Kara says, “And the answer to your original question is no. We aren’t having kids. I can’t carry a child.”
Jordan’s head swings back and forth between Kara and her father. “You can’t?”
“Apparently I have an inhospitable womb,” says Kara. Jordan blanches. “It’s an outdated term, but it just means that... Well, never mind the details. I’ve known since my first marriage. I just—”
She doesn’t get to finish. “What?” say Mae and Natalie and Jordan at the exact same time, and then, elaborating on that, Jordan says, “I’m sorry,what? You were married before?”
Kara folds her napkin. “I was married when I was in my mid-twenties. We were married for two years, together for three, and he died in a car accident.”
“You never told us that!” Jordan turns again to Calvin, again accusingly. “Dad?” This is yet another thing Calvin has been keeping from them, and, somehow, fair or not, another strike against Kara.
“It’s not my past to tell,” says Calvin neutrally.
“That’s awful,” says Mae. “Kara, I’m so sorry.” Jordan kicks Mae under the table, and once again they are seven and fourteen. “Ouch,” says Mae irritably.
“Thank you, Mae. It was a long time ago.”
“Does anybody else have any secrets to share?” Natalie asks, sort of sarcastically, but also sort of not. Mae clears her throat, wondering if this is the time, but nothing comes out. She feels Jordan shift.
“No, but I have something to say,” says Kara.
“Fantastic,” says Jordan, and now Mae kicks Jordan.
“You’re not just upset about the seat, you’re upset that I’m here at all, in your house, in your lives. I get it. I do. But I have a place here, too, now. And I’m not going to apologize.”
This is where a Shipman girl might have made a dramatic exit. Mae remembers Natalie storming off after a fight with Theresa over the length of her skirt; Jordan screaming at Calvin, “Those classes are a waste of time!” after she got caught skipping out on SAT prep; Mae herself dissolving into tears and slamming the door of her room on Galway Court when her phone was taken away after a curfew infraction. She thought the world had ended; they each had thought that, so many times, while all the time the world kept spinning.
But Kara, stranded but also safe in her no-man’s-land, neither Shipman girl nor Shipman parent, rendering the sisters silent, looks like she understands this intuitively. On and on, the world will keep spinning.
Wednesday
Interstitial
In this picture—on the end table, living room—the three Shipman girls are lined up for the requisite first-day-of-school photo. The first day of school was always so hectic! Everybody needed a lunch. A button might pop off a brand-new shirt. Theresa had her own case of nerves. New classroom, new group of students, sometimes a bigger change in the school like a new principal or different colleagues. For these reasons, Calvin took the photo before he went to campus to teach his own classes, which had begun at least the week before so he was much less fraught.
Each year they stood in the same place, by the rhododendron in front of the house. They always stood in age order, with Jordan farthest to the left, and Jordan often had a look on her face like she was running late for a congressional budget meeting—too important and busy to stay for long, but understanding that the formality of the occasion required her presence.
Natalie was beginning sixth grade, which means Jordan would have been a freshman in high school. In Lenox the middle and high schools are combined so she and Jordan would have been in the same building once again for the first time since they were at Morris Elementary. Sometimes, in certain moods, they could pass in the upstairs hallway of their own house with scarcely an acknowledgment, but Natalie remembers now how comforting a glimpse of her older sister had been in those early days in middle school. Jordan would betraveling in a small knot of friends, all of the high schoolers tall and exotic; it had felt like sighting a herd of gazelles on the savannah, and she might wave at Natalie or even say her name. Inside Natalie would swell with pride, even if she’d never admit it.
The only makeup Natalie was allowed at that time was an innocuous lip gloss, although her friend Shay Thompson was already enthusiastically clumping on mascara. How Natalie had applied her gloss, with strength and fortitude! As though her entire middle school experience depended on it!
Natalie picks up the photo and examines it. She’s smiling in the photo, of course (Natalie always knew how to look good in a photo), but she’s sure her insides are roiling with the anticipated stress of changing classes and operating a locker for the first time.
(Will her kids never learn to use a locker? She and Austin have talked vaguely about “integrating them into the school system” at some point but that point seems so far in the future, hazy and distant.)
These girls. With their careful hair, their agonized-over outfits, their stiff new backpacks! There was so much ahead of them. The poignancy of this strikes her particularly hard right now. What would she do if she could go back in time, visit the Natalie of this photo? What would she tell her?
She would tell her never, ever put a tank top over a shirt with sleeves, for one thing. But what else?
In the early afternoon on Wednesday the doorbell rings. Leo loses his mind and, perhaps suffering from canine FOMO, Cinnamon joins in. The dogs run back and forth from the door to the window, looking at each other as if to say,Can you believe it? The doorbell? I can’t believe it. Can you believe it?
Someone is here!
Natalie huffs her way down the stairs and hisses at Mae, “What the hell is going on? I just got Caspian down for his nap. What’s all this barking?”
“Bad word,” says Evangeline gleefully.
“Evangeline,” Natalie says sharply, “I wasn’t talking to you.”
