The Whole Thing Together

by Ann Brashares

  “Only for the last four years.” Yes, she was angry. She felt it in her mouth.

  He winced. “I guess I don’t stop here too often.”

  “I guess you don’t.”

  He tipped his head slightly. The air was awkward. “Everything…all right?” he asked.

  She was tempted to just say yes, fine, and send him on his way with some tomatoes and corn or whatever, but the anger was still in her mouth. “Apart from my confusing loss of identity, yeah. It’s all good.”

  His eyebrows stayed up, but the rest of his face fell. It took him a while to regroup. “Because of…what I said at Ditch Plains?”

  “It had an impact, you might say.”

  “Of course,” he said slowly. He rubbed his hands over his face. “I’ve replayed that conversation a hundred times in my mind. You must know I thought you knew. Or I thought you at least suspected. I thought that was why you came to see me.”

  Even now Mattie couldn’t close the deal in her mind. A perverse part of her wanted to. Knew what? Suspected what? Another part really didn’t.

  “I came because you invited me,” she said. “And the thing I wonder is, why did you invite me? Why did you approach me at all? Why did you start this?”

  Whether he’d meant to or not, Jonathan Dawes had thrown a grenade into the middle of her life. It had wrecked her equilibrium, her confidence, and the damn thing hadn’t even finished exploding yet.

  His body looked both tired and more erect. He put his hands on the counter between them. “Listen. There’s a lot to explain. This goes back a long way.” He shifted uncomfortably. “I thought about you very often over the years. As you grew up I saw you and your sisters around town a few times, but I never made contact. I waited until you were an adult, capable of making your own choices about what you wanted to know about yourself.”

  “I didn’t know there was anything to know,” she broke in. “It was a lot easier that way.”

  He sighed. “When I approached you at the Black Horse, I figured I’d say hello and that would be the end of it. It was you who chose to come to Ditch Plains. This is not what I expected to happen.”

  Mattie stood up tall, almost as tall as him. She let her arms fall to her sides. “But is it what you wanted to happen?”

  He looked down. When he met her eyes again, his estimation of her had changed.

  “Because you really made a hash of things for me,” she went on in a rush. “And for my parents. My mom, of course, but the real trouble lies with my dad. And you must have known that.”

  “I didn’t…”

  Mattie was past the point of caution, and for once it was in the service of honesty. “You may not have thought it through,” she said. “I’m not saying I know what your intentions were. But you can’t act like you were just an observer in everything that happened between my parents.”

  Here he stopped. After a while he nodded. “You’re right. I can’t.”

  “You were probably hurt by it too,” she said, surprised by her own forwardness.

  He was clearly struck. He considered her face for a long time, trying to gauge how much to say. He wasn’t as young as he tried to appear. “I was. You’re right about that, too.”

  He looked around. The place was quiet. Distant cars caught the light beyond the fields. “Is there a place we could sit down and talk?”

  “We can talk here,” she said. She thought fleetingly of the miraculous Reese farm talking magic.

  “All right.” He looked up at the sky. He looked down at the dusty ground. “I will be completely rash and tell you the truth. I loved your mother. At that time, I hated your father. And I hated that I couldn’t be with her and with you.”

  Check another box. Mattie now knew where the rashness came from. But for some reason at this moment, she herself felt the opposite of it: infinitely old, capable of all secrets and possibilities. “Why couldn’t you be?”

  He shook his head. “It was a total catastrophe. I don’t know how much of it you know.”

  “Not much.”

  “How much do you want to know?”

  “More. Why couldn’t you and my mom be together? After they split up?” Even her voice had a slow-motion calm, a purposeful unfolding.

  “After you were born your parents’ marriage came apart. And then Lila wanted out, but Robert wouldn’t let her go. That was a terrible time.” He looked up, as though at a memory. “Your sister Quinn saw us together once, your mother and me. I always felt terrible about that. She was so little, I don’t think she’d remember, but those eyes of hers…”

  Mattie nodded. She knew those eyes well, and she doubted they forgot anything.

