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beach towels. She looks through the bag and says, “These are a disaster. They’re so threadbare they need a towel themselves.
Trash.” They keep going. Collection of warped sand toys, decades-old sand still trapped in them. Trash. A box of cloth napkins,
zillions of them. Donate.
Kids’ books are next, in a clear Rubbermaid with a bright blue lid. Natalie’s kids have so many books already but she has
to take a peek. Jordan imagines her mother packing these all away for grandchildren, and then forgetting that she’d done that.
And then dying.
“Bunbun!” says Natalie. She holds up a book with a yellow cover and a long-eared bunny riding a scooter. It’s called Bunbun, the Middle One. “I love this book. It’s about a rabbit who’s always getting in a muddle as the middle child.” She begins to read. “ ‘This
is Bunbun. Bunbun’s big brother is Benny. His little sister is Bibi. Bunbun is the middle one.’ ”
Jordan pulls the book out of her hands. “Nope,” she says. “We don’t have time for reading.”
“It’s short!” protests Natalie. “It’s Bunbun!”
“I said no,” says Jordan sternly.
“Well, put it in the keep pile. I want it for Scarlett. It’s hard being the middle child.”
“I can’t believe you still have a complex about that.” Jordan rolls her mind’s eye because Natalie would get mad if she rolled
her actual eyes.
“It’s not a complex! It’s real.”
“I call BS on that,” says Jordan. “Being the eldest is much harder. If you’re in the middle you can play up or play down. You’re never alone. And every road is at least partially paved for you. Where are the books about bunnies who are the eldest children?”
Natalie rolls her actual eyes and says, “I’ll find one and buy it for you for Christmas.” Then, as an olive branch of sorts,
she says, “Being youngest is the easiest.”
“One hundred percent,” agrees Jordan. And harmony is restored. They keep going. A broken grill is back there, with a partial set of rusted
tools. A fan with a broken blade. A vacuum from the 1970s—must have belonged to Theresa’s parents—whose canister looks like
a spaceship.
Jordan tries to introduce the next thing casually, as though she’s simply making conversation about something that just occurred
to her, even though she’s been thinking about it since lunchtime. “Oh, hey,” she says. “The girls are too funny. While you
were in Portsmouth, after we were done with Ivy + Bean, they were playing house.”
“Okay?” says Natalie. She brushes her hands on her shorts.
“It’s just . . . I didn’t know that was a thing kids still did.”
Natalie laughs. “You didn’t know kids still had imaginations?”
Jordan tries from a different angle. “Evangeline was the dad and Scarlett was the mom. She went looking for an apron! She
told Evangeline to sit down while she brought him dinner!”
“What are you getting at, Jordan? That aprons are inappropriate? Aprons are a practical kitchen tool.”
“Mom never wore an apron. The whole thing just seemed, I don’t know—subservient.” Natalie’s shoulders tense. “Like, why weren’t
they pretending they were doctors, or journalists, or astronauts?”
“Sometimes they do,” says Natalie. “They play all kinds of things. It sounds like today they decided to play house.”
Jordan clamps her mouth shut because she’s not sure what’s going to come out of it if she leaves it open.
By the end of the two hours the storeroom looks better but the floor of the garage looks much, much worse.
Jordan is torn between feeling completely overwhelmed and succumbing to nostalgia and emotion as she looks at the three piles.
All of these things were once new, and were purchased with the hope and optimism that they’d be put to their intended use.
Maybe some of them were, but certainly many of them were not.
She imagines someone buying the picnic set with plates and cups tucked inside plastic sleeves.
Had anybody ever even picnicked with this set? It suddenly all seems unbearably sad.
“I’m back to thinking we should just throw it all away,” says Jordan. “Forget the donating. If we’re getting the dumpster
anyway.”
Natalie crosses her arms. “Why are you so eager to get rid of Mom’s stuff? Just like you’re eager to get rid of the house.”
Here we go, thinks Jordan. “I’m not eager,” says Jordan. “I’m practical. We’re not going to change Dad’s mind, the house is
going on the market, why torture ourselves going through dozens and dozens of things when nobody really needs more things?
Why not just dump it?” She picks up a toddler booster seat and points it at Natalie to prove her point. “I mean, do you need
more things in your life?”
“I don’t need that. That thing wouldn’t pass even a rudimentary safety test.”
Natalie goes back into the storeroom and comes out with a cardboard box. They peer in together. It’s full of old romance novels.
