Page 36 of Our Last Vineyard Summer

“Do you remember that day that I sailed in the regatta off Cape Cod, Mom, and you came to cheer me on? I think I was fourteen.” Betsy waited for her mother to look up from her work. When she did, her mother’s crystalline eyes brightened with recognition. Betsy continued. “I was so excited that you’d come to see me, and as I rounded the point by the lighthouse, I looked for you, thinking you’d be on your feet, clapping. But you were sitting on the beach, at the center of a circle of women, talking about something so important that you didn’t even bother watching the race. I came in second! Maybe it wasn’t first, but it was still good.”

Her mother lowered her pen. “Betsy, honey, where is this coming from? Why am I the bad guy in this story?”

Betsy felt her stomach swirl like she was spinning on a terrible carnival ride. “Because everyone acts like Dad was never around. That he was absent, that he was socomplicated. But Dad was here more than you were. He always paid attention. He was always clapping.”

“Betsy! I was there for everything. Everything you did.”

“You didn’t come to my college graduation! That was a biggie, Mom. You didn’t even come to that dance performance I did at the theater.”

“Those are two events in an entire lifetime.” Her mother rose, reaching her slender fingers out to squeeze Betsy’s elbows. “Was I supposed to turn down a meeting with the president?”

“Yes, Mom. You were supposed to turn that down. I wanted you at my graduation.”

“That’s not fair, Betsy. Your father missed so much, and I missed one thing. In dedication to the movement.”

“Two things,” Betsy said, holding up her fingers in the peace sign. She ran out of the study, leaving her mother with her face contorted into a tight ball, and hid out in the hall bathroom, sitting on the lid of the toilet, willing herself to take a breath. She sniffled, squeezing her dry lips with her calloused fingertips rough from rigging boats, and she stared at the browning grout in the floor. The house would be considered a fixer-upper by real estate agents. She could see the listing already:Charming summer cottage in need of some TLC. Great views!

Her eye returned to the brown grout. It was disgusting; years of dirt built up. Her mind skipped to a different kind of brown that she hadn’t uncovered in her underwear that week or the week before. Another swirl of nausea took hold of Betsy then, her spine tingling with a certain kind of panic.

No one brought up the tension or the conversation again after it ended that afternoon, the weight of their mother and father’s complicated legacy making all three sisters retreat to the television that night. They squeezed onto the living room couch and watchedOne Day at a Time, Alice, andThe Jeffersons. Her mother went to bed just before Betsy’s favorite,The Mary Tyler Moore Hour. Betsy barely paid attention to what was going on in the show, her mind doing the mental math repeatedly. Her last period was early June, or was it end of May? She’d been so busy with her thesis paper to remember exactly, and she remembered having some spotting in June. Did it even count as areal period? Earlier she’d consulted the Steamship Authority calendar pinned to the pantry door, each month featuring a picture of the ferry crossing, and if her last period was a phantom one, then she would be several weeks late.

She could have chalked it up to stress, except for the strange swirling in her stomach she’d been feeling. She’d been eating crackers in bed some nights, which she hadn’t thought odd until now; hadn’t Aggie been hungry around the clock when she was pregnant? If Betsy was, in fact, pregnant, she had to be about nine to ten weeks. After her sister discovered she was having her second, Aggie had told Betsy that the doctor said the fetus was the size of a lima bean. Betsy swallowed down the sour taste of bile. Being pregnant would be an impossible turn. What the hell would she do?

“Calm down,” Betsy whispered to herself, and Louisa turned to her in the glow of the television, a curious look passing over her face.

“Did you just say something?”

Betsy’s lips tightened, then she smiled, not wanting to give away her nerves. “I was telling Mary to calm down. On the show.”

Louisa turned her attention back to the television. A laugh track erupted, Aggie chuckling along with it.

Betsy recoiled at the inevitable. She was going to have to buy a pregnancy test. It wouldn’t be the first time she’d taken one. Her mother had made her go on the Pill at sixteen, which had been one of the biggest arguments she’d ever heard her parents have. A screaming match in their Washington bedroom, her father saying that giving their youngest the Pill was like Virgie giving their daughter license to go out and bed a boy. He’d actually said “bed a boy,” which had given teenaged Betsy and Aggie the giggles as they listened from the bottom of the rowhouse’s steps. “Don’t tell me you think your precious Betsy will wait until she’s married. No woman does, and she shouldn’t have to.”

Her mother did that sometimes. Called her “your precious Betsy.”

Still, after Betsy had lost her virginity to James on an ocean beach one August night, her period hadn’t arrived that September. She’d panicked, taking the Metro to a doctor’s office near Howard University—where she was the only white person in the lobby—and she’d gone in to pee in a cup, waiting for the results by phone: “Negative,” the office said. The whole ordeal had been traumatic enough though that Betsy had been extra careful when she was with Andy. Which was why she was so confused sitting there watchingMary Tyler Moore. How could anything have happened?

I don’t know anything yet, she reminded herself. She would pick up a test tomorrow after work, and she would put her mind at rest.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Betsy dove into the cold sea. She had five minutes before her morning meeting with campers, and she hoped that swimming would still her nerves. Even as she treaded water, though, her thoughts looped back to the worst-case scenario:What if the test is positive?After drying herself off and pulling on a pair of nylon shorts, Betsy got the kids out on the boats in the harbor and tried to lose herself in their endless curiosity. She was grateful when Wiley asked her to work with their most challenging students: three eleven-year-old girls who didn’t feel comfortable on a sailboat. It was the perfect distraction. The girls were wary from the moment they boarded, and when Betsy asked for a volunteer to man the till, the children kept their hands in their laps.

“C’mon, girls. The worst thing that happens is that we capsize and go for a swim.”

“I don’t want to get wet,” complained a girl with dark circles under her eyes, her shoulders freckly.

“We won’t really fall over, right?” The towhead child had legs like string beans. She tugged on the buckles of her orange life vest.

Betsy angled her face to the wind, like she remembered her father doing when they would sail. “You need to be tougher, ladies. You think the boys are out there complaining about getting wet?” She pointed to a pair of campers in yellow life vests taking the wind at full speed, determination on the boys’ faces as they bounded through the chop. “I want you to be so fearless that you believe you can sail this boat no matter how strong the wind is.”

Betsy wanted to be so fearless that she could deal with whatever came next for her, too, and for a moment, the water gave her a sense of invincibility. Out here, she was always okay.

An hour later, the group rounded the curve of land by Edgartown light, and by the time Betsy returned the girls to the dock, she’d felt the children loosen up. While the string-bean girl was biting her lip, the other two had taken turns steering, one hollering “galley ho” when the boat had glided through gentle waves.

Back on land, Betsy unzipped her windbreaker and grabbed her purse from the small wooden locker in the yacht club’s shed. The clouds had parted, and she walked out into the sunshine of Edgartown at three thirty in the afternoon. She planned to take a taxi to Oak Bluffs, where she’d be less likely to run into anyone she knew. How incredible that she could buy a pregnancy test in a store and take it in the privacy of her own bathroom! She walked up the main drag of Edgartown, deciding to check the grocery’s small pharmacy section first. Her eyes traveled over the Pepto-Bismol and Excedrin bottles in the medicine aisle next to the yeast cream and maxi pads. Nothing. Instead, she bought a snack, hurrying outside to the crowded sidewalk only to find James on the curb, along with his dog. He wore the same Nike sneakers, a baseball cap with EDGARTOWNemblazoned across the top.

James offered a tentative smile. “I saw you at the register.”

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