Chapter 4 #6
Jordan faces the sink and checks her phone. All of the calls and texts are from Bernadette. She finds a bottle of bourbon,
plunks two ice cubes in a rocks glass, and pours her father’s drink. She considers the gin but then fills her glass with water
instead. It’s going to be another long week; she’d better keep her senses about her before they’ve even had dinner.
She turns back toward the living room and sees someone running on the beach. The stride looks so familiar, the body, the bouncing
blond ponytail. Is that . . . ? No. No, it can’t be. You’re seeing things, Jordan. You’re seeing the ghost of summers past.
When she rejoins her family Caspian is still engaged in his resolute tour of the room. He points to the Summer Sessions cap
on Calvin’s head and says, “at.” He squats to examine something on the floor but declines to give it a label. Then he makes
his way over to Natalie and clambers into her lap. He puts his cheek against her cheek and his hand on her chest. “Heart,”
he says, kindly and fully. Unexpectedly Jordan feels her own heart constrict and her eyes spark with tears.
The ponytail runs by again, going in the opposite way. “Is that Simone?” asks Natalie.
“Who?” asks Jordan, playing dumb. Jordan turns her head away and tries not to remember her hands inside Simone’s bikini bottoms,
Simone’s fingers in her mouth.
Calvin accepts his drink and goes on as if there’d been no break. “A house is just a structure. Family is not a structure.
Family is people.” He looks imploringly at Jordan.
“Jordan,” Natalie demands. “Why aren’t you saying anything? About the house?”
“Jordan!” Mae chimes in. Fix it, Jordan, solve it, make it better. What is adulthood, after all, thinks Jordan, but a reprise of our childhoods?
“So now what?” demands Natalie. They’re in Mae’s room, the Green Room, because this is where Leo’s crate is. It’s nine thirty.
The children are asleep in Natalie’s room; when Jordan is ready to go to sleep, Natalie will transport Scarlett from her room
(the Flowered Room) into Jordan’s (the Brown Room, or, more commonly, the Poop Room) to make more space. Scarlett is the deepest
sleeper of the three and won’t notice that she’s been moved. Jordan is a deep sleeper too; deep sleeping has always been one
of her talents. At some point Caspian will wake up and figure out that he’s in a portable crib, which he will protest, and
he will move into the bed with Natalie and Evangeline. Calvin has agreed to have Cinnamon in his room, until Kara arrives,
to put more space between the two dogs.
All of the bedrooms in this house have queen beds, with the exception of their parents’ room, which has a king. (Calvin insists
on calling it the master bedroom still, even though they’ve all told him that he must call it the primary.)
They used to love coming here for a zillion reasons as kids, and one of them was that their rooms in Lenox all had twin beds,
so it felt luxurious to spread out here on their own or have a friend for a sleepover or, sometimes, sleep with a sister,
just because. Mae secretly loved sharing a bed with Natalie, loved breathing in the scent of her perfume, loved waking to
find that Natalie’s long hair had migrated over to Mae’s pillow.
Mae is curled up on her side, which leaves room for Natalie to stretch out on the other side of the bed. Jordan is lying on her back on the floor, using one of Leo’s dog towels draped over the arch of her foot to stretch her hamstrings. Jordan’s phone is next to her, and it keeps buzzing.
“What do you mean, now what?” Mae asks Natalie.
On the night table is a bottle of Cabernet Jordan discovered in the back of the pantry, and she has poured some of it into
three three-ounce Dixie Cups from the bathroom. Maybe a renter left the wine behind, or maybe one of the Shipmans did, years
ago, but either way, it’s theirs now. Tomorrow they will provision. Tonight, they will make do. Jordan is throwing the wine
back like a series of shots, while Natalie is sipping hers slowly, holding her cup out to Jordan every so often for a refill.
“Do you mind?” Natalie asks Jordan with great exaggeration.
“Do I mind what?”
“Do you mind turning off your phone and being fully engaged in the conversation?”
“I’m not answering it!”
“But it’s buzzing.”
Jordan sits up and shakes her head. “I’ll turn it face down.”
“Did you take time off this week?” Jordan knows what Natalie really means: unlike when Mom was sick.
“I took the week. I’m engaged. I’m very engaged. Okay, what are we talking about? What do we do about what?”
“I mean, what do we do about Dad’s plan? Do we have to, like, bow before the king and each declare our love for him before
he’ll reward us with a share of his kingdom?” (Natalie had toyed with the idea of being an English major in college, and her
Substacks are rife with witty literary references. Even as a person with nothing in common with Natalie’s target audience,
Mae keeps up with her sister’s Substack.)
