“Hi there,” Bill said, taking a step closer to him. “I’m—”
“Do you know how long I was waiting at the airport? Assuming someone in my family would come and get me? Looking at all the cars driving past, and none of them for me?”
“Uh . . . ,” Rodney said. “Did you tell anyone to pick you up at the airport?”
“Of course I did!” J.J. exploded. “Do you think I would have just . . . just . . .” He trailed off, his expression changing from angry to thoughtful. “Actually, let me check one thing,” he said, pulling his phone out of his pocket and scrolling through it. “Huh,” he said after a moment. “You know, looks like that e-mail never made it out of drafts. Whoopsie.” He put his phone back in his pocket. “So hi!” He strode over to us, now smiling. “How’s it going, family?” He and Rodney did one of their back-pounding hugs, then he gave me a quick one-armed shoulder squeeze.
“Hey,” I said, squeezing him back. “Glad you’re here.”
“Good to be here,” he said, then headed to Linnie, giving her a bear hug that picked her up off her feet. “Happy almost wedding!” He spun her around once and then set her back on the ground and smiled down at her. “How are you feeling? Happy? Excited?” He glanced back at Rodney and lowered his voice theatrically. “Second thoughts? Cold feet?”
“Stop it,” Linnie said, shaking her head even though she was smiling. “Welcome home.”
“Thanks,” J.J. said, stepping over the bag he’d dropped and pushing himself up on the counter. He reached for my coffee and took a sip of it before making a face and pushing it away. “God, how can you drink that, Charlie? It’s like drinking warm milk.”
“Hey,” I said, trying to sound mad and knowing I was failing. The kitchen with my siblings in it was my favorite place to be, and it was finally starting to feel like home again. “Get your own coffee.”
“But I just got here,” he protested, and I rolled my eyes. Jameison Jeffrey Grant was eight years older and six inches taller than me, with unruly light-brown curly hair that he’d only really learned to deal with a few years ago, thanks to some Swedish grooming paste Linnie found for him in Boston. He had brown eyes like Mike and our mom, and eyebrows that Linnie had once described as “Bert chic.”
“So what’s happening?” he asked, peering into the donut box. “Is Danny here yet, or can I take both maple frosteds?”
“He’s on the six a.m. out of San Francisco,” I said, hurrying over to the donut box. “So he’ll be here at two. And you’re not taking both donuts.” I pulled a maple frosted out of the box, put it on a plate, and then grabbed the plastic wrap out of the cabinet to cover it.
“Oh, so Danny’s schedule you know,” J.J. said, shaking his head. “Scoff.”
“You didn’t actually tell anyone,” Rodney pointed out. “How did you even get here?”
“Took a cab,” J.J. said, grabbing a donut, then pausing. “Oh! He’s actually still out there. I just came in to get cash to pay him.”
“The cab is out there with the meter running?” I asked.
“Yep,” J.J. said, taking a bite of his donut. “Who’s got cash? I’ve only got nine dollars, and half of that’s in change, and half of that’s Canadian.”
“Why Canadian?” Rodney asked, sounding genuinely curious.
“From the last time we played the Blue Jays.”
“How are you a functioning adult?” Linnie asked, throwing up her hands. “How on earth did MIT let you graduate?”
“You have to bribe the right people,” J.J., his mouth full of donut as he gave her a wink. The fact that J.J. had held a fairly important job for years now, apparently successfully, had been a bit of a shock to me as well. But the fact was, out of all my siblings, he’d had the most consistent success. He was a quantitative analyst for the Pittsburgh Pirates, using sabermetrics data to help build the strongest team possible and, therefore, get the most wins. At least, that’s how he explained it to me—I still didn’t really understand it, even after he helpfully gifted me a copy of Moneyball one Christmas. All I really knew was that J.J. had found a way to get paid for combining his two loves, math and baseball.
“You didn’t come in from New York, did you?” Linnie asked.