  “Anyway, it made Robert crazy that Lila wanted to leave him. It was like he thought he owned her. He was already making big money then. He got his lawyers involved. He wanted to punish her. He called in a domestic violence complaint to my apartment when he knew Lila and I were together.”

  “God.”

  “Three officers burst into my bedroom. I was taken to the Montauk police station based on Robert’s false information. Rumors circulated around the East End. Lila wore her scarlet letter.”

  “I didn’t know any of that.”

  “That was just the beginning. Lila would have worn the shame. It was you girls. He threatened to take you away from her. He did take you. For six days he kept you all in a hotel in Manhattan, and your mother was frantic, not knowing where you were. A judge finally ordered him to bring you back to Wainscott. It was summertime. The judge ordered that you girls stay in the house while your parents took turns week to week.”

  That explained a few things. Did Emma remember any of that? Did Quinn?

  Jonathan Dawes paused. He rubbed his eyes. His face seemed to get older as he traveled back in time. “And I did something stupid. I tried to claim you. Of course, your parents were married when you were born. Your father would have pulled the sky apart before even considering that you were not his. I had no legal standing, but I was angry. I couldn’t accept it then. Even your mother begged me to drop it for your sake. That was what finally drove us apart.”

  Mattie nodded. She breathed. Breathed more. She looked at his face and felt sorry for him. Her world made more and less sense.

  It was almost dark by the time Jonathan Dawes finished talking. Whatever produce he’d come for he no longer needed.

  “Well.” He sighed. He seemed to want to move toward her, but he wasn’t going to presume anything anymore. “Forgive me,” he said quietly. He turned and walked back to his car. “May the truth set you free, Mattie.”

  Slowly, diligently, Mattie closed up the farm stand for the night and walked her bike all the way home. She needed to stay as long as she could in the in-between.

  In her mind she considered Jonathan Dawes’s sun-lined face, his effortfully young body, his tired surfer’s affect. He was stuck, just like everybody else, wasn’t he? May it set us all free, she thought.

  —

  On the day before the party Quinn stopped at Myrna’s with cherries, and Myrna was still in her bathrobe. “Are you okay?”

  “I am fine, my darling. I just have a cold. Standard-issue.”

  Quinn went over and put a hand on Myrna’s soft and yielding cheek.

  Myrna studied her with shrewd eyes. “You are looking a bit run-down yourself, Quinn.”

  Quinn shrugged. “I’m fine. I’ll make you tea. And these cherries are good for vitamin C.”

  “Tea would be lovely.”

  Quinn filled the kettle at the sink.

  “But I’m afraid I won’t be able to come to the party tomorrow.”

  Quinn put down the kettle. “Oh. Really? What if I pick you up in the car?”

  “No need.”

  “How about I’ll come check on you after lunch to see if you’re up for it.”

  “No, darling. Really. You take care of yourself and don’t be troubled. Just bring me a piece of your cake when it’s all done.”

  —

/>   The changeover was at noon like always, and Emma and Jamie’s engagement party was at four. For the first time in Ray’s life, he was going to leave his house an occupant and return to it four hours later a guest.

  The place looked like crap. That was the thing that worried him. He wasn’t Martha Stewart, but he did have basic standards. His mind flashed on a picture of his bedroom in Brooklyn. Okay, very basic.

  The thing that woke him up at four a.m. was the idea of Robert and Evie (and Sasha!) arriving at a house left in disarray by Lila with less than four hours to fix it. He kept picturing Robert’s disappointed face, even though he didn’t even know Robert’s face, disappointed or otherwise.

  Which was why Ray was cruising along atop a John Deere forty-two-inch zero-radius mower he’d rented from Power Equipment Plus in East Hampton, mowing the hell out of the lawn.

  He couldn’t do the edging like the professional guys, but it was better than nothing.

  His mom and Adam were gone before he’d gotten back with the mower, which was frankly a relief to all four of her children. She and Adam weren’t going all the way back to Brooklyn. They were having lunch with Grandma Hardy in Oyster Bay and then bringing her back for the party.

