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about something insignificant. But Theresa must have known this was impossible advice! Natalie thinks about all the sleep
mothers through the ages have lost over one thing or another: a sick child, an unwieldy to-do list, a husband away at sea
for months at a time or off to war. What if we could get those hours back, she wonders, all of us collectively? What if we
could stitch them together into a great billowing quilt with which we could cover all of the other mothers, and let them sleep?
Let the mothers sleep.
The woman who works in the eyeglasses shop tells them they have two hours to kill. Calvin suggests they get lunch while they wait. He’s a creature of habit, and he likes the burger at Popovers. Natalie isn’t hungry, but she’ll get another coffee.
I’m feeding Dad, Natalie texts Jordan. Feel free to start the garage without me.
Jordan texts back one of those memes of Jerry Seinfeld saying, I tell ya, I don’t see it happening. I’m watching your kids, remember? Eva is going to make us lobster Thermidor.
Ha, ha, thinks Natalie. She texts back, Evangeline. Her sisters know how she feels about nicknames. Jordan doesn’t reply to that text.
When they are settled at a table with Calvin’s burger and Natalie’s coffee, Calvin asks her about the farm. The farm equals
the article and the article equals her marriage, but her father doesn’t know that, so she tries to think of something to share.
“Buttercup has mastitis,” she says.
Calvin looks perplexed. “That’s—too bad?” he says. “Or very good?”
“Bad,” she says. “It’s an inflammation of the mammary gland. If not caught early, it can affect milk quality and production.
But Dr. George is on it; she’ll be fine.”
She knows that by talking about Buttercup they are skirting around the real issues—Kara’s arrival, the house. The house is
like a drumbeat in the back of Natalie’s mind: the house, the house, the house.
“Listen, Natalie. There’s something I didn’t finish telling you all about the sale.”
“Dad,” she says. “I don’t want to talk about the sale.
Seriously, it’s crushing me. I feel like I can’t breathe when I think about it.
” Natalie watches her father take that in.
She observes the grooves in his face, the familiar rasp to his voice, the bobbing Adam’s apple.
She remembers being seven and watching him lift little Mae onto his shoulders and wade into the Atlantic; she remembers him at the Beach Club, drinking a beer with his friend Joe (after 5 p.m.!
club rules!), laughing so hard. She loves him so much, but she’s got such a ball of anger inside.
“When Kara arrives—” he says.
“I don’t want to talk about Kara either.”
“Well, I do.” This is his don’t-mess-with-me voice. “I would appreciate it if, when she arrives, you’d make her feel welcome.”
She says, looking at the clock on the wall, “The glasses should be ready soon.”
At the beach, Jordan supervises Caspian, Scarlett, and Evangeline carefully. Nothing is going to happen on her watch! She
helps Caspian build an approximation of a sandcastle. She walks with them to the edge of the water so they can all go ankle-deep,
talk about how cold it is, and retreat to the blanket. She keeps a Goldendoodle, illegally on the beach outside of the sanctioned
dog hours, from eating Caspian’s homemade crackers. (When, she marvels, did Natalie have time to make crackers?)
“You’re stingy with your time,” Audrey once told Jordan. “It’s like your time is a candy bar you’re going to share but you
always, always want the bigger half.”
Look at me now, Jordan thinks. Look at me being a gentle, giving, loving aunt who isn’t thinking about work at all!
Actually, she is thinking about work. She’s thinking about Samantha Braddock, and about the three unanswered texts Bernadette has sent her just since breakfast, and about the fact that she hasn’t yet decided what to do.
She wishes she could talk to someone—but who?
Audrey had been very good about listening to work stories, until she wasn’t, which happened when the work stories started to take over everything.
On their last vacation together, to Tulum, their first dinner at the resort was interrupted by a call from a university president with a campus crisis.
“What do you want me to do?” she’d asked Audrey (rhetorically).
Audrey had answered literally. “I want you to turn your phone off.”
She reapplies the kids’ sunscreen, she keeps Caspian from putting a large shell in his mouth, she congratulates Scarlett on
her sandcastle with two turrets. Time passes. People are sunbathing and swimming and dragging surfboards to the legal surfing
area. People are starting to unpack sandwiches and being very sly about pouring from bottles of rosé hidden in their coolers
into Corkcicles.
“What’s for lunch?” Scarlett says expectantly. She looks at Jordan like Jordan knows the answer to this question, or to any
question. Is her father right to sell the house? What will it be like when Kara is here? What should Jordan do about what happened on Memorial
Day? Should she call Samantha Braddock?
