She can’t remember the last time she’d gone three days without tending to her accounts. Actually, she does remember: It was when Theresa died. She’d posted her favorite photo of sunrise at Hillside Haven and written a paragraph about her mother, announcing that she’d be offline for the rest of the week. Her followers had been so supportive; she’d gotten hundreds of thousands of likes and comments. She’d felt it, the kindness of strangers, flowing to her. How quickly people turn. Ingratitude, thou marble-hearted fiend,she thinks.
“I give up,” she tells her father again. “Tell me.”
“I’ll fill you in when I get back.” Natalie groans. He waits a beat, then says, “It’s like pulling teeth to get you to laugh at my dentist jokes.”
“Oh my god,” says Natalie. “Dad!”
She needs more coffee. She’s so tired! “Don’t lose sleep over it,” Theresa used to say when she saw her daughters worrying about something insignificant. But Theresa must have known this was impossible advice! Natalie thinks about all the sleep mothers through the ages have lost over one thing or another: a sick child, an unwieldy to-do list, a husband away at sea for months at a time or off to war. What if we could get those hours back, she wonders, all of us collectively? What if we could stitch them together into a great billowing quilt with which we could cover all of the other mothers, and let them sleep?
Let the mothers sleep.
The woman who works in the eyeglasses shop tells them they have two hours to kill. Calvin suggests they get lunch while they wait. He’s a creature of habit, and he likes the burger at Popovers. Natalie isn’t hungry, but she’ll get another coffee.
I’m feeding Dad, Natalie texts Jordan.Feel free to start the garage without me.
Jordan texts back one of those memes of Jerry Seinfeld saying,I tell ya, I don’t see it happening.I’m watching your kids, remember? Eva is going to make us lobster Thermidor.
Ha, ha, thinks Natalie. She texts back,Evangeline. Her sisters know how she feels about nicknames. Jordan doesn’t reply to that text.
When they are settled at a table with Calvin’s burger and Natalie’s coffee, Calvin asks her about the farm. The farm equals the article and the article equals her marriage, but her father doesn’t know that, so she tries to think of something to share. “Buttercup has mastitis,” she says.
Calvin looks perplexed. “That’s—too bad?” he says. “Or very good?”
“Bad,” she says. “It’s an inflammation of the mammary gland. If not caught early, it can affect milk quality and production. But Dr. George is on it; she’ll be fine.”
She knows that by talking about Buttercup they are skirting around the real issues—Kara’s arrival, the house. The house is like a drumbeat in the back of Natalie’s mind:the house, the house, the house.
“Listen, Natalie. There’s something I didn’t finish telling you all about the sale.”
“Dad,” she says. “I don’t want to talk about the sale. Seriously, it’s crushing me. I feel like I can’t breathe when I think about it.” Natalie watches her father take that in. She observes the grooves in his face, the familiar rasp to his voice, the bobbing Adam’s apple. She remembers being seven and watching him lift little Mae onto his shoulders and wade into the Atlantic; she remembers him at the Beach Club, drinking a beer with his friend Joe (after 5 p.m.! clubrules!), laughing so hard. She loves him so much, but she’s got such a ball of anger inside.
“When Kara arrives—” he says.
“I don’t want to talk about Kara either.”
“Well, I do.” This is his don’t-mess-with-me voice. “I would appreciate it if, when she arrives, you’d make her feel welcome.”
She says, looking at the clock on the wall, “The glasses should be ready soon.”
At the beach, Jordan supervises Caspian, Scarlett, and Evangeline carefully. Nothing is going to happen on her watch! She helps Caspian build an approximation of a sandcastle. She walks with them to the edge of the water so they can all go ankle-deep, talk about how cold it is, and retreat to the blanket. She keeps a Goldendoodle, illegally on the beach outside of the sanctioned dog hours, from eating Caspian’s homemade crackers. (When, she marvels, did Natalie have time tomake crackers?)
“You’re stingy with your time,” Audrey once told Jordan. “It’s like your time is a candy bar you’re going to share but you always, always want the bigger half.”
Look at me now, Jordan thinks. Look at me being a gentle, giving, loving aunt who isn’t thinking about work at all!
Actually, she is thinking about work. She’s thinking about Samantha Braddock, and about the three unanswered texts Bernadette has sent her just since breakfast, and about the fact that she hasn’t yet decided what to do. She wishes she could talk to someone—but who? Audrey had been very good about listening to work stories, until she wasn’t, which happened when the work stories started to take over everything. On their last vacation together, to Tulum, their first dinner at the resort was interrupted by a call from a university president with a campus crisis.
“What do you want me todo?” she’d asked Audrey (rhetorically).
Audrey had answered literally. “I want you to turn your phone off.”
She reapplies the kids’ sunscreen, she keeps Caspian from putting a large shell in his mouth, she congratulates Scarlett on her sandcastle with two turrets. Time passes. People are sunbathing and swimming and dragging surfboards to the legal surfing area. People are starting to unpack sandwiches and being very sly about pouring from bottles of rosé hidden in their coolers into Corkcicles.
“What’s for lunch?” Scarlett says expectantly. She looks at Jordan like Jordan knows the answer to this question, or to any question.Isher father right to sell the house? What will it be like when Kara is here? What should Jordan do about what happened on Memorial Day? Should she call Samantha Braddock?
“Ah,” says Jordan. “I didn’t bring any lunch out here. Should we go back to the house soon?”
She expects some pushback, if not from Evangeline and Scarlett, at least from Caspian. But they are so compliant. Evangeline helps her put the towels in the bag, and Caspian feeds his crackers to the gulls, which at least makes their load a little lighter. Their beach neighbors give them the stink eye for encouraging the gulls to linger, but whatever.
