The Smart One

Chapter 3





In the Coffey house, there was always a list taped to the refrigerator. At the top, it was titled: THINGS WE NEED. When the list got too full, or most of the items had been crossed off, someone would tear it down and start a new list with the same heading. The title was always capped and underlined, as if to stress that yes, this is important, these aren’t just things we want, these are things we need.

Weezy couldn’t even remember when the list had started. She supposed it was when she and Will first moved into the house, over thirty years ago. They were so young then, barely out of college, and at that time they needed everything. But times were different, and they didn’t ask their parents for help or just charge everything, like kids would today. Neither of them even had a credit card yet, and they had a whole house to fill. So they made a list to prioritize what they were going to buy first. Weezy remembered their deciding to buy a bed and a couch, but waiting almost two years to buy a dining room table. Most of the house sat empty for those first few years, but the list always made them feel like it was only temporary.

It was on that list that Weezy told Will she was first pregnant. She’d gotten home from the doctor, so excited, and she’d added A Crib to the list. So clever, she thought. She stood back and looked at it and laughed and even jumped up and down a little bit. She was giddy the whole day, waiting for Will to come home and find out that they were going to start their family. It was almost perfect, the way she asked him to check the list to see if she’d added milk, and how he scanned it quickly, taking a moment to let it sink in, to believe what he’d read. He turned around to face her with a look of disbelief on his face. Neither of them could believe it, really, that they were capable of something so amazing, so fantastic. They were so proud of themselves, as if no one before them had ever accomplished such a thing.

Of course, when Martha was two months old, and Weezy found out that she was pregnant again, there was no such moment. Instead, she’d sat on the kitchen floor and cried up a storm. She never told Claire this story. They were delighted when the baby came, of course, but on that day, newly pregnant with a fussy infant, she had cried. Holy moly, had she cried.

Once the list had been up there for so long, it just seemed necessary. Each family member wrote down whatever it was they needed, and it was all in one place. Today, the list contained the following items: Grape-Nuts, lightbulbs, car inspection (Volvo), AA batteries.

When Max was home, the list was filled with food: Cheetos, Oreos, turkey, Honey Nut Cheerios. Max still ate like a teenager, ravenous, shoveling food in his mouth like he hadn’t eaten in days. He was twenty-one now, going to be a senior in college, but he seemed younger to Weezy. His limbs still looked too long for his body, his smile a little sheepish, like he knew that he had grown up to be handsome, but he had no idea how or when it had happened.

Once, when Claire was in high school and in a particularly foul adolescent mood, she added A Life to the list. It was after they’d forbidden her to go on a weekend trip with a group of friends to someone’s unsupervised shore house. Claire had screamed in the way that only a fifteen-year-old girl can. She’d narrowed her eyes and accused them of abuse, and denying her the right to any fun at all. “Just because you have no lives,” she’d said, “and just because you are socially void, doesn’t mean that I have to be.”

Will had found the list in the morning while making coffee, and he’d brought it upstairs to Weezy, who was still in bed, and the two of them had laughed and laughed. “What a little shit,” Weezy had said, and Will snorted. They saved the list, thinking that someday they’d show it to Claire, maybe when she had a teenager of her own. “To show her what a horror she was,” Will said.

Martha had once added Peace to the list, during the first Iraq War, and Weezy was touched that she had such a sensitive daughter. (She was also a little concerned about Martha’s obsession with war, natural disasters, and just horrible news in general, but she tried to focus on the sensitive part.) Claire had ripped down that list, saying that she didn’t want any of her friends to see it, because it was “beyond embarrassing.”

“Why do we even have this list?” Claire had asked that day. “Things we need? It makes us seem so desperate. God, we aren’t poor.”

Weezy loved lists. They made her feel powerful. Today she sat down with her coffee to make a list for the day. Shore, she put at the top. Then underneath that she wrote, grocery store. She put her pen down and took a sip of coffee. She’d been trying to get commitments from all of her children to go to the shore house for a week in August. She and Will would stay on for another week after, but she wanted all of her children there together. Was that too much to ask?

They’d all been responding in a casual way, “Sure, Mom, probably.” And now here it was, August 1, and she still didn’t have a real answer from any of them. Not even Martha, who was living with them. It was like none of them knew that things took planning, like they all expected her to just wait for them to make up their minds, and then rush around to get ready for it.

