A third episode’s starting when we hear keys rattling in the hall. Hastily, we straighten, smoothing our clothing, laughing at each other’s faraway expressions. We’re sitting on the couch with a couple of inches as a buffer when Tati comes through the door, followed by my dad.
“Oh!” Tati says, like it never occurred to her that the apartment wouldn’t be empty.
“Welcome home,” Piper says cheekily.
Tati cruises into the living room. Dad trails her comfortably. I forgot he’s been here before. They sit down in the pair of chairs across from the couch, and things get weird quick. What are we supposed to do? Rehash our respective dates? Trade anecdotes? Resume the show and hang out together, a strange quartet?
How’s that gonna work, when I can still taste Piper’s vanilla lip gloss?
“How was dinner?” Dad asks.
“Really nice,” Piper says. She shines a smile on me, like I cooked her a seven-course meal instead of serving her greasy chicken out of a paper bag. I almost reach for her hand, but I’m reluctant to give my dad shit to tease me about later. “We ate on the beach. The sunset was unreal.”
“We saw it through the window at Squid and Oyster,” Tati says, naming the restaurant Dad told me is the swankiest in Sugar Bay. And then she tells him, “I prefer to eat indoors.”
He nods, accepting this factoid like he’s working on a Tati dossier.
“Anyway,” Piper says, eying the pair of them, “it was nice of you to walk my sister upstairs, Davis.”
“My pleasure.” And then he gets the hint. “I should probably take off.”
“Oh,” Tati says. “Probably.”
It doesn’t seem like she wants him to go.
They came here to hook up, I realize, which is hilarious. Too bad they didn’t choose Dad’s place. They’d probably be a hell ofa lot happier right now.
I know I would be.
“You coming, buddy?”
“Hang out a while longer,” Piper says to me. She locks eyes with Tati, daring her sister to protest. She doesn’t, which seems to surprise Piper.
“Yeah, I’ll stick around.”
“Not too late, though,” Dad says. Normally, he doesn’t give a shit what time I come in. I’ve stayed down at the pool until after midnight a couple of times, and he didn’t utter a word.
He’s wearing his Responsible Father hat for Tati’s sake.
He pushes up out of his chair and heads for the front door. Tati follows. They turn their backs to us in the foyer, which is considerate because I don’t care much about how they say good night, and now I can lean into Piper and whisper, “I wonder what base they would’ve landed on if we hadn’t been here.”
She snickers, then curls into my side, restarting the show.
Piper
I sleep in the next day. It’s a blessed Saturday, and I don’t have to work. When I stumble into the kitchen late morning, I’msurprised to find Tati in silky floral pajamas, humming as she sips coffee and pages through a magazine. Sunlight streams in through the windows.
“What are you doing?”
She glances up. “Reading.”
Most mornings, even weekends, she goes down to the gym, where she spends forty-five minutes on the stair climber, listening to a self-help book or a metaphor-laced opus or, sometimes, a romance.
“What’s on your agenda today?” she asks when I sit down with a glass of orange juice.
You tell me, I want to say. Saturdays and Sundays are for chores and errands and personal improvement. Tati makes lists of tasks for herself and for me, and we don’t quit until it’s all knocked out.
And she wonders why I sneak out to tie one on.
