Jordan will fix everything, right? That’s what she does for a living. She’s a professional mess-cleaner-upper.
All they need is Jordan.
“Phones down, please. I want your full attention,” says Calvin Shipman.
It’s six thirty, and Jordan arrived at Ruby on Rye almost two hours ago. Weekend traffic had been brutal. One hour and forty-five minutes ago she made her first cocktail, just before her father pulled in. Now she’s on her second.
Calvin is using his I’m-giving-a-lecture voice, and Jordan feels Natalie snap to attention next to her. They are sitting in the living room, lined up in a row on the couch like little girls waiting for theirbedtime story. It’s the sofa that, right before she was diagnosed five years ago, their mother refashioned with a plush vanilla-cream cover rather than replace.
Their father is in the easy chair, his back to the wall of windows. He has moved it to face them. The usual setup in this room is that every seat has a water view. The house is decorated in what might optimistically be called “cozy chic” but more accurately “jury-rigged haute.” Rattan baskets hold magazines, throw blankets, the odd doll or toy left from Natalie’s children’s last visit, when Scarlett was only one. The kitchen, redone fifteen years ago, has the white cabinets and black granite countertops of the time, after white became the new brown but before gray became the new white.
There are absences now, for sure. The kitchen windowsill shell collections that had been there since time began, along with the wafers of old soap in the bathroom cabinets, always kept there “just in case,” even though most of the world had transitioned to bodywash, are gone. Jordan, when she carried her Away suitcase in “coast blue” up the stairs to her bedroom, had been dismayed to find on her dresser a white sign with navy blue writing exhorting her toSEAS THE DAY.Definite HomeGoods vibes. Jordan had put it in one of the dresser drawers.
“Family bonding week has begun,” says Calvin. “One, two, three... bond!”
Jordan laughs charitably. In his job as a professor of sociology at Williams, Calvin is known for his dry sense of humor, his specialty in social science theory, and his tie-under-sweater-vest professor look, though right now he’s wearing a Red Sox T-shirt and a beleaguered hat from the local shop Summer Sessions. Calvin in summer casual. In a limited television series he might be played by a Harrison Ford of ten or fifteen years ago, handsomely lined, still mostly thick-haired. You loved him, and you knew he loved you, but he was not the oneyou were hoping to run into when you were trying to sneak in, tipsy, eight minutes past curfew, after a party in Nicholas Murphy’s basement. Calvin, in the last year of his seventh decade, is not looking his age. He went gray in his late forties, so that’s nothing new, and in his early sixties the gray began to turn to white, but his hair is as thick as it ever was, his biceps as strong, his eyes still sharp even if the skin around them has acquired lines over the years.
“Jordan has her phone,” says Natalie.
Jordan’s phone had been buzzing incessantly, so she put it on Do Not Disturb and is just keeping it handy. Jordan almost calls Natalie a tattletale but even here, in this familiar childhood locale, which is where people are known to revert to old habits and patterns, that’s a bridge too far. Or too close, maybe, to their girlhood squabbles. She settles for a pointed glare, but Natalie is looking straight ahead, at their father. The Shipman girls are recognizable as sisters, with the small differences generated by luck and genetics. Natalie has the best profile, and Jordan the longest legs, though Natalie is half an inch taller. Mae has the thickest hair, with a natural wave, in a shade lighter than Jordan’s (the shiniest) and darker than Natalie’s (the closest to their mother’s dark blond). They all have blue eyes, also their mother’s, with some variation in shade and shape, from round (Mae) to almond (Natalie). It all evens out, except when it doesn’t.
“No, I don’t,” says Jordan, sliding the phone under her leg, feeling, at age thirty-six, reluctant to get in trouble with her father. When they were growing up Calvin did the disciplining; Theresa was in charge of making you feel better after. She always said that as a second-grade teacher at Morris Elementary she did enough disciplining during the day.
“Do too,” says Natalie.
“Come on Natalie, how old are you?” asks Mae.