  Ray planned to shower and change at his friend Frasier’s place before returning for the party, but now he was worried he wouldn’t finish mowing in time.

  He’d never stayed past the changeover before. He’d always sort of imagined that the house disappeared into the air at noon every Sunday and then shimmeringly re-formed from the air as a slightly different house.

  And it was the same old troubling thing of having to hustle away like an outlaw while his sisters got to stay and watch the metamorphosis. He imagined they were part of the magic too. At the stroke of noon, they became part of a different family.

  What if he just kept mowing through noon when the other family arrived? He could pretend he was the guy from the lawn service company. They didn’t know him, wouldn’t recognize him. At least, Robert and Evie didn’t.

  He saw Mattie emerge from the front door of the house in her pajamas as he rounded the driveway. “What are you doing?” she yelled over the sound of the mower.

  “Mowing the lawn.”

  “I see that. That’s great. Where’d you get the mower?”

  Ray braked and dropped the engine into neutral. “I rented it.”

  “Seriously?”

  He made to look insulted. “I have a job.”

  “How’d you get it here?”

  “They rented me a trailer.”

  “To attach to what?”

  He was starting to feel less proud and more stupid. “To the car I rented from a different place.” He threw the engine back into gear and drove off before she could ask him any more questions. The whole thing had, in truth, cost him more money than he made at the Black Horse in a week.

  Later when he paused at the pool fence, wiping his face of sweat, Quinn fluttered across the grass and hopped onto the back of the mower. He was pretty sure this wasn’t a two-person vehicle, but she folded herself weightlessly, like a cicada, to perch facing backward. He rode from pond to pool, patio to forest.

  He liked her companionship. He turned to look at her. He smiled. It was too noisy to say anything. She held a piece of sprouted grass in her teeth like an old-time farmer, as they drove back and forth, back and forth.

  Occasionally she elbowed him in the back. “Not that. That’s clover,” and he veered around.

  At the end she hopped off. The silence was more silent after all the noise. The humid, thick smell of grass filled his nose.

  “Wait. Why do you have that look?” he asked her.

  “What look?”

  There was mischief. No question. “That look.”

  “Fine,” she said. “Come with me.”

  He followed her across the grass to the shed where they kept old bikes and the garden tools. She pushed open the door and he peered into the gloom. His eyes barely needed adjustment to see, so shiny and new it was. A John Deere fifty-four-inch zero-radius mower.

  “Shit.”

  “My dad had it delivered this morning,” Quinn explained with a smile and a shrug. “It came while you were out.”

  Okay, Little Ray. Here goes nothing.

  Sasha saw Ray’s text as she heard the door opening downstairs for the first guests, and her heart kicked up another notch.

  She stood at the top of the stairs, looking down. You couldn’t call them guests exactly. As arranged, they had come first, fellow hosts, to gather before the Hurns arrived from the airport.

  “Hello?” Lila called, opening the front door. You couldn’t really expect her to knock at her own house, could you? Her own great-grandfather’s house. Not with how everything felt right now.

  Sasha drew in her breath and took a step backward on the landing, hoping she hadn’t been seen yet. She wanted a moment to observe, to fill her eyes, without having to be looked at.

  Lila was first in, looking tall and imperious. But Sasha could already make out faint sweat stains under the arms of her pale linen dress. Her blond-gray hair was a straight, fine bob and her shoes were pointy beige pumps. She wore sheer stockings, and Sasha was oddly riveted by the faded orange freckles that covered her calves and feet and hands and other parts of her skin you could see. For all the times Sasha had imagined Lila, she hadn’t imagined the freckles.

  Sasha felt dark in comparison, a dark stranger to freckles.

  Next came Adam. He was smaller than she had pictured. Not short, exactly, but he took up less space. His hair was wiry and gray and curled around his ears. He wore a blue blazer and round wire-rimmed glasses like Leon Trotsky.

  Then came Ray. She had to steady herself to look at him. He was half a head taller than his dad but didn’t share Lila’s expression. He was bemused, nervous, a little wary. She felt the fast tick under her rib cage. She tried to see him for the separate person he was, tried to see him with calm eyes in clear outlines, but it wasn’t easy. How could he fit all the things she’d felt about him into his one person?

