When my sister said they were going to the park, she meant they were going to Montauk Point Park. It was a state park on the easternmost tip of the Hamptons. There were places to fish and trails for hiking. Picnic tables and a great playground. And, of course, it was adjacent to the fabled Montauk Point Lighthouse, which was something of a tourist destination, and also Rain’s favorite place in the Hamptons. Most people liked that it was pretty—an imposing force on top of its hill—but Rain loved its history. I always wished she had volunteered at the museum there while we were growing up so she could bother other people with all the details, not just me.
Every Sunday, Rain and I bagged sandwiches for lunch and went to the lighthouse. While we were there, we agreed that there would be no fighting. Not about Dad, not about his money troubles (quickly becoming ours), not about anything. One Sunday, Rain told my father we were heading there at precisely the wrong moment. He was having trouble with a movie score he was working on, and he decided that the lighthouse had become bad luck. He went so far as to ask Rain not to go—in the way he asked for things, which was to tell her.
It was the first time I’d ever heard her refuse him. She reminded him that we had been going to the lighthouse long before the rules were in place—that he used to take us. That maybe the unlucky part didn’t come from us going, but from his not going.
He seemed wooed by that argument. When we left for the lighthouse, my father even came along. Or, rather, my father dropped us there. Because, on the way, he had an idea for his score and went immediately back home. Also, he had a rule about being off the property for too many hours on Sunday, and he probably didn’t want to risk losing track.
Rain chalked it up to a victory. It made it harder to convince her that validating his insanity was just the opposite—and the very way that his insanity could trap her too. When I told her she should have just told him the way it was, she put up her hands and said, It netted the same result. I kept my lighthouse safe. She wasn’t going to be forced to justify the means by which she did it—not in her favorite place, not in the one place we promised we wouldn’t fight.
So it made it a little weird to be there with her now—her daughter with us, so many years later—when we weren’t even close enough to fight, and we didn’t particularly want to make up.
We sat on the rocks, Sammy between us, and had peanut butter pie that Rain had made.
If peanut butter pie sounds elegant—if you’re thinking of a professional mix of whipped peanut butter and homemade crust—that’s not the kind I speak of. Rain’s pie was peanut butter stuffed into cupcake liners with smushed bananas and Hershey’s chocolate chunks. Old-school. And, really, not even pie. She would freeze the whole enterprise, and it would come out tasting like the sweetest, creamiest brownie you’d ever tasted.
Her peanut butter pie had been my favorite treat growing up, and it felt like a gesture when she took it out of the bag.
I didn’t have the heart to tell her that it tasted wrong. The chocolate chunks were bitter. The bananas were too ripe, or not ripe enough. And the peanut butter tasted sour. Could peanut butter go sour? Apparently Rain’s had.
Sammy finished her second piece. “This is great, Mom,” she said.
Rain licked her wrapper clean. “It’s pretty good, right?” she said.
I didn’t want to seem ungrateful, so I nodded enthusiastically. And asked for another.
“Mom, can I go down to the water?” Sammy asked.
“Go ahead,” Rain said. “Just stay close.”
Sammy ran down the hill, and it seemed like she was heading toward a group of kids who were eating pizza. Instead she turned away from them, and started picking flowers alone.
I looked at Rain.
She put her hands up to stop me. “Don’t say it.”
“I’m just sitting here, eating pie.”
“I know she doesn’t have a lot of friends,” she said. “She’s different.”
“That’s a good thing,” I said.
“I think so.” She looked over and caught me playing with the wrapper. “What are you doing?”
“Savoring it.”
She shot me a look, trying to decide whether she believed that. “Anyway, I never had a lot of friends growing up. And I’m fine.”
Was this a good moment to say, That’s debatable? “I think Sammy is fantastic,” I said. “So no argument from me.”
She looked at me with something I almost didn’t recognize coming from her. Gratitude.
“Well, her counselor, this woman who runs the camp, I should say, she doesn’t think so.”
“Kathleen?” I said.
She nodded. “Kathleen,” she said. “I mean, she thinks Sammy is great, but she is concerned . . .”
“About what?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know . . .”
I held my breath, not wanting to interrupt her, not wanting her to stop when she realized it was me she was confiding in.
“Kathleen thinks Sammy needs certain challenges in order to excel. To reach her potential. And I’ve heard that from her teachers, too, which is why I’m putting her at a private school next year in East Hampton.”
Private school. The good ones had fifty-thousand-dollar price tags out here. That’s why she sold the house.
“So what’s the problem?”
“She thinks the private school here isn’t the answer. She wants me to send Sammy to this gifted program in the fall. She never nominates anyone and she nominated Sammy, and she got in.”
“That’s great.”
“There’s nothing great about it. It’s in New York. I’ll never be able to make that work.”
There were apartments in New York. And there were jobs at other hotels. Didn’t she owe it to Sammy to get her the best education she could—to help her find a place where she would find friends?
But Rain wasn’t going to leave Montauk. And I wasn’t going to convince her that she should. It was a fight I’d had with her when I meant a lot more to her—and I’d lost it then.
“And Thomas is no help,” she said. “He’s so impressed by the program. Loves talking about how families move from California in order for their kids to go.”
“Sounds like he’s trying to be supportive.”
She turned toward me. “There is a way to be supportive. Quietly.”
I nodded, knowing that was the only tack I could take here. If she was mad at Thomas, whom she loved, she would be furious with me for saying a word.
“I just don’t need him telling me that he and I could make it work,” she said. “As though the issue is about the two of us. The issue is that we live here. Right here.”
She motioned around herself, as though that were the end of it. As though people didn’t move all the time. She didn’t want to hear it, though.
So I looked out at the shoreline, the water hitting the rocks, letting Rain have the last word.
Then I saw her. Meredith. I did a double take.