Chapter 34 #2
We move the folding table into the kitchen to accommodate everyone.
Patsy arrives empty-handed, which annoys me, even though she asked what she could bring and I said nothing.
She looks tired. She and Jeremy, who she gets to keep, don’t talk directly to each other, and her twins, Maggie and Kate, are adorable but seem like they’ve been freebasing sugar all day.
After dinner she sends Jeremy and the girls back to the inn and wants to sit with me on the porch swing.
I bring Grandma’s crochet blanket and two mugs of milky tea.
“Dad seems good,” she says, opening the door to one of our trademarked nothing conversations. I do not want to sit here and comment on all the things that are fine. I’m not entirely fine.
“He is good,” I say.
“Yeah, good,” she says. We’re quiet for a bit.
“Everything okay with you?” she asks.
“Of course,” I say. “I’m fine.” Lying is really just like any other skill. The more you do it, the easier it gets.
“What’s going on with you?” I ask.
She sips her tea. “Nothing. Why?”
“You didn’t eat dinner.”
“I don’t like turkey.”
“No one likes turkey, everyone eats it.”
She cups her hands around her tea and blows into it. It’s not quite cold enough to see your own breath, but the steam rising from her cup reminds me that it will be.
“I might be a little lost. Turning thirty-nine, that kind of thing.”
I don’t say anything. And I think of how Stewart used to stay quiet to draw words out of me. It aches, this thought.
She sips her tea. “I’m in therapy.”
“What does your therapist call you?” I ask.
“Patsy. Why?”
“No reason,” I say.
“I feel really locked out. Of our family.”
“The door’s open, Patsy,” I say, a little bite to my voice.
“Is it though?” She’s looking straight ahead at the maple. “Dad calls you when there’s a problem. And you don’t even mention it to me, like I’m useless.”
“No one thinks you’re useless,” I say.
“I think you do. And it makes me feel bad. And I’m supposed to be talking about how I feel. So would you stop acting like I’m being annoying?”
I turn to her.
“I actually practiced this conversation with my therapist. She was a lot nicer than you, playing you.”
My eyes go wide. “You’re in therapy over me?”
“Yes,” she says. “My therapist thinks you resent me, and I think she’s right.
I got to go away to college and you stayed.
I got to have a childhood and you worked.
Dad shouldn’t have let that happen. And Mom, well, she sucks.
But I can feel how much you resent me for things I don’t even know about, things that are happening now and things you did for me when I was a kid that I never asked you to do.
You’ve dug into your role so deep—this whole oh-look-I-can-fix-it-all role.
You don’t know who you are without it. So we stay here, stuck in this dance where you’re the hero and I’m the worst. And honestly, Dolly, no one’s winning. ”
I don’t turn to her because I have tears in my eyes. And the degree to which I cannot handle her seeing me fall apart, like the literal way that would topple our precarious family dynamic, proves that she’s right.
“You took care of me,” she says. “You took care of all of us. I don’t know how I’m supposed to thank you, especially now that you won’t even let me in.”
I’m quiet for a while. I think back to the beginning of our family, before the accident.
I was always pitching in with the baby or making Patsy’s and my lunches.
And it wasn’t to be loved. I felt loved in our house.
It was to feel safe. My mom would get up from the dinner table and go for a long walk without saying anything.
She’d put Christopher on his back on the sofa and wander out into the yard to talk with a neighbor, and I’d race over to make sure he didn’t roll off.
I monitored electrical outlets as soon as he could crawl.
I did a seatbelt check every time we got in the car, but I wasn’t around that day.
I was my mother’s understudy long before she walked away from our circus.
“I think I always knew,” I say. “That she didn’t want to be our mother.
That she’d eventually leave.” I let the tears spill down my face and turn to her.
“Like I wasn’t even that surprised. But I put myself away that day.
I stopped wanting things for myself and started making all of my decisions for you guys.
And I’m proud of it, you know? And then so soon after I finally had time to figure out what I wanted, I had Gus. I’m proud of him too. But…”
“But you never got to be selfish. And you totally resent me for it,” she says.
That sounds impossible, but it feels true. Like the place in my body where I store my anger knows this. “Maybe.” I wipe my eyes with the sleeve of my sweater. “I’m sorry.”
Patsy puts her arm around me and I let her. “I think your whole identity is tied up in doing everything for everyone. Would you still be Dolly if I brought a stupid pie?”
I laugh. “Now we’ll never know. You must hate coming here.”
“I hate coming here because I feel bad that I have my own life and you don’t.”
“I have a perfectly good life,” I say.
“In Boston? Or do you secretly want to live here? You’re here a lot.”
