Jem sank to the floor next to her. They leaned together in the refrigerator chill. “Are you okay?”
“Bad day yesterday. Bad worse worst terrible day. But I’m okay,” Ruthie said. “Oh, shit, I lied. I’m not. I was mean to someone who was trying to be nice to me.”
“Daddy?”
“No, not Daddy. Someone I used to know.”
“Well, you know what you always told me when I was a kid.”
“No.”
“If you say ‘I’m sorry’ with sorry in your heart, you’ll be okay.”
“What a sanctimonious ass.”
“What?”
“By the way, I quit yesterday. Or maybe I was fired. I’m still not sure.”
“Quit the Belfry?”
“It was a you-can’t-fire-me-I-quit scenario, I think.”
“But…you love it there. And everyone loves you.”
“Do you know what Mindy said? That I serve at the pleasure of the board. She used the word pleasure. Like she was fucking Queen Elizabeth. I mean, not literally fucking Queen Elizabeth. That’s Philip’s job. I wish I could stop cursing. Shit.”
“But what about Carole? And Helen? And…everyone! They can’t just fire you! It must be a mistake. They’ll ask you back.”
Remembering the lilac tree, Ruthie shook her head. “I think the die is cast.”
“But it will be okay, right? I mean, what are you going to do?”
“It will be okay, sweetie.” Ruthie wiped her nose on the hem of her T-shirt. “I just need some time. And coffee.”
“I’ll make you coffee.”
“You are the best of the best of the best of daughters.”
Jem sprang up. Ruthie shut the refrigerator but stayed on the floor, hugging her knees. Jem found a pod and stuck it in the coffee machine. “What does Daddy say?”
“I haven’t told him yet. He’s, uh. Kind of hard to track down these days.”
“Yeah, I know.” Jem banged down a coffee cup.
“What?” Ruthie leaned back against the fridge. Her head felt as though it was being jackhammered apart.
“Everything this summer is so weird. It’s like this house is a portal and we all walked through. Like we’re trying on being rich, and it just doesn’t fit.”
“I know,” Ruthie said. She had gone back to the main house and left the watch on top of Carole’s dresser. She couldn’t see tossing it into Verity’s box again. Yet it sat there, at the front of her brain, like an obstacle obstructing a clear view.
Next to her on the floor, Jem’s phone dinged. Ruthie glanced at the text hovering on the screen. “What’s the Mayflower thing?”
“What Mayflower thing?”
Ruthie pointed to the text. It was from Saffy.
You are going down. #mayflower
“What does that mean?” Ruthie asked as Jem snatched back the phone. “Are you guys comparing ancestors? Because Duttons didn’t come over on the Mayflower. They probably waited until there were hospitals and distilleries.”
“It’s a stupid nothing thing.”
Jem’s mouth stretched in that way that happened when she was upset.
“What is it, sweetie?” Ruthie struggled to her feet.
Jem banged down a spoon. She turned away, her shoulders shaking.
“Sweetie?” Ruthie reached out to hold Jem while the smell of coffee invaded the kitchen with a promise of something normal to come if they could just get through this moment. And the next. And a few more after that.
Jem was in her arms, her cheek flushed and wet against her. “Okay,” Ruthie said. “You’ve got to tell me whatever it is.”
“They hate me, Mommy. I have no friends.”
She rocked her, her sweet, sweet girl, murder in her heart.
“I mean, I get it, they’re awful, I shouldn’t want to be friends with them.”
“Yeah.”
“But why do I still?” Jem raised her face, teary and red.
“Because you’re buying into their story, maybe. That they’re the coolest. They’re making a reality and you’re in it. What about Annie? Isn’t she your friend?”
“Yeah, she’s been cool. And there’s this new friend…”
“A boy?”
“Sort of.”
“A sort of boy?” she asked, gentle, gentle.
“A summer person. Out of my league.”
“Nothing’s out of your league. Is he nice to you?”
