Bittersweet

Birch strode into the kitchen. The whole cottage seemed to sigh under the weight of his footsteps. I held my breath as I watched him go, praying he’d be impressed by the Windexed windows, the lack of clutter. ‘I don’t think Indo can be made to do anything’ was his answer when he returned with a cup of coffee. I was glad I’d been the one to brew it that morning.

I smiled, thinking of Fritz and his compatriots surrounding me.

‘I see you’ve met my sister.’

‘She’s certainly a character,’ I answered, feeling an ounce of betrayal as a mocking tone crossed my lips.

‘It’s not hard to be a responsible pet owner,’ Tilde remarked sourly. ‘Madeira and Harvey come when we call, and when our angels are on the rocks, we leash the poor creatures. Besides, I think it’s torture to bring a dog that isn’t a swimmer here, but what do I know? We’ve got dachshunds and corgis and greyhounds up the wazoo. Whatever happened to a good old-fashioned water spaniel, that’s what I’d like to know.’

Birch shook his head. ‘I’m not about to waste the next year of my life on a leash bylaw that’ll be fought by more than half the board.’

‘Anyway,’ Ev chipped in, ‘everyone loves it when Abby shows up – we wouldn’t want her leashed.’

Tilde arched one eyebrow.

‘Abby is our handyman’s yellow Lab,’ Birch explained, thinking he was filling me in. ‘Come to think of it, she’s a lot like John – loyal—’

‘Dumb,’ Tilde added.

‘Mum!’ Ev harrumphed.

‘Temper temper,’ Tilde scolded, lifting her eyes to the ceiling. They narrowed. I followed her gaze – she’d found the only cobweb we’d missed. As Ev fumed beside me, I watched Tilde take in the porch – windows, floor, ceiling – and realized that Birch wasn’t the one doing the inspection. Oh sure, he’d stay, and he’d be the one to issue the verdict. But this was Tilde’s game. She nodded approvingly at the already installed bolt, and I thanked John silently for taking that into his own hands. But her foot touched on a loose board and she frowned.

‘Would you like to see the kitchen?’ I asked, gesturing into the house.

‘I’m glad one of you remembers your manners,’ Tilde sniffed, and, as I followed her off the porch and into the house, I turned and shot Ev a look that meant buck up and start smiling.

Tilde declaimed. The kitchen needed new appliances and a new floor, ‘and for god’s sake, get rid of this hideous table.’ The living room furniture was ‘unlivable,’ the beds were probably crawling with ‘god knows what kind of vermin,’ the bathroom was ‘atrocious.’ As the list of ‘necessary fixes’ reached a page and more, I noticed Ev begin to disengage. Weariness replaced annoyance. By the time we were back in the living room, from the defeated look in Ev’s eye, I half expected her to toss the keys to her father and volunteer to give up Bittersweet herself. Birch looked on with a distracted smile, nodding when prodded, agreeing with Tilde as she shook her head at the sad state of affairs, offering a sympathetic pat to Ev before he excused himself to the bathroom.

‘Aren’t you going to offer us a cold beverage?’ Tilde demanded when we’d covered every square inch of the house. I retreated into the kitchen, grateful for a break. That woman made my mother look like a carefree soul.

‘Have you been in for a dip yet? Is it cold?’ she queried as I brought in a tray of lemonade and Ritz crackers, placing it on the rickety bench we’d pulled from the side of the house. There wasn’t enough seating, and Tilde had taken the armchair for herself, so I sat beside the food. The bench swayed precariously. Birch had been in the bathroom for a while, relieved, I imagined, to get a break from the female politics.

‘I have,’ Ev responded. ‘I don’t think Mabel’s much of a swimmer.’ I opened my mouth to protest – I had shivered my way through a waist-high wade during one of Ev’s dawn forays – but, before I could say anything, Ev demanded from me, ‘Have you thought about changing your name? Even just to Maybelle, and then we could call you May for short; it just suits her so much better, don’t you think, Mum?’

Only one person had ever called me Maybelle. Involuntary tears filled my eyes. I crammed a Ritz into my mouth. Salt. Butter.

‘It’s Winloch,’ I heard Tilde respond. ‘She can go by anything she wants.’

I told myself to get it together. Chew. Swallow. Sit up straight. Be sweet.

Ev took a sip of coffee. ‘When’s Lu coming?’

‘Our baby girl,’ Birch explained, returning from the bathroom.

‘You have a baby?’ I asked. Ev had mentioned only older brothers.

Tilde’s laugh erupted sharply. ‘Well, it’s not outside the realm of possibility.’

‘Jesus, Mum,’ Ev said, ‘not everything is a comment on how old you look.’

‘She’s in Switzerland, dear,’ Tilde replied testily. ‘At tennis camp.’

‘The one you sent me to?’ Ev asked in an innocent voice. ‘Where that twenty-five-year-old deflowered me?’

I nearly choked on my coffee. Birch pounded me on the back, and, by the time I’d regained myself, Tilde was already out the screen door and Ev had shut herself in the bedroom.

‘You girls coming for dinner tonight?’ Birch asked cheerily, popping a Ritz into his mouth. ‘We’re having a spur-of-the-moment get-together.’

‘Did we pass?’ I blurted, unable to help myself, sure my rude question was the final nail in the coffin. But he didn’t answer. Just gave my shoulders an affectionate double pat and followed his wife out the door.

Twenty minutes later, Ev emerged from the bedroom, face stained with tears. I watched her pull the bolt closed on the front door. When she shut herself back into the bedroom, I heard the bolt slide closed there too. She didn’t say one word.