She puts the box on the garage floor and pulls out one of the books. It’s swollen and water-stained, like it went for a vigorous
morning swim in the ocean twenty-five years ago and has been trying to dry out ever since. “Oh my,” she says. “Do you ever
remember Mom reading anything like this?”
Jordan shakes her head and holds out her hand for the book.
On the cover, a bare-chested, dark-haired, suntanned man in jeans is pressed up against a woman in a flowing lavender gown with a lace-up bodice.
The laces are half undone. “It’s an actual bodice ripper!
” she says gleefully. “Or at least a bodice unlacer.” She studies the cover.
“I’m trying to figure out the incongruity of the jeans with the gown.
Like, what restaurant do they have a reservation at? ”
Natalie studies the book. “I’m pretty sure they’re skipping dinner,” she decides. She turns her attention to the box. “Maybe
these were Mom’s secret guilty pleasure. Maybe she read them in the bathtub.”
“Did Mom even take baths?” asks Jordan. “I think I remember her taking a bath, like, once, ever, when she strained her back.
And yet we kept giving her bath salts and candles for Mother’s Day as though she had all day to soak.”
“Kids are the worst,” says Natalie. “No awareness of context.”
“Can’t read the room,” agrees Jordan.
Whether by accident or design all of the girls were late winter or early spring babies, so Theresa had them sleeping through
the night in time for the first day of school in September. She never missed a year of teaching until she got sick. When Jordan
thinks of Theresa she thinks of someone constantly in motion, buzzing from here to there, grading spelling tests at the kitchen
table, carrying baskets of clean, unfolded laundry to each of their bedrooms, where she’d drop them on the floor with a thunk as if to say, There. My part is done.
“I never liked having to share her with her schoolkids,” says Natalie. “I always wanted more of her.” Jordan studies her sister.
She remembers this about Natalie. The chaos of the house bothered her in a way it never bothered Jordan and Mae. She wanted
quiet time, orderly meals, organized cabinets. “I think it’s because I never got her all to myself. You had her when you were
a baby, and Mae when we both left the house. But I never did.”
Jordan doesn’t know what to say to this, because it’s true. She concentrates on a collection of plastic cups from Water Country, where they used to go once every summer, climbing the high ladders and skimming down the flumes.
Natalie stacks the cups into a tower and says, “What if we bought it?”
Jordan stops and stares at her. “What? No. With what money?”
“You make a ton of money.”
“I make a good living,” corrects Jordan. “But I live in an expensive city. I work long hours, every day. I wouldn’t have time
to come up here much.” She pauses. “And maybe I’m saving for something.”
“For what?” challenges Natalie.
“I’m not ready to talk about it. Why don’t you buy it? With Austin’s money.”
“We don’t live off Austin’s money.”
“I thought his parents were loaded.”
“They are. But they’re also big believers in self-sufficiency. They helped us buy the farm, but they don’t give us regular
money or anything. We live off what we make from the farm, which honestly is minimal, and the social media accounts.”
“Wow,” says Jordan. “I thought they were helping you. I didn’t realize your accounts make that much.”
“All of this stuff that never even got used,” says Natalie, changing the subject. She holds up a metal rake–looking thing.
“I mean, what even is this?”
Jordan examines the item, turning it this way and that. “Sand flea shovel,” she says finally.
“I’m not sure I ever met a sand flea!” says Natalie. Then, quick as a wink, quicker even, she turns away from Jordan, and
her shoulders begin to heave. She’s crying.
“Nat! What is it? The sand fleas?”
Natalie shakes her head.
“Natalie.” Jordan feels herself growing stern.
“You can tell me.” As the older sister, Jordan has seen Natalie through some sketchy times.
Sophomore year of high school breakup with that kid Michael.
The drunken prom night incident of junior year, 2009.
The pregnancy scare freshman year of college. Innumerable friend dramas.
Natalie turns and wipes her nose. “Okay,” she says. “Hold on. I’ll pull it up.” Natalie sits on a meditation cushion in the
middle of the donate pile, scrolls through her phone, and holds the screen up to Jordan. Jordan sees an article on the New York Magazine website, with a photo of Natalie wearing a long flowered dress and holding a loaf of homemade bread. “Trad Dad wants her
barefoot and pregnant,” says the caption.
Jordan shoots her eyebrows up.
Natalie thought again of the Sisterhood Napa trip and how much the exclusion had smarted. She’d eased the sting by telling
herself how busy she was, how fulfilled. If the Sisterhood wanted to exclude her, let them. She had Austin and the kids and