The Whole Thing Together

by Ann Brashares

  “And otherwise?”

  “Just a few questions.”

  “Now I’m nervous. If I start saying ‘sorry’ too much, will you kick me under the table?”

  Emma laughed. “The thing is, I want my mom to glimpse what an awesome and lovable person you are, so that later when she finds out what you do and all, it won’t be the only thing she can think about. She’ll already like you before she can hate you.”

  “But what happens if she asks me what I do first thing when I meet her tonight?”

  “I don’t think she will. That’s why we’re going to be so incredibly chill. She counts herself superior to parents who immediately ask their kids’ friends what they do or what college they go to.”

  “That’s weird. Okay. That’s helpful, though.”

  “So come around nine. We’ll say we’re going to hang with some people in Prospect Park. We’ll play it like we’re recent friends, just practically acquaintances, right?”

  “That is distant from the truth, Em. I’m a terrible actor.”

  She laughed again. “Just be friendly, okay? That takes no acting.”

  “Okay. Got it.” She could hear him knocking his foot against his desk, and that was not a good sign.

  “See you then.” She paused. “I love you.”

  “God, I love you.”

  —

  “I thought you were surf casting.”

  Ray turned to look behind him. The old dock stuck out into the pond like a crooked gray finger, and Quinn flickered along it, stepping expertly over the softest planks. He turned back to his line drooping in the still water of the pond. “I was going to. And then I came here instead.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing. Why?”

  She was suddenly sitting next to him, dangling her legs over the side. He had the weird sense that time elapsed in a special way for Quinn. Here she is standing, there she is sitting, now she is kneeling, suddenly she is flat. You never saw her in any of the bending poses in between.

  “You fish in the pond when you’re sad.”

  He turned to her. “That’s not true.” Was that true?

  “And in the ocean when you’re happy.”

  No, he didn’t. Did he?

  Quinn never tried to force a point. She just opened her hands and set it forth like a firefly. You caught it or you didn’t. Even if you didn’t, you tended to notice it blinking around, distracting you.

  “Who called before?” she asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “On the landline in the kitchen.”

  Had she overheard the whole business? She was a silent thing sometimes. She didn’t spy exactly, just perched and absorbed. “Oh. Right. That was George.” He studied the worm guts on his fingers.

  “George Riggs?”

  “Yep.” He was glad she didn’t say “your brother, George.” “He was calling for Adam.”

  She reached into Ray’s bucket and grasped its lone, wriggling occupant. She tossed it into the pond.

  “Hey.”

  “You can’t keep the little guy.”

  “Now I can’t.” He reeled in his line. He baited another hook.

  “If you throw your line back in, you’ll probably catch it again.”

  Ray laughed. Sometimes he did have the forlorn suspicion that he hooked the same poor bass over and over. That was enough to make a person sad if they weren’t already.

  “How’s he doing?”

  “George, you mean?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I don’t know. Fine.”

  “You didn’t talk to him long.”

  Ray was quiet for a while. “No. Not really. No.”

  She was quiet too.

  “I can never think of what to say to him,” Ray heard himself saying. Sometimes when Quinn shut her mouth it caused his own mouth to open and issue unexpected sentiments. Why was that?

  She nodded.

  “He’s a great guy. I know.”

  Quinn smiled.

  He felt stupid, annoyed at himself. He wanted to clear away those words but they kept vibrating in the air. “You are friends with him, aren’t you? I mean, outside of everything?”

  “Everything,” in this case, meant their strange, sprawling family. Quinn was related to George as a stepsibling, but not by blood. Not by the DNA of an inconstant father, as Ray was.

  “Sure. Kind of.” She pointed her toes through the skin of the pond. “I send him seeds sometimes.”

  “Seeds?”

  “Yes. Like for turnips, sunchokes, yams. He has that community garden he works on in Oakland.”

  Of course George did that. He planted root vegetables at a community garden when he wasn’t working a hundred hours a week at a software startup or saving dolphins from oil spills.