Weezy called Claire for the third time that week. As soon as she said, “Hello,” she could hear Claire sigh. “Mom, I told you I’d try. I’m not sure if I can take the time from work.”

“It’s less than a month away,” Weezy pointed out. She tried to stay calm. “Have you even talked to them about it? Have you asked? I’m trying to finalize everything.”

“I’ll ask today, Mom. I promise. But they might say no.”

“Well, see what you can do. Your sister would love to spend some time with you. And Max, too. He’s bringing Cleo. And your Aunt Maureen will be there for sure, although it’s looking like Ruth and Cathy can’t make it. Neither can Drew, which is too bad.”

“Max is bringing Cleo?” Claire asked.

“Yes. He asked if he could, and I said it was okay, of course.”

Claire stayed quiet for a few moments and Weezy wondered what she was thinking. They’d all met Cleo last year, when Max had brought her for a visit. Right after they’d all been introduced, Weezy and Claire went to the kitchen to get drinks for everyone, and Weezy whispered, “She’s a bombshell.” It was the only word she could think of to describe Cleo.

“Mom.” Claire laughed. She’d started to say something, but then stopped and nodded. “She really is, isn’t she?” And the two of them had bent their heads together and giggled like girlfriends at the pretty little bombshell that Max had brought home.

Weezy had warned her sister before she came over for Thanksgiving. “Just so you know, Max’s girlfriend is quite a showstopper.” Maureen had laughed and said something about Weezy’s being a protective mother. “No, it’s not that,” Weezy said. “She’s just … she seems older. She seems, well, very sexual.”

Maureen had laughed again, but when she got to the house and met Cleo, she was visibly taken aback. She recovered, walked over to Cleo to introduce herself, and tripped just as she got near her. Maureen put her hands straight out, ended up pushing Cleo down on the couch to break her fall, and the two of them landed tangled together. They pulled themselves up and off of each other, and then sat side by side on the edge of the couch.

“I’m Max’s clumsy aunt,” Maureen had said. Claire, Martha, Cathy, and Ruth had watched the whole thing with their mouths hanging open. Cleo brushed off her arms and insisted she was okay, that there was no problem. She’d even laughed.

Later in the kitchen, as Weezy poured Maureen a glass of wine, she said, “I told you.”

“You weren’t kidding,” Maureen said. “Good lord.”

It wasn’t that she didn’t expect Max to bring home a lovely, pretty girl. She did. But Cleo was something else altogether. She seemed out of place in their house, like a runway model that had been dropped out of the sky and into their Thanksgiving. She was nearly as tall as Max, and she wore strange, funky outfits that looked amazing on her, like the fake fur vest that kept shedding, so that little tufts flew behind her when she walked, making Will sneeze.

Weezy was immediately worried that she was too much for Max. She wanted Max to date someone just a little less stunning, someone who didn’t seem like she would break his heart so easily. And so, although Cleo seemed perfectly polite and nice, Weezy prayed every day that they would break up.

Claire had defended Cleo. “Just because she’s so pretty doesn’t mean she’s not a good person,” she’d said. Claire was always protective of Max, and she’d gone out of her way to be nice to Cleo.

But Weezy could hear something in Claire’s voice now, like she didn’t want Cleo to go to the shore for some reason. Maybe Claire finally sensed that Cleo wasn’t the right match for Max? Weezy started to ask Claire about it, but Claire interrupted her.

“Okay, Mom. I’ll ask at work and let you know, okay? I’ll call you later.”

Weezy hung up and started to cross the item off her list, but then realized she couldn’t because it wasn’t taken care of yet. She did add Empty dishwasher to the list, and then crossed it off, because she’d already done that and it made her feel like she had accomplished something.

She sipped her coffee, which was starting to get cold, and tried to plan out her day. There was so much to do, and already she was exhausted. How was it that even as her children got older, it seemed harder to get things done? It was supposed to be the other way around, she was pretty sure of that. But it seemed like the more she tried to get things in order, the more she tried to corral them, the more they squeezed out of her grasp like a group of little greased pigs, determined to do the opposite of whatever she wanted.

WEEZY COFFEY HAD ONCE BEEN Louise Keller. No one called her Weezy until she met Will, when they were freshmen at Lehigh University and were seated next to each other in World Civ class. She’d introduced herself as Louise, but the next day Will called out to her from across the quad, “Hey, Weezy!” It made her laugh, made her heart beat faster to hear him call her that. (Of course, if she’d known it was going to stick, she would have put a stop to it right away.)

