“Not me,” says Mae softly.
“Yes, you do,” says Natalie. “A rental is still a home.” She pats Mae’s knee, and Leo growls. Mae lets out a puff of air and doesn’t answer. Natalie was four when Mae was born, and Jordan remembers how Natalie used to treat Mae like her own personal American Girl doll. She tried to help their busy mother change her diapers; she fed Cheerios, one by one, into Mae’s little mouth as soon as she was old enough. She picked out her outfits and brushed tangles from her beautiful hair.
“Where’d all the pictures go?” asks Mae. Suddenly she sounds so young. “The family photos? Are they gone?” Her voice cracks.
“Same question,” says Natalie.
“I put them away when we started renting it,” says Calvin.
“If this is our last week here,” says Natalie, “we need to put the pictures back.”
“I’ll put the pictures back,” says Calvin. “Yes, sure, I can do that.”
“I really thought this was family bonding week,” says Mae. She looks really desolate. “Not selling-the-family-house week.”
“I told the kids we’d go to the beach every day, and now we’re cleaning out a garage,” says Natalie.
“Of course we’ll go to the beach!” says Calvin. “There are a lot of hours in a day.”
“Not enough,” says Natalie.
“I’m getting another drink,” says Jordan, standing, picking up her phone. “Anyone want anything?”
Natalie and Mae shake their heads. “I’ll take a double,” says Calvin.
“A double what?”
“A double anything.”
The living room bleeds into the kitchen. The sunroom is off to the side, with its own door. The sunroom is where, as kids, they were relegated with their card games and board games, their pre-technology forms of entertainment.
Jordan faces the sink and checks her phone. All of the calls and texts are from Bernadette. She finds a bottle of bourbon, plunks two ice cubes in a rocks glass, and pours her father’s drink. She considers the gin but then fills her glass with water instead. It’s going to be another long week; she’d better keep her senses about her before they’ve even had dinner.
She turns back toward the living room and sees someone running on the beach. The stride looks so familiar, the body, the bouncing blond ponytail. Is that...? No. No, it can’t be.You’re seeing things, Jordan. You’re seeing the ghost of summers past.
When she rejoins her family Caspian is still engaged in his resolute tour of the room. He points to the Summer Sessions cap on Calvin’s head and says, “at.” He squats to examine something on the floor but declines to give it a label. Then he makes his way over to Natalie and clambers into her lap. He puts his cheek against her cheek and his hand on her chest. “Heart,” he says, kindly and fully. Unexpectedly Jordan feels her own heart constrict and her eyes spark with tears.
The ponytail runs by again, going in the opposite way. “Is thatSimone?” asks Natalie.
“Who?” asks Jordan, playing dumb. Jordan turns her head away and tries not to remember her hands inside Simone’s bikini bottoms, Simone’s fingers in her mouth.
Calvin accepts his drink and goes on as if there’d been no break. “A house is just a structure. Family is not a structure. Family is people.” He looks imploringly at Jordan.
“Jordan,” Natalie demands. “Why aren’t you saying anything? About the house?”
“Jordan!” Mae chimes in.Fix it, Jordan, solve it, make it better. What is adulthood, after all, thinks Jordan, but a reprise of our childhoods?
“So now what?” demands Natalie. They’re in Mae’s room, the Green Room, because this is where Leo’s crate is. It’s nine thirty. The children are asleep in Natalie’s room; when Jordan is ready to go to sleep, Natalie will transport Scarlett from her room (the Flowered Room) into Jordan’s (the Brown Room, or, more commonly, the Poop Room) to make more space. Scarlett is the deepest sleeper of the three and won’t notice that she’s been moved. Jordan is a deep sleeper too; deep sleeping has always been one of her talents. At some point Caspian will wake up and figure out that he’s in a portable crib, which he will protest, and he will move into the bed with Natalie and Evangeline. Calvin has agreed to have Cinnamon in his room, until Kara arrives, to put more space between the two dogs.
All of the bedrooms in this house have queen beds, with the exception of their parents’ room, which has a king. (Calvin insists on calling it the master bedroom still, even though they’ve all told him that he must call it the primary.)
They used to love coming here for a zillion reasons as kids, and one of them was that their rooms in Lenox all had twin beds, so it felt luxurious to spread out here on their own or have a friend for a sleepover or, sometimes, sleep with a sister, just because. Mae secretly loved sharing a bed with Natalie, loved breathing in the scent of her perfume, loved waking to find that Natalie’s long hair had migrated over to Mae’s pillow.
Mae is curled up on her side, which leaves room for Natalie to stretch out on the other side of the bed. Jordan is lying on her backon the floor, using one of Leo’s dog towels draped over the arch of her foot to stretch her hamstrings. Jordan’s phone is next to her, and it keeps buzzing.
“What do you mean, now what?” Mae asks Natalie.
On the night table is a bottle of Cabernet Jordan discovered in the back of the pantry, and she has poured some of it into three three-ounce Dixie Cups from the bathroom. Maybe a renter left the wine behind, or maybe one of the Shipmans did, years ago, but either way, it’s theirs now. Tomorrow they will provision. Tonight, they will make do. Jordan is throwing the wine back like a series of shots, while Natalie is sipping hers slowly, holding her cup out to Jordan every so often for a refill.