“He makes me laugh.” She shrugged. “It’s not important. It’s just a thing, a flirty thing, at work. He comes by sometimes. It’s just that I miss my own room. It’s like here…it’s beautiful and everything, but I’m afraid to touch anything. It’s not home.”
“You’re right,” Ruthie said. “We’ve got to stick it out this summer. But after this year, no more moving.”
“Really?”
“Just us in our house. All year long.”
“You promise?”
Ruthie set her jaw against the pain in her head. Cue sunset, cue her shaking fist. As God was her witness. “Nobody’s taking our home ever again.”
26
WHEN MIKE AND RUTHIE had heard that Mike’s great-aunt Laurel had left Mike her house on the bay in Orient, it was an occurrence so startling, so out of the blue, that it was like the scene in that old movie where a secretary sitting on the top of a double-decker bus—who was it, Jean Arthur? Irene Dunne?—suddenly had a fur coat land on her head, tossed from a Park Avenue penthouse. Giddy from their luck, blinded by the thwack of luxury goods, they didn’t stop to think that they could not afford the life that had fallen on them.
It was the fall of 2001. In New York City, Mike and Ruthie had moved back into their Tribeca loft with their baby after crowding in with friends uptown. The head of the EPA had told them they were safe. The instructions? Clean with a bucket and a mop.
Ruthie and Mike had been art majors, painters; they knew about toxic materials. They wore face masks and bought HEPA filters, but Ruthie found the ash everywhere: caked into the ridges of the Dreft plastic top, in the joints of the stroller, in the cracks, in the seams, in the hinges, in the vents. Her neighbor hadn’t evacuated and had sores that wouldn’t heal and an excruciating and recurrent case of bronchitis. Ruthie heard the dry cough everywhere, in the stores, on the streets, in the diner. They stood in the lobby, mail in their hands, and spoke in low tones of dioxin and asbestos, PCBs and heavy metals, the toxic properties of jet fuel, what happens to computers when they atomize; they did not discuss the other organic material they were no doubt inhaling, all those lives in a cloud of dust.
Then anthrax hit the news. Their friends were renting cars and driving to Westchester and New Jersey on weekends with their babies strapped into car seats, house hunting with easy, preapproved mortgages in hand and gas masks in the trunk. Ruthie lay in bed at night, feeling as though she now lived on a perilous, ashy moon.
Leave Manhattan? A year ago they would have laughed. But the house in Orient could be worth something, enough to buy something else, somewhere, one of the river towns in Westchester, maybe. Enough to get them out of one big room with Mike’s paintings stacked along a wall and the crib in the corner and the look in Mike’s eyes that Ruthie read as trapped.
They borrowed a car and headed east.
Ruthie had only met Laurel a handful of times on Laurel’s infrequent visits to the city, but that had sparked a kind of friendship. She’d liked Laurel’s sense of rigor about things. Where Mike’s father was soft and indistinct, Laurel was as bracing as a salty wave.
Laurel and Mike’s father no longer spoke, a long-ago quarrel they wouldn’t discuss, though Mike traced it to Laurel finally erupting at his father’s refusal to allow her to bring her girlfriend to Thanksgiving. He didn’t object because she was a lesbian, he insisted to Mike, it was that La
urel just wouldn’t settle down. Laurel had called out this bullshit with the contempt it deserved, and their relationship, never close, was severed. “A relief,” Laurel said tersely.
Mike was a terrible correspondent. Ruthie sent Laurel a Christmas card every year with a note enclosed, and had sent a photo of Jem when she was born. Laurel responded with a silver rattle from Tiffany’s and a copy of Frog and Toad.
The truth was that they rarely thought about Laurel until they got a call that she’d died. Heart attack, on the porch. A neighbor had found her, had said that from the road, she appeared to be looking approvingly at her dahlias.
