2. Tilly #2
"I miss you too, Daddy," I tell him, and mean it. "We'll see each other in Italy for the wedding, and then I'll be home for Easter."
Cain is the fourth Stone brother, the fancy one, as they like to call him.
He lived in Manhattan for a while before moving home and bringing a whole drama with him.
He and his wife married in the courthouse, so now they are throwing a family second wedding on the Amalfi Coast. They're flying my family there to celebrate with the Stones.
That is exactly the kind of thing Cain does.
"Italy's going to be busy with the Stones and the wedding. I won't get my Tilly-Time. And Easter is so far away. Can you make a trip before? For the weekend?"
"I do my reef work on Fridays, so it will be hard for me to get East before the wedding.
It'll be here before we know it. Also, I've been thinking.
Let's do Easter out at Oak Moss this year, like we used to do.
All of us. Grandbank, Libba, the cousins.
I know Coop won't be able to come, but we can FaceTime him the whole time. "
The line goes quiet enough that I pull the phone off my ear to check I still have him.
"Daddy?"
"I'm here. Just a gust of wind. That house hasn't been opened since your mama got sick, Til.
The shutters are still latched. That's a lot of airing out and a lot of hauling, and your mama's the one who made that whole thing work.
I don't know that any of the rest of us could pull it off the way she did, anyway. "
"That's the point. She'd want us to figure out a way." My throat bobs and I fight it with little luck. "I don't want the first Easter without her to be in the dining room with her chair sitting there."
"No," he says. "No, you're right about that."
"So let's do it."
"Let me talk to your grandfather."
He says it like making it happen is an act of Congress. It's simple. We make a decision to all go to our family property on Wadmalaw Island, outside of Charleston, for the long weekend.
"Talk to him about what? It's a long weekend at a house we already own. What is there to talk about?”
“There are some things going on out there I want to run past him first."
"What things?"
A gull screams somewhere behind him. "Let me get off this dock, and I'll call you back tonight."
"Okay."
He won't call me back tonight. I know it, standing here, and I let it go anyway, and then I put it somewhere I can find it later, with everything else this family says sideways.
"Tell Grandbank he's on deviled eggs."
"I'll tell him."
"Listen, Dad, I've got to run."
"Okay, baby. I'll let you get back to whatever you're doing out there on the boat. Don't fall in."
"Everybody keeps saying that."
He laughs and tells me he loves me.
We hang up, and I stretch my knee on my makeshift cooler seat, letting the boat rock me for a second. I don't cry, despite the lump in my throat, which is its own small skill I have gotten good at.
The water slaps the hull. Somewhere behind me, Jo's little engine drones along the marsh line. The guilt settles onto me again, the old coat, the family weight, the sense of being a problem that a whole clan of good people love very much and would like to please solve.
I pick up the phone and text the one person who has never once tried to solve me. I pull up my twin sister's contact.
Dad just did the sideways sleep question. He also admitted the group chat about babysitting me exists. Please tell me you aren't on a group chat about how to keep me wrapped in bubble wrap.
The three dots come up right away. Libba is always right there, my other half, the easy one, the one nobody ever had to have a group chat about.
oh my GOD hell no. give me more credit than that. for the record my vote is leave tilly alone she is a grown adult with a 4.0.
3.9.
don't correct me while i'm defending you.
I am smiling at my phone like an idiot on an empty boat in the middle of a bay.
That's what she does. She has done it our whole lives, reached across whatever room I have made too heavy and cracked a window.
Fraternal, everyone always says, like it's a disclaimer.
For some reason, everyone always feels the need to emphasize that we don't match.
She is sunshine, and I am the gray-white winter day.
But she is the only person alive who has never for one second looked at me like I might come apart in her hands, and I would set myself on fire for her.
you okay?
I'm okay.
good. can I call you this afternoon? I'm running out to meet Mary-Margaret for brunch. love your face.
yeah. no rush. love yours, more.
That's always been our joke, since I'm blonde-haired and blue-eyed, and she is brown-haired with hazel eyes. We are the twins who couldn't look or act more different.
The skiff's engine changes pitch, and I look up.
Jo is coming back across the flat, standing up in the little boat the way she does.
She has one hand on the tiller, a string of empty traps behind her, and her hood down now that the wind has laid off.
She noses in against the big boat, and I catch the line and cleat it without thinking.
That's a lifetime of dock reflex in action.
She hauls herself over the side and takes one look at my face and goes still.
"Who died?” She asks, and then hears herself and winces. "God. I'm so sorry, Tilly. I meant who called."
I gloss over that. I don't take offense.
"My dad."
“Is he okay?"
"He's fine." I hand her the thermos because her hands are red. "He's concerned about the beds, and he's decided the solution to all of it is to make sure I don't get left alone down here like I'm going to wander into traffic. Or fall off a boat."
Jo unscrews the thermos and drinks the coffee. She’s quiet for several seconds, which I appreciate. She is a shrimper's kid from down in Chauvin, so we're the same kind of animal, marsh-raised, mud in the blood. Pluff mud for me, bayou for her.
"He still doesn't get it," she says. It is not a question.
"They get it. They just get it like a diagnosis.
To him, it's a thing that happened to me that could happen again if they stop watching.
" I take the thermos back. The coffee is terrible, and I love it.
"In Charleston, I'm the girl who went to rehab.
Over here, I'm the nobody tomboy. I don't know which one I'd rather be. "
"Embrace them both. No shame for either."
"I'm trying." And then, because it's Jo and because the water is quiet and she already knows the worst of me so there is nothing left to protect, I say the thing I didn't say to my father. "There's something else. You know I take over Coop's place Wednesday, the second he flies out."
"Yeah. I know you're excited to have your own space, and to get out of that shitty roommate situation. And then we get to be roomies next year!"
"Yeah, well, I've got a real bad feeling about how they're planning to handle me while he's gone. Dad mentioned that he and Cooper have been talking, whatever that means."
Jo fumbles with her pocket knife, and then clips it to her waistband. "Handle you how?"
"I don't know yet." Out past the reef line, the tide has started to turn. I can see it in the way the grass leans, the whole bay beginning to breathe out.
"I mean, what are they going to do? Pull you out of Tulane? Send your dad to New Orleans? I think you're being paranoid."
"Maybe you're right," I say, and I start coiling the wet line because my hands need something to do. "I'll tell you one thing, though. The next person who tries to tie me off is going to lose a finger."
Jo grins at me, this slow, Chauvin grin, and reaches for the ignition. "Now that," she says, "sounds like a badass tomboy I want to be friends with."
She fires the engine on the big boat, and we head back to the boat ramp.
I keep my eyes on the reef going wrong behind us for as long as I can see it.
Somewhere between the marsh line and the landing, I make myself a promise with my back teeth.
Whatever is waiting for me on shore, I am not going under for it, not this time and not for anybody.