in full.” She helps herself to a cup of coffee and sits down.
“Dad,” I say. A full sentence and also a question.
“He wanted to surprise you,” he says. “He had those plans, and he knew you’d never spend the money.”
The pressure on my chest is familiar now. He did know me so well.
“Well,” I say, somehow also a full sentence.
“Maybe you could start construction after she leaves,” my dad says to Izzy. “They’re only here another week.”
Lifeguard camp ends and Clay’s parents invite Gus on a camping trip. I sleep upstairs in my childhood bedroom, which feels like a balm. No night sounds to imagine Stewart’s footsteps passing through. No ghost of him beneath me in the daybed. In fact, Stewart has never stepped foot into Gus’s room, making it a temporary refuge.
After work, I regrout the tile in the kitchen and find myself staring into the middle distance a lot. Every thought leads to my wanting to tell him about it, which reminds me that he is not here to tell. Which reminds me that I might be going mad. I am heartbroken but also disoriented—the things that I believe deep in my heart about Stewart and me are not true.
Naomi becomes, again, a place I go to on my not-so-great days. She lets me sit in her kitchen, silent if I want. Or cleaning if I want. She lets me rail against the company who sold me this magic epoxy to reattach her refrigerator shelf.
It doesn’t work. I knew it wouldn’t, but I bought it anyway.
Stupid. She lets me go on and on about it, and she pretends she doesn’t know what I’m really talking about.
On the morning that we leave for Boston, Gus asks if there’s any way we can stay in Whitfield. We can’t, because I have twenty-two kindergarteners counting on me, but I wish we could. I would love to see him start high school in Whitfield, where he has friends. I don’t trust myself to be in Boston and not wander down Stewart’s street to see if the light is on in his den.
I wasn’t prepared to walk back into our apartment. Fern is alive and well because I have great friends, but any CSI team would immediately conclude that sex was had here.
Two mugs are in the sink. My bed is hastily made, clearly by a person who was too dazed to care about creases. I stand in my bedroom doorway and stare at that extra bedside table,
there for symmetry but totally useless. I might sleep on the sofa tonight.
In the bathroom I unpack my toiletries and catch my reflection. I’ve gotten some sun this summer. All that yachting. I feel the ends of my hair, no longer so blunt cut after two months, and I imagine a time-lapse of it growing and growing until I’m exactly who I was before I changed Stewart’s tire. Before I knew about salting butter and hidden grottos. Before I knew what it felt like to wake up to a man bringing me tea because his first thought was what I might want. I don’t have Stewart anymore, but I don’t want to go back to who I was. I take scissors from the medicine cabinet and trim an inch off my hair and decide to wear my yellow pants to the first day of school.
The night before school starts, Layla and Kim come for dinner. We clear the plates afterward, and they sit with me while I make frog-shaped name cards for everyone’s cubbies.
“Naomi says this Stewart thing is a code red,” Kim whispers. There’s no need. Gus is wearing headphones while playing Xbox on the couch.
“It’s at least that,” I say. “Sorry I didn’t tell you.”
“We know. NDA and all that,” says Layla.
“I had to look it up,” says Kim.
“It’s fine,” I say. “Gus had a great summer. I crashed and burned. So net positive.” It almost feels like it never happened. For the first ten days I allowed myself one Google search per day. I told myself it was to arm myself with facts in case Gus saw anything. I was both relieved and disappointed to see there was no gossip about the Starlight Gala, no news of our breakup. If I had to guess, I’d say this was Busy’s doing.
“There was a feature on him in theGlobe,” Layla says.
“Big photo where he looks like Mother Teresa with a bunch
of sick kids.”
“What an asshole,” Kim says.
“Saw it,” I say. It actually came up in my email subscription to theGlobe. I just saw the top of the photo—his hair recently trimmed and neatly combed—and didn’t open it.
I deleted it and then deleted it from my trash.
“Are you going to call him out on it?” Layla asks. “Write a letter? Key his car?”
“Not my style,” I say. “I’m probably just going to get over it.”
Kim leans in. “Speaking of your style, can we see the clothes? Naomi says the green dress would look great on me.”
WE GO BACK to Whitfield the day before Thanksgiving.
