Noah hops up from his seat, punching his fist into the air. “Yeah, Duncan!” Phoebe stands up, too, holding Bear Bear over her head and dancing.
“He’s playing well,” Andrea says, leaning behind Noah to speak to Diana. “Too bad The General and Dad missed that basket. Where are they, anyway?”
“Dad’s closing ran over. They’ll be here soon,” Diana says, watching Duncan high-five his teammates.
Diana still hasn’t told Andrea or her parents about Tom’s letter or the break-in. At first, she thought she was holding off because her family would ask too many questions—questions she couldn’t yet answer—but the truth is, she’s still hiding herself from them. She’s lost count of the number of times she’s forced a smile on her face when all she wants to do is weep, or said everything is great when really, she’s drowning.
“Pay attention, Noah,” Andrea says, as she ties his sneaker laces. “You don’t want to fall going up and down the bleachers.”
“Yup,” he says, keeping his eyes on the game. Andrea smiles and kisses him on the top of his head.
“Mom,” Noah hisses, pushing Andrea away and scowling. “There’s a game going on!”
“Okay, okay, no kisses from Mom during basketball, I get it,” Andrea says. She catches Diana’s eye and shakes her head. “I thought I had more time before he rejected me.”
“You don’t have anything to worry about,” Diana says. “You’re a good while away from being embarrassing just for existing.”
“I hadn’t planned on dealing with parental alienation for another eight to ten years.”
Andrea is never without a plan. Diana knows of only two occasions on which she deviated from a plan she’d set into motion: when she chose psychiatry instead of the surgical career she always envisioned, explaining that she wanted to “understand what made people tick, not just cut them open,” and when she gave up on the idea of a second child after barely surviving Noah’s early years, which were marked by severe acid reflux, colic, and an inability to sleep through the night until he was three years old.
Diana admires Andrea’s clear vision of the way her life is to unfold, though she doesn’t completely understand it. She wonders whether her sister is closed off to spontaneity or unknown possibilities, but she’s never shared those concerns. Their relationship doesn’t work if they criticize one another’s choices. They learned that the hard way.
Tom taught them that. Or more specifically, Diana’s relationship with Tom was the catalyst for Diana’s understanding that her relationship with her sister included areas where they could not tread. Within months of meeting, Tom and Diana were living together and talking about marriage. Andrea, who dated Evan for four years before agreeing to move in with him, and then only after drafting an extensive pro-con list, thought Diana was moving too fast toward a life-altering commitment. “What happened to moving abroad? Running your own library?”
Andrea posed these questions, her voice urgent and bewildered, while they helped their parents decorate their house for Christmas. Andrea and Diana stood in the stuffy attic, handing boxes down to their father. Their mother’s directions floated up from the living room, where she commanded each step of the preparations.
Hunting amid the boxes for the angel to place on top of the tree, Diana shrugged and bent down to push a box of ornaments to the edge of the stairs, the cardboard scraping against the plywood floor. “I don’t know. I’ll figure that out. Or I won’t. It doesn’t matter.”
“Doesn’t matter? Your plans don’t matter?”
“Everything okay up here?” Francis asked as he popped up through the attic opening.
“We’re good, Dad. Still looking for that angel, though,” Diana said. He nodded and left with the ornaments.
Andrea clutched Diana’s arm. “You’re moving too fast, Diana. You’re not thinking this relationship through.”
Diana slowly unpeeled her sister’s fingers. “Andrea, I’m happy with Tom. That’s what’s important. Dreams change.”
“You’re making a mistake.”
“No,” Diana said softly. “I’m not.”
They never spoke of that conversation again.
Phoebe taps Diana’s elbow. “Can I have M&M’s?” She gestures to a table in the corner of the gym where the booster club sells candy and bottled water.
“I want Twizzlers,” says Noah, tugging on Andrea’s arm.
Diana’s phone buzzes, and she pulls it out of her coat pocket to find Jonathan’s name on the screen. “I have to take this.”
“Candy’s on me,” Andrea says, shepherding the children down the steps.
“Is this a good time?” Jonathan asks, as Diana hikes up the bleachers, passing families watching the action below and a group of giggling tween girls.
“I’m at Duncan’s game, so it’s a little noisy.” Diana finds a seat in the nearly empty top row, near a curly-haired woman hunched over her phone.
“I did some research and wanted to update you.”