They were in college, and everyone was new to everyone else, and this crazy nickname took the place of her real name. Half of her friends from college never even knew her as Louise. With time, even her parents and sisters adopted the name, and eventually she just stopped fighting it. She almost forgot that she’d ever been Louise in the first place.

Even her own children sometimes referred to her as Weezy when talking to each other or to their friends. And a couple of times in high school, when Claire was annoyed, she’d say, “Chill, Weeze,” which made her sound like a frozen treat.

Weezy had graduated from Lehigh with a degree in education, even though she had never really wanted to be a teacher. Her mother had pushed her toward it, telling her that it was a doable profession for women. Weezy took a job in a sixth-grade classroom for one year, and then she’d gotten pregnant with Martha and then Claire, and she never went back.

She hadn’t missed it. After her first week of teaching, she knew she wasn’t going to like it, but she had committed to it, so she gave it a try. The kids she taught were right on the brink of adolescence, that time when they don’t quite fit in their bodies, when they can turn nasty in a second and gang up on each other, on teachers, on anyone, really.

It didn’t make sense for Weezy to work those first few years, not with two babies at home. When both of the girls were in school, she’d started looking into other jobs. “But not teaching,” she told Will. She wasn’t even sure that she wanted to go back to work, but she felt like she should. Not for money reasons—they’d actually been quite fortunate, inheriting enough from Will’s father to buy the house, and it wasn’t like they lived an extravagant life. No, it was more that Weezy had always talked about how women had the right to work, how they were equal, and now she felt that she should act on it.

She’d worked on and off for years—at the front desk of a medical office, as the office manager of a small law firm, and most recently at an accounting firm running the day-to-day operations of the office. She’d been there for almost six years, and she couldn’t say she was sorry when they started suggesting they were going to eliminate the position.

The secret she never told anyone—not Will, not Maureen, and certainly not her mother—was that she much preferred the times when she was at home, when she wasn’t working. During those years she was able to make her life more orderly, was able to spend more time with the kids and Will. And even though it had felt chaotic a lot of the time with three kids and a dog, she still loved it.

Her favorite times were Sunday nights, when the house was clean and picked up, the laundry was done, the lunches for school were made and sitting in brown bags in the refrigerator, homework was done, and everyone was asleep. It was those nights when Weezy felt she’d accomplished the most, when the quiet of the house buzzed through her, made her feel like she’d won a prize.

Maybe it would have been different if she’d majored in something besides education, something that she was interested in. But then again, maybe not. Her parents had always told her she was the smart one, right in front of Maureen, like Maureen wasn’t even there. In their eyes, Maureen was the pretty one. “Maureen will marry well,” her mom said once, but that wasn’t true. Maureen had married an awful man, and they’d stayed together long enough to have two kids and then he’d left, moved clear across the country and barely saw his children.

No, it had been Weezy that had married well, married a kind man who was a caring father and a good provider. It had been Maureen who had found a career she loved and raised Cathy and Drew practically on her own. Sometimes Weezy wondered if they’d almost done it on purpose, fulfilled the part of their lives that their parents doubted they would, just to show them they could.

Weezy found herself overcompensating when she talked about women in the workplace, as if her children were going to pick up on her desire to stay at home and get some sort of subliminal message that told them women couldn’t make it. No, she didn’t want that. She couldn’t raise two daughters and let them think there was anything they couldn’t do.

Her rants became almost background noise to her children. They were so used to hearing her go off on the way the world viewed women, in a commercial, or a TV show, or a billboard. She wanted to make sure that they knew it wasn’t right, but sometimes she wasn’t even sure if they were listening.

She remembered once overhearing a friend of Claire’s say that she “wasn’t a feminist or anything,” and Weezy had scolded her. “Do you know what a feminist is?” she’d asked. “Do you even know what you’re saying by denying that? Do you think you’re worth less simply because you’re a woman?”

The girls had all giggled at being called women. They were twelve and uncomfortable at the thought. Claire had sat there, her face red and hot, trying to get Weezy to stop talking, rolling her eyes to the top of their sockets, saying, “God, Mom, come on, stop!” But Weezy didn’t care. So her child was humiliated by her—so what? Wasn’t that the job of a parent? And when Claire was embarrassed enough to answer back, embarrassed enough to react, well, then at least Weezy knew that she’d been heard.