  He glanced upward like he knew she was there. He didn’t say anything. Just looked at her, smiled, shrugged a little. He didn’t call her out for spying, but she knew it was time to come downstairs. She kept her eyes on him, smiled knowingly, wary to match his wariness. As nervous as she was, she didn’t take her eyes away.

  Sasha came down the stairs just as her dad and mom appeared from the living room. She was aware of the pale green silk of her dress rustling around her knees, the subdued silver of her shoes.

  Here we go.

  She glanced again at Ray. It was a comfort, having a counterpart. Though she’d had almost no proximity to his flesh, his body, she felt as if the two of them were watching their parents from behind the same eyes.

  Robert made the first move. First he shook Adam’s hand, then Ray’s. Meanwhile, Lila reached to shake Evie’s hand, then Sasha’s. Were other hands as sweaty and cold as hers felt? “Hello’s” and “Nice to see you’s” went around.

  She was sorely conscious of how red the red of her mother’s dress pulsed next to Lila’s beige, how red her mother’s lips looked compared to Lila’s plain gloss. Again she felt the warring feelings, the cowardice and shame battling. Would Lila approve of her own dress? She would, wouldn’t she? Would she approve of Evie’s? No. She might even laugh about it later.

  Even worse, she felt the undeniable force of Lila’s confidence, Lila’s basic sense of belonging. Evie’s dress probably cost ten times as much, but Lila was the one who knew how to do this: how to look, how to act. In her posture alone you could feel that it was still her house, still fundamentally her family, however Robert tried to spin it otherwise.

  When they all pulled back and it came time for Robert and Lila to greet each other, they didn’t. Time got slow and thick. Lila cocked her head, pressed her lips together. Robert’s jaw was clamped. He put an arm around Evie. Sasha felt his other hand land on her angel bone, not soli
dly possessive, as she would expect, but slightly shaky. That rattled her too.

  Sasha was nervous to keep looking at him. With Lila in the room, she saw him through different eyes, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to.

  Robert placed his large frame at the place where the foyer opened up to the rest of the house, like it was his and he was the gatekeeper. Lila’s entrance was inexorable, but he was acting like he got to say when.

  Sasha cast an eye at Ray and saw her trepidation mirrored there. So united were they, she suddenly remembered they forgot they hadn’t met. As momentous an occasion as this was, nobody appeared to be paying much attention to them. She turned and took a step toward him, put her hand out. “Hi, Ray,” she said.

  “Can I get anyone a drink?” Robert boomed. He turned and walked down the three stairs into the living room. And that was that. Robert said when.

  How would they greet each other? They wouldn’t greet each other. That was the answer.

  All the parents moved through the foyer and into the living room. Ray held her hand for an extra second. “Hi, Sasha,” he said just to her.

  Quinn came out from the kitchen. She was wearing an aqua-colored Indian print tunic, her fine, wispy hair neater than usual, with a sprig of jasmine tucked above her ear. A silver dot sparkled in her nose, in spite of her dad’s demand that she not wear it. But her face was troubled, complicated. Her eyes were so far away it looked like they saw a different house, a different party.

  She hugged Sasha, even though she’d seen her ten minutes earlier. And then Sasha watched Quinn hug Ray.

  When she was little, she’d been jealous when Quinn talked about Ray. She was tormented by envy when Quinn left their old apartment on Eighty-First Street to go back to Brooklyn. She knew Ray was there, and that her loss was always his gain. She knew Quinn loved him. She knew it, and now for the first time she saw it: for a moment Quinn’s troubled, distant face was remade by her tenderness, her comfort with him, and Ray’s face lit up in return. Looking at it from here, Sasha didn’t feel jealous anymore.

  She saw from the outside what she had, and she felt lucky that in a family like theirs they had it—they both had it. In a family where there was always too much, there was never enough, Quinn was their shared miracle. Her influence over the two of them was as quietly powerful as any. It was because of her that Sasha and Ray understood each other as they did.