Chapter 4

“I t seems like things are finally working out for you, Jackie.”

My mom nodded bravely. “It’s a real relief.”

The other woman glanced toward where I stood, but I pretended to be engrossed by my phone. “Is Sophie doing any better?” she asked, her voice low.

“Well…she and Grace have some growing up to do,” my mother answered quietly. “They’ll get there, some day.”

“You’re so strong!” They hugged.

Holy Mary. I actually had to put my knuckle in my mouth and bite down so that I wouldn’t say something that Addie would claim I should have regretted. I walked away quickly from that grouping of guests and grabbed a tray from the food table, and then I went to the kitchen for more hummus and some snap peas to replenish it.

I wasn’t anything like Grace, the lazy baby of the family! And I knew exactly what my mother’s friend was talking about when she said that things were “finally” working out: she meant that Nicola had gotten married and that Addie was going to soon, and that there would be a grandchild in the family. Now, there were only four offspring left to force into matrimony and/or childbearing (hopefully, both) so that Mom didn’t have to worry about us anymore. She had many concerns about our futures, and we were truly blessed to hear a lot about that topic.

The repetition of this theme in our conversations meant that I already had a response for her:

“There’s no reason for me, Juliet, Brenna, or Grace to get married. Many, many women lead happy, fulfilled lives without a husband, without kids, without anyone. In fact, I already lead that kind of life, so why don’t you shut up and deal with your own marriage and kid issues, namely that you and your husband are virtual strangers, that your son is a horse’s butt, and that your youngest daughter lives at home and hasn’t held a job for a longer duration than a month? Or how about confronting the fact that I hate you?”

I didn’t really, but I was furious. I took it out on the hummus, slapping it into the serving dish with a lot more force than necessary, and then I viciously rooted around in my parents’ chilly refrigerator for more vegetables. No, I wouldn’t say any of that now, not at this party. It had been going surprisingly well; the guests were all mingling, eating, and having fun, and there were lots of good presents for the baby. It was definitely not the time to start a fight with my mother and no matter what some of my sisters thought, I could keep my mouth shut. At times. If I wasn’t pushed too hard.

I was flinging some sliced carrots onto the tray when my sister Juliet walked in. She was staring at her phone but looked up guiltily when she saw me and immediately put it into her pocket.

“What’s wrong? What are you doing?” I asked quickly. “What are you up to?”

“Nothing! Sugar, Sophie, leave me alone.” She went to the fridge and, in a surprising move given the baby-themed party and the fact that it was not even noon, she grabbed one of my dad’s beers. Then she chugged it, draining the bottle and throwing it into the recycling.

“What’s wrong, JuJu?” I repeated.

She wiped off her mouth with the back of her hand and shook her head. We hadn’t ever been the closest siblings and we’d definitely had our share of fights in the past, so I wasn’t the person she went to with problems. I wondered if I should get Addie or Nic.

“Everything’s great,” she announced. “I’m fine.”

But she looked like she had once in high school, when she’d gone off the block early and DQ’d her medley relay. Yes, I’d attended those swim meets, sometimes. “Tell me what’s going on,” I ordered, doing my best impression of our oldest sister.

And that worked. “I’m having some issues with stuff,” she admitted slowly and obliquely.

Two things came to my mind, because I’d been monitoring what she was up to. “With your job or with money?”

She glanced at me before returning her gaze to the floor, and I watched a flush wash over her cheeks. Obvious blushing was an unfortunate side effect of being a redhead, as every kid in our family was to some degree. Even I, whose auburn hair was sometimes called mahogany, still got a lot of color in my face and right now, JuJu was heating up.

“With both of those things,” she said curtly. “I’m having a hard time with both. Addie already knows because her dumb boyfriend found out, but please don’t tell Nicola.”

“Ok.” It went without saying, but I wouldn’t tell our parents, either. “Are you going to get fired?”

“Maybe.”

“Did you do something to get fired for?”

“Not really. Not anything worse than…I don’t want to talk about it,” she said.

“Do you need help?”

She swallowed. “I need some money.” More blood bloomed into her cheeks until they were cherry-colored.

“How much?”

She told me and it was a lot. “Addie and her boyfriend offered to help but I said no. I told them that I had it figured out but I don’t. I can’t get out of this.” She blinked a few times.

“Ok.” I nodded. “I can loan that to you.”

“Seriously?” JuJu sounded shocked. “I didn’t think you had any money.”

“I have a good job and I save,” I said, my temper ticking up.

“You don’t spend anything,” she said doubtfully. “Like, no offense, but you’re wearing…what are you wearing right now?”