  Ray suddenly felt too downcast to say the half-true things he usually said about how he wished he and George lived closer. “I don’t really know him,” he said instead. “I haven’t seen the guy in, like, two years.”

  He looked at his sister, her stubby, dirty fingernails splayed on the dock, tanned legs melting into the planks. Her forearms were ropily veined like an older person’s, but the haphazard hair tucked behind her ears made her seem more like a little kid. She was the only girl he knew with short hair, but did she ever get her hair cut?

  “Sad,” she said.

  “Yeah, I guess.” George’s being his brother was a thing of some significance, because otherwise Ray had three sisters. Four sisters, because there was also Esther. Ray still kept a picture on his bulletin board from the time George took him to a Nets game when he was twelve. It was hokey to keep and impossible to throw away.

  Quinn knocked her ankle against his. “It wasn’t because of you, you know.”

  Ray acted at first like he didn’t understand what she was saying, but he did understand.

  “Adam left California before you were born,” she said.

  Ray shrugged.

  “It was unfair to them. I know. But you didn’t do anything wrong.”

  Ray didn’t do anything right, either. He just hung around being a bratty kid while George went to Stanford and won some big engineering prize. If that guy didn’t deserve a father who stuck around, who did? Certainly not Ray.

  When Adam met Ray’s mom, George and Esther were still in middle school. Adam was already divorced from Gina, their mother, but he lived a few minutes away from them in Sausalito and dutifully took them on weekends, from what Ray understood. Half a year later, Adam fell in love with Lila and moved across the continent to be with her. After that he only went back to California twice a year. George and Esther came to the Wainscott house for one week each summer until they finished high school, and then they didn’t come at all. Ray could barely remember those times.

  Adam and Lila got married in the back garden of the Brooklyn house when she was already visibly pregnant with Ray. He grew up pretty much knowing he was an accident. Why have another kid if you can’t be bothered with the two you’ve already got?

  Ray knew about the wedding only from the photographs. And he was admittedly kind of fascinated with those photos. Particularly he’d studied the graphic distress of his five half siblings. He’d even imagined the prelude: Gina grudgingly shipping George and Esther from California stuffed into their best clothes. At the wedding they look like captives in a hostage video. Lila’s three little girls in their hippie hand-me-downs look like they turned up at the wrong party. Even Emma looks uncertain on that day. Quinn is large-eyed and serious. If you look closely you can see in every picture she’s carefully holding Mattie’s hand.

  Why did parents ever make their kids watch them get remarried? Ray imagined a coffee-table book suited to a photographer like maybe Diane Arbus for publication around Halloween: Children Watching Their Parents Marry People Who Aren’t Their Parents.

  —

  “I’m sorry, what was your name?” Emma overheard her mother asking at the front door of the Brooklyn house that evenin
g.

  It was 8:56, according to her phone, and there was Jamie framed in the doorway of their brownstone, a lanky, handsome, fidgeting portrait. She sped down the hallway and pulled up quickly behind her mother. Of course he wouldn’t be on time. Of course he’d be early.

  “It’s James Hurn. Uh, Jamie.” He shot his hand out like he was meeting the president. “I’m a friend of Emma’s.” He hit the word “friend” a little too hard.

  “I’m Lila. Emma’s mother,” Lila said, giving him the once-over.

  “Hi, Jamie,” Emma piped up, probably too brightly. Her heart was pounding. “What’s up?”

  “Come on in,” Lila invited, moving aside for him, shutting the door behind him. She was wearing jeans and slippers and a cardigan with a big moth hole above the hem in the back. She looked like she hadn’t washed her hair in a week. Emma was so worried about what her mom would make of Jamie, she forgot to worry about what Jamie would make of her mom.

  “I was just going to hang with some friends in Prospect Park and I came by to see if Emma wanted to come along.” Oh Lord. He sounded like he was reading from a script. “This is an awesome house,” he added in the least chill manner possible. This was the wrong kind of subterfuge for him. Was there any right kind of subterfuge for him?

