The Sunset Sisters: An utterly gripping and emotional page-turner (The Sisterhood Series) Page 11

  For three months, we were a real family. They both dropped me off at school in the morning. We had dinner as a family every evening. We went on road trips on the weekend. We even talked about taking a family trip to France, though that didn’t happen until many years later, and I didn’t go with them. I never saw them argue or fight. Not even once. Sophie was elated, beatific. And I was the happiest kid on earth.

  I wanted Sophie to quit her job. To me, it was the natural next step. But it wasn’t an option—we needed both their paychecks, she said. Dad made a decent living, but most of their money came from Katherine. Even though I was only six, I understood this—money concerns had always been at the forefront of my mind. And I didn’t mind, not really. Some of my classmates’ moms worked. Having Dad live with us was enough. More than enough.

  Dad left us two days before Memorial Day, 1995. I didn’t see him again until the beginning of the fall. Sophie said he’d done the math and it turned out he couldn’t leave Katherine, after all. Divorce was expensive. She delivered this news with stoicism, but I could tell that it was a front borne out of pride. On the inside, Sophie was breaking. She loved my dad. I shared her pain, her heartbreak. I also felt—irrationally, unreasonably—betrayed. And I blamed Sophie: she’d promised she was working on it. But Dad had only stayed for a few months. She should’ve worked harder. Should’ve found a way to make him want to stay. To make more money.

  That was the real culprit: money.

  Our lives were constantly being disrupted—made worse—by a lack of money. Money was both a disease and a vaccine: a cure made from its sickness.

  I hated money. I also wanted money.

  I’m on my third beer when I decide to call Patrick. We haven’t had a conversation since I arrived in Montauk. He probably won’t pick up. It’s Tuesday, he’s at work. Everyone else at the firm will have left early, or maybe they didn’t go in at all—tomorrow is the Fourth, after all. But Patrick will still be there, toiling away, proving his worth to the world in the only way he knows how: by working harder than everyone else. I admire his work ethic, even if it is rooted in a deep sense of insecurity. I decide I’ll leave him a message.

  Except I’m wrong. He does pick up.

  “Hey, you,” I say. My strategy is to be affectionate, warm.

  “Where are you?” His tone is polite, formal. Maybe there are other lawyers around him. Maybe he’s made his team stay late.

  “At Nana’s house.” I’m staring at my reflection in the antique commode’s aged mirror. Immediately, I zero in on what’s wrong with my appearance: barefoot, bitten-down nails, hair up in a messy bun. Not to mention the beer I’m drinking. I feel a jolt of panic, but quickly check myself. Patrick can’t see me. We’re on the phone.

  “Are you coming home?”

  “Not for another three weeks.” I don’t add that he knows this already. I finger the seashells around my neck. Patrick wouldn’t approve of them, either.

  “Your mother said you’d be coming back.” I hear him breathing through his nose. “I thought that’s why you were calling.”

  “I’m calling because I miss you.” A pause. He doesn’t say he misses me, too. “I know that things have been weird between us,” I continue. “But I don’t want to fight. I know I didn’t handle this very well. I shouldn’t have left in such a hurry. I was upset because of what happened at the benefit.”

  “You overreacted.” It’s something he’s said before.

  “No,” I say. I fight the urge to tell him that it was his behavior that was unacceptable: blaming a fainting spell on me, telling me to get my head out of the clouds, insinuating that I had a pill problem. I resist the impulse to say that his obsession with the image we project is getting out of hand. That it’s OK to gain a few pounds or to miss an event. People fall, people faint. People nap. I want to tell him that he doesn’t have to be a winner all the time. That we are allowed to be fallible. That he can let go, unwind. Instead, I simply say, “I want to put it behind us.”

  A pause. “You leaving really hurt me.”

  “I understand.” A lie: I do not. I do not understand Patrick’s mind. I know it works differently from my own. I try to be patient, to appreciate that he suffers from anxiety, that he needs a certain level of emotional validation—and that often leads him to act in a controlling way. But it’s exhausting.

