Page 8 of Sister of the Bride

I suggest an Uber, but Polly is adamant that she wants to take the T—something about it being vital to her reentry into the United States.

“I’ve been listening to delicate British voices implore me to mind the gap for months. I’m ready for garbled Southie accents to bark at me about Green Line delays,” she explains.

So we board the Silver Line to South Station, gratefully letting the bus driver heave Polly’s suitcases onto the luggage rack.

“Did your stuff multiply?” I ask, eyeing the two extra-large suitcases along with the rolling carry-on and her tote.

“I bought an extra suitcase to bring stuff home. It was cheaper than shipping!”

We make our way to the open seat in the middle that straddles the two segments of the bus. As kids, we loved to ride in this spot when we headed to Logan to pick up Nonna’s cousins visiting from Sicily. Nonna always had to leave us alone there, because the way the floor twisted and the seats bounced made her carsick. But we loved it. And still do, apparently.

I eye the two enormous suitcases and wonder where Polly’s going to put all that stuff. Our attic room has always been a cozy little nook with barely enough space for our twin beds, desks, and dressers, and as we’ve grown over the years, it’s only become more dorm-like. I’ve mostly had it to myself over the last eight years, since I lived at home while going to UMass Boston, working at the restaurant between classes. Polly spent her four years at Harvard living on campus, then headed off to a cramped studio in New Haven for grad school. This will be the first time we’ve been back together in the attic since we were eighteen, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t excited. Polly will be spending the summer revising her dissertation and preparing to defend it while she job-searches. Until she knows what college will be lucky enough to have her as its newest art history professor, we’ll be roomies again. I will happily overlook her clothes hoarding and the fact that she talks in her sleep. I’m just so damn happy to have my sister back.

“Okay, so I’ve got a whole list of ideas to facilitate your, what did you call it,reentryinto Boston life.” The bus shudders to a start, and I pull out my phone, where I’ve been making a list basically since the moment Polly took off six months ago. “The MFA has a new Basquiat exhibition that we should for sure check out, and the Brattle is showingEmpire Recordsnext week. Oh, and Mr. Tanner said he’d be happy to spot us some Sox tickets this summer, we just need to pick a date.” I make a note to follow up with one of our favorite regulars, who happens to work in the Red Sox front office. “There’s also the summer concert series on the Esplanade, so we should go through and see what looks good, and I want to plan a trip out to Mendon to hit the drive-in. Pizza, beer, and a double feature of some Marvel something. Sounds good, right?VeryAmerican.”

“Easy, trigger.” Polly reaches over and covers the screen of my iPhone, lowering it gently to my lap like a hostage negotiator. “Put the calendar down slowly so no one gets hurt.”

“Ha-ha. What’s the problem? Don’t worry, I’m not expecting to monopolizeallyour time. I know you’ve got your dissertation, Madame Genius.”

“It’s mostly written,” Polly says. She bites her lip, a telltale sign that she’s holding something back. She glances at her own phone for, like, the eleventy billionth time since we sat down. But before I can ask what’s on her mind, the bus shudders to a stop at South Station and passengers jump up as if there’s a prize for getting off with all your luggage first. Joke’s on them—it’s just extra time spent inhaling hot bus fumes in the tunnel.

We wrestle Polly’s bags off the rack, down the steps, and onto the platform, me pulling the largest suitcase and Polly dragging the other two. And with the crowds streaming towards the various train lines, there’s no chance to question her about summer plans, because we’re swallowed up in a sea of commuters and tourists, couples consulting maps and parents wrangling tantrumming toddlers. We reach the Red Line platform just as a train whooshes into the station, and it’s not until we’re cramming into the car that we can finally talk again.

“I missed this,” Polly says, though I notice she doesn’t inhale quite as deeply as she did at the airport. Which is wise, because the man dressed as Ben Franklin sitting next to us smells like he hasn’t had a shower since 1776.

“I’m sorry, you missed rickety cars that smell like an unholy mix of Dunk’s and BO?”

“Believe it or not, yes?” Polly leans against the pole and braces herself as the train departs the station. “I mean, I loved London. It was an incredible experience, and I’m so lucky that I got to travel around Europe a bunch too. Tuscany, Mykonos, Barcelona, Brussels…oh my god, I ate so much food and saw so much art, it’s a wonder my stomach didn’t explode and my eyeballs didn’t fall out of my head.”

“Where’d you get the nose ring?” I ask, poking my finger at the thin silver ring, shiny and new.

“We did a weekend in Capri, and I decided to go for it,” Polly says, catching her reflection in the darkened glass of the subway car. Her cheeks flush with a rosy glow as she tilts her chin.

“Ah, so that explains the tan,” I say. I run my fingers across a constellation of freckles on Polly’s shoulder. “I thought you seemed a little too sun-kissed for someone who just spent six months in a country famous for its rain.”

Polly blushes from her cheeks to her chest. There’s definitely more of a story here than a few European side trips.

Polly’s always been the more adventurous of the two of us. She was first up the tree, off the top of the monkey bars, and under the biggest waves. As a person who likes to make sure something is safe before I do it, it was unbelievably helpful to be born with my very own crash test dummy of a sister. When Polly pumped her legs on the swings until the chains felt loose, then jumped off and broke her arm? I knew not to do that. But when she popped up on her second try surfing on the Cape, I decided maybe I could give it a whirl too. (I wiped out three times and lost my bathing suit top before I decided surfing wasn’t for me.) I wasn’t at all surprised when Polly announced that she was moving to a new country where she knew nobody. And from the tan and the smile and the general sunshine oozing off of her, maybe it’s something I might want to do too.

If I can find a reason to leave the restaurant for six months.

“It’s just nice to be home, you know?” Polly says. “Familiar.”

“Love that dirty water,” I reply like a reflex.

“Boston, you’re my home,” Polly sings, her voice lilting along to the melody of the Standells song Dad used to sing while stirring giant pots of Bolognese. It’s the kind of memory that jumps up and catches me by the throat every once in a while, a hard shake that reminds me Dad is actually gone. And as good as it feels to have Polly back, it also serves as a reminder that things can never be like they once were, like they were the last time Polly lived at home and Dad would clomp up the attic stairs to wake us up for school singing “That’s Amore.”

The day Dad died marked a clear before and after, a fracture point when something in our family felt like it broke apart. I feel like I’ve been holding the pieces together with my bare hands ever since.

And my hands are getting awfully tired.

Chapter4

Toby

Why did Billy get fired from the banana factory?

Pippin

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