WEEZY COULD HEAR WILL WALKING around in his office upstairs on the third floor. Sometimes it sounded like he paced back and forth across the room all day long. Will was the head of the sociology department at Arcadia University, a small liberal arts school near their house. He’d started working there in the eighties, when it was still called Beaver College. It had existed as Beaver College for over a hundred years, but as the Internet grew, parents who went searching for “Beaver College” didn’t find the school’s homepage—instead they found themselves on some pretty disturbing pornography sites. And so the school decided to reinvent itself.

Will was a popular professor at the school, teaching classes in sociology and in cultural anthropology. His most popular class was Society and the Cyberworld, which looked at the way culture changed because of technology. He used the name change of the college as his first example, pretending to be a prospective student as he searched the Internet, then faking his surprise at what he found. He always made the kids laugh, as he covered his eyes and shook his head at the results. His students loved him, found him entertaining and engaging. They begged to get into his classes, even after they were already full. He was almost a campus celebrity.

Will had written a book in the late eighties called Video Kids, which had become something of a phenomenon. It was a look at the effect that television and video games had on children. He hit something in the culture at that moment, and his book had become a best seller. He’d appeared on talk shows, and was still invited to sit on panels and give speeches.

It had been somewhat of an amazing time when the book came out. They’d been plugging along just fine, and then all of a sudden Will was a celebrity. He’d gotten a two-book deal with the publisher, and the movie rights to the book were snatched up. The good news just kept coming, and Will’s job as a professor turned into something much more profitable.

Of course, the next two books that he’d written, Video Adults and The Anger We Teach, hadn’t done nearly as well. The movie rights were still being optioned by the production company, but at this point there was almost no hope of those books’ ever being made into anything. Will was at work on his fourth book, which he was reluctant to talk about at all. Weezy understood that. She knew he’d been shaken after the mild reception of his two follow-up books. She reminded him that since he started out so high, anything would seem like a letdown. And Video Kids was still used as a textbook for college classes all over the country, which made for some nice royalties. But Will had seen his requests for speaking engagements and panels diminish in the past few years, and Weezy knew that he was anxious for another success.

Will had even cut back on his classes this year, and now was home three full days during the week, which took some getting used to. He was teaching three different sections of Society and the Cyberworld, but he could do the class in his sleep and he had teaching assistants, so it wasn’t a big time commitment.

It was amazing to Weezy that Will could spend days locked away, studying how other people lived their lives and what it meant for them, and how the culture influenced choices, and vice versa, but she could barely get him to talk about his children for more than five minutes. His attitude was that they were grown, that he and Weezy had done their job and now it was up to the children to choose their own paths. It drove Weezy up the wall.

“What do you want me to say?” Will would ask sometimes, when she went on about Claire’s calling off the engagement.

“I want you to have an opinion,” Weezy said. “I want to know what you think.”

“I think Claire’s a smart girl. I think if she thinks it was the right decision, then it was.” And that was all he offered. Claire’s a smart girl. Like she was just a distant relative he didn’t know that well, instead of their own daughter. They’d always assumed Claire would be fine. She was the most independent one, the one who was ready to live on her own by age five. But then, last year, Claire’s plans had all fallen apart, and Weezy felt like they’d failed her, like they hadn’t been paying enough attention. Will still believed she’d work it out.

Weezy wanted to shake him until he got some sense. “These are our children,” she wanted to say. “Our flesh and blood, the people we made, and you really don’t care what they do with their lives?”

WHY DID EVERYONE ACT LIKE it was so wrong of her to want her children to be happy and healthy and successful and settled? Wasn’t that what everyone wanted for their children? Was she really supposed to stop caring, stop getting involved, now that they could vote and drive?

Will always pointed out that he and Weezy hadn’t had the same support that they gave their kids. “Once I was eighteen, I was on my own,” Will said. And Weezy knew that he was right, but why did they have to raise their children the same way they’d been raised? That didn’t seem right. Wasn’t there some sort of cultural evolution that took place? Will of all people should be interested in that.

Her children were her greatest accomplishment. Wasn’t that what every mother said? Well, it was true. And Weezy didn’t know how she was supposed to stop being a mother now. She’d grown them, raised them, and now she was still raising them and she probably would be until she died. What was wrong with that?