  Her mother had turned around by now. She was studying him carefully. “You want something to drink?”

  Emma glanced at the living room, noticing how cramped the place felt with the dark wood and the billions of books. There wasn’t a single surface that wasn’t piled with stuff. Now she had to worry about that, too. She pictured Jamie’s clean, airy suburban house with a big picture window looking onto a sunny lawn and a carport. What was a carport, anyway?

  “Water? Club soda? Wine? Beer? You’re of age, right? Are you hungry?” Lila was always friendly to their friends. She always liked to feed them and ask them about what they were reading and watching.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he answered quickly. He glanced at Emma for guidance.

  Emma gave him a quick shrug in return, trying to telegraph that he should say whatever he wanted.

  “I’m mean, yes, I’m of age. And no thanks, I’m not hungry, I just ate.”

  Lila looked from Jamie to Emma and back again with her perceptive eyes. The two of them stood stiff as boards, an unnatural distance apart. They looked like they were waiting for sentencing. This was not chill.

  “Can’t I get you a drink, at least?”

  “Sorry. Uh. Just, uh. Water?” he answered.

  “Sure,” Lila said. “Sit down, why don’t you? Unless you’re in a hurry? Emma?”

  “Uh, thank you, Mrs. Harrison,” Jamie pitched into the brief silence that followed. “No, ma’am. I mean, yes, ma’am. No, I’m not in a hurry. Yes, I’d like to sit down.” He gave a drowning look to Emma.

  “Maybe we should get going,” Emma called loud enough for her mother, who was pouring a glass of water in the kitchen. She sensed this was going downhill.

  In a flash Emma had her shoes on her feet and her bag in her hand. But it was too late. Jamie had already perched woodenly on the sofa, across from her mother, with his glass of water.

  “Emma, sit. Stay for a minute.” Lila was on to a scent. Emma could just feel it.

  Emma sat. It seemed the least controversial option. “Just for a minute,” she said.

  “So how do you know Emma?” Lila asked Jamie.

  Emma clenched her fists. Downhill and off the cliff. This was a terrible idea. Whose terrible idea was this, anyway? God, she hated it when her idea was the terrible idea. She gave Jamie what she hoped was a reassuring look.

  “We met at a…work function,” Jamie said.

  What could Emma really ask of him? Jamie was pathologically honest. It was one of the things she loved about him.

  Lila looked perplexed, maybe owing to the fact that the Black Horse Market didn’t put on a lot of “work functions.” “And what is it you do?” Lila continued.

  “Jamie works in business,” Emma put in. She could tell immediately it didn’t help.

  “What kind of business?”

  Emma let out the breath she’d been holding. Since when was her hippie-dippy mother the Gestapo? “Mom.” She knew she sounded like she was twelve.

  “What? Is it a secret? Are you a spy?”

  “Investment business,” Jamie said quietly.

  This was not a great answer under any circumstances. Lila would be more open to him if he were a gas station attendant than a banker. “What firm?”

  Jamie looked at Emma in abject misery and Emma just shook her head. Neither of them said anything.

  “What is going on with you two?” Lila demanded.

  “What do you mean?” Emma said weakly, unable to summon up any indignation. “Nothing.”

  “How long have you been seeing each other?”

  Silence. They couldn’t even look at each other.

  “Nine weeks,” Jamie finally answered, relieved to say something honest.

  Lila looked at Emma carefully. “Okay. So that explains a lot about you, my dear one.”

  Emma returned her mother’s gaze. “What are you talking about?”

  Lila smiled. “I knew something was up. I knew you were involved with somebody. I just couldn’t figure out who. But why are you both acting so weird? Why have you been so secretive?”

  Emma and Jamie exchanged another set of plaintive looks.

  “What? What? You’re making me nervous now.”

  Emma cracked her knuckles. Jamie looked deeply queasy. Emma took a stabilizing breath. She opened her mouth and came out with nothing.

  “My God, are you pregnant?” Lila asked.

  “No!” Emma shot back. “How could you ask that?”