Christopher is under the crocheted blanket on the porch swing when we pull in to the driveway. “Dolly!” he calls. We haven’t visited since the summer, partially because we’ve been busy and partially because I’ve been dreading seeing the sleeping porch. It was my personal space in my personal home. Now it’s made of plans I approved of in a fantasy time, and it’s the one bit of visible proof that Stewart ever loved me.
The fireplace greets me from the corner, right where I wanted it. It’s stunning in black stone against the freshly painted white walls and windows. There are copper fasteners to unhook the windows so I can replace them with
screens in the spring. They remind me of Stewart’s kitchen, and I feel a sneaky wave of grief.
Dad’s on Cook House, and he roasts trout and new potatoes. Christopher seems good. We talk on the phone pretty often, but I never have a real sense of how he’s doing until I’ve seen him, how focused his eyes are or aren’t. Gus leaves by bike immediately after dinner to meet up with Clay and his friends. Tonight will be the first time he’s socialized since starting high school, and I try to imagine what these past few months might have been like if we’d stayed.
I make a fire before bed and leave the door open to the night. The fall noises are different, more sinister, and the sound of the waves is louder without the din of tourists in town. I used to like this time of year in Whitfield when I was little, it felt like a coming inward, a rest. My dad would always have a fire going in the living room and we would roast marshmallows and watch movies. I think I was still under the crocheted blanket back then.
Patsy and her family are coming for Thanksgiving, and everyone acts like she’s doing us a big favor. We’re so grateful that she’s going to drive a couple of hours and let us cook for her. We feel terrible that she’ll have to stay at the Whitfield Inn with their fluffy robes and European-made pillow chocolates. Poor Patsy with her husband, who’s not perfect but who she gets to keep.
On Thanksgiving morning, I sleep late because I was up from three to five a.m., contemplating this injustice. In the middle of the night there is nothing to clean or paint or care for. I am a fountain of grief, and it pours in every direction and never runs out. I wake and it’s already light out. Gus is sitting on the side of my bed.
“Hi,” I say, sitting up. “Wow, I overslept.”
I get out of bed; I need to get the turkey in the oven. But Gus stays there.
“Mom?” he starts. I sit back down because this is unusual. “Was my dad a good guy?”
I put my arm around him, but he squirms away. “That’s a big question. I’m not sure what it means to be a good guy.
Pops is a good guy for sure. Your father was friendly and I think mostly kind to people. He was smart and worked really
hard. Those are all good qualities.”
“But he didn’t want to be with you.”
“True,” I say. “But we weren’t right for each other.”
Gus gives my hand a squeeze. “I want to be a good guy, I think. Is Stewart a good guy?”
“Yes.” My heart does this thing now, it’s a quick jab of pain. I think of it as the Stewart punch. “He is. It was a fun summer.”
“There’s a race next summer.” He says it like he’s
apologizing.
“What kind?”
“Sailing. It’s out of the yacht club and it’s sort of hard to enter, but I want to try.”
God, I love this kid. “That’s great, you should.”
“You need a yacht club member to sponsor you.”
My heart sinks. “And you want to ask Stewart.”
Gus nods. “Is that okay? Is he still someone we can talk to?”
I put my arm around him and pull him in close.
Somewhere along the line, my kid learned how to ask for what he wants. “Sure. Text him. And if you don’t hear back, I
can text Busy.”
“You think he won’t text me back?”
I know he will. Even if he doesn’t want me, I know deep in my heart that he won’t ignore Gus. “He will,” I say. “As
long as he’s on a break from doing whatever he does, fluffing up his rich-guy hair.”
Gus laughs, and if that’s not the most heavenly sound on earth, I don’t know what is.
WE MOVE THE folding table into the kitchen to accommodate everyone. Patsy arrives empty-handed, which annoys me, even though she asked what she could bring and I said nothing. She looks tired. She and Jeremy, who she gets to keep, don’t talk directly to each other, and her twins, Maggie and Kate, are adorable but seem like they’ve been freebasing sugar all day. After dinner she sends Jeremy and the girls back to the inn and wants to sit with me on the porch swing. I bring Grandma’s crochet blanket and two mugs of milky tea.
“Dad seems good,” she says, opening the door to one of our trademarked nothing conversations. I do not want to sit here and comment on all the things that are fine. I’m not
entirely fine.
“He is good,” I say.