Weezy had loved being pregnant. It had agreed with her—everyone said so. She didn’t have any of the vomiting or swollen ankles that Maureen and her friends had. Her cheeks got rosy when she was pregnant, and she loved the feeling of her babies swimming inside, loved watching her stomach move with the fists and the feet of the baby. Toward the end of each pregnancy, she mourned just a little. She was excited for the baby to come, but she knew the things that went with it: bottles, diapers, spit-up. She loved how neat and tidy being pregnant was, carrying everything with you, giving the baby everything it needed without having to think about it.

It was harder once they came out, harder with each year that went by. Weezy wanted her children to have everything they needed and more. But it was hard to figure out just what that was. Sometimes she got fixated on things that she wanted the kids to have. She was determined to get bunk beds for Claire and Martha, something she’d always wanted so badly when she was younger. She used to picture herself and Maureen building forts, and talking to each other in their bunks, late into the night. What little kids wouldn’t want that?

Her girls hadn’t seemed as interested, but Weezy pushed for it. “You’ll love them,” she kept saying. It turned out that they were both too frightened to sleep on the top bunk. Martha cried the whole first week she was up there, so Claire agreed to switch, but ended up falling out of it a few days later and spraining her wrist. Weezy tried to remain hopeful that they’d end up falling in love with the bunk beds, but after waking up to find them both squished into the bottom bunk for almost a month straight, she gave in and had Will take the bunk beds down.

So maybe Weezy hadn’t always been right about what would make the children happy. But that didn’t mean she was going to stop trying or step back and let them search all by themselves. They didn’t know what they wanted. She was their mother, and she couldn’t help it. She was involved.

That was why she was hell-bent on getting them all to the shore. They didn’t know how important this time would be to them later. Maureen seemed to have given up on her kids’ coming to the shore. “They’re busy,” she said. Maureen’s daughter, Cathy, was living in Ohio with her partner, Ruth, and her son, Drew, was all the way in California, and somehow this didn’t seem to bother her. It seemed absurd to Weezy—they’d all gone to the shore together when the kids were little; it had been a tradition. Maureen should have encouraged her kids to keep coming. Didn’t she want them to be able to look back on the family vacations and appreciate all the time they’d had together?

“They’re adults now,” Will said, when she complained about getting the kids to clear their schedules for the shore. But they didn’t really seem like adults to Weezy—Claire didn’t even do her own laundry. She had it sent out to the cleaners around the block. Martha was still living at home. And Max was practically a child, still in college, likely to eat cereal for dinner if no one was there to cook for him. They weren’t adult enough to know what was good for them, that was for sure. So she was going to get them to the shore, come hell or high water.

Weezy and her family had been going to Ventnor City since she was a little girl. Her father’s family had acquired the house, and every summer her father and his brothers used to pack up their families for the summer and head out there. The husbands went back to the city during the week and returned each weekend to the shore, where the children greeted them like long-lost explorers, running out to meet them at the car, jumping on them like monkeys, wrapping their sunburned arms around their necks and saying, “Daddy, we’re so glad you’re back.”

There were four bedrooms in the house where the adults stayed. Weezy and Maureen and their cousins were crowded on cots on the sleeping porch, lined up like little soldiers, waiting for a breeze to cool them down. From there, they would listen to the sounds of their parents outside on the front porch, getting drunk with the other neighbors, laughing and singing, smoking cigars, and saying, “This is the life.”

Those were the best summers of Weezy’s life. She firmly believed that. She was shocked when her own mother, Bets, had told Weezy that she’d always hated going to the shore. “It was so crowded, and no one had any privacy. Your aunts weren’t the best company, and anyway we had to cook and clean and what kind of a vacation is that?” After Weezy’s father died, Bets never went back to the shore house.

But Weezy didn’t care what Bets thought. She wanted her kids to have the same summers that she did, full of hot dogs, taffy, and sea salt. Of course, it was different now. The house was split between Weezy, Maureen, and nine other cousins, and no one (including Weezy) wanted to double or triple up on families and be squished the way they once were. She and Maureen always went together with their families, which was plenty. And for the past few years, Maureen’s kids hadn’t come, so it was just one extra person.

Weezy had claimed the last two weeks in August early on, and thankfully no one had challenged her on it. She and Maureen had brought their families there every summer for the past thirty years. Weezy was afraid to miss even one year, worried that if she did, one of the other cousins would take her time slot. Even the year that Will’s mother died in August, they packed up the week after the funeral and went. It was good therapy to be by the ocean, Weezy thought, and what good would it do to sit at home?

