11. Sabrina
— ? —
Sabrina
The Kerrington women descended on the cabin without warning.
I was in the middle of attempting to make lunch, which meant Ivy was eating crackers while I stared at the contents of the refrigerator and tried to remember how to assemble food into a meal.
My appetite had been unreliable since the pregnancy started, and nothing sounded good, and I was tired in a bone-deep way that had nothing to do with sleep.
The knock on the door made me jump.
“Ivy, can you see who that is?”
“Okay!” She bounced to the door and threw it open with the complete lack of caution that characterized her approach to life. “GRANDMA!”
Bridget swept in with a lasagna in her arms and a determined expression on her face. Behind her came Tessa with grocery bags, and behind Tessa came Josie with flowers and an apologetic smile.
“We’re not staying long,” Bridget announced, setting the lasagna on the counter. “We just wanted to make sure you had actual food and weren’t wasting away in this shoebox.”
“It’s not a shoebox.”
“Sweetheart, I love you, but this cabin is a health hazard. Have you seen the bathroom?”
“The bathroom is fine.”
“The bathroom has mold in the grout. I’m sending someone to clean it.”
“You really don’t have to.”
“I’m not asking permission. Tessa, put the groceries away. Josie, find a vase for those flowers.”
They moved through the cabin with brisk, practiced efficiency, and I found myself backed against the refrigerator watching them work. Ivy was thrilled by the invasion, showing Bridget her hermit crab drawings and explaining her elaborate ranking system for the best shells on the beach.
Tessa caught my eye and jerked her head toward the bedroom. I followed her, leaving the chaos behind.
She closed the door and turned to face me.
“I booked you an appointment for tomorrow morning. Dr. Patterson, nine o’clock. I’m driving you and I’m not taking questions about it.”
“You didn’t ask me.”
“I asked you at the Juice Shack. You said you were fine, so I’ve stopped asking and started scheduling.”
I sat down on the edge of the bed. My legs were tired. Everything was tired.
“That’s aggressive.”
“You’ve met me.” She sat down beside me, her shoulder pressed against mine, warm and solid. “Now tell me the part you didn’t tell me in the café.”
“What do you want, all of it? I’m pregnant and scared and living in a cabin that apparently has mold in the bathroom. My marriage is falling apart and my husband sent a drone to my house with a banner about how amazing I am. I don’t know what I’m supposed to feel.”
She turned to look at me, her dark eyes serious. “This pregnancy is high-risk. You don’t get to white-knuckle it in a moldy cabin with a broken sink and a five-year-old who never stops moving.”
“The sink is fixed. Killian fixed it yesterday.”
Tessa’s eyebrows rose. “Did he now?”
“Don’t make it into a thing.”
“I’m not making it into a thing. I’m just noting that my idiot brother managed to do something useful for once.”
“He’s not an idiot.”
“He’s absolutely an idiot. But he’s an idiot who loves you.” She paused. “He didn’t send us, by the way.”
“What?”
“We didn’t tell him we were coming. This isn’t part of his grand campaign to win you back. We came because we wanted to. Because you’re family, Sabrina. You’ve been family since the day you married him, and you’ll be family even if the divorce goes through.”
My throat tightened. I looked down at my hands, trying to hold myself together.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
“You don’t have to figure it out today.”
“But I have to figure it out eventually. I can’t just live in limbo forever.”
“Why not?” Tessa’s voice was gentle. “Why do you have to have all the answers right now? You’re allowed to take time. You’re allowed to be confused and angry and uncertain. You’re allowed to grieve what you thought your marriage was going to be.”
“I’m not grieving.”
“You are. You’re grieving the future you imagined, the one where Killian was present and your family was whole and everything worked the way it was supposed to. That grief is real, even if the marriage isn’t over yet.”
I let that sit and didn’t touch it. The tears came before I could stop them, sliding down my cheeks in hot, silent tracks.
Tessa pulled me into her side.
“I’m here for you always,” she said quietly. “Killian or no Killian. Whatever happens between you two, I’m not going anywhere. None of us are.”
The door burst open, and Ivy ran in with a cookie in each hand.
“Grandma said I could have two because I’m growing! And also because I showed her my drawings!”
I wiped my face quickly and smiled at her. “That sounds like a good deal.”
“Are you sad, Mommy?”
“No, baby. I’m just having a grown-up talk with Auntie Tessa.”
“Grown-up talks make you cry?”
“Sometimes.”
Ivy considered this. Then she handed me one of her cookies.
“You can have this one. It’s chocolate chip, which is the best kind.”
