Caroline whispered, “She was Gigi Hadid gorgeous.”
I widened my eyes. That wasn’t a term Caroline and I threw around. We had a lot of levels of beautiful in our repertoire. But Gigi Hadid was the highest level a woman could attain.
“And he chose Mom anyway?”
She looked at me, never slowing her pace or the furious swinging of her arms. “I have to think that, really, he chose us. All of us.”
I laughed ironically. “You, maybe. And Sloane. His daughters. And Mom, the mother of his children. But he sure as hell didn’t choose me. I’m just some poor orphan kid next door.”
Even though I could only see her side profile as we walked down the street, I could tell that Caroline was rolling her eyes.
“You’re so damn dramatic about everything. He’s a sperm donor, Em. It’s not like we spent every other weekend and Wednesdays with him and now he’s here to reclaim us. We’re Mom’s grown kids. We’re part of the very large package that comes with marrying her.”
“Is that your nice way of saying that we’re baggage?”
“We are, aren’t we?”
“Maybe you are,” I said under my breath.
It was a perfect eighty-three degrees, the sun was shining, the birds were chirping, newborn foals were roaming Starlite Island, and I was in such a foul mood I couldn’t enjoy any of it. The logical, adult part of me knew that it was stupid to feel like Sloane and Caroline had gotten a replacement father while mine was still dead. But the silly, childish part of me felt like I was an outsider in the real family that Mom, Jack, Sloane, and Caroline had found. Like I was a goose being raised by a family of swans.
When I’d said that to Mark, he had said, “Em, trust me. If anyone’s the swan, it’s you.” It was the perfect thing to say. I was lucky I was marrying him, despite the fact that his mother refused to leave the living room because the humidity outside “absolutely ruined” her hair. People would kill to spend one day in a place like Peachtree Bluff, and she and her martini wouldn’t get off the damn couch.
The day before, I had tried to talk to her, had tried to have a civil moment in time with her, make some small talk. In the midst of my telling her all the details about the cast ofA Tree Grows in Brooklyn, she had looked at me, as if we had been talking about it the entire time, and said, “Are you pregnant?”
I’m sure I looked at her like she was insane, because shewasinsane. “Um, no. Definitely not.”
“Oh, OK,” she said, the feathers on today’s pale-pink caftan blowing as she whisked her arm likec’est la vie.
“Why?” I asked.
“I suppose I assumed that’s why you and Mark were getting married.”
Fortunately, Mark came in to intervene. “Mom, you should get out of the house today. Go take a walk. Call a friend for lunch. Anything.”
She gave him a death stare. “I am absolutely exhausted from my trip. I’ll do no such thing.”
“A little fresh air might make you feel better,” I chimed in.
She looked at me with daggers in her eyes and said, “Is that why you insist on going back to LA? For the fresh air?”
At that point, I stood up, saluted to Mark, and mouthed,I’m out. Godspeed.
Just thinking about it now irritated me all over again, making me even more unpleasant on my walk with Caroline.
She broke me out of my thoughts, saying, “We’re still sisters, Em. We’re still family. Nothing has changed between us.”
“Maybe not foryou,” I practically spat.
“We have got to get you acting again,” she said. “Give you somewhere to channel all this energy.”
I stopped and crossed my arms. Caroline walked a few more paces before she even noticed. Then she turned and crossed her arms back at me.
“What? I’m not being a bitch. You need your creative outlet. It’s not a bad thing. It’s just reality.”
“First,” I said, not caring about all the tourists walking down the street, whispering and pointing. They knew who I was, so I definitely should have been behaving better. But sometimes I get to this point where I don’t care, and I can’t control it. “You arealwaysbeing a bitch, so that’s not true. And second, you have been so incredibly insensitive to me about this whole thing. You sit up there on your high horse with your perfect self and your perfect life and look down and judge us all and deem our little problems insignificant. My problems are real, and they are significant.”
I stormed off, and after a few minutes, I finally got the nerve to turn around. Caroline wasn’t following me. Instead, she was continuing to walk ahead without me. Sisters are important to Caroline, but steps are more important. My anger at her was already burning off. It had been a stupid thing to say. Her life was far from perfect.
