“Talk to her,” Bill says. “And then listen to her.”
“How about I just keep a low profile until she’s gone?” I offer, knowing I sound desperate, but too desperate to care. “She’ll leave soon. She always does.”
Bill shrugs. “She might leave. Or she might stay awhile. Who knows.”
My stomach drops. How am I supposed to share a city with that woman when I can barely survive her typical four-day visits? We haven’t regularly coexisted in the same hemisphere since I was eighteen and she was twelve. Back then I was a teen on the verge of adulthood, Kate a kid who delighted in my annoyance. She’d jump out of tight corners to scare the shit out of me, stick fake spiders in my shoes, give me wet willies while I did homework at the Wilmots’, desperate for the comfort of a homemade meal and a parent to ask the occasional question. She was a menace whom I menaced right back, six-year age difference be damned.
Kate was still that menacing little girl when I left for college and stayed away all four years, letting my grandmother live her best cranky life alone in my childhood home. I rented an apartment with the disgusting amount of money left to me by my parents after their death and hid from the Wilmots. Because two days into being at college in the city, I realized how badly I missed them. And I feared what missing them meant—that they mattered to me, that I loved them, that I could lose them, and it would crush me. I’d sworn to myself after I lost my parents that I would never love and lose again. Distance was my only coping strategy.
That strategy lasted me through college and two years post-graduation, until my grandmother died. And then there was no one left in the home my parents had filled with memories. Their photos still lined the walls. My mother’s quilts draped across the beds. My dad’s family recipes still sat on their shelf in the kitchen. I couldn’t sell it, couldn’t let it sit empty, unloved, left to fall apart and be forgotten.
So I moved home. And there was Kate, out on her parents’ porch next door with some small helpless creature cupped in her hands. Tall and lanky like her father, with her mother’s sea-storm eyes. Freckles on her nose and streaks of auburn in her dark hair from all the hours she clearly still spent outside.
I looked at this eighteen-year-old in front of me, who’d shot up into a woman, wild and electrifying, barely recognizing her, while a very different kind of recognition blazed through me.
I knew right then that peace was the last thing we were ever going to share.
“Christopher?” Bill presses. “What do you say?”
I blink, torn from my thoughts. “I’ll . . . try.”
And by “try,” I mean I’ll make myself scarce, even if Kate stays a bit longer than she typically does. I’ll stay away and she’ll cool off. It’ll blow over. Then she’ll be gone, and I’ll have kept my distance. No more fights will have happened, and that will appease our family and friends.
The sound of Bill’s name cuts through the uneasy silence at our table. Hearing Fee call him, Bill glances toward the bar, where she pats a to-go bag and offers him a smile.
“Well.” Bill stands slowly. “I’ve said what I came to say. And now my shepherd’s pie is ready to go.” He raps his knuckles gently on the table. “Don’t blame Jamie for this intervention, by the way. I asked him if I could crash your meet-up.”
Jamie scrubs his face.
“I am sorry about the other night,” I tell Bill. “And I’ll try to smooth things over.”
Gently, he clasps my shoulder again. “Thank you.”
As Bill walks away, Jamie sits back against the bench and rubs his eyes beneath his glasses. “Well, that was stressful.”
“Says the one who wasn’t in the hot seat.”
“God, I’m sorry. I didn’t want you to feel like that.”
“It’s all right,” I tell him. “I appreciate your honesty. I think I’m just . . . wrapping my head around it.”
Two pints of Guinness are set at our table, then a shot beside my beer, which, judging by the smell, is a strong Irish whiskey.
Jamie frowns in confusion and says to the waiter, “We didn’t order these.”
“Compliments of Fee.” They jerk their head toward the bar. “She said you both looked like you needed it. You especially,” they tell me.
“Cheers to that, I guess.” I raise my beer glass and knock it with Jamie’s as he lifts his, too.
After tipping back our pints, we set them down on heavy exhales. “I’m not touching the whiskey.” I slide the shot toward Jamie, who slides it away from himself, toward the edge of the table.
“Me neither,” he says. “A shot and a beer, and I’d be laid flat. I’m too old for that nonsense.”
A laugh leaves me. We’re both only in our early thirties, but I feel the same way. “Hangovers in your thirties hit hard.”
“They really do,” he says. “I’m glad I’m not the only one who feels like this. You’re, what? Thirty-three?”
My laugh fades. “Yeah.”
This coming April, I’ll be thirty-four. One year closer to being as old as my father was when he died. Since I’ve realized how close I’m getting to outliving him, I dread each birthday a little more.
“Something wrong?” Jamie asks.
I force a smile and lift my hand for the waiter. “Nothing a plate of Reuben nachos won’t cure.”
? FIVE ?
Kate
“We’ve arrived!” Bea trills. Shouldering open the door of the Edgy Envelope, she enters the store on a dangerously lopsided twirl that almost takes out a standing display of greeting cards. “Bring Your Sister to Work Day has commenced!”
I shut the door behind me on a sigh. “You are aggressively cheerful when you’re in love.”
“Aren’t I?” She grins.
I roll my eyes, a begrudging smile tugging at my mouth. Bea’s happy in a way I haven’t seen her in years, maybe ever. For her sake, I’m trying to act happy, too. But the truth is I’ve never been good at faking much, especially happiness, and I’m too on edge to be happy right now. This is officially the longest I’ve been home in half a decade, and as I step inside the Edgy Envelope, the place that seems to knit my sisters’ friend group together, worries tangle into an anxious knot beneath my ribs.
How will they see me, what will they think of me, these people who’ve always been more Jules and Bea’s than mine, if I’m not the wild-child sister who shows up once in a blue moon for a couple of fun days that are a blur of board games and beers and not enough time to be known beyond that?
“There you are!” Sula waves from behind the glass-topped checkout desk. The owner of the Edgy Envelope, the custom stationery and paper shop for which Bea both designs and works the sales desk, Sula was Jules’s friend first but clearly has become just as close with Bea, whom she squishes into a hard, affectionate hug.
I love hugs, the sensory joy of being wrapped tight and receiving pressure, but something about me must broadcast that I don’t, because I’ve observed how readily people hug my older sisters yet not me. Maybe it’s my height. Maybe it’s my resting bitch face. Maybe today it’s simply because I’m wearing the sling.
Sula turns my way, beaming like the sunrise outside, with her bright smile and burnt orange–dyed buzz cut. “Good to see you, Kate. I’m so glad you’re here!”
“They’re here!” Bea’s friend Toni calls, strolling in with a smile and wave for me and another hug for Bea. “Aaand the moment you’ve all been waiting for,” he says. With a flourish, Toni whips off a floral domed lid on the desk, revealing a glistening tower of glazed doughnuts that smell like autumn incarnate: tart apples and cinnamon, pumpkin and pungent nutmeg, warm vanilla and rich maple syrup.
I stare at the doughnuts, my mouth watering. “Wow.”
Bea smiles up at me. “A welcome home treat. I told him doughnuts and fall flavors were your favorite.”
“She did.” Toni smiles. “And I have to say, they were a nice break from the same three cookie recipes that keep this one smiling for the customers.”