by Nancy Star
“And if they forget?” Solly asked.
“Always with the worst. In that ridiculous scenario you’ll hear from me tomorrow when Evelyn comes. Her house is close. Just past the dump and around the bend. Happy?”
“You call, I’ll be happy.” He gave kisses, top of the head, to each of the children, and then little kisses to Glory, one time so close they banged teeth, which made them both laugh.
They all watched as he trudged up the block to the train. As soon as he turned the corner, Glory clapped her hands. “Chip-chop. Put the suitcases in the car while I change.”
She was zipping up her dress when she came outside. “What do you think?” She twirled around to show it off. “Darling, right?” The dress was new, blue, crocheted, and short. To Ginger it looked a poor choice for a long drive, but she nodded along with everyone else, doing her best to look convincing.
Glory hustled them into the car and then announced she had to scoot over to Evelyn’s to get some last-minute instructions. As soon as she disappeared into the Clarke house, Mimi began complaining. “It’s hot in the car. I’m going to die from heat.”
Callie turned to Charlie. “Can you die from heat?”
“You can die from anything.”
“I’m half-dead,” Mimi said. Charlie got out and started digging in the dirt. “I’m three-quarters dead,” she said, and Callie got out to help him. “I’m ninety-nine hundred and ninety-nine percent dead.” She lay down across the seat.
Ginger saw the Clarkes’ front door crack open. “Get up.” She leaned out the window and called, “Get in.” She took in the signs of her mother’s mood change, shoulders hunched, eyes to the ground. “Sit up,” she hissed, and this time Mimi listened.
By the time Glory got in the car, they were all sitting, hands neatly folded in laps. She gazed out the window. “Well.” She rubbed her temples. “How do you like them apples?”
“What apples?” Mimi asked. “What happened?”
“What happened is Paul Clarke moved out last night. No warning. What do you think about that?” Ginger didn’t know what to think. “Which means Evelyn’s not going to Martha’s Vineyard tomorrow. And Casper—well, what do you think he’s going to do once he hears his sister’s home, alone, abandoned.” Again, no idea.
“Are they getting divorced?” Mimi asked. She sounded dangerously cheerful.
“I don’t want to get divorced,” Callie added quietly.
“Good god. Children don’t get divorced. Callie, are those tears? You know tears are not for the car. Tears are for the privacy of your room with the door closed and the shades drawn.”
“We have blinds,” Mimi pointed out.
Glory, talking over her, didn’t hear. “There’s plenty worse things in the world than divorce.” She looked in the rearview mirror. “Like having a bunch of glumsters stare at the back of your neck all day, for example.”
They quickly rearranged their mouths into smiles that wouldn’t fool a dog.
“We can stay home.” Ginger tried to sound cheery. “There’s fun things to do at home.”
“I’d give that a two,” Glory told her. “On second thought, a one-minus. You got to put feeling in your eyes. That’s what good acting is about. If you feel it in your eyes, people will buy it’s true.”
Mimi opened the back door. “Come on. Let’s go hide behind the couch until Daddy comes home. Then when he walks in, we can all jump up and yell, Surprise! We’re still here!”
“Close that door right now.” Glory turned on the engine. Hearing about Solly seemed to have decided things. “We’re going. On vacation.” The car bucked as she shifted to reverse. “And we’re going to have fun. Loads and loads of fun. Agreed?” Her brood of bobbleheads nodded vigorously.
Suitcases and sand buckets blocked the back window, but that didn’t stop Glory from accelerating down the driveway. She slowed briefly as she pulled out onto the street, sped up again to the corner, slowed as she made the turn, and continued, herky-jerky, to the highway.
The sea was calm, the sky was clear, the boat was big, the crossing smooth. Ginger felt sick.
“You got your father’s stomach.” Glory rooted around in her purse, dug out a packet of Ritz, and handed them over. “Don’t inhale them. Nibble.” She opened her journal and turned to the sea.
The crackers made Ginger queasier, so timing it with one of Glory’s languorous blinks, she snuck them to Charlie, who raced with Callie to the other side of the deck to feed the gulls.