I took the cookie and pulled her into my lap. She snuggled against me, cookie crumbs getting everywhere, and for a moment everything felt almost okay.
***
After they left I took Ivy into town for ice cream, because she had been promised ice cream at some point in the afternoon by three separate Kerringtons and had been keeping a ledger.
She got the chocolate fish on top, which is the only correct order, and we sat on the bench outside the shop while she conducted the delicate operation of eating the fish first without losing it.
“Sabrina Kerrington.”
Tilly Whitmore came at me the way weather does, from a direction I hadn’t been watching.
She was in tennis whites with a cardigan over them and a visor pushed back on her head, and behind her, arranged in a loose crescent, were Melissa and Mrs. Aldrich and a fourth woman whose name I have never once managed to hold in my head.
“We’ve just come off the courts,” Tilly said. “I said to Melissa, that’s Sabrina, and Melissa said it couldn’t be, because we’d heard you were in ’Sconset.”
“I am in ’Sconset.”
“Well, exactly.”
Melissa leaned in and kissed the air beside my cheek. She smelled of sunscreen and white wine, which at four in the afternoon told me everything about how the clinic had gone.
“You look wonderful,” she said, in the voice people use when they mean the opposite and want credit for kindness.
“I look like I live in a rental with a broken sink.”
“That’s what we heard!” Melissa said, delighted, and then heard herself, and didn’t appear especially sorry.
Ivy had gone still beside me with the fish halfway to her mouth. She has an unerring instinct for the moment adults stop being safe.
“Ivy, sweetheart,” Mrs. Aldrich said warmly, “is your daddy on the island this week?”
“She’s five,” I said. “Ask me.”
There was a pause of the particular kind that happens when four women recalculate at once.
“It’s only that people are asking,” Tilly said, and she said it without the smallest trace of shame, which I had to admire. “And when people ask me, I like to have it right. I don’t traffic in nonsense.”
“You run a book, Tilly.”
“I run a pool. There’s a difference and the difference is that a pool is for charity.”
“Which charity?”
“The lifeboat fund,” she said, with dignity.
“So the island is betting on my marriage for the lifeboat fund.”
“The island is betting on a great many things and your marriage is currently the most interesting of them, and I would rather you heard that from me than found out sideways in the checkout line.” She adjusted her visor. “Labor Day is the popular window, if you’re curious.”
“I’m not.”
“The Cabot business ran three summers and paid out beautifully,” Melissa offered, helpfully. “Though of course they’re disgusting about each other again now. You see them at the club.”
“That one had a lawyer in it by June,” Mrs. Aldrich said. “That’s what moved the odds. A lawyer in June is a different animal to a lawyer in August.”
And there it was, laid out on the pavement in front of my daughter and a melting chocolate fish. Not a question. A gap in a spreadsheet, and four women waiting politely for me to fill it in.
I thought about Victoria Pryce’s office, and the folder, and the word she’d written down and turned over.
“Ivy,” I said. “What do we do when we don’t know the answer to a question?”
“We say we don’t know,” Ivy said immediately, “because guessing is how you get it wrong and then you have to do it all again.”
“That’s right.” I stood up and got her hand and her ice cream sorted in one motion, which is a skill nobody warns you that you’ll acquire. “So. I don’t know. Enjoy the courts.”
“Sabrina.” Tilly caught my arm, and her grip was firmer than a woman her size had any right to.
For a second the performance dropped out of her face entirely.
“When it does get decided, one way or the other, you’ll want to be the one who says it first. Whoever says it first sets the story.
That part I will give you for free, and I have never given it to anyone. ”
“Why would you do that?”
“Because I married into this island too,” she said, “forty years ago, and nobody gave it to me.”
She let go and rejoined her crescent, and the four of them moved off down Main Street in formation, and I heard the laughter start again before they reached the corner.
“Mommy,” Ivy said. “That lady squeezed you.”
“She did.”
“Is she a friend?”
“I honestly don’t know, baby.”
Ivy thought about this the whole walk back to the car, and when I buckled her in she announced, with total finality, that she had decided the lady wasn’t a friend, because friends don’t make your mother’s voice go flat.
I sat in the driver’s seat for a moment before I started the engine.
***
The house was quiet.
Ivy had been asleep a while, worn out from the invasion and the ice cream and the walk.
The Kerringtons had stayed for most of the afternoon, filling the tiny cabin with noise and warmth and a love that made my chest ache.
By the time they left, the refrigerator was stocked, the bathroom had been scrubbed, and there were fresh flowers on every surface.