The Whole Thing Together

  “I love you. I love him,” Quinn said simply. “I think you would love each other. But that math has failed me before.”

  Sasha nodded.

  Quinn’s sad face was never intentional like Mattie or her mother’s, but it was the most distressing. Quinn bore a child’s love for her parents no matter how they hated each other, how ugly the scar they made down the center of her life.

  Kids come first. Both adult halves of the family shared the mantra. It was one of the few agreements, and neither of them meant it.

  “When Ray was little I would stand with him at the edge of the pond,” Quinn finally said. “He would spend hours catching tadpoles and frogs with his hands. The next week you would come and we would collect things in the woods. You would make these beautiful little terrariums. There were so many times like that when I wished I could be with the two of you together.”

  For some reason Sasha felt like crying.

  Quinn lowered her gaze to Sasha’s face. “I think I would love it if you and Ray knew each other. You two are opposites in most ways, but you make two halves of a whole. It scares me a little. I’m not allowed to want the two halves to come together. But I always do.”

  —

  “You want to what?”

  Mattie looked dangerously pleased with herself, standing in her tank top and Pink Floyd pajama shorts in the middle of Quinn’s bedroom.

  Quinn sat up in her bed. “You’re talking about next month? This coming August?”

  “Everybody has an engagement party. Why are you looking at me like that?”

  Quinn’s eyes opened directly onto her thoughts, mostly because she didn’t think to shutter them.

  Mattie came and sat cross-legged at the end of her bed. “I think the best method is jumping in, you know? Because why let everybody build it up for a whole year? Why not start breaking down the barriers now? Get some of the drama out of the way. Give us all a little practice before the actual wedding?”

  One nice thing about Mattie was she tended to answer her own questions in case you didn’t. She was happy to carry on a conversation without your assistance.

  “Here at the house?”

  “Yes. Come on. Will you help me?”

  Quinn pushed the covers off, folded her legs under her. “Have you asked Emma?”

  “No, I want it to be a surprise.”

  Quinn looked at her seriously. “I think that is one of the worst ideas you’ve ever had.”

  Mattie smiled. “And that’s saying something.” She jumped off the bed and walked to face the mirror over the dresser. She cocked her head and made her mirror face before she turned back around. “Okay, fine. So we’ll tell them. We don’t know Jamie that well. And we don’t want to scare him away forever.”

  It hadn’t escaped Quinn that she and Mattie had just become “we” in this enterprise.

  Mattie paced and considered. “Do we want to scare him away? Maybe we do?” she mused. “No. If Emma hasn’t scared him away all on her own, then maybe we should keep him. Anyway, I think I like him.” She opened Quinn’s closet and stepped in. “Well, I’m glad that’s decided, then,” Mattie continued from inside the closet.

  “What are you doing in there?”

  “Nothing. You have nothing I want.” She came back out. “Except storage space. Can you ask Mom?”

  “Ask her what?”

  “Or tell her. Can you tell Mom about the party?”

  Quinn sat at the edge of her bed. “Why?”

  “Because she can’t say no to you.”

  “Sure she can.”

  “Well, she can’t say yes to me.”

  “And Dad?”

  “Can you tell him too?”

  “Seriously?”

  Mattie looked sheepish, but it wasn’t sincere. She was reckless.

  “I don’t think I want to.”

  “I know.” For the first time Mattie allowed Quinn to see the intensity under the request. “But will you anyway?”

  Quinn watched Mattie flounce confidently from her room, knowing her sister would do what she asked.

  It was precisely because of what it would cost that Mattie wanted her to do it. Because her parents would understand that, too, and on the strength of that, maybe they wouldn’t say no.

  —

  “This August? One month from now? Are you serious?” Emma looked around to make sure Francis wouldn’t catch her talking on the phone while at the bakery counter.

  “Yes. It gives us enough time to plan the party, but not enough time for them to dig the trenches and plant the explosives,” Mattie explained.

