“I know. I wish you didn’t have to work so hard, the both of you!”
“If wishes were horses,” says Pauline. She notices Nicole stops short of offering the record producer’s money to make this wish come true. Not that she would take it. “Anyway that’s not my point. You know, me I’m an ox. I’ve got years’ more work in me. What I meant was that Hazel’ll be left to her own devices most days. I’m off Wednesdays and the weekend, that’s it. And you know how your dad’s hours are. She good at entertaining herself?”
“She’sso goodat entertaining herself,” says Nicole. “She won’t have any problems with that. She’ll be happy for a change of pace, you know? It’s so hot here in the summer. Maybe Daddy can take her out on the boat one day.”
“What, hauling?”
“Of course, sure. Yeah. Hauling. Why not? She’d love it. She’s skinny, but she’s strong. The way I used to be.” Nicole stopped going out on the boat the summer she turned fourteen. Suddenly shecouldn’t stand the smell of the bait, the motion of the waves, the earliness of the hour.
“Why not?” says Pauline. “Maybe. Send me the information on the flight, will you?”
“I will. Right away, once we’re off the phone, I’ll text it.”
“Okay, then. I’ll look for it.” Pauline hates texts. She can never figure out how to make them get off her phone’s screen once she’s done with them. “Bye, now, honey.”
“Goodbye, Mama. And thank you.”
“Yup,” says Pauline.
Sometimes Pauline feels like she has never been quite so exasperated by anyone in her whole life, and at the same time like she hasn’t loved anyone quite so much either.
13.
Louisa
Louisa loves the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, and she’s trying to feel excited about the trip Annie has proposed, but she’s having trouble summoning her usual enthusiasm. She’s trying to thinksummer summer summerandfamily family familybut instead she keeps thinkingbook book book.June is slipping away; despite its initial promise, time is as elusive as a bar of soap in a bubble bath, and she’s written eleven and a half pages when she should have written sixty-eight. July had better be some kind of productive. She agrees to the trip mostly out of guilt—she doesn’t want to disappoint her mother, and she doesn’t want to disappoint Abigail, whose devotion to the museum is highly unusual for a contemporary child. Louisa is trying not to smother Abigail’s ardor with her own ambivalence. Also, there is the promise of a sandwich after from Atlantic Baking Company when they are finished, and she really loves those sandwiches.
While Annie is showing her membership card Abigail slips out of sight. A guard says, “Looking for the little girl? She’s up there.” He nods toward the Hadlock Gallery. They climb the short flight of stairs from the lobby and find Abigail in front of an Andrew Wyeth painting calledHer Room,which depicts a room with a wooden desk or table holding a conch shell just off center. Light pink diaphanous curtains are pulled back from either side on each of the two windows. A door stands open, with a diagonal splash of light across it.
“This is a very plain room,” says Abigail sternly, acknowledging her mother’s and grandmother’s appearance on either side of her. “But, oh! Look at the seashells lined up on the windowsill. In order from biggest to smallest. I love that.” She has her hands clasped together behind her back and looks for all the world like a miniature professor.
Louisa, who hadn’t even noticed the shells on the windowsill, leans in. “Very observant of you, Abigail.” She touches Abigail’s hair, done in two French braids by Louisa herself that morning. Abigail’s hair is thick and tends toward unruliness, like Louisa’s, and tamed in this way it gives her a clean, old-fashioned look that Louisa loves. Claire’s hair, by contrast, is fine and straight and falls like a cap around her face, and Matty’s—well, Matty has boy hair, subjugated every six weeks by a Brooklyn barber. Their eyes are all different too: Abigail’s are sapphire blue with a dark rim, like Louisa’s and Martin’s; Matty’s are brown, like Steven’s, and Claire’s shift between blue and green depending on what she’s wearing. The McLeans are their very own Punnett square.
“I wonder whose room this was?” asks Abigail.
“There’s a whole display with information about it,” Annie tells her. “Early sketches and so forth. You can see the different versions the artist worked through before creating the final. See? Just over there.” She takes Abigail by the shoulders and turns her gently around. “You can read all about it.”
“I don’t think I want to read about it,” says Abigail, turning back to the painting. “I don’t think I want to know for sure. I prefer to imagine.”
“She’s just like you were,” says Annie to Louisa as they move out of Abigail’s earshot, leaving her to take her time in front of the painting.
“Oh, no. I was never such a dreamer, was I?”
“You were,” says her mother, “Oh, you were. Always talking to your dolls, setting them up with their own little worlds and circumstances. Sometimes they’d have arguments, and you’d be in charge of settling them. That part came from your father, I suppose. The desire for order in the face of disagreement. I always thought you’d go to law school yourself.”
“I don’t remember anything about doll arguments,” says Louisa.
“I figured it was the curse of the only child, left so often to your own devices, that made you that way. But here’s Abigail, sandwiched between the other two, with her head in the clouds. Who knows? Maybe she’ll become an artist.”
“No thank you,” says Abigail primly, appearing beside them without warning. “I think I’d like to be a vet.”
Abigail has so far shown a total of zero interest in science, though it is a fact that her devotion to dogs has always run strong and true.
“I think you should be a pianist,” says Louisa. “If you would just practice more, you’d be really good.” Abigail’s talent for the piano seems to have fallen onto her long, cool fingers from the clear blue sky, none of the rest of them having ever played at all. She doesn’t like to practice, so her teacher says she’ll never be as good as she could be.
“Absolutely not,” says Abigail.
They take their time walking through the rest of the museum, then, when a sufficient amount of time has passed, Louisa mentions that Atlantic Baking Company often sells out of the sourdough pullman bread, her favorite.