The end of August was Weezy’s favorite time, right before the end of summer, when fall and responsibility and schedules were so close that you could smell them in the changing air, and everyone rushed around to get as much sun and ocean as they could before they had to return home. That was all she wanted for her children, who were no longer children—to smell like sunscreen and play mini-golf and shuffleboard, and jump in the waves. If she could give them this one thing to carry with them, then maybe it would make everything else okay. And so she forced this gift on them, summer after summer, whether they wanted it or not.

WEEZY WAS IN THE TV ROOM sorting through the beach towels and her summer clothes. She had them all spread out on the couch, trying to decide which things to give away and which things she could keep. She needed to make a list of things to get for the shore and start shopping, because really she was already behind.

She held a black one-piece bathing suit in her hand, debating whether or not to just pitch it. She hadn’t bought a new bathing suit in years, and she knew it was time, but the thought of standing in a dressing room to find a new suit that would (to be honest) just stay hidden underneath her cover-up seemed like a waste of time. Not to mention an unpleasant errand, to say the least.

She was still holding the suit when the door slammed, making her jump. Then she heard Martha clomp to the kitchen and open the refrigerator.

“Martha? Is that you?”

Martha came around the corner with a glass of Diet Coke in her hand. “Mom,” she said, “that bathing suit is like a million years old.”

“I know, I’m tossing it.” Weezy put it down on the couch. “How was your afternoon?”

“Fine,” Martha said. She sounded down and Weezy felt her heart drop. She was used to Martha’s moods, but she’d hoped for a good one today. Now dinner would be strained and silent. Maybe they would eat in front of the TV.

“Is everything okay?” Weezy asked. She tried to make it sound like a light question, so Martha wouldn’t think she was prying.

Martha sipped the fizz off the top of the glass and sighed. “It’s fine. Just a bad day at work.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Yeah.” Martha sighed again. “I’m just kind of over it. J.Crew, I mean. I’m thinking about looking for some other jobs. Maybe even think about going back to nursing.”

Weezy stayed silent, not wanting to say anything that would make Martha change her mind. She had wanted Martha to do something else for so long, but she hadn’t wanted to push it. It had driven her crazy to watch Martha rot away at that store. It was a waste of talent. But she hadn’t been able to say so. She’d remained quiet and patient, at least in front of Martha. At night to Will, she would whisper, “What is she going to do? Work there for the rest of her life?”

“Really?” Weezy finally said. “That’s interesting.”

“Whatever. It’s just something that I’m thinking about. I don’t even know if I’ll go through with it.” Martha took her Diet Coke upstairs, leaving Weezy to worry in the TV room.

Will teased her that she spent twenty-three hours a day worrying about the kids. But what did he expect? Of course she worried about them. That was what mothers did, wasn’t it? Will had the luxury of knowing that she was taking care of the worrying and so he didn’t have to. He could rest his head on the pillow at night and sleep well.

When the kids were little, she’d worried about their getting hit by a car. She was a firm believer in hand-holding. Max and Martha had been like obedient little suction cups when they reached the street, holding their hands up to her, clinging to her with trust. Claire was the first one to pull away, to hold her arm stiffly by her side, glaring up at Weezy, wanting her independence.

When they were in high school, Weezy worried that they’d get in a car with someone who’d been drinking. When they were in college, she worried that the girls would be raped, that Max would be mugged, that they’d fall down the stairs at a wild party and break their necks, that they’d try drugs, drink too much, or vanish. The list went on and on. She kept most of her worries to herself, knowing that if she shared them with Will, he’d just think she was overreacting.

And then she worried that all of her worrying had made Martha the way she was. Maybe as a child Martha sensed Weezy’s fear of the world, absorbed it as a little person, and let it overtake her. Or maybe it had been passed down in her genes, a worrying gene that mutated and grew in Martha.

She wondered if having the girls so close together hadn’t given her enough time with either of them. They were less than a year apart and so different in every way. Had she made them the way they were? She would never know.

And so she continued to go through her clothes and worry. She worried that Claire was unhappy, that Max would get hurt by Cleo, that Martha wasn’t going to be able to get back to nursing. There was always something. That’s what Will never got. You could worry from morning until night, and even then, there’d be something more, something else that you needed to add to the list.