“Mom!” said Zoe, and her face lit up like a Christmas tree. She was a little too cool for a full hug in front of others, so she offered Eliza her specialty: a half hug, half lean. That was okay. Eliza knew the love was under there somewhere, maybe hidden inside those stupendous legs. You couldn’t take your eyes off teenage girls, you really couldn’t: their legs just got longer and longer and longer. But you couldn’t say that to them because they just rolled their eyes and made you feel old and short-legged and thick. “You’re home!” said Zoe. “For good, right? You’ll see the fireworks with us.”
Deirdre was sporting a navy-blue halter dress, which showed off her toned shoulders, and matching navy espadrilles. She smelled like a garden after a spring rain shower, and she looked like a walking ad for probiotics, glowing with good health and the appropriate amount of gut bacteria. Eliza had on a pair of grimy shorts that she’d worn twice without washing, and an old Lobster Festival T-shirt she’d found in her childhood dresser drawer. She hadn’t meant to stay so long in Little Harbor when she’d packed, and she hadn’t especially wanted to do battle with her father’s geriatric washing machine.
———
Lesson Number Two from her mother’s letter:
Floss, Eliza! I have good teeth. Your father has good teeth. Your teeth have come in pretty close to perfect. This is a gift, not a right. Take care of it.
———
“I’m home!” said Eliza. “I’ll see the fireworks with you.” Zoe smelled exactly like herself, like hair that had been washed too often and too vigorously. She smelled like overly fragrant lotion from Bath & Body Works, and a little bit like Belgian waffles. She smelled glorious. “I’m home,” said Eliza.
“Rob had to drive to Boston,” said Deirdre. “Something about meeting with Mrs. Cabot, an emergency. Super early, he should be on his way back. He didn’t want to bother you. Kristi has the day off from nannying, so I brought Evie to camp, and then I took these two”—she indicated Sofia and Zoe—“out to breakfast at Big Joe’s. And here we are.”
“Big Joe’s!” said Eliza. “Lucky.” That explained Zoe’s Belgian waffle cologne.
She tried not to be bothered that Rob and Evie were both gone. Of course Rob had to work. And of course Evie had to go to camp! Soon they’d be holding auditions for the end-of-session performance of Charlotte’s Web.
When Sofia and Zoe left the room, Deirdre said, “He said—well, he didn’t tell me any details. But he said something is going on with your dad. I figured you could use a hand.”
When Deirdre said things like I figured you could use a hand, sometimes Eliza heard Clearly you can’t handle things yourself. It made her feel inadequate, even though that’s probably not how Deirdre meant it. Deirdre never seemed to feel inadequate. Of course she didn’t! She was living in the exact same kind of world she’d grown up in. Deirdre’s parents were both alive and well in Darien, Connecticut, residing in the four-bedroom, three-bath center-hall colonial where Deirdre and her younger sister, Bethany, had grown up. Her parents golfed together four mornings a week and traveled internationally twice a year. Brock’s parents had retired to Clearwater, Florida, and Deirdre and Brock took Sofia to see them every April vacation. Deirdre and Brock were fully pedigreed. They were purebreds.
Rob was also a purebred, and Rob’s girlfriend before Eliza had been a purebred too. Kitty Sutherland. Eliza was a mutt. Brown hadn’t even been Rob’s first-choice school—he’d wanted to go to Princeton and hadn’t been accepted. Brown had been more of a safety, he’d told her once. She never really got over his saying that. She could never get Rob to understand what a big deal it had been for someone from her tiny rural high school to get into an Ivy. It had literally never happened before. He would never truly comprehend how she’d had to claw her way there, and then scrabble to keep herself afloat once she arrived.
Deirdre said, “Sooo…” And Eliza understood that this was the place where she could bring Deirdre into the kitchen and tell her about Charlie, but the thought of doing that filled her with a bone-deep fatigue.
Just then they heard the mudroom door open and Rob called out, “Helllooooo!”
“I’ve got to run,” said Deirdre. She called up the stairs, “Sof?”
“Leave her here,” said Eliza. Rob’s phone rang, and he called from the mudroom, “I’m going to grab this, I’ll be quick!”
“Are you sure?” asked Deirdre, about leaving Sofia.
“Of course.”
“Oh my God, thank you,” said Deirdre. In Barton you were supposed to go out of your way to thank someone who did you a favor, even if it wasn’t one you’d asked for, so that in turn they could over-thank you when you returned the favor or performed a favor of a similar value. It had taken Eliza a little time to learn these rules, but she was pretty sure she had them down now. “I’ve got a hundred and thirty things to do for the gala. And with Kristi off today…”
“Go,” said Eliza. “It’ll be my pleasure to have her here.”
While Rob finished his phone call, Eliza went at a few sticky spots on the island with the rough side of the sponge, and then she pulled out the spray bottle and gave the whole place a good wipe-down.
“Let me do that,” said Rob, off the phone now, wrapping his arms around her. “I thought I left it clean.”
“I got it,” answered Eliza. “I have to tell you the whole story, and if I stop moving I’ll start crying.” She’d only had a chance for the short version on the phone with Rob. Besides, there were a lot of unidentifiable sticky spots on the counter.
Rob leaned back uncomplainingly when the spray bottle came near him, and he made surprised and sympathetic little noises at all the astonishing parts, and he didn’t try to jump in and finish Eliza’s sentences the way some people did. It felt good to talk and have someone listen, and when she had finished talking, Eliza said out loud what she’d already known was true: “If he won’t come down here I have to go back, right after the Fourth. I’d bring the kids with me, but there’s not a lot of room, and I don’t want to upset them, and they’ve got their activities going on down here….But I can’t leave my dad alone with this. He won’t do anything on his own, I know he won’t. I have to go back.”
“Of course,” said Rob. “You go.”
“But the girls.”
“I’m here.”
“You have Mrs. Cabot.”
“Mrs. Cabot can wait.”
“No she can’t. Can she?”
“No,” admitted Rob. “Mrs. Cabot doesn’t know how to wait.” They both stared at the counter, and then Rob said, “Deirdre can help!”
“She has the gala. She’s really busy.”
“But she has a full-time nanny. And one child.”
“True,” said Eliza, thinking. “But we didn’t hire Kristi to take care of our kids.”
“We could hire our own nanny.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“What about my mom?”
Eliza rolled her eyes. “She’ll probably get them drunk.” It was such a cliché, having a boozy, rich mother-in-law, Eliza realized this; it was a subplot to so many sitcoms, but the fact that it was a cliché didn’t make it any less true.
Rob laughed. “I bet she won’t. Not too drunk, anyway.”
If anyone asked Eliza about her relationship with her mother-in-law her answer was always, It’s complicated.