“No,” says Mae, who was an environmental studies major but did once date someone who played Edmund in an amateur summer theater production of King Lear.
(Emphasis on the word amateur.) She’d sat through four long performances, and they’d broken up the next week.
She remembers thinking, after the breakup,
that she’d never get those hours back. “First of all, I don’t want to get sent away. The youngest daughter in Lear gets sent
away.”
“True,” says Natalie.
“I don’t think you’ll get sent away,” says Jordan. “Aren’t you the favorite?”
“I don’t know,” says Mae. “No.” When they were growing up they were never sure who was the favorite, or, rather, they believed
that Favorite Daughter Status was largely situational. As it probably should be. Their mother had even gotten them matching
T-shirts one Christmas that said FAVORITE DAUGHTER in small caps across the front, with a red heart centered beneath the words. Mae still has hers; she wonders if her sisters
do. They used to ask Theresa if she’d instruct each of them when it would be appropriate to put it on, and she’d throw up
her hands and say, “Oh, come on, now. It’s a joke. You’re all my favorite daughter.”
(“You’re each my favorite daughter,” Natalie had corrected.)
“Cordelia was the favorite, and look how that turned out for her,” points out Natalie now.
“Can you please stop with the Shakespeare references?” asks Jordan. “You’re giving me a headache. I don’t even know what you’re
talking about.”
“Cordelia is killed in Act Five,” Mae explains. “And a heartbroken Lear carries her lifeless body with him before he dies.”
The actor who played Lear in the production she’d seen four times had actually been very good.
“Okay, fantastic,” says Jordan. “Thanks for the mood lift.” She lies back down on the floor and tucks both of her knees into her chest, making her body into a little ball.
Jordan is the most flexible of the three, owing to her devotion to very expensive Pilates classes.
She carries herself like a dancer, even though she actually has two left feet.
“Anyway. Moot point. I don’t think there’s a lot of kingdom to go around. ”
“When he sells the house, though,” says Natalie. “I looked up the listing. It’s jaw-dropping.” She pulls the listing up on
her phone and passes it around so they can all see. Obediently Mae and Jordan drop their jaws.
“Yeah, okay, but that’s not our money. That’s Dad’s money,” says Jordan. “When Mom died everything of hers went to him. And
then, not to be cold-blooded and talk about an event that I’m sure is extremely far in the future, but when Dad dies . . .” Her voice trails off and they all look at each other, coming to the realization
at the same time.
“Everything will go to Kara,” says Natalie.
“Everything will go to Kara,” says Mae.
“Yup,” says Jordan. “Everything will go to Kara.”
“I knew it!” says Natalie, half triumphant, half horrified. “I knew she was making him sell the house. Instead of waiting
until she inherits it to do it. Why would she want something that holds all of our memories when she could have the money
to spend on—on who knows what?”
“I don’t know,” says Mae. “She never seemed like a person who cares a lot about money. I don’t think you go into hospice nursing
for the money?” Her voice wavers uncertainly even though she’s positive it’s true: you do not go into hospice nursing for
the money.
“We obviously never knew her the way we thought we knew her,” says Jordan. “I mean, here we thought she deserved a nurse of
the year award, when all along she was waiting her turn.” It’s not the first time the sisters have sifted through these thoughts,
and it won’t be the last.
“I don’t think that’s really true—” says Mae. She doesn’t divulge her secret (one of many), which is that not only does she not dislike Kara the way her sisters do, she actively likes her. Her sisters would lose their minds.
“It’s definitely true,” says Jordan.
“I think if you looked at it differently . . .” Mae tries. Too far? Maybe she should pull back.
“I will never, ever change my views on Kara,” says Jordan. “And that’s that.”
“Me either,” says Natalie.
“Can’t you buy the house, Natalie?” Mae asks, to change the subject but also because she’s curious. “You’re rich.”
Natalie snorts. “Well, no. I’m not. And also, just no.”
“But you are. You guys have an empire.” Mae’s favorite time of the year in Natalie’s tradwife empire is autumn, when the foliage
turns in Vermont and Natalie’s social media is full of astonishing yellows and oranges framing the farmhouse and the dairy
barn. There are (were?) lots of good things about living in Boulder, but the absence of a real New England fall is not one
of them. In Natalie’s October posts there’s always lots of plaid flannel—even Cinnamon dons a plaid bandanna—and there are
scarecrows and apples and videos of Natalie herself pulling a loaf of homemade pumpkin bread out of one of the two side-by-side