“It’s from my mom.”
“Hate mail?” says Kristie. “Should I check it for anthrax?”
“Ha!” (How dare Kristie befunny.)“It’s—it’s money. It’s a check.”
“For what?”
Many answers dart through Louisa’s mind, and the one she comes up with, disappointingly, is, “Um.”
Kristie crosses her arms over her Renys vest. “Is it so I’ll go away?”
Louisa hesitates. “Things are complicated in my family at the moment,” she says. “My mother’s been through a lot, and my dad’s really sick.” She squints at Kristie. “It’s not the right time for something like this to come up, that’s all.”
“So itisso I’ll go away.”
Louisa says nothing—she offers instead an infinitesimal shrug. “I don’t really know,” she says. “I’m just the messenger.”
“I’m sorry about the timing,” says Kristie. Her voice sounds like it spent the night in a deep-freeze. “But I didn’t have a lot of control over when I found out about it. I didn’t even know about your father...ourfather... until May. I never knew who he was. Not a name or anything.”
“Mom?” Louisa turns. Claire is beside her, holding a game of Connect Four. “Can we get this? We don’t have it.”
“I love that game,” says Kristie, in a kinder voice. “That’s a good one. Old school. I can ring it up with my discount.”
Why, Louisa wonders, couldn’t Kristie at least have the decency not to be nice to Claire? That would make it much easier to tell her to take the hush money and run.
“No, thank you,” Louisa says primly. “We don’t need it.”
“Pleeeeeease,” says Claire. “I want it so much.” She hugs the game to her chest as if it’s her firstborn child. “I want it so, so much.”
“We have enough games,” says Louisa. She knows her voice is growing sharp. “We have games that we brought up that you haven’t even looked at this summer. There are stacks of games in the downstairs closet too.” And then she cringes at how she must sound to Kristie.We have so much! So many games in our big, big waterfront house. And you there, unpacking your sad little cardboard box, probably have so little. You probably have no games at all!
“The games in the downstairs closet all have missing pieces,” says Claire accurately. “They’re about a hundred years old.”
Kristie gives Claire a little smile and shrugs and says, “Sorry, Claire. Maybe next time.” Maybe it’s just a garden-variety shrug, but to Louisa it says,I know your mother is unreasonable and probably also mean.
“Wait by the pool noodles and boogie boards, okay?” Louisa tells Claire. “And don’t talk to anyone.”
“Not even if they talk to me first?”
“Especially not then.”
When Claire is gone Kristie shakes her head and says, “I should have guessed from Danny that it would go like this, the first time we really talked.”
“Danny?”
“Yeah.”
“Danny at the house?OurDanny?”
Kristie looks briefly disgusted. “He’s notyourDanny.”
Louisa’s head is spinning. She thought she would be in control of this situation, but instead she’s on her back foot. “I mean, Danny who works for us?”
Another look moves over Kristie’s face, quick as a passing shower. “He works for a lot of people, not just you. We’re together.”Kristie gets two spots of color on her cheeks when she’s upset, just like Louisa does: their father’s Irish heritage.
“So you’ve been following us around, and now you’re dating ourlawn guy?”
“Following you around?” The spots of color grow brighter. “Youcame tomyrestaurant!”