They drove and drove on that gray December day on an empty road lined with bare trees, wet black branches creaking ominously in a rustling, steady wind. The tiny village seemed forlorn and time-warped, waiting for summer. On the main street, everything was closed. Houses with brown lawns looked unoccupied. One lone person walked a frisky dog. They hailed him (later they would know him as a neighbor, Clark Fund, an eccentric who made an almost-living as an auction picker) and asked for Laurel’s house. “Ah, Laurel,” he’d said. “So you’re the nephew with the good wife.”
The first view of the house was not auspicious. It was weathered gray siding, paint peeling on the trim, a lopsided house with a second-story addition jutting up and out, an elbow in the side, your uncle the comedian making sure you got the joke. That cold day they stood in the front yard, holding each other and the baby. The wind slapped their faces like a wet mitten, but it was fresh and tangy. The clouds scudded away, and the sun suddenly shone on their faces. When they walked, their footsteps stirred only mud, not ash. They rounded the corner of the house and caught their breath at the expanse of sea and bountiful sky.
“I don’t care about the inside, we can fix it,” Mike said. “Let’s do it.”
Ruthie would have set the words to music if someone hadn’t gotten there first.
“It’s perfect,” she said. “As far as you can go without drowning.”
* * *
—
THAT FIRST WINTER Ruthie and Mike had truly gotten to know the house, every rotted sill, every piece of wiring, every creak and every draft, and had known that years of struggle lay ahead. The taxes might ruin them. They lay in bed dismayed, clutching each other and dreaming of decent takeout. They had left a rent-stabilized loft in New York. They knew they could never afford to go back.
Ruthie was the one to figure it out, on the first perfect summer weekend. She sat on the porch at the market on Village Lane with a cup of coffee and watched as the renters arrived, toting bikes and kayaks and coolers. All that summer she investigated fees, snooped, pondered, bought Elena, the local realtor, a cup of coffee.
They had the bones. They had the cedar shingles, the oak floors, the fireplace. They had the view, the classic Orient view of bay and sky and thin golden ribbons of sand across the water. They had everything, but it was falling down. They bought steel-toed boots and went to work.
By the next summer they were able to rent out the house for weekly periods in July and August, enough to pay taxes for the year, plus hire an electrician for an overhaul of the wiring. No more glass fuses! They bundled up Jem and rented a studio apartment in Greenport.
Year after year the renters came, and as the North Fork adjusted to the spillover from the more chic Hamptons, as more potato fields were turned into wineries, as the fifties motels became retro rather than dingy, Ruthie had a vision. It wasn’t enough to rent—they had to rent big. They had to, over time, make their house into the kind of place that could command a fee substantial enough not only to cover taxes but to do real improvements as well. They would build up to the big money—fifteen thousand for the summer, twenty thousand…the sky was the limit for the right kind of property. That would give them income, enough to live comfortably, have a savings account, save for Jem’s college. It was the only way to lift them out of the bohemian poverty they lived in, two art majors scraping by. By then she was director of the Belfry, a job that didn’t pay much but required all her time and energy. They were barely making it. A second mortgage plus summer rentals would make all the difference.
All they needed were the correct basics—the farmhouse sink, European appliances, closet systems—and they could fill in carefully with vintage items so that the place wouldn’t skew too flea-market-y. They were artists; they knew what color and texture could do, how to cull from house sales and Craigslist. They found out about billionaires buying renovated twenty-million-dollar homes in the Hamptons who invariably hired a designer who decreed that everything must be completely redone, and that’s when they pounced. They’d picked up Italian cabinets and double ovens for peanuts or for free. Mike entered the genial core of workers who renovated houses all over the North Fork, and made friends and did favors and called them in, and floors were sanded, kitchen counters were installed, closets expanded, bit by painful bit.
Now it was the house that people photographed, that was gestured to from passing sailboats, the house with the cornflower-blue French doors opening out to a slate patio. In summer, roses tumbled, bright pink and yellow against the seagrass, and it was all topped off with a briskly flapping American flag.