CHAPTER ELEVEN (#ulink_e7e169e1-a7d3-582d-8a9d-7ba0a3fe4fcd)

The Brothers (#ulink_e7e169e1-a7d3-582d-8a9d-7ba0a3fe4fcd)

SEE?’ EV SEETHED LATER that afternoon. ‘See? She’s a psychopath.’

We were strolling down ‘Boys’ Lane,’ a side road that angled off from the main thoroughfare near the Dining Hall and led to a string of three of the ubiquitous Winloch cottages.

‘But when will they tell us if we get to keep Bittersweet?’ I asked, gagging at the memory of my mother’s chipped beef on toast, the first meal I’d be met with if I had to go home.

‘You never get to know anything important, not when my mother’s concerned.’ Ev sighed. I bit a nail. She pulled my hand from my mouth. ‘Don’t worry so much!’ she insisted. ‘She’ll be onto something else by tomorrow and forget we ever existed.’ She slung her arm over my shoulder and snuffled my ear until I smiled. I understood the sentiment well: hoping your mother forgot you walked the earth. It was the one thing Ev and I shared in spades.

We came upon the first cottage, smallest and farthest from the water. ‘This is Queen Anne’s Lace,’ Ev said. She made a face. ‘It’s Galway’s.’ My heart started pounding, and I was grateful to confirm the place was devoid of life, for his predicted absence was the only reason I’d dared accompany his sister to this side of camp.

I eyed the house – it was unpainted, the wood gray and weathered. ‘I thought he came up on weekends.’

Ev rolled her eyes. ‘Too busy saving the world. Don’t despair, you’ll see him again soon if he doesn’t make it for the Midsummer Night’s Feast,’ but before I could ask her what that was, she sniped, ‘Can you believe he chose this shack? Such a hovel. He could have had Banning’s’ – pointing to the cottage sitting ahead at the left end of the road – ‘I mean, he is the second-born, but he can’t appreciate natural beauty or something. The views are to die for over on this side.’

Soon we were before Goldenrod and Chicory, the house on the right standing at attention in crisp white, the one on the left saggier and tea-colored in a dirty, unintentional way. Beyond the cottages, through carefully thinned woods, lay a wide view of Winslow Bay – not nearly as impressive as Indo’s, but something to admire. Before them, matching SUVs were piled high, hatchbacks open. Two towheads, an older boy and a younger girl, ran in shrieking circles, chased by a pair of game, harmless golden retrievers.

A tall, handsome man emerged from Chicory, his frame nearly filling the doorway. ‘Hey, Sis.’ He strolled over and pecked Ev on the cheek, then introduced himself as Athol.

‘This is May,’ she blurted. I was tongue-tied; firstborn Athol was better-looking than I’d prepared myself for, perhaps because Ev had described him as all serious business. Samson’s cheekbones, crystal-blue eyes, six-foot frame – out of a propaganda photo for eating organic or running Ironman. As he extended his hand, I realized that he was the spitting image of a young, lean Birch, although he didn’t radiate his father’s charisma.

Athol picked his little boy up and tossed him in the air; the four-year-old shrieked in laughter. To the chubby toddler at his feet, he cajoled, ‘Do your parents know you’re out here?’ and she huffed with resignation toward the other cottage. Soon they had all come out to greet us, Athol’s equally tall and tanned wife, Emily, who explained that the baby was napping; the little boy, Ricky, being gathered by his auburn-haired, foreign au pair for an afternoon swim, water temperature be damned; Ev’s other brother, Banning, balding, rotund, pulling Ev into a sloppy hug; his wife, Annie, an air of messiness in her curly hair and round face, bearing the chubby little girl, Madison, out on her hip and asking the au pair if it wouldn’t be too much trouble to take Maddy along too. There were dogs too – I had begun to realize there would always be dogs: Banning and Annie’s two simple-looking golden retrievers (named Dum and Dee, although, like their namesakes, they were only ever mentioned in the same breath, giving them a collective identity) and Quicksilver, an old greyhound who stuck close to Emily’s side until he spotted an unfortunate squirrel and took off up the road, toward Galway’s.

‘Be careful,’ Ev said, watching the dog’s pursuit. ‘Mum’s on about leashes again.’

‘All well and good for her,’ Athol snapped. ‘She doesn’t have a greyhound.’

‘Don’t shoot the messenger,’ Ev bit back, matching her eldest brother’s tone.

I could already see a few fault lines in their siblinghood, but I couldn’t help but feel a pang of jealousy. It was impossible to imagine being known this way, teased, taken for granted. And Ev would never ask me what it was like with my brother, because, as far as she knew, I was an only child.

Athol and Emily’s summer cottage was far nicer than the year-round home I’d been raised in, and Emily proudly took me on the grand tour, explaining how over the winter the whole foundation had been lifted onto steel beams, and then, naturally, they’d decided to repaint, and redo the kitchen with Sub-Zero and Wolf appliances. The home was modernized, with every possible extravagance, although that was not the word Athol and Emily would have used to describe the chrome garbage can that opened with the wave of a hand, or the flat-screen television hung on the wall in the ‘library.’ Every surface in that cottage was dust-free, and, when the baby awoke, I noticed that she, too, was a perfect, tidy creature, smiling down from her mother’s arms like a dewy baby bird. I liked Emily in an abstract way, but she was the kind of tall, athletic person who lived in a different stratosphere, hardly looking below her shoulders. I wondered if she’d even recognize me the next time we met.