“Yeah, good,” she says. We’re quiet for a bit.
“Everything okay with you?” she asks.
“Of course,” I say. “I’m fine.” Lying is really just like any other skill. The more you do it, the easier it gets.
“What’s going on with you?” I ask.
She sips her tea. “Nothing. Why?”
“You didn’t eat dinner.”
“I don’t like turkey.”
“No one likes turkey, everyone eats it.”
She cups her hands around her tea and blows into it. It’s not quite cold enough to see your own breath, but the steam rising from her cup reminds me that it will be.
“I might be a little lost. Turning thirty-nine, that kind of thing.”
I don’t say anything. And I think of how Stewart used to stay quiet to draw words out of me. It aches, this thought.
She sips her tea. “I’m in therapy.”
“What does your therapist call you?” I ask.
“Patsy. Why?”
“No reason,” I say.
“I feel really locked out. Of our family.”
“The door’s open, Patsy,” I say, a little bite to my voice.
“Is it though?” She’s looking straight ahead at the maple.
“Dad calls you when there’s a problem. And you don’t even
mention it to me, like I’m useless.”
“No one thinks you’re useless,” I say.
“I think you do. And it makes me feel bad. And I’m supposed to be talking about how I feel. So would you stop
acting like I’m being annoying?”
I turn to her.
“I actually practiced this conversation with my therapist.
She was a lot nicer than you, playing you.”
My eyes go wide. “You’re in therapy over me?”
“Yes,” she says. “My therapist thinks you resent me, and I think she’s right. I got to go away to college and you stayed. I got to have a childhood and you worked. Dad shouldn’t have let that happen. And Mom, well, she sucks.
But I can feel how much you resent me for things I don’t even know about, things that are happening now and things you did for me when I was a kid that I never asked you to do.
You’ve dug into your role so deep—this whole oh-look-I-can- fix-it-all role. You don’t know who you are without it. So we
stay here, stuck in this dance where you’re the hero and I’m the worst. And honestly, Dolly, no one’s winning.”
I don’t turn to her because I have tears in my eyes. And the degree to which I cannot handle her seeing me fall apart, like the literal way that would topple our precarious family dynamic, proves that she’s right.
“You took care of me,” she says. “You took care of all of us. I don’t know how I’m supposed to thank you, especially now that you won’t even let me in.”
I’m quiet for a while. I think back to the beginning of our family, before the accident. I was always pitching in with the baby or making Patsy’s and my lunches. And it wasn’t to be loved. I felt loved in our house. It was to feel safe. My mom would get up from the dinner table and go for a long walk without saying anything. She’d put Christopher on his back on the sofa and wander out into the yard to talk with a neighbor, and I’d race over to make sure he didn’t roll off. I monitored electrical outlets as soon as he could crawl. I did a seatbelt check every time we got in the car, but I wasn’t around that day. I was my mother’s understudy long before she walked away from our circus.
“I think I always knew,” I say. “That she didn’t want to be our mother. That she’d eventually leave.” I let the tears spill down my face and turn to her. “Like I wasn’t even that surprised. But I put myself away that day. I stopped wanting things for myself and started making all of my decisions for you guys. And I’m proud of it, you know? And then so soon after I finally had time to figure out what I wanted, I had Gus. I’m proud of him too. But…”
“But you never got to be selfish. And you totally resent me for it,” she says.
That sounds impossible, but it feels true. Like the place in my body where I store my anger knows this. “Maybe.” I wipe
my eyes with the sleeve of my sweater. “I’m sorry.”
Patsy puts her arm around me and I let her. “I think your whole identity is tied up in doing everything for everyone.
Would you still be Dolly if I brought a stupid pie?”
I laugh. “Now we’ll never know. You must hate coming here.”
“I hate coming here because I feel bad that I have my
own life and you don’t.”
“I have a perfectly good life,” I say.
“In Boston? Or do you secretly want to live here? You’re
here a lot.”
“Yes. I wish I could have a life here.”
“A bakery at the fish house,” she says, because your
sister always knows your dream.
“Yes,” I say. “Dad is so stubborn.”
She gives me a look over her tea.
“Okay. I’m stubborn too,” I say.
“I want you to text me when someone needs something and give me a chance. I don’t want you to protect me and then resent me. I just want to be sisters. I want to joke around about Mondays and Mom coming back again.”