“Ah,” says Jordan. “I didn’t bring any lunch out here. Should we go back to the house soon?”
She expects some pushback, if not from Evangeline and Scarlett, at least from Caspian. But they are so compliant. Evangeline
helps her put the towels in the bag, and Caspian feeds his crackers to the gulls, which at least makes their load a little
lighter. Their beach neighbors give them the stink eye for encouraging the gulls to linger, but whatever.
“Don’t tell your mom about the gulls and the crackers,” she advises Evangeline.
In the kitchen, the kids eat the sandwiches Jordan makes for them. Well, eat is a generous term for Caspian, but he makes a nice design with the pieces and consumes some of them. She puts Caspian down
early for his nap, but luckily nobody notices.
When Caspian is sleeping and Evangeline is reading Ivy + Bean out loud to her and Scarlett, all Jordan wants to do is lie down herself. Aunting is exhausting! How does Natalie do this all day every single day? How does she make it all look so pretty?
“If this is what the summer-home storage room looks like I can only imagine what’s in the attic in Lenox,” says Jordan, after
Calvin and Natalie have arrived home, and Calvin, spiffy in his new glasses, has gone inside to check on the to-do list.
“Ugh,” says Natalie, coming to stand beside Jordan. Then she says, “Silver lining. The Lenox attic is not going to be our
job. It’s going to be Kara’s.”
“Natalie! What a morbid thing to say.”
“What? It’s true.” There’s a pause, then Natalie says, “Do you ever feel bad that we didn’t go to the wedding?”
Jordan stares at her. “Are you insane? No, never.”
“Yeah, me either.”
“This is a terrible system,” Jordan says, looking at the storeroom, which runs along the back of the garage. “You literally
have to take out everything to get to the stuff on the far side. This thing should have a door in the middle. We’ll get a
dumpster and just put everything in it. I’ll call today, have one here on Friday.”
Natalie looks horrified. “We can’t do that! With Mom’s stuff!”
“Why not?”
“It’s bad enough you’re okay letting the house go! What if treasures abound?”
“I don’t want any treasures. I live in an apartment. Do you want treasures?”
“Maybe,” says Natalie. “Depends what they are. I want to see everything, everything that has to do with Mom.”
Jordan sighs. But she knows she’s already the odd man out among her sisters since she sees the logic of the sale in a way that they do not.
(Obviously, she’s right.) And her mental space is heavily occupied; she can’t turn everything into an argument.
“Okay, then. If we’re not dumping it all, we’re going to need three piles.
Keep, which means one of us or Dad has to take it.
Donate; I’ll find a place where we can bring everything on Saturday.
And trash.” Natalie nods. There is some discussion over whether or not they need handwritten signs to keep the sections straight, then Jordan decides they will be fine without signs: trash to the far right, keep in the middle, donate to the left.
“I’m going in,” says Jordan. She straightens her shoulders, tips her chin up, and enters the storeroom, emerging with an electric
roasting pan. “Item number one,” she says formally. “Do you want this?”
Natalie glances at it. “I have one.”
“You have an electric roasting pan?”
“Of course.”
“Why?”
“I cook dinner for five people six nights a week. I have an extremely well-equipped kitchen.”
“And on the seventh night you rest?” Jordan puts the roasting pan in the donate pile. It looks serviceable.
“Sort of.” Natalie pulls a hair elastic off her wrist and uses it to put her hair in a high ponytail. She pulls a lip gloss
out of the pocket of her shorts and applies it. “Every Saturday night Austin and I get a babysitter and have a date night
in Bennington.” Natalie sounds like she’s auditioning for a role on Father Knows Best, which is a show Jordan has heard of only because she once dated a woman who loved to get high and watch old television shows
that her own father used to like. (It was weird, but whatever, everyone has their thing.) “You would know that if you followed
me on social media.”
“Of course I follow you on social media,” says Jordan. “I just don’t spend a lot of time on social unless it has to do with
work. You post a lot—it’s hard to keep up!”
“Well, that’s fine,” says Natalie, and something sounds funny about her voice. “Have you been online a lot since we’ve been here?”
“Not even once. I’m technically on vacation. I’m just checking my calls and texts.” Jordan pauses and looks more closely at
her sister. “Natalie?” She touches her on the shoulder. “Is everything okay?”
“Why wouldn’t it be?” Natalie turns away and goes into the storage room herself, returning with a garbage bag full of ancient