“Juliet, do you want my help or not?”

She did, and we worked out how it was going to go, how she would gradually pay me back. “Don’t tell, ok?” she requested for the fifth or sixth time.

“I won’t.” I knew how to keep secrets, ones that people wouldn’t discover no matter how hard they looked. “Why is it ok to borrow from me but not Addie?”

She was now staring at the refrigerator instead of toward me, and she hadn’t lost the embarrassed blush, either. “Addie will get invested, she’ll get all emotional and worried, but you won’t. You don’t care.” Then she did briefly meet my eyes before shifting her gaze to her boots. “Thanks, Soph.” She walked out, moving fast, before I could tell her something. It would have been something like, yes, we fought a lot, but I did care. Didn’t I? Didn’t she know that?

The rest of the party went ok, mostly because I stayed away from my mom and tried not to overhear anything that she was saying to her friends about babies, marriages, and my brother. After the guests departed, I helped clean up, covering for Nicola because she said she needed to check something and then disappeared. She’d actually fallen asleep on Grace’s bed in the room that we girls had shared before. Now the space belonged only to my youngest sister and the other upstairs bedroom, the one that had been inhabited by our brother Patrick, was preserved as a shrine to him, with all of his stuff exactly as he’d left it. However, it also served as my mother’s yoga studio and after today, she’d have a bunch of baby gear to put in there, too. I thought that she might have to do her breathing and stretching somewhere else.

While three of my sisters did the dishes and took down decorations, I helped my mom carry the boxes and bags of gifts into Patrick’s old room. She looked around and sighed. “There’s a lot in here now,” she noted, and I agreed. “My friends were so generous today. It was very kind of them.”

I agreed with that, too. “Where is Patrick going to sleep?” I asked. “Will he be in this room with the baby?”

“He’ll have to be. The only other place I could put them is your dad’s office, and he won’t give that up.” My mom sighed again.

“Are you rethinking your decision to let them move in?”

“No!” she shot back quickly. “No, I wouldn’t want to miss out on meeting my first grandchild and establishing a strong bond.”

That was kind of funny, since she hadn’t worried too much about a bond with her own kids, certainly not with the three oldest or the two youngest.

“I’m worried…” She trailed off and looked around at the décor that Patrick had left behind, the trophies on a shelf, his old baseball cap collection, the poster of a woman’s boobs that had always infuriated me and my sisters.

“What, Mom?”

“I’m worried that the house will be cramped with all of us in it,” she said, but I didn’t think that had been on her mind at all. She was a lot like Addie in that you could usually see what she was thinking—it was as if she had her feelings written across her face. She was worried about Patrick and where his life was heading, and she was worried about taking care of his baby. And she should have been.

“You had seven kids bunking down at one point,” I said. “We all fit back then. If you need an open room, you could always kick out Grace.”

“I would never kick anyone out,” she scolded, and that was true. We’d always had somewhere to come home to (even if none of us besides Grace had ever done that for any significant length of time after we’d graduated from high school).

“The baby will be here any day,” she noted. “Juliet was going to travel to San Francisco for the birth, but she told me that she won’t be able to. She didn’t go on her trip to Spain, either.”

“Hm.” I busied myself with taking some baby blankets out of a bag decorated with cartoon animals. “I guess everyone chose yellow presents because they don’t know the sex. Does Patrick?”

“Did you hear me asking you about your sister?”

“Juliet didn’t discuss her trips with me,” I said, perfectly honestly. “You should talk to her directly.”

My mom frowned at the soft blankets with the little ducks. “It is a lot of yellow. Should I paint the walls that color? According to Brenna, it makes people anxious.”

Brenna had also told me not to paint my house pink, and she’d been very wrong about that. “She doesn’t know anything. Take down the boobs poster and paint whatever you want. Except I’m busy next week and I won’t be able to help you do it,” I put in quickly, and fortunately for me, Nicola wandered out of the bedroom next door and my mom latched onto her about why she’d been sleeping. I made my exit/escape.

As I neared my house, I saw Danny outside working in his yard. It was mostly all semi-frozen mud right now, but he was making some kind of effort against the sticks and dead leaves. That was one way to deal with your property, I supposed, but others preferred to allow nature to figure out things on its own. After all, sticks and leaves never hurt anyone, as much as someone’s neighbors claimed that it was blight. I parked but instead of going inside, I went to the sidewalk and when I waved at him, he put down the rake (it hadn’t been working too well, anyway).

“How was the party?” he greeted me as he walked over.