Mimi tugged at Ginger’s sweater. “Want to play Spit? Want to play Spite and Malice?”
Ginger didn’t want to play anything, so Mimi sat on the deck and took out her jacks. But something about this—the thump of the ball or the sweep of her hand—was annoying Glory. Ginger felt the heat of her mother’s irritation seep into the air.
Her journal banged shut. “Even here? Sitting in the middle of the ocean, I still can’t get a—” Without waiting to hear the rest, Mimi ran off in search of her brother.
Glory closed her eyes, and Ginger watched as her mother’s slender fingers danced over to her gauzy kerchief, tucking in runaway strands of her honey-kissed hair. Her hand moved to her cheeks, then her neck, then her mouth. Ginger wondered what she was checking for and then what she was smelling that made her nostrils flare? Her subject swiveled, polarized sunglasses pointing at her. “For god sake, there must be something you can go do.”
She joined Charlie and her sisters, and they all watched the gulls swoop and hover, hoping for more crackers. The boat glided through calm water. The sun painted freckles on their cheeks. The ferry turned and Charlie pointed to the dock. In the distance people were waiting, as if for their arrival.
Then Glory was behind them. “Everybody wave.” She raised her arm and drew a slow arc, back and forth through the air. “See anyone waiting to surprise us? Come on, wave. Who wants to be the best waver?”
Competition between the siblings never ended well. Within moments Callie tried to get closer to the railing and Mimi yelled, “Stop it,” and shoved her. Ginger was about to intervene but Glory beat her to it, her hand clamping tight around Mimi’s wrist. Mimi made her legs go limp, feet dragging as her mother pulled her out of sight.
When a woman in a broad-brimmed hat hurried over to ask if everything was all right, Ginger didn’t hesitate. “My sister gets seasick. If she doesn’t get to the bathroom in time, she’ll throw up all over the deck. One time when she did that, the smell was so bad the rest of us threw up too.” The woman gave a weak smile and withdrew.
Like statues waiting to be brought back to life, they stayed where they were, even after the boat bumped the dock with a jolt. They heard her before they saw her—Glory rising out of the stairwell like a goblin. “Hurry up. Chip-chop. You’re holding up the works.”
On the vehicle deck no one spoke, not even when Glory hurried them past their car for the second time. “Good lord, someone stole it.”
Mimi pointed. “It’s right there.” She slid in first, cheeks still burning red. Callie got in next, but she kept a distance in case what happened to Mimi was catching. Charlie scooted in last, leaving Ginger no choice but her usual punishment, the front.
Glory handed her a piece of paper. “Directions. You okay? Course you are.” She brushed Ginger’s hair out of her eyes. “Listen, kiddo.” Her fingertips, moving quickly, felt light as butterfly wings. “You’re my peach, you know that? My little bruised peach.” She turned on a dazzling smile and drove off the boat ramp, onto the island of her dreams.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The November incident—Julia’s Thanksgiving Rebellion—had a rehearsed feel about it that Ginger only noticed after it was over, when she and Richard were in the car on the way to Glory’s. It was then, as she replayed their declarations in her head, that she realized Julia and Nick had taken turns talking, like characters in a play where the playwright decided to make all the dialogue of equal length. She imagined Nick timing it with his phone. Julia went first.
“Nick’s mom isn’t making Thanksgiving this year. She went to Texas.”
“To visit my uncle Brian. He’s my mom’s brother and he’s kinda sick.”
“That’s why she went. That’s why I’m staying here. So Nick’s not alone.”
When they seemed finished with their explanation, Ginger told them she was very sorry to hear about Nick’s uncle, but she didn’t understand why that meant Julia wasn’t coming to Thanksgiving.
“I don’t even like turkey,” Julia said as if that made a difference.
Ginger offered the obvious solution. “Nick doesn’t have to be alone. Bring him with you. Grandma won’t care. You can come,” she told the boy.
They were in the living room, Nick and Julia squashed close together on the sofa, as if they wished they were one person. Nick, tall and gangly, knees rising high in front of him, fiddled with the small silver hoop at the edge of his unruly eyebrow. Ginger thought the hoop hole looked early-stage infected. She considered offering to check it out, but Nick interrupted her thoughts.