Surprisingly, Natalie’s phone is nowhere in sight. Jordan assumed she had been posting continuously throughout the day. Sometimes in her office Jordan will pull up Natalie’s Instagram or TikTok account and watch her videos. There are videos of Natalie making biscuits in a cast-iron skillet, of her wearing overalls and milking a cow, of her cuddling with the children on an elaborately pillowed couch with a Christmas tree visible in the background, reading a picture book. When she watches the videos, Jordan can’t help but think, Who is this person? She’s so familiar, but she’s also a stranger. Sometimes she reads Natalie’s Substack (the free version, she’s not a subscriber) and thinks, What? Are there actually people who depend on her sister—the girl who failed her driver’s license test twice, who had a crush on her high school physics teacher so severe that her friends had to hold her back from delivering a letter she had written him, whose dwarf hamster had died from overfeeding—to tell them how to parent?
There are quite a lot of people who do, it turns out. Nearly one and a half million of them.
Mae has a dog attached to her; she’s had a dog attached to her since Jordan arrived. Leo. The dog is lying down next to Mae, and every thirty seconds or so Mae delivers a tiny treat to him, right between his two front paws. In between treats he fixes Mae with an unswervingly devoted gaze.
“I can’t tell you how happy it makes me to see the three of you together like this,” says Calvin, as Natalie ignores Mae’s question. “So grown up and beautiful.” These would normally be sentiments Jordan would roll her eyes at—she’s been told she’s prickly, that she has a wall up, that it wouldn’t kill her to be softer—but there’s something really quite touching about watching her father express emotion. (Are his eyes damp?) Emotion had been Theresa’s department, where Calvin expressed his love with acts of service and gratitude. And dad jokes, lots of dad jokes. Calvin used to bring Theresa flowersfrom Bella Flora after work every Friday. He made her the perfect dry martini each Saturday night before their date night. He pumped the tires on the girls’ bikes and kept the garage organized and grilled a mean steak. He would have walked barefoot over a field of razor blades if doing so would have saved his wife.
Beyond the windows, of course, is the ocean, stretching on forever and ever and ever. At low tide, as it is now, it’s the longest, widest, prettiest beach on the Seacoast. Maybe in the whole world. New Hampshire boasts eighteen miles of coastline, a length a state like California might laugh at, but each mile is a jewel. In another hour or so the sky will turn its famous pinks and purples and they’ll have a front row seat to the show. Sunrise is even better, with the fireball rising over the water from the edge of the horizon.
Jordan takes a sip of her drink, a gin and tonic, Broker’s London Dry; she’d brought it with her because she was worried there’d be no good gin in the house (correct). The cubes clink against her teeth as she tips the glass all the way back, emptying it. It would be rude to get up and get another. But she really wants one.
The children and Cinnamon have been banished to the upstairs, with the exception of Caspian, who’s walking around the living room, placing a flat palm on any items whose name he knows and pronouncing them with authority and flourish, if sometimes without their first letter.able. indow.ommy.Caspian has been told to give the dog a wide berth but every now and then he circles a little too close and Leo shows the whites of his eyes.
“There’s another reason I wanted you all here.” Calvin clears his throat again and Jordan feels a pulse behind her left earlobe (this is where all of her concerns first appear). What’s with all the throat activity? Esophageal cancer? She is not losing another parent. She refuses!
“I guess I’ll just come out with it.” Calvin frowns, like he’s mad at the words that are about to emerge. “Okay, here we go. I’m putting thehouse on the market.” They all stare at him, open-mouthed. “Tomorrow is Monday. We have an open house scheduled for Sunday. That gives us six days to say goodbye, to enjoy some time here, to complete some tasks. The Realtor expects it will sell quickly. I have a lot of details to manage, so I’m asking you girls to clean out the garage. I’ll handle the rest. I want you to have enough free time to enjoy your last week here.”
Natalie swivels her head back and forth between Mae and Jordan. She’s the first to speak. “No,” she says firmly, in her strict mom voice. “No. You can’t do that. Sorry, but no.”
“I knew that woman wasn’t a renter!” cries Mae. “She was definitely giving Realtor.”
Natalie and Jordan turn to Mae and together they say, “What woman?” at exactly the same time and in exactly the same tone. Sometimes, there’s no arguing with the power of genetics.
“There was a woman outside when I got here. She was fiddling with the lockbox. I thought she was the renter, like maybe she’d come back because she forgot something. But it was suspicious; she was way overdressed for a beach vacation.” Mae turns accusingly to her father. “Why didn’t she say?”
“I asked Nikoletta if she happened to see you not to say anything until I’d talked to you.”
“Nikoletta,” says Natalie. “That’s such a Realtor name.”
“You can’t sell Mom’s house,” says Mae. “You can’t, this person Nikoletta can’t, nobody can.”