He shook his head. “Hartfield-Putnam.” Hartfield-Putnam Airport was a tiny airport twenty minutes from us, but if J.J. hadn’t flown in there, he would have landed at one of the big New York airports, all an hour and change away, leading to a much more expensive taxi fare.
Linnie nodded, then immediately grabbed her right earlobe, and J.J. and Rodney followed suit—this was our not it gesture, one we’d all been doing so long I didn’t know the origin of it.
“Seriously?” I asked, sounding more annoyed than I really was. This was one of the thousands of tiny things that only happened when we were together, one of the things you didn’t know you’d miss until it was gone.
“Can’t be slow on the uptake,” J.J. said, taking another sip of my coffee, then making the same disgusted face and setting it aside.
I didn’t have any cash on me—in fairness, I was still in my pajamas—so I grabbed two twenties out of the mason jar that had always held the cash for things like pay the pizza guy and tip the delivery person and buy up all the Thin Mints. It had always sat on a teetering stack of cookbooks, but there were only two left there now. I spun the lid shut on the jar, then pushed my way out of the kitchen door. The sun was shining weakly, and it was a bit overcast. I crossed my fingers that everything would clear up by tomorrow as I hurried across the wooden deck that wrapped around the back of the house. Beyond the deck, the backyard was a huge expanse of green, almost a perfect rectangle that backed up into the woods bordering our house. My dad’s garden ringed the front and the sides of the yard, but there was a big, open empty space in the center that was free from plantings. It’s where the tent would be set up and where the wedding would take place tomorrow, the spot that we’d always campaigned for a pool to go, without any success. The closest we’d gotten was a trampoline that split the space between my dad’s greenhouse and my mom’s office.
I crossed the deck, went down the stone steps, past the side entrance to the garage, and out onto the driveway. Sure enough, there was a black Stanwich Taxi idling there.
The driver inside was staring down at his phone, so I knocked on the glass. He jumped, and looked over at me, then rolled down the passenger-side window. “Hey,” I said, leaning in slightly. “Sorry about that. I have your money.” I glanced at the meter and saw that it was thirty-five dollars, and handed him the twenties, hoping the change was somewhere in the realm of the right tip amount.
“Thanks,” he said, taking the money from me and hitting a button on his meter, then looking back at the house. “Have you guys called me before? I keep thinking I know this house from somewhere.”
I glanced at where he was looking. Our house was from the turn of the century and had started out as a Victorian, but over the course of years and owners, it had Frankensteined (Frankenstein’s monstered, Danny always corrected) with extra additions and wings, into something that no longer belonged to any one architectural style. But it was still striking—three stories, white with black trim and green shutters, a widow’s walk at the top of the house and a wide front porch that got festooned with pumpkins in autumn and twinkle lights from Thanksgiving until approximately Valentine’s Day.
It would have been familiar to the millions of readers of Grant Central Station, since the fictional Grants lived in an identical house, down to the color of the shutters. And I had a feeling this was why the taxi driver recognized it. “My mom draws a comic strip,” I said proudly. “Maybe that’s where you know it from?” The second after I’d asked this, I felt my smile falter as I realized I’d just used the present tense, and that it was no longer technically correct.
The guy’s face cleared, and he nodded. “I think so . . . the comic strip about the beagle, right? The one that’s always eating everything?”
I nodded.
Waffles the beagle was unquestionably the breakout star of Grant Central Station. He’d been introduced when I was five, and for a while there, the Waffles merchandise was selling like hotcakes. He was the only character without a real-life counterpart. We’d never had a pet—Linnie was allergic to cats, and my mom always claimed that five kids was chaos enough without bringing a dog into the mix. “That’s the one.”
“Cool.” He nodded and backed out onto the road, the only car on our always-quiet cul-de-sac.
I was just starting to walk up to the house when a flash of something pink caught my eye, and I whipped back around to face the street. Sure enough, Sarah Stephens was riding her bike slowly up the road, zigzagging back and forth. She may have been a twelve-year-old seventh grader, but that didn’t mean she didn’t have the ability to inspire a slow-burning fury in me whenever I saw her.