“Honestly?” He smirked and shook his head. “Your invitation? Doesn’t sound like you mean it.”
Emboldened, Julia stood her ground. “We’re not going. Why do you even care? Thanksgiving in our family is a total fraud.”
“What does that mean?” This was not the first time Ginger noticed it, that when Julia was with Nick it sometimes felt like they were speaking a language she didn’t understand. She glanced at Richard who shot her a back off look. Registered and ignored. “How is it a fraud?”
Julia used her fingers to count off the infractions. “No one ever says the truth. No one talks about anything real. No one wants to be there. Aunt Mimi’s whole family hates it. Wallace told me when they go to their other grandma’s they don’t sit doing nothing all day. They can be on their phones or go outside. They can go on the roof if they want. It isn’t so snobby and strict.”
Describing a meal at Glory’s as snobby was so off base it wasn’t worth addressing. But the roof? “Have you gone up on the roof?” Richard shot her another unappreciated warning look.
“That’s not the point,” Julia said.
Ginger nodded. If the point was that the Popkins were more fun, she wouldn’t argue. This was partly a matter of numbers. Mimi’s husband, Neil Popkin, was one of six siblings, all of whom had procreated prodigiously. Because of this, Mimi’s three boys, a dainty brood by Popkin standards, had twenty cousins, or maybe now it was up to twenty-five. The extended family included not just grandparents, cousins, aunts, and uncles, but great aunts, second cousins, first cousins once removed. There seemed to be enough of them to make their own country. The country of Popkin. Ginger believed, and Richard agreed, this was what attracted Mimi to Neil in the first place. He came with the protective shield of a clan.
Of course, Mimi would deny it. She was, or pretended to be, unaware of the benefit the chaos of the Popkin clan afforded her. Instead, she complained about how her house was always overfull, and given the size of her house, this was no small feat. Richard referred to the place as the Clue House, because it boasted a study, a library, and a billiard room. There was also a solarium, a media room, a dedicated closet for Neil’s fly-fishing equipment, and a carriage house out back, which Mimi was currently using as a studio, now that she was an artist. Quilts were her current thing. Before she started quilting, she’d been a real estate agent. Prior to that she owned a children’s furniture store. She’d also sold organic cosmetics and ran a small food cooperative. This was in addition to her volunteer work, heading up all the boys’ booster clubs, spearheading the skate park, forming a committee to get rid of the geese in the pond near her house, and fighting to extend the hours of the public library.
By now, Ginger was used to the fact that none of her sister’s pursuits lasted very long. Something was always wrong with them, eventually. It had been the same in college. Like a real-life Goldilocks, Mimi cycled through a big state school, a medium-sized university, and a small liberal arts college, transferring her way to her bachelor’s. After that there was half a year of a master’s in linguistics, two months of landscape architecture, and five days of a three-year midwifery program. The problem with midwifery was too many bodily fluids, plus night work.
As to how many infected tonsils and swollen adenoids Neil, an ENT, had to cure to support a house like theirs, Ginger had no idea, but she assumed it was a lot. Her own house was closer in size to the home they’d grown up in, cozy in her words, or as Mimi would describe it, about a thousand square feet short of quaint.
But no matter how big it was, Mimi’s house was not big enough to handle the demands of the Popkin clan. Every relative—Ginger’s tiny family included—knew that the spare key was under the green watering can at the back door. There was an alarm system that was never used because the house was never unattended.
Describing her lack of alone time was almost a sport for Mimi. Her weekends were jammed with mandatory family get-togethers and weeknights booked because no Popkin could have a birthday without a full complaint of relatives coming over for coffee and cake. And it wasn’t just birthdays. There was always an occasion to mark. An anniversary, a graduation, a hiring, a firing, someone sick, someone sad. It was brilliant, really. With three boys and a job that changed so frequently, Ginger struggled to keep up, the Popkins were the final impenetrable layer of Mimi’s hazmat suit, a tornado of activity protecting her from all undesirable parts of life, otherwise known as Glory.
