But then that girl, Daisy, had come in, right before noon. The girl who had bumped into her in the convenience store. There was something about her Evie liked; she seemed like an open and friendly person. But Evie had to be so careful. So much was at stake. And a real friendship wasn’t something Evie thought possible now. Not until . . . Not until things changed.
Kate Willow. She had been her last real friend. Evie had no idea what had been going on in Kate’s life since she had been sent away. . . . And yet, if it hadn’t been for Kate and her parents, Evie didn’t know how she would have survived those first weeks after the accident. Like, for example, the day of the funeral. Evie’s father was still in the hospital, still in danger of losing a leg, so Evie had gone to the funeral with Kate and her parents, sitting between Mr. and Mrs. Willow at the church and holding Mrs. Willow’s hand at the cemetery. Kate, she remembered, had lent her a sweater as it had been an unusually chilly day and Evie had arrived to stay at the Willows’ house with only one hastily packed suitcase.
The Willows had been so good to Evie in the weeks following Evelyn’s funeral, too, taking her to visit her father in the hospital (though she hated going; the place frightened her and she had nothing to say to her father) and making sure her clothes were clean for school. Mrs. Willow made her favorite meals and Mr. Willow took the girls to a crafts fair one afternoon. Both of Kate’s parents helped Evie with her homework. And even though she missed her mother terribly, though she missed her room and all of her things, Evie had started to think that she could stay with Kate’s family forever. Nothing more would have to change. She wouldn’t have to go back to live with her father. Maybe one day Mr. and Mrs. Willow would even adopt her.
Evie had been with Kate’s family for about six weeks when one afternoon she overheard her friend talking to her mother.
“She’s my friend and all,” Kate had said, “but it’s not like we can have a sleepover for the rest of our lives. I want my room back all to myself. She’s so sad all the time. It’s like I don’t know what to say to her anymore.”
Mrs. Willow had murmured something Evie couldn’t entirely catch, probably something meant to reassure her daughter that before long Evie would be back where she belonged. “Just try to be patient, Kate, okay? She’s been through something really traumatic.” That much Evie had heard.
Then her father had been sent home from the rehab facility where he had been sent upon release from the hospital and after a few days during which a visiting nurse and a social worker helped settle him in and make a few adjustments to render the house more accessible for a man in a wheelchair, Evie, too, was sent home. She met the visiting nurse. She met the social worker. She met the physical therapist. The house—what had once been her home—felt as if it were being invaded by strangers, and there was nothing she could do about it. But it wasn’t all bad. When those other people were there, Evie didn’t have to be alone with her father. She didn’t have to try and talk to him. And he didn’t have to try and talk to her.
After a while the professionals stopped coming by. Dan was improving nicely, they said. Physically, he was on the mend. He would be able to go back to the law firm before long. But not one of them had been able to see that emotionally, Dan was not improving at all. He was deteriorating.
As for Evie, it was so hard to walk through the rooms her mother had once walked through and to know she would never return to them. It had been so hard to see the crystal vase her mother had loved and the curtains she had chosen so carefully and the beautiful little oil painting one of her friends had given her and to know that Evelyn would never be able to appreciate or find pleasure in them again.
About a month after he had been sent home Evie’s father had made it known he didn’t have the energy to go through her mother’s clothing and personal items, so Evie had asked two neighbors who had offered to help. The afternoon before Mrs. Mallory and Mrs. Tribble were scheduled to come over, Evie had gone into her parents’ bedroom, hoping to find a few things of her mother’s she could keep, but after only a few minutes she had felt overwhelmed by sadness and had raced back into her own bedroom, slamming the door behind her. She had managed to take only her mother’s gold locket in the shape of a heart with a tiny diamond on the cover. Inside was a photo of her father and one of her. She considered throwing the photo of her father in the trash and decided not to.
During that awful time she had been so torn between wanting and needing her father’s love and comfort and hating him for what had happened to her mother. And then there was his foreignness. This man with the wheelchair and then the walker and then the cane, who was he? This man who never smiled and who could barely meet her eye when he spoke to her, was this her father? This man who barely managed to heat a frozen meal each night for their dinner, was this Dan?
Things began to fall apart slowly at first, then more rapidly. Evie grew embarrassed by her father’s decline. There was his appearance, for one. He grew so thin; he wasn’t eating and he was taking all those stupid pills. He shaved, but he never seemed to get all the stubble. He wore the same shirt three days in a row. His shoes were never shined. He couldn’t keep up with the house and yard work. Evie did her best, but her mother had always done the laundry and cleaned the kitchen and the bathrooms and Evie just didn’t know how. They had a housekeeper for a few months—Evie supposed her father had hired her, but maybe a social worker had taken care of it—but she had abruptly quit. Evie remembered the woman taking her hand on her last day, telling her to take care, looking at her so intently it had made Evie uncomfortable, like the housekeeper knew a dreadful secret about what was in store for Evie and her father, a secret she was forced to keep to herself.
And then there had come the day when her father had not gone in to work. He had not even gotten out of bed except to use the bathroom. It was the same the next day and the day after that. After an entire week of this nightmare of uncertainty, during which Evie felt constantly sick to her stomach, she had finally confronted her father.
