Marty chuckled. "You're serious, man?"
I looked at my hands. "As a heart attack. She won't say no to this."
Chapter Fifteen
Molly
"Do you think Paige would think it's weird if I write a paper on the maternal impact she had on older children who have no biological tie to her?"
My hand froze, the bottle of wine suspended mid pour over my glass. "Umm, no?"
Claire typed furiously on her laptop before slapping it shut. "I can't figure out what to do with this paper, and I have to get started."
Isabel came down the hallway of our apartment and glared at Claire’s computer like it kicked her in the crotch. "Do you have to type so loudly? You sound like a chicken pounding a mallet on that thing."
Claire flipped her off.
From my perch on the couch, I smiled at both of them as I took another sip of my wine. It was drier than I usually liked, so I grimaced as I swallowed. Lia and Claire were huddled together on the other end.
Their faces were mirror images of each other, but our family could tell them apart with no problems. It was in the angle of Lia's jaw and the slope of Claire's nose. Not to mention, the second they opened their mouth, it would be a dead giveaway to anyone who actually knew them.
Our mom—or as Isabel affectionately referred to her, that selfish bitch who birthed us—might not have won any parenting awards, but she passed down a helluva gene pool because all four of us bore a striking resemblance to her. I could see her easily in the dark, thick hair, high cheekbones, and shape of our blue, blue eyes.
Isabel's smile was more like our dad's, more like Logan's, and she had the same lanky, athletic build that Emmett promised to have as he grew up. My curves had lessened into adulthood, but the twins still maintained a curvier figure as they tiptoed quietly into their twenties.
"Why wouldn't you write your paper about Paige?" Lia asked, handing Claire a half-finished glass of wine. Claire took it without a word and finished for her. "She basically was our mom."
In the kitchen just around the corner, Isabel slammed the cupboard door shut. "There's no basically about it," she called.
I smiled at Claire. "Which class is this for?"
She was graduating from college with a major in developmental psychology and a minor in sociology with plans to start her master's in the spring after a winter graduation. Dropping her head back on the couch, she sighed. "Sociology of families. I should have taken it earlier, but"—she shrugged—"I was kind of dreading this part of it."
Lia took the empty wine glass from Claire and set it on the end table. "Our family isn't that dysfunctional."
"No, but trying to discuss the structure of it is a bit confusing." She started ticking off fingers. "We had married heterosexual parents with an unconventional age difference. One died, followed a few years later by one voluntarily abandoning us to an unmarried heterosexual male relative. A couple of years after that, he married a single heterosexual female for legal purposes. Neither adopted us, and Paige never had guardianship rights installed, so technically, she's just a cool sister-in-law who helped when she didn't have to." Claire shook her head when Iz slammed something else around in the kitchen. "For all intents and purposes, she was the main maternal figure in our life, but our mother is still around. Just not ... around us."
"Isn't she in fucking Bali or something?" Isabel muttered from the kitchen. “That’s what her last bullshit email said, what? A year ago?”
"India, I think," I corrected. "She lives at that center. The weird guru guy who wrote all those books on mindfulness and blah, blah, whatever."
The wine had me feeling pleasantly fuzzy, not drunk, not even really buzzed, but just happy enough that I didn't even care that we were talking about Brooke—that selfish bitch who birthed us. Even she was a pleasant distraction from the fact that Noah had invited me to come look at the house. Saying no had been hard. Really, really hard. Like Noah's biceps hard. Noah's rock-hard ass hard.
Not that I knew what his ass felt like, but I could imagine. I'd watched him lift weights all week. Do squats. Bend over on the field when he lined up against the offense. I'd touched a few things on Noah's body back in the day, but his ass had not been one of them.
What a freaking tragedy, I thought through my wine haze.
Isabel stormed into the family room, a bottle of tequila in her hand that had me blinking owlishly at her. Were we at tequila level? I missed it. "Paige deserves to have a paper written about her."
"She does," Claire said diplomatically.
The tequila bottle waved like a flag. "She stepped in when no one could handle you two little hellions."
Lia rolled her eyes. "Like you were a walk in the park, Miss Angry Girl."
"That's the point of this class, though," Claire interjected when Iz opened her mouth with what promised to be a scathing retort. "The structure of the family, as we know it, has changed dramatically. Even the phrase family structure itself holds different weight than it did twenty years ago. The rise in single parent families, homosexual parents, even saying things like nontraditional implies a bias that we need to be careful of. Our family history didn't meet any sort of definition of 'traditional,' even when our parents were married. Dad was so much older than her, but they still fit the definition of a traditional family structure as it’s been historically defined. It implies there's something wrong or nontraditional about Paige and Logan raising us when they filled the parental roles to much better success."
We all stared at her for a beat.
I poured more wine.
Iz unscrewed the top of the tequila and disappeared into the kitchen.
Lia spoke first even though she'd probably be able to stare at Claire and communicate what she was thinking. "So why are you questioning what to do your paper on?"
Claire licked her lips, and her gaze darted to the kitchen. "Because I'm wondering if it's too easy to write about Paige. I could argue that Mom, and her absence in our life, had a greater impact on us. On how the structure of our family changed, and how that played out on our emotional growth and maturity."
Isabel stormed back in. Her hair, unbound and tumbling past her shoulders, flew behind her like a flag, and her eyes were blazing in her pink-cheeked face. "No way, that bitch does not get papers. She doesn't deserve papers written about her."
"Isabel," I cautioned quietly. "It's not your decision."
"Then why is she asking us for our opinion?"
All four of us fell quiet. Claire, as wild as she'd been as a child, had mellowed more quickly than Lia had once they reached high school. She was an observer of life, of the people around her, like Isabel was, while Lia still held that boundless energy that had been a hallmark of their youth. She was like a live wire, always bouncing, always tapping her foot, always seeking an outlet for the force bound behind her skin. Yet despite that, she was quietly watching our middle sister, eyes bright with unshed tears at how quickly she turned to anger at the topic of Brooke.
"I'm asking your opinion because I love and respect you," Claire said.
Isabel relaxed, her shoulders losing a bit of their tightness.
Lia looked at Claire and smiled sadly. "But opinion is different than permission, isn't it? You don’t need our permission to do this."
Leave it to those two. The thought had flowed from Claire to Lia without skipping a beat. Claire nodded. "It is."
My eyes fell shut because we all knew what that meant.
"What do you think, Mol?" Claire asked.
Words crowded my throat because as much as I knew moments like this required me to act as the firstborn, I didn't feel like that was me. But I was.