“We haven’t done that in a long time,” I say. I rest my head on her shoulder. “My favorite thing about myself,” I say, “is that I don’t need help. I make do. I’m someone who can make something out of nothing. This summer I loosened up on that a little, sort of pretending I was a different kind of person. I wasn’t gripping my righteousness so tightly.”
“Did you like being that person?” she asks.
“I actually felt like myself, just not so tired. Not thinking of every single other person before myself. I’d like to figure out how to be her all the time.”
We’re quiet for a bit, listening to the waves in the distance.
“Can we talk like this again?” I ask. “Like, can you call me after therapy, or in the middle of the night or whatever?”
Patsy nods. “I wish I could just stay here tonight.
Jeremy’s been snoring and Maggie’s been sleepwalking, and
I’m so goddamn tired.”
“This is why I live like a nun,” I say.
She laughs. “The inn is so loud. It was hopping when we got in last night, people home for Thanksgiving. Busy Whitfield was there dressed in head-to-toe silver. Shoes, dress, jewelry, though it was probably platinum.”
“Why would the Whitfields be here? They don’t come for
Thanksgiving.”
“What just happened to your voice?”
“Nothing.”
“Dolly, you look like you’re about to cry. What’s going on?”
So I tell her. ThePost and the boat and the sex. The way he said he’d change the world for me. The gala, the check delivered by messenger.
She’s cross-legged, facing me now. “You totally lied to me. And Mom would lose her shit over you having sex in that house. But I know that’s not the point. So then what? He must have apologized.”
“Never heard from him again. There wasn’t even a note with the check.”
“Wow,” she says. We’re quiet for a bit, and the night sky is completely black, with a single star that’s probably just an airplane.
“Yes,” I say. We sip our tea for a bit in silence. “The Niles thing hurt, but as soon as Gus was born my focus totally shifted anyway. It’s kind of felt comfortable, familiar, to be on my own for so long. But I fell for Stewart. I fell for the whole
thing. And my brain is screaming at my heart to move on, but it’s like I’m addicted to thinking about him.”
“What a jerk,” she says.
I’m quiet for a beat as I wait for that phrase to ring true.
“That’s the thing. He’s not. Which is why this makes no sense. He either loved me or he’s a sociopath. But he’s not a jerk. I haven’t lost anyone worth grieving since Maud. And this feels like grief.” Patsy takes my hand to comfort me, and I let her. I close my eyes and feel that solid brick of pain in my chest. “I should be in therapy,” I say.
“You should for sure,” she says. “Do you ever talk to Busy?”
“No. She sent me a sweet text about staying in touch, and I said thank you, but that was it. It’s easier not to.”
“Was there a horse?” she asks, and I smile.
“One white, one black. I got to keep neither.”
Patsy adjusts the blanket so it covers me as evenly as it covers her. I feel the weight on my legs and let her hold me.
IN TRAFFIC ON the drive back to Boston, I tell Gus what I’ve been thinking about since I sat on that porch with Patsy. “It was nice to be with everyone,” I say.
“Sure,” he says. He’s looking at his phone.
“I’ve been thinking about how nice it is in Whitfield in the winter. And also in the spring.” He doesn’t look up. “I want to move there full-time.”
He puts down his phone and turns to me. I have his full attention. “Really?”
“Yeah. I mean, I love our life in Boston and our place. But we could try it out. Sublet our apartment. I could take a
leave of absence.”
“Would you get a teaching job in Whitfield?” he asks.
“I could try. Plus we’d be living with Pops for free, so we’d be okay for a bit.”
I can see his biggest smile out of the corner of my eye.
“Or maybe you’d finally do all the things you want to do at the fish house?”
“You know how Pops feels about that. I’m sure I can substitute-teach until a job opens up. But what do you think, generally? Would you want to move?”
“Yes. A hundred percent,” he says. He starts texting furiously but is still talking. “I’m going to join the hockey team because all the lifeguard kids do that, and I’m going to work at the fish house after school and you and I are going to turn it into an empire.”
I laugh. “We’ll see what Pops has to say about that. You know I don’t want to run it the way he has it set up now.”
“I’ll handle Pops,” he says. “I’m a Brick, you’re a Brick.
We’ve got to keep it going.”
