Page 35 of Our Last Vineyard Summer

Louisa made a face, then paused as Aggie asked, “Can I ask you something personal, Mom?” Louisa lingered in the doorway as she tucked her ruffly blouse into her bright blue shorts, looking like Sandy fromGrease.

“Sure. You know I’m an open book,” her mother said.

“Did you ever regret marrying Dad? Did you ever wonder if you would have been happier with someone else?”

Betsy flopped down on the tufted leather sofa against the windows, a series of thin quilts spread across the seat to cover the cracks in the leather. Louisa came back into the room and sat beside her, all of them listening to the distant voices of boaters drifting through the window in the silence that followed.

Her mother leaned back in her chair, pressing her bare feet against the desk drawer. “I want to say no, because I never loved anyone but Charlie.” She twirled a pencil in her fingers like a baton. “And yet, I have to say yes, sometimes. Your father was a complicated man. He had so much unfinished inside him. I always saw him as a type of Humpty-Dumpty; he’d glued all his pieces back together so seamlessly, and yet I could see the cracks. He could feel them.”

Betsy pressed against the sofa back, feeling like she had to say something in case her father’s spirit was sitting on the edge of the windowsill listening. “But he was good to us.”

Louisa laughed in that condescending way she always did when she found her sisters intolerable. “Oh, Betsy. Being the youngest certainly shielded you from the worst of it, didn’t it?”

“Even though things were complicated with Mom and him, hewasgood to us,” Betsy said. Something about the way her sister saidthe worst of itleft a swishing sensation in her middle. “Just because you didn’t get along with him doesn’t mean he was a bad person.”

Virgie came to sit beside Betsy, placing a warm hand on her bony knee. “Charlie was a good person, one of the best, but he was layered. Just like we’re all layered.”

“Is that what you would call it?” Louisa’s eyes bore into her mother like a spear. Then she spun out of the room. “This conversation is getting depressing. I’m going downstairs.”

“Okay,” her mother said, nodding.

The pounding of her feet vibrated the cottage as Louisa trudged down the steps.

“I know Dad could be hard at times, and I remember that he would get inexplicably sad,” Betsy found herself saying by way of explanation, “but what about when he would take us on the campaign trail and invite us out to talk to the crowd and tell everyone how proud he was of us?”

“Louisa and I despised that.” Aggie crossed her legs and leaned down in a twisted-up stretch. “It’s like we were his show horses.”

“Or when he’d play tag with us on the beach? Or show up at my college with show tickets? Or how we’d go out onSenatorial?” Betsy tried.

Aggie swept her eyes around the room. “He took you out onSenatorial, Betsy. We hated that boat. I’m realizing this with men. They all have something that consumes them more than their wives.”

“And what consumes Henry?” Her mother returned to her desk, glancing over her glasses at Aggie.

“His patients,” Aggie sighed. “The practice. The hospital. They always come first.”

Her mother took a fresh piece of paper and rolled it into the typewriter. This was their cue: it was time for her to work. Betsy imagined the pages sitting in her bottom drawer, the terrible things her mother had been writing about her father. “You must admit, Mom. Dad made everything feel special.”

“Oh, honey,” her mother said. “He really did, and he worked hard not to disappoint you, any of us really. You put him on a pedestal, and he loved that. He wanted you to keep him there.”

Betsy didn’t like how her mother had turned around her words, making her father sound insincere. “I’m so confused. Did I grow up with an entirely different man than Louisa and Aggie?”

Aggie began packing her daughter’s crayons, gathering the coloring books into her arms. “It’s hard to see some of the bad when you’re the favorite.”

Betsy pinched her own thigh, hard. “I was never the favorite. The true favorite in this family is the person not in this room.”

Her mother pressed her eyes closed, then opened them. “I need to write, girls, and just so you know, there is never a constant favorite in a family. My favorite child changes every day, depending on how you’re treating me.”

“Well, most of the days of the week you had the same favorite. It was Louisa, and it still is.” Betsy felt a lump in her throat. She’d never said those words aloud, not even when she was a teenager. Now the feelings were real, something that would need to be wrangled with.

Aggie encouraged Tabby to toddle toward the door. “I don’t know, Betts. I think I was Mom’s favorite.”

Her mother exchanged a knowing look with her middle daughter, a lowered eyebrow and an expression that readShe has no idea what she’s saying.

But it was true. Everything in their family had always revolved around the tender care of Louisa. It was Louisa’s school day that her mother focused on when the girls got home from Sidwell Friends. When Louisa was given a solo in the winter concert in junior year, her mother bragged about it to anyone who would listen. The morning that they dropped Louisa off at college at Barnard, her mother had sat on the steps of the campus library and cried.

Instead, it was Charlie who had taken Betsy to college, just the two of them driving up the New Jersey Turnpike together from Washington. It was her father who bragged to his friends at the yacht club about how well Betsy could tack a sailboat in the wind. Sometimes her father would wake up on Sunday mornings in winter in Washington and take Betsy out for scrambled eggs. Things with her mother had always felt strained in comparison, like her mother was too tired to pay her much mindbecause she was busy and the older two had beaten her down. While Betsy knew her mother loved her, in the same way you know that the sun will be highest in the sky at noon, there had been a hierarchy in the way she and her sisters were treated, with Louisa reigning queen in her mother’s heart, and the rest of them fumbling to remain relevant.

Things had been feeling okay, maybe even good, these last few weeks. Betsy had received an apology from Louisa. She was feeling close to Aggie again. She loved her job at the yacht club. But she could feel a vibration, a negative sound pushing some long-held belief out of the broken recesses of her heart, and as much as Betsy didn’t want to say anything to stir up emotions right now, the words were already leaving her mouth.

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