  Emma shook her head. It was one thing to imagine her parents in the same room next summer. This had a terrifying nearness.

  “Mom and Dad will never agree to it.”

  “They will. Quinn is asking them. She never asks them for anything.”

  “Does Quinn think it’s a good idea?”

  “She said as long as nobody gets surprised.”

  “I’d have to ask Jamie right away. His parents would need to come from Ohio.”

  “Ask him.”

  Emma considered for a moment. “Listen. I’m flattered and honored you guys want to do this. But…why do you want to do this?”

  “Because we love you. We want to celebrate. Everybody has an engagement party.”

  “Not with our family.”

  “Well, maybe it’s time to get them on board. Maybe it’s time for them to get over themselves and put their kids first.”

  Emma smiled ruefully. “Matt, that’s crazy talk, and you know it.”

  “But it shouldn’t be! That’s the thing!”

  Emma laughed and then got serious again. “I don’t know.”

  “Here’s another way to look at it: we get the worst of it out of the way before the wedding.”

  This made a certain kind of sense. “Okay. I’ll talk to Jamie. I gotta go.”

  —

  “Do you remember a guy named Jonathan Dawes?”

  Mattie had made her way into her father’s study unobtrusively.

  His back was to her. His laptop was open; one phone was in his hand, another on the desk. One earphone was stuck against one ear, a newspaper on his lap, a cup of coffee a few inches from his elbow. Two wide screens mounted just above eye level showed the changing prices of commodities, mostly in red.

  Her father barely registered her. His gaze ricocheted from screen to screen. He always left the door to his study open, but people didn’t usually step through it.

  It had taken a lot to get the question out the first time. She couldn’t relax until she’d asked him, but she didn’t really want to ask him. In fact, she was relieved that he wasn’t paying attention. She didn’t want him to pay attention. It would be a big relief to turn around and walk back out. But then how was she supposed to get any peace?

  Suddenly he was looking at her. Her silence always caught him as her voice did not. “Matilda. Did you say something?”

  She pulled at a string trailing from the hem of her cutoffs. “Nothing important. I just…”

  “What?” Now he was curious. Once he was curious, you were stuck.

  She could make up some dumb thing about her debit card, or she could ask again. “I ran into this guy at the Black Horse. He was kind of familiar, and I wondered if you knew him.”

  “Who?”

  She yanked at the string until it made a groove across her palm. She had to say it now. She felt like a bomb disposer, but she had to. Clippers out, wires in hand.

  “Mattie?”

  “His name is Jonathan Dawes.” Snip.

  His face showed nothing.

  “I guess…he’s big into…surfing.” Her volume descended with each word.

  Bomb disposers didn’t always know right away whether they had succeeded or failed. She didn’t know. She didn’t even know what constituted success or failure in this case. She remembered Emma’s old policy: “Don’t ask Dad a question unless you already know the answer.”
r />   His eyebrows rose. His mouth compressed a bit. He cleared his throat but said nothing.

  “I think he taught us to surf when we were small. Do you remember that at all?”

  His body was still. Absolutely. Phone still poised in hand. Commodity prices fell behind his head. Was he thinking? Was he remembering? Was he distracted? Was he mad at her?

  “No.”

  “You don’t remember him?”

  “No.”

  “You don’t remember us learning how to surf?”

  “No.” Was he glaring at her? Was she being paranoid?

  She snapped the string from the hem of her shorts. “Okay.”

  He rotated back toward his screens, hardly seeming to move.

  “Dad?”

  Nothing. Phone down. Head bent.

  “Okay.” Now she knew which wire she cut: the one that caused the explosion. Slow and quiet maybe, but now unmistakable. And in some terrible way, maybe that was success. Because now she also knew she hadn’t come in here to fix anything.

  His posture was strange to her. She didn’t know what to say. He never turned his back on her. She felt like she should say something, but she didn’t know what. Her face felt hot and her palms were wet, and she wished she could put the wire back together and rewind the detonation.

