Calvin chortles. “Why? It’s true. And I’m perfectly okay with it. I say it to Kara all the time.”
“You do not.” Calvin shrugs and smiles mysteriously. Maybe he does and maybe he doesn’t.
Things are really getting going at Petey’s now, as the height of lunchtime approaches. There are kids spilling out of cars and dumping ice cream on themselves and pointing at the dozens of bright lobster buoys hanging from the sign and from the railings. There are parents who look like they might just have one of the signature cocktails, because the children are driving them crazy, and they’re on vacation, so why not? One young boy, most likely a new reader, is sounding out the words on the sign that saysLIVE LOBSTERS. He turns to his grown-up and says, with horror and wonder, “People eat alive lobsters?”
Calvin begins to gather their detritus, saying, “We should probably give up our spot.” Jordan helps him, stacking the plastic cups, balling up her napkin to place it inside her chowder cup. She agrees that they should go, but she doesn’t want to leave without asking one more question: “Why’d you decide to talk to me about this? And not Natalie?”
What she means is,Is it because I’ve been such a bitch?
Calvin doesn’t hesitate. “I thought you’d understand the most. I thought maybe if you got it then Natalie would too. Or that maybe you’d help her understand.”
“I see.” She nods. “I think I do. I think I will.”
He’s being kind here, she can see that. It’s not so much that Jordan can help Natalie understand; it’s that Jordan has had the hardest time with Kara.
It occurs to Jordan that Kara is not just Kara. She’s the symbol of all of Jordan’s erroneous judgment. If she has judged Kara so wrong, what else has she judged wrong? Natalie? Mae? Bernadette?
No, not Bernadette. Definitely not Bernadette. But she’s willing to concede the others.
“Dad?”
“Yes, Jordan?”
“Does this make me the favorite daughter?”
The first rule of Favorite Daughter Status, they all know, is that you do not talk about Favorite Daughter Status. Her father merely raises his eyebrows at her and grants her again that mysterious smile.
Natalie, Scarlett, and Kara meet a millworker from the 1800s, a shipbuilder from the 1700s, and a homemaker from 1950. They visit all nine houses at Strawbery Banke that are open to the public. They admire the wallpaper in Governor Goodwin’s house; the fireplace frieze in the Chase House, home to a successful Portsmouth merchant; and the tools that Samuel Kingsbury used in the 1800s. They watch a cooking demonstration on an open hearth where a woman in a bonnet makes a meat pie.
I could rock an open hearth, Natalie thinks. I could kill this assignment.
They visit the 1940s general store, the tavern, the live demonstration of coopering (which, they learn, is the production of casks and barrels). Each time Natalie thinks Scarlett will get bored she finds something else to marvel at. In the olden days, last week, Natalie might have taken a video of Scarlett wandering through Strawbery Banke, hashtagged it with #homeschool, and written a caption about every experience being a learning experience, even in summer. #yearroundeducation. She would have tagged the museum too, and her followers would have liked and shared it, and overall visits would have risen by some percentage. It might have become A Thing. But today her phone is in her bag, and she will only reach for it if Mae contacts her with a question about Caspian or Evangeline.
Natalie can’t believe Scarlett’s endurance or her attentiveness to the past. Natalie is pretty sure that if her mother had marched her through The Mount, Edith Wharton’s home, one of the jewels in Lenox’s vast crown, when she was Scarlett’s age, she wouldn’t have taken such interest. She would have wanted to repair to the gift shop. (Natalie has always been a shopper.)
Then again, maybe she would have loved to go to The Mount at that age with her mother. Maybe, like Scarlett, she would have been happy for any time with Theresa, away from her sisters, the rare only-child day for the middle child, and she, too, would have soaked up every second, would have done anything to make the day go on forever.
Tears form immediately in her eyes as she thinks this. Maybe Theresa did take her to The Mount, and she’s forgotten! Maybe she’s forgotten many important things. Early childhood memories are capricious; we don’t capture everything from those years, even as so many parents do all they can to enrich us, expose us, form us, mold us. Most of it, we won’t even remember. This is suddenly unbearably sad to Natalie. Nothing of Ruby on Rye will remain in Caspian’s memory—he’s too young.
In the heirloom garden, Scarlett finds a hoop and a stick to try her hand at—yesteryear’s version of the iPad, but much more difficult to maneuver, and with no battery limitations. Natalie and Kara watch her, watch another little girl, maybe a year or so older, approach and stand shyly, waiting her turn.
Natalie is content with the silence, but then Kara breaks it to say, “Your father is really sad.”
“We’re all really sad,” says Natalie immediately, hotly. HowcouldKara?
“I know.”
“You don’t know.”
Then Kara says the very worst thing of all, the very worst thing she could say. She says, “I loved your mother too.”
If Scarlett were not just a few feet away, doing what’s actually a passable job of rolling the hoop with the stick, Natalie might have raised her voice. But instead she hisses, “Don’t you dare. Don’t you dare say that.”
“I can say it, because I did. Not like you all did, of course not. But I got to know her, and I loved her. She was a lovely woman. She was beautiful and gracious and honest and funny, all the way until she died.” Natalie wants Kara to stop talking and at the same time she wants her to keep going. Even though she’d been there herself, she wants more; she’s like parched earth soaking up every extra thing she can learn about Theresa. Close to the end it had gotten harder to make the trip back and forth from Vermont to Lenox—she was nearing the third trimester of her pregnancy with Caspian, and he weighed nearly nine pounds at birth, so Natalie was enormous. And there was always a lot to do at Hillside Haven. Evangeline and Scarlett were so young; every time Natalie got in the car she knew she was leaving Austin with the lion’s share (the cow’s share) of both farm and family life. Austin hadn’t complained, not even once.
She thought she’d be able to bring the baby to meet Theresa. She’d take a photo of their hands together, Theresa and the baby’s. She’s always been a sucker for those old hands/young hands photos. Not to post it! Of course not! Just to have it. To treasure it.
She thought there was time.
