She stayed two weeks. Her father hadn’t had many friends that she knew of, but the house was crowded with people Louise knew, all of them rubbing Louise’s back, fitting cups of tea into her hand. “It wasn’t a love affair,” Sadie heard someone say to Louise, and Louise snapped up. “I liked him,” she said furiously. “He was my husband.”
Sadie drifted through the house. People were polite. They asked her how school was, if she had any boyfriends, and she was polite back. They told her stories about her father that she had never heard before, and then they waited, but the only story she could think about was that last Cape Cod vacation, and she didn’t want to tell that. She felt as if she should be weeping, as if she should be telling stories, but instead, the only thing she felt was numb.
It wasn’t until everyone left, until the house had emptied out, that she felt panicked.
Louise looked around. “Let’s just try to sleep. People will be here again tomorrow,” Louise said. They slept in Louise and Bill’s bedroom. Sadie hesitated and then crawled into her mother’s bed, the same way she used to when she was a little girl. Louise smelled of powder and sweat and starch. “I’m so tired,” Louise said. “I’m so tired of everything.” She shut her eyes. She looked to Sadie as if she were 100 years old.
All that night, Sadie lay awake while her mother slept, watching her, and then, toward morning, Louise bolted up, crying, terrified, her hands washing over her face. “I’m here!” Sadie cried. “I’m here!” Louise blinked and flung herself into Sadie’s arms. “I want him back,” she wept. “I want him back.”
Sadie soothed her mother’s back. She clutched her mother’s hand. She said whatever she could think of. “I’ll come back more often. I’ll call every night.”
“I want him back!” Louise wept. Sadie spooned as close as she could, rocking Louise, until morning, until it was time to get up all over again.
Sadie stayed for another week, until she had to go back for finals. The house was always crowded with people, the phone never stopped ringing, and Louise began thanking God for what she had. “Thank God I have my work,” she told Sadie. “Thank God I have the neighbors. Thank God I made so many friends.”
Sadie waited. Thank God I have you, she heard, but her mother didn’t say it.
“Go. I’ll be fine,” Louise said. “Really. Thank God I’m not the kind of mother who lives through her kids.”
On Sadie’s last day, all the company began to be too much for Sadie. She was tired of dressing up, tired of having to avert the plates of food handed to her. Her mother was sitting on the couch, deep in conversation with a neighbor. Someone touched Sadie’s arm. She turned. “You’re so thin,” a woman Sadie didn’t know said to her, and Sadie half-smiled, thinking it was a compliment. “You look like a skeleton,” the woman said.
Sadie excused herself. She went into her parents’ room and shut the door tight.
Sadie sat on the bed, staring around the room. Her mother had made arrangements for Goodwill to take Bill’s things away. “I don’t want to have to touch anything. I don’t want to be reminded,” Louise said. Sadie slowly got up and opened her father’s closet. There was his heavy jacket. There were his gray ties. She opened his drawers. Tucked under his socks, she found a high-fat candy bar, a half-eaten bag of potato chips, a package of Chips Ahoy cookies. She pulled them out and threw them into a wastebasket. She opened the second drawer. Socks, balls of color, lined up like little soldiers. She ran one hand over them and as they parted, she spied something. An envelope.
She pushed the socks aside and pulled it out. She opened the clasp and there, inside, were all the letters she had sent him, all the decorated envelopes. She sat down on the bed. The edges of her letters were dog-eared, as if he had read them more than once. Sadie fanned through the letters and began to cry.
“Sadie?” Someone rapped on the door. “Sadie, are you in there?” She didn’t recognize the voice. Sadie swiped a hand over her eyes. She rubbed at her drippy nose. And then she pulled out her suitcase from under the bed and opened it, and gently lay the letters in it, under her blue sweater, carefully, so they wouldn’t crush. “Sadie?” the voice called again. Sadie shut the case and pushed it under the bed. She stood up.
“I’m here,” she said, “I’m right here,” and then she opened the door.
Reading Guide Questions
1. In “The Wrong Sister,” what do you think sisters can give us that our lovers cannot?
2. What do you think Rose means when she says, “We’re always sisters”?
3. What part do the times—the ’70s—play in this story? Why do you think Leavitt set the story in the ’70s, and how would the story play out in any other time?
4. In trying to become her sister, Stella actually finds herself. How do you think she does that?
5. What do you think the real meaning of the title “The Last Vacation” is? Why would Leavitt call the story that?
6. Sadie has problems with both her father and her boyfriend. How are these troubles similar? What’s different about them?
7. There are ties that bind a family together, but they also tear them apart. Talk about that in light of this particular story.
8. What do you think happens to Sadie in the end?
About the Author
Caroline Leavitt is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of Is This Tomorrow, Pictures of You, and eight other novels. Is This Tomorrow was a January magazine Best Book of 2013, a May Indie Next Pick, and a San Francisco Chronicle Lit Pick. Pictures of You was a Costco Pennie’s Pick and was on the Best Books of 2013 lists by Kirkus Reviews, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Providence Journal, and Bookmarks magazine. Leavitt’s new novel, Cruel Beautiful World, will be published by Algonquin Books in 2015. Her work has appeared in New York magazine, “Modern Love” in the New York Times, Salon, Redbook, More magazine, and more. She teaches writing at UCLA Extension Writers Program and Stanford and reviews books for People magazine, the Boston Globe, and the San Francisco Chronicle. She can be reached at Carolineleavitt.com.
Also by Caroline Leavitt
Is This Tomorrow
Pictures of You
Girls in Trouble
Coming Back to Me
Living Other Lives
Family
Into Thin Air
Jealousies
Lifelines
Meeting Rozzy Halfway
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