  She was his pink girl, his yellow-haired baby. She rode on his shoulders. She climbed on his head. She’d never been around him and not known how to be.

  She walked out of his study.

  “Close the door, please,” he said. It was the voice he used with the pool cleaner when there was scum on the surface. It wasn’t the voice he used with her.

  She closed the door, but she couldn’t make her legs walk her away from it. She stood there trembling.

  She heard something roll and then crash. Something involving glass. She put her hand on the knob and listened to quiet. She could feel them both breathing on either side of the door, but far apart. Her heart was racing, but she didn’t dare go through the door again.

  On Sunday afternoon Quinn brought Myrna Chapman a brown bag of yellow Saturn peaches. She liked to stop by there once or twice a week after she finished in the Reeses’ orchard, bringing some of whatever the trees had best to offer that day.

  Myrna had been her grandma Hardy’s babysitter growing up and later her friend. She lived in a Victorian house near the road in the village and had once kept the most beautiful garden Quinn had ever seen.

  Quinn was always turning up at Myrna’s when she was small, when her own house got loud. Myrna would give her chessmen cookies and grown-up black tea and teach her about flowers.

  Quinn was a pest when she was tiny, a student when she was a little older, and a real help by the time she was about twelve. Myrna won the village award for her garden one year “hands down,” as everyone liked to say at the time, and she had insisted on sharing it with Quinn at the presentation.

  “Mattie is throwing an engagement party at the house for Emma and Jamie this August,” Quinn announced, cutting up two of the peaches and putting them in a bowl in the middle of Myrna’s small kitchen table. “I got the job of asking my parents.”

  Myrna looked amused. “And what did they say?”

  Quinn sat down across from her. “They both said maybe, but they will both say yes.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because Mattie decided we’re going ahead with it anyway, and Jamie’s parents agreed to come all the way from Ohio. Jamie is my dad’s star employee. My dad has to be there to greet the Hurns as father, boss, and host. And once my dad and Evie agree to be there, then my mom has to too. She will hate it, but you know her. She has to represent her side of things. She couldn’t abide my dad acting like it’s his party and his house and his daughter.”

  Myrna nodded. “Right you are.”

  “Same old,” Quinn said.

  Myrna’s fingers were twisted and thick-knuckled now as she reached for a slice of peach, but her pleasure was pure in the taste of it.

  “Will you come?” Quinn asked.

  “Of course,” Myrna said.

  Myrna hadn’t been invited to their house for many years because it was presided over by Grandma Hardy, and Grandma Hardy had judged Myrna for getting divorced when people at the club didn’t get divorced yet. Twenty years later Grandma Hardy herself was divorced and remarried and living in Oyster Bay, saying things like, “Why in God’s name did I wait so long?”

  “I’ve never seen my parents in a room together,” Quinn said. “Not that I can remember.”

  “I have.”

  “How were they?”

  Myrna tipped her head, remembering. “Hard to say. Your grandfather was drunk and acting like a lout—the housekeeper had burnt the roast, I think. A truck from the volunteer fire department rushed in because the fire alarm went off, and your parents tried to keep Emma quiet.”

  Quinn smiled. “They weren’t always the source of trouble.”

  Myrna smiled. “It’s generational.”

  They savored the peaches for a few moments in silence. “I think I’m going to make a flower cake for the party,” Quinn said.

  “Lovely. I still have dianthus and borage. Those are wonderful in a cake.”

  As Myrna got older, her garden got smaller and closer to the kitchen door, until now it was a small patch of hardy perennials hugging the back wall of the house.

  At first Quinn was pained by this march of diminishment. “I could keep it going for you,” she’d offered ardently, almost in tears. “The whole thing.”

  Myrna was moved by her offer, but firm. “A garden should reflect what you yourself can and want to do.”