“Yes. I wish I could have a life here.”
“A bakery at the fish house,” she says, because your sister always knows your dream.
“Yes,” I say. “Dad is so stubborn.”
She gives me a look over her tea.
“Okay. I’m stubborn too,” I say.
“I want you to text me when someone needs something and give me a chance. I don’t want you to protect me and then resent me. I just want to be sisters. I want to joke around about Mondays and Mom coming back again.”
“We haven’t done that in a long time,” I say.
I rest my head on her shoulder. “My favorite thing about myself,” I say, “is that I don’t need help.
I make do. I’m someone who can make something out of nothing.
This summer I loosened up on that a little, sort of pretending I was a different kind of person.
I wasn’t gripping my righteousness so tightly. ”
“Did you like being that person?” she asks.
“I actually felt like myself, just not so tired. Not thinking of every single other person before myself. I’d like to figure out how to be her all the time.”
We’re quiet for a bit, listening to the waves in the distance.
“Can we talk like this again?” I ask. “Like, can you call me after therapy, or in the middle of the night or whatever?”
Patsy nods. “I wish I could just stay here tonight. Jeremy’s been snoring and Maggie’s been sleepwalking, and I’m so goddamn tired.”
“This is why I live like a nun,” I say.
She laughs. “The inn is so loud. It was hopping when we got in last night, people home for Thanksgiving. Busy Whitfield was there dressed in head-to-toe silver. Shoes, dress, jewelry, though it was probably platinum.”
“Why would the Whitfields be here? They don’t come for Thanksgiving.”
“What just happened to your voice?”
“Nothing.”
“Dolly, you look like you’re about to cry. What’s going on?”
So I tell her. The Post and the boat and the sex. The way he said he’d change the world for me. The gala, the check delivered by messenger.
She’s cross-legged, facing me now. “You totally lied to me. And Mom would lose her shit over you having sex in that house. But I know that’s not the point. So then what? He must have apologized.”
“Never heard from him again. There wasn’t even a note with the check.”
“Wow,” she says. We’re quiet for a bit, and the night sky is completely black, with a single star that’s probably just an airplane.
“Yes,” I say. We sip our tea for a bit in silence.
“The Niles thing hurt, but as soon as Gus was born my focus totally shifted anyway. It’s kind of felt comfortable, familiar, to be on my own for so long.
But I fell for Stewart. I fell for the whole thing.
And my brain is screaming at my heart to move on, but it’s like I’m addicted to thinking about him. ”
“What a jerk,” she says.
I’m quiet for a beat as I wait for that phrase to ring true.
“That’s the thing. He’s not. Which is why this makes no sense.
He either loved me or he’s a sociopath. But he’s not a jerk.
I haven’t lost anyone worth grieving since Maud.
And this feels like grief.” Patsy takes my hand to comfort me, and I let her.
I close my eyes and feel that solid brick of pain in my chest. “I should be in therapy,” I say.
“You should for sure,” she says. “Do you ever talk to Busy?”
“No. She sent me a sweet text about staying in touch, and I said thank you, but that was it. It’s easier not to.”
“Was there a horse?” she asks, and I smile.
“One white, one black. I got to keep neither.”
Patsy adjusts the blanket so it covers me as evenly as it covers her. I feel the weight on my legs and let her hold me.
In traffic on the drive back to Boston, I tell Gus what I’ve been thinking about since I sat on that porch with Patsy. “It was nice to be with everyone,” I say.
“Sure,” he says. He’s looking at his phone.
“I’ve been thinking about how nice it is in Whitfield in the winter. And also in the spring.” He doesn’t look up. “I want to move there full-time.”
He puts down his phone and turns to me. I have his full attention. “Really?”
“Yeah. I mean, I love our life in Boston and our place. But we could try it out. Sublet our apartment. I could take a leave of absence.”
“Would you get a teaching job in Whitfield?” he asks.
“I could try. Plus we’d be living with Pops for free, so we’d be okay for a bit.”
I can see his biggest smile out of the corner of my eye. “Or maybe you’d finally do all the things you want to do at the fish house?”
“You know how Pops feels about that. I’m sure I can substitute-teach until a job opens up. But what do you think, generally? Would you want to move?”
“Yes. A hundred percent,” he says. He starts texting furiously but is still talking. “I’m going to join the hockey team because all the lifeguard kids do that, and I’m going to work at the fish house after school and you and I are going to turn it into an empire.”
I laugh. “We’ll see what Pops has to say about that. You know I don’t want to run it the way he has it set up now.”
“I’ll handle Pops,” he says. “I’m a Brick, you’re a Brick. We’ve got to keep it going.”