The house was beautiful, that was for sure. Commercial Street is one of the prettiest streets in America, packed with old houses and mysterious crooked alleys, gardens that burst with blooms. The new house had been a teardown; the builder had bought a crooked, decaying old building, destroyed it and built this gem in its place. It was so glamorous—a cedar-shingled three-story house, traditional enough from the street, all windows and decks on the water side. The tiny front and side yards were packed with peonies and lilacs, and Mom had put a vase of flowers in every bedroom. The kitchen was modern and huge, and the sunshine almost hurt my eyes.
“Let’s flip a coin and see who gets to pick her room first,” Mom said, and I won the toss. My room would be—could be—overlooking the water. I could wake up and see Dad go out to sea. Yes, Mom said, of course I could paint it purple. Yes, that big bed was for just me. She let us jump on the beds and ooh and aah over the bathrooms. There was a cupola with a ladder to peek out. We splashed in the ocean, and then Mom took us shopping for clothes, a bribe even my eight-year-old self could see.
Still, I couldn’t remember such a happy day with Mom. “Just us girls,” she said. “It’ll be like this all the time.”
“Except for Beatrice,” I said. Mom ignored me.
But when we got home that night, I knew I couldn’t leave. The birds, the chipmunks I had worked so hard on taming, the blue heron that walked slowly along the edge of the pond . . . how could I leave this place?
And, if I moved to Provincetown, who would my father have? HandsomeBoy was a good dog, but Dad would be so lonely. Mom already had someone else, but Daddy would just fish and come home to a dark, empty house. So we would stay. Obviously, we’d stay. This was our home. We could visit Mom. It might even be fun.
“I don’t care how fancy the new house is,” I said to Hannah that night. “This is home.”
She murmured in agreement, but she was almost asleep.
Which was why I was gobsmacked when, the night before we had to meet with the lawyers in Orleans, Hannah announced she’d be going with Mom.
“What? But you can’t!” I yelped, bursting into tears. “We have to stay together!”
“Then come to Provincetown,” she said in her calm way. “Don’t you want to start over?”
“Don’t you want to stay here?”
“Not really, Lillie. Here kind of sucks for me.” She rolled over in her bed and looked at me, her face soft in the gentle glow from the night-light.
“What are you talking about?”
She looked at me almost sadly because I was so dumb. “You don’t know what it’s like to be ugly,” she said.
“You’re not ugly!”
“Yes, I am. Look at this nose. My whole face is weird.” Okay, she did have a big nose. And she was very tall, already taller than Mom. “I have one friend, and she’s been giving me the cold shoulder since September.”
“What about me? I’m your friend!”
She sighed. “I know. But even if it’s just a town away, Provincetown is . . . new. A fresh start.”
Fresh start? I was aghast. I knew she didn’t have a lot of friends at school, but that was because she didn’t need them, not with me! She got good grades. Teachers liked her. We had fun, pretty much, though yeah, for the past couple of years she hadn’t been as keen on playing our old games in the woods. “You can’t leave, Hannah,” I said, my voice thin and small.
“P-town will be better for me,” she said. “Mom has a point about being with her. I can’t see telling Dad I got my period and he needs to run to the general store and get me some maxi pads.” She rolled onto her back and looked at our sloping ceiling. “Maybe it’ll be easier, starting over where no one knows us.”
“I’m not leaving,” I said. “I could never leave!”
She gave me a kind look. “Well, then, we’ll live apart.” Her voice roughened with tears. “It’s only fifteen minutes, Lils. Don’t worry. We’ll talk every day and see each other at least a couple times a week. We’ll just have two houses now.”
She was so serene about her decision. I was furious. I told her she was my sister, my big sister, and she was abandoning me and Daddy. She was going to live with a stranger! Our mother had been cheating on Dad! Didn’t she have any loyalty? How could she leave this place?
Hannah was unmoved. “I’m sorry, Lillie,” she said. “My mind is made up.”
To be fair, back then, our home was dark and poorly insulated, filled with drafty windows and iffy electricity. You couldn’t use the blow-dryer if the stove was on. The back steps were crumbling. We were always cold in the winter, as the furnace couldn’t get the temperature above sixty-three, and Dad’s solution was “put on another sweater.” The modernity of my mother’s new house, the light, the glamour of Provincetown had its appeal, sure.
But what about the woods and the pond and the breeze and the adventures? What about Daddy? There was no way I would go to Provincetown and stab my father in the heart.
Three weeks later, Hannah packed up her side of our room, hugged me and, with an excitement that felt like acid on an open wound, skipped out to our mother’s SUV. “See you this weekend!” she called, and closed the car door on my childhood.
We never got it back, that sisterly bond. I think I was too young to forgive her, and as I got older, I stopped wanting to. Hannah did indeed love Beatrice, our glamorous stepmother. She learned how to dress, wear a “signature” lipstick, speak French. By the end of high school, she was unrecognizable to me, this imposingly tall, fashionable girl with an awesome haircut. And even though she returned from Bates College, she never really returned to me. The best I could say is that she loved my son. Otherwise, we had never—not once—spent any voluntary time just the two of us in the past thirty-three years. Which is a very long time.
So it was as much a surprise to me as it was to her when I climbed her porch steps, knocked on her antique oak-and-glass front door and asked to come in.
“Hey!” she said, rightfully surprised. She glanced at my scrubs and nurse’s clogs. She herself was wearing a gray silk top and darker gray pants with snakeskin flats. “Just coming from work? Or going to?”
“From. So . . . Brad is leaving me for another woman.”
Her eyes went comically wide. “Come in,” she said.
I had been to my sister’s workplace before—she had it open for the Christmas stroll each year and served mulled wine and French cookies, and sure, I stopped in. I didn’t hate her, after all. We just had nothing in common as adults.
Her office was lovely—a front parlor where she met with her brides and grooms, the bookcases filled with glossy coffee-table books on floral design and wedding dresses, wedding cakes, wedding cultures. Her office overlooked the flower-filled courtyard in the back. Her assistant, Manuel, had a large, beautiful desk in the parlor and would greet people as they came in, make them tea or coffee or pour them champagne. So I heard. I’d never had a reason to visit her aside from the Christmas stroll, and I had never been invited over as a solo guest.
“Have a seat,” she said. “Can I get you some water? Coffee or tea?”
“How about wine?” I suggested.
“I have that, too. One minute, please.”
There was a silver vase on the coffee table, filled with creamy pink roses, white hydrangeas and bright pink ranunculus. Stunning. I sighed and looked around, hearing her fuss in the kitchen.
Hannah always treated me this way—like a pleasant acquaintance. We didn’t talk about anything personal. To be fair, I’d given her the cold shoulder those six years she lived with Mom and Beatrice, or guilt-tripped her by sobbing and begging her to move back home. After she went to college, the window seemed to close on any chance of friendship. Later, we didn’t even seem to think about it—me busy with a new baby, marriage and home, her completely occupied with her business of excess.