It helps to think of saying yes as doing a favor for her father, but in fact Natalie is starting to come around for other reasons too. She and Austin have their Saturday-night dates, yes, but she doesn’t have a group of girlfriends in Vermont. She hasn’t seen the Sisterhood together in one place since Theresa’s funeral. Until this week she and her sisters haven’t all been in the same place since the Christmas after Theresa died. Maybe it will be good for them to leave the house and to go somewhere they aren’t accosted by ghosts at every turn.
They take Mae’s car to Portsmouth because Natalie’s car seats are a pain to move and Jordan’s rental car is blocked in by Mae’s car—and it’s too small anyway. It’s a reverse of their teenagerhood, when Mae was forever a passenger, never a driver. The driver gets to choose the music, and Mae sings along to her Spotify playlist.
“When did you go country?” asks Jordan from the passenger seat. “Was it when you got the tattoos?”
“Zach Bryan is so mainstream,” says Mae. “Anyway, Idolive in the western half of the country. It’s not a stretch.”
“Feels like you actually live in your car,” says Natalie from the back seat. “There’s so much stuff back here. Is this abaking dish?”
“It might be,” says Mae, without elaborating. “Where are we going?”
“Portsmouth.”
“Duh. But where specifically?”
“We’ll figure it out when we get there,” says Jordan. She clears her throat. She wants this to go well, she really does, but she knows that her sisters are holding against her the conversation with the Realtor. If she can just get them to see the logic of the situation, they might all be able to relax into the evening and enjoy being together. “Listen, you guys,” she says. “About the house—”
“Nope,” says Natalie, and Mae says, “Uh-uh.”
“Wow. Did you guys choreograph that or something?”
“No,” says Natalie. “But I’m sure we’re both ready for a break from talking about it.”
“We are,” confirms Mae.
“Got it,” says Jordan. “Definitely noted.”
They luck their way into a parking spot on Congress Street. Back in the city, on a night out, Jordan might just be getting into the shower right about now. The street is buzzing; some of the shops are still open, and people are pouring in and out of the restaurants. There must be something on at The Music Hall, because there are swarms of people walking through the big metal arch and toward the iconic pink building. It smells like the summers of Jordan’s youth, the heaviness to the air, the sense that, even though you can’t see it, the ocean is not so far away. It smells like nostalgia and heartache.
“Is there still a wine bar here?” She could go for a very cold, very good champagne. One glass, maybe two.
“Let’s go here!” Natalie leads them to the door of The Goat and pauses to read the sign outside. “It’s Portsmouth’s only country bar.”
“Were we looking for a country bar?” wonders Jordan.
“We weren’tnotlooking for a country bar.”
“Looks good to me,” says Mae, and Jordan says, “Well, yeah, it would,” and Mae rolls her eyes and says, “Sorry, Jordan, would you rather go to the bar at the Wentworth?” (The Wentworth is the fancy Gilded Age hotel in New Castle, just a few miles east, where Austin and Natalie had their wedding reception.) Yes,of courseJordan would rather go to the bar at the Wentworth, where they could look at the fancy pleasure boats in the harbor and drink good wine, but she zips her lips. She’s with her sisters! They’re already mad at her! She can do a country bar!
Lucky again, two people are vacating the bar, leaving three empty stools in a row. The Shipman girls slide into the seats. It’s been a long time since Jordan has been out with both of her sisters—she’d forgotten how they make sort of a spectacle, a triangle of genetics and DNA. They look like each other, yes, but each with her own distinctive differences. Natalie’s hair is longer, Mae’s face rounder, Jordan’s eyes a deeper blue, almost navy. “Here come the Shipman girls,” the hostess at The Red Lion Inn used to say when they arrived for their Christmas dinner reservation each year. The receptionist at the dentist would say the same thing. Jordan used to roll her eyes at the latter—Mae was so much younger, couldn’t Jordan have her own dentist appointment?—but secretly she’d loved it; it had felt like being a member of a very exclusive club.
All of the female servers and bartenders at The Goat are wearing cutoff shorts and cowboy boots, and Jordan is put in mind of the weekend she and Audrey once spent in Nashville. Drinking on Broadway, long mornings in bed at The Hermitage Hotel. She’d summarized Audrey so quickly for Simone, but they’d been together for nearly four years, and when Jordan thinks about her she still experiences a deep pang of regret and loss.
On the wall behind the bar, above the painted American flag, are the wordsWHISKEY THE PEOPLE.
“That’s my kind of wall painting,” Jordan says.
“Because you’re a patriot?” asks Mae.
“No, dummy, because I’m a whiskey drinker.”
She’s sitting between Natalie and Mae, and to Mae’s right is a guy by himself, maybe in his early forties, who might or might not be eavesdropping.
“I can’t do whiskey.” Mae wrinkles her nose.
“I can,” says Jordan. “I can do whiskey all day long.” She peruses the bourbon selection—it’s actually pretty good! Okay! She sees Buffalo Trace and Woodford Reserve and even Blanton’s.
“Sisters?” says the guy, leering, and Mae nods and tilts her body slightly so that a little bit of her back goes toward the guy.Good job, Mae,says Jordan in her head. She forgets sometimes that Mae has been out in the world for many years now. She knows how bars work.