Julia’s observation—that Thanksgiving at Glory’s wasn’t fun—was a fair one. Ginger now regretted not trying harder to convince Glory it was time that she and Richard host it for a change. But her mother had been adamant. Thanksgiving, she insisted, was her holiday.
“How about I organize some games?” Ginger proposed to Julia. “The library is running a digital scavenger hunt. We could form teams. We can join online right now.” Julia rolled her eyes. “Okay, how about charades? That would be fun. And if you’re on Grandma Glory’s team, you’re guaranteed to win.”
Her daughter let out an airy hoosh. “A scavenger hunt or charades? Really?”
“Okay, forget a game. Just come. If you want to go outside, go outside. Grandma won’t care. She probably won’t even notice. Going outside is not a problem.”
“It’s not a problem because we are not going.” Emphasis communicated. Julia’s position was clear.
“Sorry, Jules. You have to come. Not coming is not an option.”
But apparently it was.
CHAPTER NINE
Glory leaned closer to the steering wheel. “Make a left where? And don’t mumble. Project.” According to her, navigator-mumbling was the reason she’d overshot the last two turns.
This time Ginger shouted out the instructions. “Make a left where the road splits. Over there.”
Glory scowled but made the left. “I said project. Not scream. Project and e-nun-ci-ate.”
Ginger corrected her volume and enunciated. “Turn right after the clam shack.”
“The what?” Glory scanned the unfamiliar landscape.
Mimi tapped her shoulder. “That thing.” She pointed to a small gray-shingled building where a long line of customers snaked to the parking lot.
“A little notice would be nice next time.” As Glory made the turn, the cars behind her honked, but she drove blithely on, past low stone walls surrounding meadows where sheep and horses grazed, as oblivious to her as she was to them.
Mimi leaned forward and jabbed Ginger in the arm every time she noticed something good. A pond with swans. A sign for afternoon pony rides. An honor farm selling sunflowers. In the far distance, Ginger made out the soft line where the horizon met the sea. The road zigzagged inland. The car coasted beneath a canopy of leaves, tree limbs wrinkled like alligator skin.
Glory slowed. “What next?”
Ginger enunciated. “Go past the store with the blue rowboat in front, and turn right after the climbing tree.”
“That’s what it says? Right after the climbing tree? No street name?”
“No.” This answer seemed wrong, so Ginger tried another. “Yes?”
Behind them, traffic compressed—a pickup truck, a delivery van, a Volkswagen bus—as if the cars were now trying to nudge them along.
Mimi pointed. “There it is.” Glory turned to look. The car swerved. More horns blared.
“For crying out loud.” To avoid getting hit, Glory pulled into a snarl of bushes on the narrow shoulder and stopped. A branch poked through Ginger’s window. Vehicles whizzed by, kicking up pebbles and blowing in a punishment of dust. “Let me see that.” She grabbed the directions. When she finished reading, she let the paper flutter to her lap. This time, she stopped traffic in both directions as she pulled onto the road with a careful seven-point turn.
The sign for “Fisher’s Hollow” was etched into a small piece of wood, the letters painted a faded green. “Excited?” Glory asked as she turned onto the road. The car dipped in and out of a rut. Ginger closed her eyes against the smells of manure, hay, lilies, and skunk. They lurched to a stop. “Well? What do you think?” The house was mostly hidden by a thicket of trees, but Charlie gave a two-finger whistle of approval anyway, which Callie and Mimi seconded with applause. Glory turned to Ginger. “What’s the matter, your majesty? Not up to your standards?”
Because of the trees, Ginger couldn’t make out much. The house was gray and weathered-looking. There were two round windows upstairs and a roof that looked like moss was growing out of it. None of this seemed right to mention. “It’s beautiful,” she said, and her mother smiled.
As they lugged their suitcases over the path of crushed shells past a parched flower garden, Glory picked out what she wanted to see. “Ooh. Beach plums. And those flowers? With the umbrella petals? Those are lady’s slippers. Evelyn told me lady’s slippers are murder to grow, but around here they thrive like nobody’s business.” She rustled around in her purse for a key.