“When I’m off the phone,” she heard our father say.
He had been on the phone when Sally returned from her walk on the beach. He had been on the phone when she left for Vineyard Haven. Apparently, he was still on the phone. Whom was he talking to?
She had a pretty good idea whom he was talking to.
In the bathroom, the toilet flushed, and with that utterly pedestrian sound something inside her clarified. The house, and all the people in it, known and unknown, known but unknown; hers was not the only story underway, she understood. I need to go talk to Lewyn, Sally thought. Like, right now.
“Listen,” she said when Rochelle came out, “I’ll be right back. I want to go ask my mom something.”
“Should I come?” said Rochelle.
“No, no, I’ll be right back. Make yourself at home.” And Sally left her there, rooting around in her shiny red bag for a sweater.
She went downstairs to the kitchen, where she found Johanna pulling Champagne out of the fridge: two bottles that hadn’t been there this morning.
“Have you spoken to Dad?” our mother said.
“No,” Sally said. “Not since this morning.”
“I’m very irritated.”
Yes, that was plain. She was jerking wineglasses off the shelves and slapping them down on the countertop, which was marble and probably not a good surface to slap things made of glass down onto.
“Mom, listen, I should have mentioned this, but I have a friend I just picked up at the ferry. She’s upstairs. I wasn’t sure she’d come. I mean, I invited her, she didn’t just turn up, but I wasn’t certain she’d actually get here.”
Johanna turned to her. “You invited her for your birthday? Who is she?”
“She’s my roommate. Rochelle. I don’t think you ever met her, but we’re friends.”
That only sounded additionally aggressive. You, my own mother, never met her and yet we still managed to become friends?
Johanna nodded. “Okay. But why didn’t you tell me she might be coming? Those sheets on the other bed in your room, I have no idea when they were last changed.”
“Don’t worry about that,” said Sally. She thought, inevitably, of Rochelle’s own Ellesmere home, so unclean that Sally hadn’t even been allowed inside. “The bed’s probably fine, and if it isn’t we’ll change the sheets. And I’m sure there’s plenty of food.”
“I’m sure there is,” said Johanna, sounding a little sad. “I might have forgotten how much it takes to feed us when we’re all together. When were we last all together?”
Sally considered. The conversation had taken an unexpectedly morose turn, but at least Johanna didn’t seem angry at her.
“And I might have said we were six people, when I talked to the caterers. I always think: I have four children, as if Phoebe could put away a lobster and a couple of ears of corn.” She paused to smile, more to herself. “So yes. We have enough.”
“Okay,” said Sally.
They both heard a door open upstairs, and the slap, slap of shoes heading along the corridor. Too heavy to be Rochelle, Sally thought. She braced herself for her father, but it was only Harrison, pulling on the bright red sweater with the Anglophilic crest he’d brought back from Virginia. He’d worn it constantly since he arrived.
“Oh,” Harrison said to Sally when he entered the kitchen, “I thought you were in your room. I just heard you upstairs.”
“I have a friend visiting.”
“A friend,” said her brother with a distinctly lascivious edge.
“Yes. I do have them, you know.”
“Do I know that?” Harrison considered.
“Harrison,” our mother said, “do you think wineglasses are okay? We only have four Champagne flutes, and we’re six adults. I don’t think it matters.”
Harrison grinned. “You’re right. It doesn’t matter. Except, there is a right way to drink Champagne, and it isn’t in a wineglass. If it had been, the flute wouldn’t have been designed to enhance carbonation by reducing the surface area for it to escape.”
There was no limit to what her brother Harrison could convert to pure assholery, Sally thought.
“You’re right,” our mother said sadly. “I’ll take down the four flutes and two wines. Daddy and I will take the wineglasses. You three, and your guest, should be able to toast your birthday properly, even if we won’t all match.”
“It’s too bad. Appearances are so important at a clambake, too,” Harrison observed, arguing against himself for the pure pleasure of it.
Johanna picked up the baby and zipped her into her woolly cardigan. “Try to get your father out of that room,” she told them. “And Lewyn.”
“Lewyn’s down there already,” Harrison said. “He’s not upstairs, anyway.”
“Oh no?” said Johanna. “Okay, I’m going now.” And she left with the baby on her hip and four Champagne flutes wedged upside down between the fingers of her other hand, probably not the wisest way to travel over slippery sand, but neither Sally nor Harrison made any effort to stop her.
“So. Tell me about your friend,” said Harrison when she’d gone. This time his tone was deliberately flat and decidedly unprovocative.
“Her name’s Rochelle,” said Sally. “She was my freshman-year roommate. You might actually like her, Harrison.”
“Oh?” He opened up the refrigerator door and looked balefully inside. Then, as if he were settling for something far beneath his intentions, he pulled out a carton of Newman’s Own lemonade and drank from the spout.
“I mean, she’s very smart.”
“Smart? Or educated?”
“I don’t even know what that means,” said Sally.
“I know you don’t,” said Harrison, sounding triumphant. He raked back a forelock of his thick brown hair. This had been a habitual gesture, almost a tic, since middle school, but it looked sillier than ever just now, and the hair fell back over his eyes almost immediately. But maybe that was the point.
It did smell good out there, a mix of shellfish and roasting corn coming up through the dunes and in through the kitchen window. She hadn’t eaten since that morning.
“Did Mom say anything to you about papers?” Sally asked.
“What kind of papers?”
Newspapers, dummy. Academic papers.
“Legal stuff. Guardianship for the baby.”
He stared at her.
“I’m not going to be a guardian for that baby.”
“By which you mean our sister, Phoebe.”
“I’m not going to be a guardian for any baby. Including that baby.”
“Okay,” Sally said. “Glad that’s clear. I’m actually more concerned about what it means for Mom, her wanting us to sign something. She doesn’t seem okay to me.”
Harrison shrugged. “What’s wrong with her?”
Sally shook her head. “I don’t know. But I’m concerned.”
He faced her and crossed his arms. “She shouldn’t be dumping this kind of stuff on us, now. She should have worried about it before she did such an asinine thing. Nobody told her to do it. Nobody said, ‘Hey Mom! Why don’t you defrost that kid you left behind eighteen years ago and hire some lady in a trailer park to give birth to it?’”
Spoken with his trademark Harrisonian compassion and empathy, thought Sally. And it hadn’t been a trailer park. Though how she knew that she wasn’t sure.
“I’m just saying, I’m worried about her.”
“And I’m saying: Don’t be. The whole point of growing up is to put away childish things. If she can’t do that, the best her children can do is model responsibility.”
“Really? That’s the best her children can do?” Sally shook her head. “The parent-kid handbook doesn’t say anything about caring for your aged mom and dad if they’re sick or incapacitated?”
He hauled open the Sub-Zero, which made its usual sucking sound, and shoved the lemonade carton back inside.