  “Because I know something is up. Just tell me what it is.”

  Jamie couldn’t take it anymore. “I’m an analyst at Califax Capital,” he finally confessed, as though he’d murdered somebody. “For Mr. Thomas. Not directly for him. I mean, he’s like my boss’s boss.”

  Lila slumped back into her chair. “Seriously?” She looked more sickened than relieved.

  “Yes.” Jamie hung his head.

  “And that’s how you met? Through Robert, I’m guessing?”

  “Sort of,” Emma answered.

  Lila looked deeply suspicious. “He didn’t set this up, did he?”

  “No,” Emma said quickly. “Not at all. He doesn’t even know.”

  Lila sighed. “I get it.” She shook her head at Jamie. “You kids who work for Robert are worse than a cult.”

  Emma got up. “Mom, you don’t get it. And that is a horrible thing to say.” She grabbed her bag. Jamie got up too, looking between Emma and her mother uncertainly.

  Lila sighed again. “I think I would rather you were pregnant,” she said to Emma.

  “Oh my God, Mom!”

  Lila turned to Jamie. “But not by you,” she snapped.

  Dear Other Sasha,

  A quote for the day from our fearless manager:

  “It’s weird. One week Ray is prettier and works harder. The next week he smiles a lot and carries heavier boxes.”

  I can’t figure out who is who.

  BTW, he’s taken to calling me Little Ray.

  Original Sasha

  —

  “We were not that chill,” Jamie lamented as the two of them sat glumly in the window of a diner on Seventh Avenue.

  Emma reached out and took his hand. “I’m thinking chill is not our best strategy. We’re not very good at tricks.”

  “I can work on it,” he offered.

  “I don’t even want you to.” She took a sip of iced tea. “It’s my mom’s problem, not ours. She is insane. Both of my parents are insane. They make each other insane.” She shrugged. “If not for each other, they might be okay people.”

  “What are we doing here?”

  Ray hadn’t penetrated much past the front door. He floated among the doorframes offered by the foyer, not pushing throu
gh any of them. Parker said the girls on the Upper East Side were hotter, and that might have been true, but between the tallness of the shoes and the shortness of the skirts, Ray was pretty sure he preferred the ones in Brooklyn.

  What was he doing here? It was mostly kids from the kind of private-school scene he preferred to skip, but Parker knew somebody who knew somebody. Ray wasn’t here to pick up girls. He thought of Violet in East Hampton. He and Mattie had come back into the city for the night to pick up some stuff and to give his mom a ride out to Wainscott in the morning. His shift at the market didn’t start until one p.m. Violet had complained she wouldn’t have any fun until he got back and encouraged him not to have any fun either. He looked around. Well, he was complying.

  There was a girl standing alone outside the kitchen. He couldn’t tell if she was waiting for a friend or the bathroom or what. She wasn’t wearing a minuscule skirt or even leggings, but actual pants. She was small and her hair was long and dark. Her skin was also dark. She was maybe Hispanic, he thought. He didn’t mean to be leering, but when she turned to put her plastic cup down on the hall table, he noticed the generous shape of her hips in relation to her waist. And then after that, even though her shirt wasn’t particularly tight or low-cut, it was hard not to notice that though her frame was small, her breasts were large and round. Parker always went for tall, athletic girls, but this girl had the kind of feminine body Ray was madly attracted to.

  She didn’t look impatient and he didn’t see an indication of a bathroom around. He could only see her from the side and her hair was obscuring most of her face, but he could tell she was pretty. She wasn’t doing anything with her hands. That was another thing that got him.

  When you’re alone, look at your phone. It was a tenet central and unquestioned. Why wasn’t she looking at her phone? She looked up at him. He suddenly realized he was alone and not looking at his phone either. He was looking at her. He was worried he was staring at her like a cartoon character with his eyes bouncing out on springs.

  Now what? He was clearly caught. He waved. She smiled and waved back, a little awkwardly. She looked kind of familiar. Did he know her from somewhere? Or maybe he just liked the kind of face she had.