“Why aren’t you at the office?” she asked, standing in the doorway of the bedroom he had once shared with her mother.
He was sitting on the edge of the bed, his hands folded between his knees. He was wearing a pair of stained sweatpants and a T-shirt that had once been white. “I lost my job,” he said.
Lost it. Like he had put it down and forgotten where he had put it. Like it had fallen out of his pocket. Evie felt faint. She put a hand on the doorframe to steady herself.
“You were fired.”
“Essentially, yes.”
“You were taking those pills at the office.”
“No. I—”
“Are you looking for another job?” she demanded, the shock passing, being replaced by anger. “How will we get money?” Who will hire him now? Who will trust him to be their lawyer?
Her father put his head down and did not reply.
“I hate you!” she cried and ran off to her own room. She took her mother’s locket from her jewelry box, opened it, removed the photo of her father, and threw it in the trash.
He hadn’t come after her. He hadn’t bothered to argue with her, to comfort her, to reason with her. He had lost himself, too.
After that, Evie began to withdraw from everybody, even Kate. She buried herself more deeply in her schoolwork. She searched every inch of the house for loose change. She went through her father’s pockets when he was asleep—which was most times—looking for a stray dollar bill. Whatever she found she stashed under her mattress. She knew things couldn’t go on like this forever and she wanted to be prepared. She hunted out a small photo of her mother and put it in the heart-shaped locket, across from the picture of herself.
And then, the day came when her father told her that he had lost the house, too. “I have nothing,” he said. His wife, his job, his house . . . and now, his daughter. He sent her away to live with relatives, her Aunt Joanne and Uncle Ron and their kids, people she had seen only once in her life and barely remembe
red (there had been some falling-out among the adults and then a halfhearted reconciliation, followed by a lapse into indifference), and while her aunt and uncle were nice enough her cousins hadn’t known what to do with this sad stranger now installed in their home. Alexa, who was a year older than Evie, was openly resentful of her presence. Craig, who was a year younger, mostly ignored her.
She would never forget the moment when her cousin Alexa told her that her father was sometimes homeless. Living on the streets, she had said. “What did you think would happen to him when you lost the house and he sent you to live with us? That he’d get some nice apartment and a new job and make back all the money he lost and then send for you?”
That was exactly what Evie had thought. Or, had hoped for, in spite of her hatred for her father. She had hoped that somehow, miraculously, they could start over together. Things wouldn’t be the same as they had been before the accident. But maybe they could be . . . okay.
Evie stuffed the last chocolate chip cookie into her mouth and put the empty packet on the bedside table. She tried not to dwell on the past—staying alive and safe was work enough—but sometimes the past just wouldn’t be ignored.
It was close to ten o’clock and Evie suddenly felt exhausted. She got out of bed and set about her nightly routine. She didn’t know why Nico didn’t have an alarm system. It seemed ridiculous for someone who lived alone in such a large house, even if the house wasn’t exactly located in a high crime area. There was always the possibility of a dishonest person passing through town . . . Like me, Evie thought. I don’t want to be dishonest, but I have to be. Life has made me dishonest.
First, she made it a point to double check that all doors and windows in the house were locked, and all blinds and curtains closed. Then she pushed a heavy wooden chest against the front door as another precaution. (Luckily, the back door, accessible from the kitchen, was dead-bolted from the inside.) Finally, before going up to the bedroom Nico had told her she could use, she made certain that the light in the hallway leading to the staircase was turned on. Once back in the bedroom, she wedged a chair under the doorknob as the final bit of makeshift security and hugged Ben to her chest. Still, there was no guarantee of a sound sleep and sweet dreams.
Chapter 24
Freddie and Sheila lived in a charming post-and-beam house they had designed and built (with some professional help of course) back in the mid-eighties. It was a two-story structure with an enclosed porch on one side of the house and an open deck on the other. During the colder months the women ignored those areas in favor of the cozy central living area, complete with wood-burning stove, overstuffed couches, high-backed armchairs, and thick woolen rugs with patterns of maroon and gold and green. The two bedrooms were on the second floor; Poppy had seen the master bedroom only once, many years earlier, when Sheila was down with a nasty flu. Poppy had accompanied her mother to the house with a vat of homemade chicken soup and they had waved to the invalid from the door of her bedroom. Freddie hadn’t allowed them to get any closer.
“Hand me that vase, will you?” Sheila asked. “The yellow ceramic one on the second shelf.”
Poppy did. She and her sisters were at 14 Howard Lane for dinner, and while Daisy and Violet helped (or hindered) Freddie in the kitchen, Poppy was helping Sheila set the table in the section of the living space that served as a dining area. Poppy had always loved coming to this house. The feeling it projected was one of true peace and stability, and that, Poppy thought, was largely due to the lifetime’s accumulation of mementos of important events and souvenirs of travel and works of art carefully collected and photographs of people long gone but still loved. It always fascinated Poppy to see how the homes of two people who had lived together in harmony for many years—fifty-three, in Freddie and Sheila’s case—seemed to reflect the tastes and preferences of one many-sided person, a style that seemed to have grown naturally, organically over time, not a style imposed by one or the other person with a small, out-of-place piece that was a reluctant nod to the annoying whim of the other. She supposed her parents’ house appeared to others like Freddie and Sheila’s did to her, but as it was also her childhood home, she was too emotionally tied to every little bit of it to see anything at a critical, assessing distance.