For most of this past year, Sarah had just been our papergirl, and if I happened to be leaving the house early and she was delivering copies of the Stanwich Sentinel, I might wave at her as I passed, but that was basically the extent of our interactions. But in the last few months, something had changed. For whatever reason, she’d stopped delivering our paper altogether. We hadn’t gotten a paper since February. My dad kept calling to complain, but Sarah kept insisting that we were mistaken and that she was delivering it, that she hadn’t missed a day yet. This had led to a standoff, both of us insisting to the subscription office at the Sentinel that the other one was lying. My dad tried to cancel our subscription, only to be reminded that he’d prepaid for the entire year. So now, not only did we not get our local paper, but we also had fraught interactions with the middle schooler who lived down the street.
This had, of course, all made it into the final months of Grant Central Station. The appearance of Sophie Silver, rogue papergirl, had not made things any more pleasant with Sarah, and I had a feeling that this bike-by she was doing now was just to harass me.
“Hey.” Sarah was biking in circles in front of the house that somehow felt threatening, her eyes narrowed underneath her pink bike helmet.
“Why aren’t you in school?”
“Stanwich Academy is on spring break. Tell your mom to stop putting me in her stupid comic strip.”
“You’re not in the strip,” I said automatically. This was the Grant family mantra. Never tell anyone they’re represented in the comic. Even if you think they are. Even if it’s obvious that they are. Before I even knew what litigation was, I was aware that it was a thing you shouldn’t ever give anyone the chance to do, and I knew the words “plausible deniability” before I started preschool. “Plus, it’s ending on Sunday.”
“Oh.” Sarah braked and dropped a foot to the ground. “Well—tell your dad to stop complaining about me.”
“Start delivering our paper,” I said, crossing my arms over my chest, “and we will.”
“I delivered your paper,” Sarah said, her voice rising.
“Uh-huh,” I said, looking a little dramatically around the empty driveway. “Wow, how could I have missed it?”
“I’m required to deliver all the weekday papers no later than six a.m., and the weekend editions by eight. So I did deliver it this morning. Like, three hours ago.”
“Well, we never got it.”
“That’s not my problem,” she said, starting to ride off again. “I did my job.”
“Give us our newspaper!” I yelled at her retreating back, but she just lifted one hand off her handlebars to make a very rude gesture at me. Cassie, my Grant Central Station character, would have had the perfect snappy retort to this, but I just turned and headed back to the house.
“So tell me,” J.J. was saying to Bill as I walked into the kitchen. “Is Bill a nickname for something? It’s not short for Billiam, is it?”
I could practically feel Rodney’s reaction to this; it was like he was doing a mental double take. “Billiam?”
“It’s a name,” J.J. said, taking a sip of coffee—it looked like he’d finally gotten his own.
“I really don’t think it is.”
“It is,” J.J. insisted. “It’s a thing. I got my master’s with a guy named Billiam.”
“No, you didn’t,” Linnie said.
“Oh yes, I did,” J.J. said, and I exchanged a look with Rodney. J.J. always did this—he would dig himself into increasingly deep holes, always steadfastly refusing to back down. “You want me to prove it to you?”
“I do,” Rodney said.
“Me too,” I added.
“Fine!” J.J. yelled as he got down from his stool. “In that case, I will!” He stormed out of the kitchen in what I knew my dad would have described as “high dudgeon” before returning a second later, retrieving his coffee cup, and then storming off again.
“Uh . . . it’s short for William,” Bill said a moment later, clearly not sure if he should answer the question, now that the person who’d asked it had left. “But I was named after my uncle, and he goes by William, so . . .” His voice trailed off, and he cleared his throat. “Okay. So I heard from my uncle. He wanted me to just go over some stuff with you two so when he gets here, he can jump right in.”
“Sounds good,” Linnie said, as J.J. wandered back in, like I had a feeling he might—he’d left his donut on the counter.