  “Then why are you there?”

  “I have to do this,” I say. “For me and for my grandmother.”

  “I told you we could fight the will in court.”

  “It’s not just about the house. It’s about fulfilling her last wish. She wanted me to be here.”

  “That’s not acceptable.”

  “It’s just for a month, Patrick. It’s not a big deal. And you can come visit.”

  “You know I can’t do that.”

  The troubling part is that he believes he really can’t. Traveling drains him. Anything that takes him away from his routine sends him into an internal spiral. To Patrick, life is a script that must be followed to the letter. He can’t forget a line. He can’t improvise. He can’t handle spontaneity. It’s who he is.

  Is it possible to love someone but not love who they are?

  “Could you at least think about it?” I get up to fetch another beer from the fridge.

  “What if we bought the house?” he asks.

  I hear the sound of a door closing in the background. The air on the other side of the line is now quieter.

  “Patrick, come on.”

  “It’s humiliating to have you out there all summer long.”

  I feel queasy when I hear him say that. Sometimes I think all of Patrick’s life is an exercise to avoid humiliation. “Do you even miss me?” I hear the catch in my voice.

  “I want you home.”

  “Because you miss me?” I insist. “Or because you’re worried about how it looks, having me spend the summer away from you? Do you really think anyone cares, Patrick? I can think of two, no, three lawyers at your firm whose wives are here for the summer. They join them on the weekends. They allow themselves a little bit of fun every now and then.”

  “You’re being difficult.” I don’t have to see him to know he’s speaking through clenched teeth.

  “I’m being honest.” A pause. “For the past decade you got to decide how we spent our summers. Can’t I have a say just this once? Can’t we compromise?”

  An impatient exhale on his end. “We’ll buy the house.” His voice is thin, metallic. “You’ll still get to keep it. Just come home. You belong with me.”

  It’s like talking to a child. A rich, entitled brat.

  “I don’t want to buy the house, I want to inherit it.” I take a deep breath. I can feel my skin prickling with frustration. “I want to honor Nana’s wishes.”

  “What’s more important: your dead grandmother or your husband?”

  I gasp. I can’t believe he just said that.

  “I’m serious, Julie. I want you here.” He delivers these four last words slowly, carefully. They sound like an ultimatum.

  I feel something come apart inside me.

  “This isn’t about you, Patrick,” I begin, a wave of indignation crashing in my chest. “This is about me. My childhood home. My grandmother.” My voice goes up a notch. I don’t care. “If you can’t be flexible, then at least be supportive. I’m sick of everything being about you. You, you, you!” My throat hurts. I may have yelled this last bit.

  “You’re being irrational.” His voice is cool, collected. It’s infuriating.

  “Go to hell, Patrick.” I’m screaming. Cassie can probably hear me.

  I hear him suck the air through his teeth. “I don’t know what’s happened to you, Julie. I barely recognize you. First you stuff yourself with junk food and sleep all day. Then you leave our home, after everything I’ve done for you. I wanted to give you the benefit of the doubt, but I think you’ve gone off the rails. I’m beginning to think you were better off when you were popping those pills
.”

  “Popping pills?” I hear my tone: shocked, horrified. “I took a couple of Xanax because my grandmother had just died!”

  “Then do me a favor and take a Xanax now,” he says, acidly. “I’d rather have a wife who’s asleep all day than hysterical.”

  I end the call. I don’t even think about it. I just do it.

  I stare at my phone, slack-jawed. How dare he talk to me like that? My pulse quickens. The living room is now spinning. I take a seat on the rocking chair. A mistake: I need a steadier surface.

  A beeping noise floods my mind. A sliver of smoke is coming from the kitchen. I turn around, blinking. I must be imagining things. But, no—I’ve left the burner on. Smoke has caught on to a cloth potholder. There’s a small fire.

  A fire. In Nana’s kitchen!

  I throw the potholder inside the large, farmhouse sink. The alarm won’t stop beeping. I climb onto the dining table, using a tea towel to fan out the fire detector.