“I do love a dinner party,” Sheila said, making a final adjustment to the purple irises she had arranged in the yellow vase. “I even enjoy the cleaning-up process. I even enjoy ironing all the linen napkins!”
Sheila was wearing a smartly tailored taupe linen pantsuit with navy espadrilles. Around her neck were multiple strands of highly polished silver beads. On her wrist were matching silver cuffs. On the ring finger of her left hand was a chunky gold band that Freddie had given her many anniversaries ago.
Poppy smiled. “Sheila, you’re the only one I know who can wear a suit at any time of the day or night, on any occasion, and make it look appropriate.”
“You can take the girl out of the city,” Sheila said.
“Don’t you ever regret leaving New York? I mean, it’s pretty much the opposite of Yorktide.”
“Not for a very long time,” Sheila admitted. “New York, after all, is just a place. To be sure, a wonderful place. But Freddie is a person. And I’ve always found that a person ranks much higher with me than a spot on a map.”
Poppy sighed. “I wonder,” she said, “if I’ll ever love someone enough to make a sacrifice like that.” Love someone at all, really. Oh, once she had been infatuated with a guy, back in high school. What was his name? And she had had her share of crushes; she recalled with some embarrassment how she had almost made a fool of herself over her French professor at Adams. (It was only after her mother, the man’s colleague, had told her about his devotion to his wife that Poppy’s ardor had waned.) And after college, there had been a few halfhearted relationships. But never love. Suddenly, Poppy wondered if she had been lazy in that aspect of her life, too. Had she neglected to develop her emotional life as she had neglected to develop a career? Or was cowardice at fault? Did she lack the courage to love?
“I don’t see it as a sacrifice,” Sheila was saying, and it took Poppy a moment to refocus on the conversation. “Oh, I did at one point, a few years into the relationship when Freddie and I were going through a rough patch. Self-pity took over I’m afraid. ‘Look at all I’ve done for you, I’ve given up my home, et cetera, et cetera, and what have I gotten in return?’ But I got past that fit of immaturity, I’m glad to say.”
Poppy smiled. “Then I wonder if I’ll ever be so mature.”
Sheila excused herself to see if Freddie needed help in the kitchen and Poppy finished setting the table. As she straightened silverware and refolded a napkin, she wondered what her parents might have sacrificed for each other over the course of their marriage. She had never been aware of any sense of discontent on the part of either of them. But then again, no one outside a relationship really knew what went on inside it. And Oliver and Annabelle had made it a point never to argue in front of their children, even about small things. Of course there must have been disagreements, but none that Poppy could call to mind ever knowing about. And for that, she was grateful.
“Time to eat,” Daisy announced, leading the rest of the group to the table.
“A nice, clichéd summer meal,” Freddie said, as they took their seats. “Lobsters, corn on the cob, coleslaw, salad, and strawberry shortcake for dessert. Sheila made the shortcake from scratch.”
“And I’ll whip the cream by hand,” Sheila added. “None of that artificial stuff from a can.”
“I actually like that stuff,” Daisy admitted, putting an ear of corn on her plate. “Dad used to like it, too. You know, sometimes I wonder if Dad would have preferred one of us die instead of Mom.”
“Daisy!” Poppy cried. “That’s an awful thing to say!”
Freddie agreed with her. “For God’s sake, Daisy, don’t be melodramatic,” she scolded. “The man had a bad heart. Biology. Science. Genetics. His father had a bad
heart, too. Henry died when Oliver was only twenty-six. Nothing to do with romantic notions.”
Poppy looked at Violet. Daisy’s blurted comment didn’t seem to have disturbed her; she was aggressively cracking a lobster claw, a frown of concentration on her face.
“I wonder,” Daisy said now, “what Mom would have done if she had had boys. I mean, you can’t very well name a boy Rose or Lily, can you?”
My sister, Poppy thought, is determined to be perverse tonight.
Sheila laughed. “Not if you don’t want them to be cruelly teased, taunted, and beaten you don’t.”
“Oh, she probably would have gone with something like Sage,” Poppy suggested, wondering why she was contributing to such a silly discussion. “That’s not really a gender-specific name is it?”
“Thyme,” Violet said, looking up from her mostly destroyed lobster body. “Tarragon.”
Freddie shook her head. “I think your father would have had something to say about his son being named after anything in the plant kingdom!”
“Dad would have done anything Mom told him to do,” Daisy argued. “He did do everything she told him to do. Because he wanted to. Not because he was afraid of her. He loved her. Well, we all know that.”
“Not to change the subject,” Freddie said then, in her forceful and authoritative attorney tone. “But, I’m changing the subject. I hope you girls are keeping up with your reading this summer. One doesn’t want the brain to turn to mush.”
Summer with My Sisters Page 10
