Page 31 of Our Last Vineyard Summer

She glanced inside the wide-open door to her mother’s study. It was the first time she’d been in the house without her mother since she and her sisters hatched their plan the other night. Betsy crept inside the room, the floors creaking underfoot. She felt like she was trespassing, the smell of her mother’s jasmine perfume permanently etched into the air. Crouching down in front of her large wooden desk, Betsy pulled out the drawers, one by one, running her fingers along the depths to see what her mother stowed inside: more books, letters, binders without anything notable inside. In the bottom drawer were files, one devoted to “Book Ideas,” another for “Article Ideas.” A hanging folder labeled MAGAZINEARTICLEShad a collection of clipped glossy pages, while EDITORIALScontained the yellowed edges of aging newsprint.

She rifled through the center drawer, finding pencils and erasers, black flare-tip pens, and a checkbook. Flipping through the mostly empty ledger, she thought of how her father had always complained that her mother didn’t record her expenditures. It was partly why Betsy kept a meticulous checkbook, down to the cent, even if lately she’d been stowing cash in her top drawer; her father had sat with her and her sisters myriad times to teach them to add and subtract on the thin gray lines, pleased when Betsy’s math was correct.

Betsy moved to the opposite side of the desk, opening more drawers. There weren’t any folders, just a stack of typed pages with a paperweight on top. The paperweight was a rock from Fuller Street Beach that Louisa had painted with a rainbow when she was seven or eight. Curious, Betsy lifted the stone off the crisp sheets, realizing by the title “Charlie and Me” and the paper clip holding the pages that she was holding her mother’s latest writing project.

A screen door slammed, and she froze, listening with the intensity of a watchdog and reassuring herself that if it was her mother, she could say that she had only been looking for paper and pen. OnceBetsy heard voices coming from next door and not downstairs, she relaxed into the chair. Resting the pages on her lap, she flipped through.

Charlie wasn’t always the man people thought he was. His complicated past haunted him, making him distant and unforgiving at times, even to his girls. On many occasions he left me feeling uncertain of which husband would come home: the man who would do anything for me and his daughters, or the man who resented us for not being able to chase away his demons for good. I often told him: “You need to stop hiding your pain. A seamless campaign does not create a seamless heart.”

Betsy turned fast to the next page, then the next.

He could be impulsive at times, and he expected me to jump at his every need. One morning I woke up in our Washington bedroom and watched him dress in a suit, knotting his tie. “I have a meeting with Kennedy,” he told me. “I want you to come.” I yawned, barely awake.

“But Charlie,” I said, “what will I do with the girls?”

“Kennedy is bringing his wife, and I think he wants you there, or maybe she does.” Charlie put his hands on his hips and pouted. “Believe it or not, you’re the draw these days.”

That was our life at times, a mad scramble to make a meeting, to get a law passed, to get people on our side.

There were other vignettes, all of them snapshots that told stories of her mother and father’s years in Washington. The stories didn’t seem to be in any sort of order date-wise. Was this a diary or just her mother’s way of recording memories? The information was much too private, and it made her father seem like a shadowy villain in a comic book. What did her mother mean when she said,I didn’t know what husband was going to come home? There were certainly dark times in herchildhood. Betsy could remember the winter her father stayed in his room for weeks. Her mother tended to him in bed, even though he didn’t look sickly, telling Betsy and her sisters that he wasn’t feeling like himself, until one day he returned to the Hill.

Sometime later, Louisa had shown her and Aggie their father’s pill bottle, telling them he suffered from sadness.

Her father had been prone to mood swings, too, she could acknowledge that, but that was who he was. Just because he sometimes arrived home from the Senate in a tirade, stomping about the house and yelling at the girls to pick up their toys, didn’t make him a bad person, at least not to Betsy. He was stressed. He was under pressure. But he wasn’tmean. With someone as brilliant as Charlie Whiting, Betsy’s mother said, the good came with the bad.

She returned the pages to the drawer, setting the paperweight in place and sliding it closed.