  “What’s going on?” Cassie is standing by the stairs. Her face is flushed.

  “I must’ve left the stove on.” I have to yell because the alarm is deafening.

  “That’s not helping.” She crouches in front of the cabinet under the sink and takes out a fire extinguisher. How did she know it was there? “Here, let me.”

  “No, I’ll do it.” I grab the red tube.

  “It’s fine,” she says, irritated. She climbs on top of the table.

  It happens in the blink of an eye: we bump into each other and come stumbling down onto the floor. Cassie goes down first. I land right on top of her, feeling a thud in my leg. I roll off her, groaning in pain.

  “Why did you do that?” she says. “I was handling it.”

  My head is still thumping because of the blaring noise. I’m not interested in another fight, not today. I’m relieved when the fire alarm stops shrieking.

  “I just wanted to help,” I whisper. Something stirs inside me, something not altogether unpleasant. This tableau we’re in, it reminds me of how we became friends in the first place. It’s enough to make my heart smile. Maybe this is Nana interfering from above. Maybe this is the push we need to—

  “Next time you want to help, just do nothing.” Cassie’s brittle tone cuts me. I feel the hope inside me begin to evaporate. “You could’ve burned down the house.”

  “But I—”

  “Just stop, OK? Stop cooking. Stop cleaning. You’re not Nana.”

  What does that mean: I’m not Nana? “I was trying to be nice.”

  “I know, it’s all you can do. Be nice.” Her face is now red.

  “How is that a bad thing?”

  She lets out a high-pitched, animalistic grunt. It’s possible that my sister has gone mad.

  “It’s bad enough that I’m stuck in this house with you!” Cassie says. “Is it too much to ask that you not burn it to the ground?”

  In that moment, a primal nerve explodes inside me. I am a bear that’s been poked one too many times. That’s been let down one too many times. By grief. By Patrick. By my silly imagination. And now by Cassie.

  “Maybe you think you can get away with this kind of behavior because no one else will call you on it. So I’ll say it: you’re a bitch, Cassie!”

  I don’t wait for a response. I race up the stairs, the boldness that allowed me to stand up to her quickly evaporating.

  I don’t want her to see me cry.

  Fifteen

  Cassie

  Tuesday, July 3rd

  This isn’t me. I know how to keep my cool, how to control my emotions.

  I don’t know what made me snap like that. It’s true that Julie was massively irresponsible—who forgets to turn off a stove? But I didn’t have to come down on her like that.

  It occurs to me that I might have scared her off. Maybe she retreated to her room to pack. Maybe she’s forfeiting our claim to the house—and it will be our claim. The will leaves no room for interpretation: we either both stay here for a month, together, or we both lose the house. I can’t let that happen. I swallow the fully formed lump in my throat and go up to her room.

  Her door is open. She’s sitting on her old bed, hugging her knees. I can tell she expects an apology by the way she meets my gaze. She isn’t getting one. I look around: her suitcases are neatly stacked behind the door. She hasn’t been packing. I am oddly relieved.

  “The fire extinguisher is in the cabinet under the sink,” I say, standing by the door. “In case your pyromania strikes again.”

  “Fine.”

  The smart move would be to walk away or to defuse the situation. But her stance is making me angrier. She doesn’t get to sit there looking like a wounded deer. Not when she was the one who insulted me.

  “You’ve made your point. No need to sulk up here.”

  “Who says I’m sulking?” It’s unfair, how pretty she looks: bright eyes, rosy cheeks, dark, cascading hair. She’s even more beautiful when she’s hurt—it’s something about her vulnerability.

  “What else am I supposed to think? You use an awful word to describe me and then you come up here to do God knows what.” I don’t add that her calling any woman the b-word is an affront against feminism.

  “What God? You’re an atheist.”

  I scoff derisively. It’s so typical of Julie to assume that time has stood still over the past decade. It doesn’t occur to her that I could be an altogether different person. For all she knows, I could’ve found religion, joined a cult, become a nudist!

  OK, the last one would’ve been fairly obvious by now—we are sharing a house.