“So,” Bill said, “your guest list is capped at one twenty, right?”
Rodney nodded, and Linnie started to, then stopped, mid-nod, and whirled around to face J.J. “Who are you bringing?”
J.J. choked a little on his donut. “Bringing?”
“As your date,” Linnie said, raising an eyebrow. “Because you RSVP’d for two. And apparently you’re both having the steak.”
“Ah,” J.J. said, blinking a little more than usual. “Right. About that. So when I RSVP’d—which was months ago, by the way—I was certain that I would have a serious girlfriend by now. There were many promising ladies who were in consideration. But then . . . uh . . .”
“Pay up,” Linnie said, turning to Rodney.
“Thanks a lot, J.J.,” Rodney said as he reached for his wallet.
“For what?” J.J. asked, frowning.
“Yeah,” I said, slightly hurt that I hadn’t been a part of this.
“I didn’t really think you’d be bringing a date, when you hadn’t mentioned anyone in months,” Linnie said, as Rodney handed her a twenty.
“I believed in you, though,” Rodney said, then sighed. “For all the good it did me.”
“You guys had a bet?” J.J. asked, sounding scandalized. “About my future potential love-slash-possible heartbreak?”
“And you didn’t even involve me?” I added.
“I just can’t believe the lack of faith,” J.J. said, his voice rising. “From my own sister no less.”
“It’s fine,” Rodney said, looking at Bill, clearly trying to get things back on track. “So, you mentioned the guest list?”
“Yes,” Bill said, flipping open the binder. “The list is capped—”
“Wait a second,” J.J. said, smacking his palm down on the kitchen counter like he’d just thought of something. “I don’t think it said anywhere that this was going to be a binding thing, if I was going to bring a date or not. It didn’t say anything about that on the STD.”
We all just stared at him for a moment, and I noticed that Bill was looking fixedly at his shoes. “What?” Linnie finally asked.
“When you and Rodney gave me the STD,” J.J. said, shaking his head, clearly impatient that we weren’t keeping up. “There wasn’t any disclaimer that—”
“You mean the save the date?” Rodney asked, and J.J. nodded. “Dude. Acronyms aren’t always a good idea.”
“I’m just saying, if you’d put anywhere on any of the invitations that I would be held accountable for what I wrote—”
“J.J., just admit you couldn’t get a date,” Linnie said, shaking her head. “It’s not a big deal.”
“Well, I don’t think you should say for sure I can�
�t get a date,” J.J. said. “I mean, I don’t want your guest count to be off, after all.”
“Don’t worry about the number of guests,” I said quickly, since I had a feeling I knew where this was going.
“Linnie, give Rodney his money back,” J.J. said grandly. “I’ll get a date yet.”
“By tomorrow?” Linnie asked. “To a wedding? No way.”
“Do you not think I can do it?”
“No,” Linnie said, shaking her head. “That’s literally what I just said, Jameison.”
“Well, then, another challenge accepted, Linnea,” J.J. said, pulling his phone out of his pocket with a flourish. “I will bring a date to your wedding. See if I don’t!”
“Guys,” I said, trying to head this off. J.J. showing up with whatever rando he could get to come to a wedding with him on one day’s notice really didn’t seem like the best idea, and certainly didn’t fit in with my plan for the weekend. “Let’s not—”
“Fine,” Linnie said, talking over me. “And if you can’t, which you won’t—”
“Which I will—”
“You have to publicly admit that you were wrong. And pay me twenty dollars.”
“Oh, it is on.” J.J. stuck out his hand, and Linnie shook it. “Witness?”
“Witness,” Rodney and I replied in unison. “But I don’t think you’re going to pull this off,” he added.
“You don’t, eh?” J.J. asked, arching an eyebrow. “You want to make this interesting?”
“Things are interesting enough,” I said.
“Side bet? Fifty bucks says I can.”
“I’m already out twenty,” Rodney pointed out.
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