First, her mother announced the sale of the house, and now, she had a secret writing project. These last few weeks, she and her sisters had been worried that their mother was lonely and sad, but maybe she wasn’t lonely. Maybe she was filled with guilt that she was about to turn their family inside out like a soiled shirt, holding it up for all to see.

The buoy bell chimed with the choppy waves. Betsy opened a bag of potato chips, even if it was early morning, and ate them by the handful while standing at the kitchen counter. Then she broke them into pieces over an omelet just like she’d seen Carlos do at the diner; it was one of the most popular items on the breakfast menu and perfect for Sunday morning. When Aggie trudged in wearing a pair of lime-green baby-doll pajamas, Betsy was lost in thought. “Morning,” Aggie said, settling Tabby into her booster seat with Mikey cradled in her arms. “Are those potato chips?”

Betsy grabbed another handful of Lay’s. “Take a bite. I promise, it’s good.” Last night’s wine pulsed in her temples. After they got homefrom music on the lawn, they had played Scrabble on the porch, wrapping themselves in blankets. It was a tradition her mother and sisters had in summer: Shower off the sand and salt water from the beach, eat dinner, and then pull out the family’s favorite board game and set it up outside under the stars. Theirs was the serious kind of Scrabble board that spun so every player could see the words in the correct orientation, and they’d played until midnight, since Louisa had demanded a rematch after she was pummeled in the first game. She’d won the second, everyone laughing when she’d taken the top with the word “fiz,” an unusual but legal spelling of “fizz” on a triple word, earning forty-five points. Betsy didn’t bring up what she’d inadvertently discovered in her mother’s study, but she’d been tense, guzzling multiple glasses of wine, sticking her tongue out at Louisa when she asked her if that was her third glass.

She’d woken in a contemplative mood, and as Aggie warmed Mikey a bottle, Betsy sat at the table with her bag of chips. “Do you ever think it strange that the world seems to change every day, but you get back to the island and time stands still? The house looks like it did when I was five. Sometimes I feel like a little kid standing here cooking breakfast.”

Aggie turned off the stove and pulled the bottle out of the hot water. “You don’t remember the house when you were five, do you?”

“I remember Louisa stealing my Tiny Tears doll and holding her head under water in the bathtub to see what would happen.”

At that moment, Louisa walked into the kitchen. “What did I do now?” Her sister snickered when Betsy repeated the story. “You acted as though I was trying to kill that doll, and I actually got punished.” Louisa slid into the banquette, sniffing the omelet, then taking a tiny bite and moaning.

Betsy needed to make her mother one. She folded over the eggs in the pan, lost in thought, frustrated when some pieces of the omelet stuck. Finding those pages in her mother’s drawers had given her anoverwhelming desire to protect this house, like preserving it was the only way to preserve her family. They had always felt like a family on this island, more than they ever felt like one in Washington, where cameras followed and time with her parents grew scarce. She tried to remember what it had felt like to be a kid here, bare feet and climbing trees, riding bikes until dark and throwing fishing lines into the harbor alongside James.

“Can you believe another family will be living here by fall? We’ll never see the elm tree on the front lawn turn yellow again.”

“I’m just afraid one of those slick financiers from Boston will tear this place down,” Aggie said, holding the bottle to Mikey’s lips.

“Mommy wouldn’t be able to bear it.” Louisa said it as their mother walked in the kitchen in a silk robe and moccasins, her hair pulled back into a chignon.

“Why do you all look so glum?” she said with a chuckle.

“We’re just going to miss the house,” Aggie said, careful not to sound like she was casting blame.

Her mother’s face remained impassive. She kissed her grandchildren, then carried her omelet outside to the patio, while saying, “Oh girls, people sell houses all the time and move on. We’re going to be okay.”

Betsy flicked on the transistor radio, looking at her mother through the glass doors. “Mom is faking all that positivity. She has to be.”

“Of course she is,” Louisa whisper-yelled back. “Why do you think she went out there? She can’t bear to hear us talking like this.”

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