Everything had gone exactly as Ruthie had envisioned on that freezing day so long ago. Except for the ending.
The thing was, when he said he wanted to leave, she thought he only needed room to turn around and come back. And if an occasional rageful thought of how he had seemed to leave her so casually (just because of a lack of happiness, really?) came over her, she was determined to wait it out.
It wasn’t just that the house was something they created together, sacrificed for. It was that it was indeed everything, need and want and desire and safety, all the connective tissue that held her together.
27
AFTER THICK SLICES of toast and honey and a cup of coffee, Ruthie felt able to face the world. She took her second cup outside and sat by the pool, sipping carefully and watching the ruffling of the waves out on the bay. The heat felt like a blanket she wouldn’t throw off until October.
There were so few days in life that changed everything. It was always a surprise, the blow at the back of the knees that could come so fast you don’t even hear the whistle of the bat through the air.
She knew she’d made a fool of herself. She knew she’d been hard on Joe. She knew it was unfair to hate Mike, that he hadn’t cheated, but she couldn’t stop the wide, wild anger beating through her like the wings of a raptor.
Mike’s pickup jounced up the driveway. He got out and slammed the door. He saw her and stopped. He was wearing a new shirt, soft cotton that matched that perfect sky. She clutched her warm cup to her chest and kept her face turned away as he approached her.
“Is Jem ready?”
“She’s getting dressed.”
“Good, it will give us a chance to talk.”
“I really don’t think it’s a good idea.”
“It’s better to just air it out, don’t you think?”
If she were hoping that Mike would look ravaged, or even unhappy, she was disappointed. He looked nervous, sure, but also…she could smell it if she leaned over, if she got away from the coffee steam, she could sniff it out…he was satisfied. She had had moments of hating Mike over the past years, moments of temptation when she wanted to kick him, or stab him with a fork. But not this. This was a whole other level of temptation. Murder. Mayhem. Truck torching. She ran over the possibilities in her mind. After all she was a woman with an ax.
“So, there’s a hole where the lilac tree was.”
“Wow. That’s terrible.”
“There was broken glass on the porch. Roberta got some in her foot.”
“So sorry to spoil the party.”
“Look. We’ve stayed friends. Really, truly friends. I want us to stay friends through this. I think we can do it. We’ve
done it.”
“You’re not my friend anymore. You’re fired.” Ruthie placed her cup carefully on the side table. “Speaking of which, so was I.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, I quit. But I had to. It was clear that I was being set up by Mindy and Gloria. Even Helen. That’s why I was looking for you.” She didn’t know why she was telling him. It wasn’t just because she wanted him to feel bad. It was that she needed so desperately to tell someone who understood. Mike had been through years of Belfry Museum politics.
Mike slowly sank onto the chair next to her. “Helen, too? That’s crazy. You should go to the full board.”
“That never works. Boards hate fights like this. The director always loses.”
“You could sue.”
“Nobody sues. She’s going to tie me up with a nondisclosure and dangle the severance to make me sign it. That’s how it works.”
“Wow, I’m so sorry. There has to be something we can do.”
“Not your problem.”
“Of course it is—”
“If you say We’re family, this conversation is over.”
“Ruthie.” His voice was gentle. “I didn’t know. This is awful.”
“How could you know? That would imply that you’d answer my texts, or see me once in a while, instead of being so busy fucking our tenant.”
“Okay. Okay. We need to talk about it. But can we just…”
She shot forward so fast he reared back. “No, we can’t just!” she spit out. “There will be no qualifiers in this conversation. For once, we’re going to say it plain, without your Connecticut WASP evasions.”
He held up his hands, as if she were attacking him. “Can I remind you that we’re not married?”
“But we’re family, remember?”
“I didn’t tell you because it was so new, and it happened so fast. Why upset you if I didn’t have to?”
“Because it’s lying!”
Mike shook his head. “I’m sorry my moral compass isn’t as finely tuned as yours. It never was.”