  As Quinn rode home from Myrna’s, it occurred to her she’d said something that wasn’t quite true. When she was eleven, she’d come down with a mysterious illness that lasted for days. Finally the fever got so bad they put her in the hospital. She was in and out of consciousness, hallucinating and dreaming. Which was a mercy, really, because she just hated the sounds and smells of the place.

  She remembered one moment of rough clarity when she woke up in the dark hospital room. She looked through the open door to the hallway and believed she saw her parents framed in the doorway, both of them. She remembered their heads bent together, talking in low voices.

  She might have been hallucinating, but she thought she saw her father reach for her mother’s hand and grasp it for one moment before they turned in different directions and walked away.

  —

  Violet looked pretty. Ray liked the sparkly stuff on her eyelids. He didn’t mind the way her knee kept touching his under the table. But he really hated that question.

  “Nothing. Why?”

  Violet put her hair behind her ears. She shook her iced coffee. “You just seem very distracted.”

  That was fair. He was so distracted it took him a few seconds to process that she’d just accused him of being distracted. “Yeah. Maybe. I don’t know.”

  That wasn’t totally fair. He didn’t know, but he had a pretty good idea. He was comparing a girl he’d touched nearly every part of—hooked up with, hung out with off and on for two years—to a girl he’d met for less than five minutes outside a party.

  With Violet it was always casual, never really intimate. But she was eager and ready and always around. Whereas the other girl was totally off-limits.

  He knew them in completely different ways. Violet he knew from the outside—how she looked and dressed and how she felt in his hands. And though he’d barely seen (let alone touched) the other girl, he only knew her from what she did and wrote and read and made.

  It was a flaw of character, his father told him once, to favor what you didn’t have over what you did. What you couldn’t have over what you could.

  But would she ask him so often what he was thinking?

  He stood. He took his overpriced Hamptons coffee cup from the table. “I have to be at work in a couple minutes,” he told her.

  Violet stood too. As the
y walked toward the door, she slid toward him. She kissed him on the jaw and he breathed in a flower smell.

  “Are you going to Frasier’s tonight?”

  Violet smelled different every time. Always good and strong and girly, like the makeup aisle, but never the same.

  She was looking at him impatiently out on the sidewalk.

  “Sorry…Frasier’s? No, I already told him I couldn’t make it.” Frasier was an old Wainscott friend. Ray was happy to go surfing or fishing with him but couldn’t stand his parties. “I’m home tonight. Family dinner.”

  “Then back in the city?”

  “Yeah. I’ll see you the next week, I guess.”

  “I might come in for a night.”

  “Okay,” he said.

  “It gets boring out here without you.”

  Violet got bored quickly, he knew. He kissed her and turned to walk to the Black Horse, happy for his thoughts to be free from anyone wanting to get at them for a while.

  Would she get bored quickly?

  For some reason he thought of the Lego city. He couldn’t really imagine Violet, not middle-school Violet or any Violet, working for five months on a Lego city with six parks and no school or even any shopping.

  He tried to re-create her face in his mind, but it was already blurry less than two weeks after seeing it. In fact, it had grown blurry that very night as he tried to fall asleep, superimposed as it was with memory and expectation. He had no problem picturing Violet’s face.

  He’d had those few minutes of clarity, before he knew she was her, when he really saw her. That was the moment he kept trying to go back to, meeting eyes in the hallway outside the kitchen. That was the part that churned into an odd brew of confusion, shame, and excitement.

  He had enough clarity to know he thought she was beautiful. As beautiful as Violet. More beautiful. Maybe other guys would disagree with him. Violet was tall and glamorous and head-turning. But he agreed with himself.

  Why was he doing this?

  He went into the Black Horse through the back door. He checked in with Julio and got to work in the storeroom.

  He started unloading boxes of fancy Italian spaghetti from cartons onto storeroom shelves.

  He peered around the aisle at the back of the last set of shelves to look for more cartons. Instead he found a faultless rendition of the three pyramids of Giza in cans and boxes.