As I stood up from the couch, I could felt the knot in my stomach get bigger. This did not seem to be the good sign Gelsey was talking about, and the one that I had wished for. Because if it was good news, I figured that my mother just would have told us. She wouldn’t have needed to tell us in the dining room, which in itself seemed ominous. In addition to the few times it was used each year for eating fancier dinners on nicer plates than usual, the dining room was the place where things were Discussed.
I followed Warren and Gelsey through the kitchen toward the dining room, where I saw my father was sitting at his usual spot, at the head of the table, looking somehow smaller than I remembered him being only a few days ago. My mother stood at the kitchen island with a square white bakery box, and she pulled me into a quick, awkward, one-armed hug. We weren’t really physically affectionate in my family, making this as worrying a sign as needing to hear news in the dining room.
“I’m so sorry about your birthday, Taylor,” she said. She gestured to the white box, and I saw that the sticker keeping the box closed read BILLY’S—my favorite cupcake bakery. “I brought these for you, but maybe…” She glanced at the dining room and bit her lip. “Maybe we’ll save them for afterward.”
I wanted to ask, After what? but I also felt, with every minute that passed, that I knew what the answer was. As my mother took a deep breath before heading in to join everyone, I looked to the front door. I could feel my familiar impulse kick in, the one that told me that things would be easier if I could just leave, not have to deal with any of this, just take my cupcakes and go.
But of course, I didn’t do that. I walked behind my mother into the dining room, where she clasped my father’s hand, looked around at all of us, took a breath, and then confirmed what we’d all been afraid of.
As she spoke the words, it was like I was hearing them from deep underwater. There was a ringing in my ears, and I looked around the table, at Gelsey who was already crying, and my father, who looked paler than I’d ever seen him, and Warren furrowing his brow, the way he always did when he didn’t want to express any emotion. I pinched the inside of my arm, hard, just in case it might wake me up from this nightmare I’d landed in and couldn’t seem to get out of. But the pinching didn’t help, and I was still at the table as my mother said more of the terrible words. Cancer. Pancreatic. Stage four. Four months, maybe more. Maybe less.
When she’d finished and Gelsey was hiccupping and Warren was staring very hard at the ceiling, blinking more than usual, my father spoke for the first time. “I think we should talk about the summer,” he said, his voice hoarse. I looked over at him, and he met my eyes, and suddenly I was ashamed that I hadn’t burst into tears like my younger sister, that all I was feeling was a terrible hollow numbness. As though this was letting him down somehow. “I would like to spend the summer with all of you up at the lake house,” he said. He looked around the rest of the table. “What do you think?”
chapter five
“YOU HAVE GOT TO BE KIDDING ME.” MY MOTHER CLOSED ONE OF the kitchen cabinet doors a little harder than necessary and turned to face me, shaking her head. “They took all my spices. Can you believe it?”
“Mmm,” I muttered. I’d been drafted into helping my mother unpack the kitchen, but mostly I’d been organizing and reorganizing the silverware drawer, which seemed preferable to dealing with one of the large boxes that still needed to be sorted. So far, my mother hadn’t noticed, since she’d been taking inventory of what was left in the kitchen. It seemed that last summer’s renters had taken most everything that hadn’t been nailed down—including cleaning supplies and all the condiments in the fridge. Conversely, though, they had also left a lot of their stuff behind—like the crib that had so offended Gelsey.
“I don’t know how I’m expected to cook without spices,” she muttered as she opened one of the upper cabinets, rising up on her toes to check the contents, her feet turned out in a perfect first position. My mother was a former professional ballet dancer, and though a tendon injury had sidelined her in her twenties, she still looked like she’d be able to reenter the studio at any moment. “Taylor,” she said a little more sharply, causing me to look at her.
“What?” I asked, hearing how defensive I sounded, as I straightened a teaspoon.
My mother sighed. “Can you stop it with the pouting, please?”
If there was a sentence designed to make me pout even more, I didn’t know what it was. Even though I didn’t want to, I could feel myself scowling. “I’m not pouting.”
My mom glanced through the screened-in porch out to the water, then looked back at me. “This summer is going to be hard enough for all of us without this… attitude.”
I closed the silverware drawer harder than I probably needed to, now feeling guilty as well as annoyed. I’d never been my mother’s favorite—that was Gelsey—but we’d always gotten along fairly well.