  “I’ve watched your interviews.” She rubs the back of her neck.

  I raise my eyebrows. I don’t want to, but I think of Rachel’s comment, the one about Julie missing me. Could it be true?

  “Just try to be more careful when you cook.”

  “I’m careful.”

  “You’re obviously not.”

  “Accidents happen.” She turns to face the window. The water is a pale blue, with just a few whitecaps off in the distance.

  “This wasn’t just any accident. You almost set the house on fire. Nana’s house. Full of Nana’s things. So I don’t care how careful you’re being, be more.”

  She won’t look me in the eye. It’s unnerving. She should be taking responsibility for what she did. She should be apologizing.

  “Could you…stop?” She scowls. “I’m tired of being told what to do. I’m not a child.”

  “You’re acting like one.” It’s true. Responsible adults do not leave the stove on.

  Julie scoffs and looks at me with an expression that approximates anger.

  “Well?” I continue, undeterred. “Aren’t you going to apologize?”

  I wait, but she remains silent. There’s a tension around her mouth. Her cheeks are now red. Does she really think I’m going to walk away before she recognizes the severity of what she’s done?

  “Are you even listening?” I say. “Get your head out of the clouds.”

  “Stop it.” She covers her ears.

  “Stop what? Trying to talk sense into you?”

  She lowers her hands. “I don’t need you to talk sense into me.”

  “If only that were true.”

  “I don’t appreciate you coming into my room to scold me.” Her face is blotchy, red. Beads of sweat are gathering at her forehead.

  “And I don’t appreciate you acting like a child.” I pause. “A forgetful, hysterical child.”

  “Now I’m hysterical again! Just what I needed to hear.” What is she talking about? This is the first time I’ve called her hysterical. But I don’t get a chance to ask because she continues, her eyes stormy. “What’s next? Are you going to tell me to take a Xanax, too?”

  The shock is like falling through ice—cold, painful. I wince.

  She takes in my reaction. I know this because her face twists into an expression of understanding. And then horror.

  “Cassie, I’m sorry,” she says. G
one is the edge in her tone. “I didn’t mean it.”

  I look down at my arm. It’s stinging. I see why: I’ve dug my nails into my skin. I take a deep breath. I’m not letting her get away with such a cruel, cowardly comment.

  “I’m sure you didn’t,” I say. “Just like your mother didn’t mean to kill mine.” I turn around to leave, slamming the door on my way out.

  Miss me? The woman doesn’t even like me.

  I race down the stairs. I need to leave this place, if only for a few hours. I’m two steps from the landing when I hear something falling on the ground. A picture frame.

  I sit on the last step and pick up the photo. The fall has knocked it out of its pretty wooden frame. I turn it around. It’s an old one, taken on my sixth or seventh birthday. We’re all standing around the dining table—Nana holding me up on her lap, Gramps next to her. My mom is to our right, holding a glass of something in her hand—whiskey maybe?—and my father is to the left, his fist thrust in the air like he’s celebrating some type of victory. Earlier that year, he’d left the house for several weeks, possibly months—I don’t quite remember now. I didn’t know he’d been staying at Julie’s house. Back then, I didn’t know Julie existed. I remember this day, though. Nana baked me a triple-chocolate cake with marshmallow frosting. White on the outside, black on the inside. I didn’t want anyone to eat it. It was too pretty—and it looked delicious.

  “I’ll bake you another one,” Nana had said, cutting a big piece for Gramps. “And I’ll give your mom the recipe.” I didn’t say, “Mom doesn’t bake,” because I knew it made Nana sad to hear about my parents’ lack of domestic bliss.

  Nana had kept her promise, baking a total of eight cakes that summer. Eight delicious cakes that I ate over a period of two months—the wonders of a child’s metabolism.

  I study our tiny faces. I don’t look like an anxious kid. My mom doesn’t look drunk. My father doesn’t seem angry.

  We look normal. Happy, even.

  A picture may be worth a thousand words, but, in this case, they are all lies.