“It went better than expected. I brought you something,” I answered, and gave him one of the goody bags that Brenna had made. She’d painted them and filled them with wrapped caramels (thanks also went to me for saving the candy from Grace). “They’re tasty, and Addie is very serious about food safety since her boyfriend owns a restaurant. These are totally fine to eat,” I pointed out as he looked inside the bag.

Of course, that information made him hesitate before he unwrapped a square. He thanked me but then asked, “Why wouldn’t your food be safe?”

That led me to tell him about the issue I was having with my refrigerator, how it was heating up more like a microwave, and he suggested that he could come in and take a look at it.

“No, thank you. I’ll get it fixed.”

He leaned a little, peering around me and toward my backyard. “What do you have there? What is that stuff?”

“There’s a mower that broke a while ago, and there’s a ladder and tools that were left behind by the family who lived here before.”

“When did you move in?”

“Seven years ago,” I said. “The refrigerator that used to be in the house is also back there. That’s why the problem I’m having with my current fridge is especially annoying, because it’s new. New as of seven years ago, anyway.”

He still wasn’t eating the caramels, even though I knew that he had a sweet tooth. I’d taken over the task of candy-making with him in mind, because when Nicola did it, she always made them grainy…I hadn’t been thinking of Danny too much, though, and no one liked grainy caramel. “What are you trying to do with your own yard?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said, looking over his shoulder toward it. “I never had a house like this and I’m not sure how to take care of the outside. It looked so messy.”

I was already aware that he’d been a renter in the past. He’d had two addresses since he’d left the military, and had been a tenant in good-standing at each.

“Everyone on this street keeps things neat…almost everyone,” he corrected himself. Now that the snow was gone, it did show that my place was not quite like the others. An inhabitant of my house had, at one point, planted some bushes and a few trees, but in the intervening years not a lot of time and energy had gone into upkeep. I myself had other things to do.

“The neighbors around here are very critical,” I said. “They’re very conformist. But you shouldn’t feel pressured to keep up with them, because they can suck it. Do what you want.”

“I want to have a nice house,” he told me. “I want to be proud of it. I’ve always loved this neighborhood. Do you remember how we used to tool around and look at how people lived?”

I did, because I’d been the driver and we’d ridden in the car gifted by my grandparents. I remembered how he’d wanted to tour open houses, too, which wasn’t a popular pastime among teenage boys. He used to talk about living in places like that. Someday.

“I want to make my home better, not worse,” he continued.

“Oh.”

“But now’s apparently not the time to do yard work, because I’m not getting very far,” he continued. “I can switch to another item on the to-do list. There are plenty.”

“If you’re heading to your dad’s, I could go with you,” I suggested. At the shower, Brenna had told me that I had on workwear and might have felt more comfortable sliding under a car rather than attending a party; apparently, I was dressed for an oil change. “I’d be happy to go, if you need help there.”

“I probably do, but I have projects in my own house, too.” He paused. “You’re not busy?”

“No,” I answered eagerly. I sounded like a child. “No, I’m taking the weekend off from my job,” I explained, and that sounded much more adult. “My sisters are always saying that I need a break.”

“That sounds like Addie.”

“It is Addie,” I said, and smiled. Nicola probably would have told me to work harder, and the rest of them probably wouldn’t have noticed.

“If you want to help paint, I’m happy to accept,” Danny said. “Or you could keep me company while I do it.”

I was good either way, so I threw my purse and my own bag of candy into my house and trotted with him to his front door. No, I didn’t need to change, I assured him, because I wasn’t worried about getting paint on my outfit. That did make me reconsider why I’d worn it to my mom’s party; I hated to admit that Brenna might have been right, but she might have been right. It also wasn’t lost on me that I had preemptively refused to help my mother paint the baby’s room, but here I was happily helping out a neighbor with the same chore. Whatever.

“What do you think about this?” he asked as he held a color sample chip to the wall of his living room. The floor and furniture were already covered with drop cloths and he’d put tape over the trim. He’d also removed the outlet and switch covers, so it seemed as if he wanted to do a careful job. We hadn’t been quite as careful when we’d painted the exterior of my house, which still showed on some nearby trees.

“I like blue,” I answered.

“I would have thought you were more of a pink person,” he said. “You may have the only house that color in Detroit.”

“So you agree that it’s a bold choice?”

“Carrington said that to you,” he pointed out and the image of his girlfriend, her well-glossed lips sneering, flashed through my mind. “She wasn’t trying to be rude. She felt strange seeing me talk to another woman.”

“A neighbor, and an old friend.”

“She sometimes sounds sharper than she really is,” he explained. “Like Nicola.”

Carrington was nothing like my sister, but I only shrugged and said, “Really?”

He assured me that was true and then continued, “The pink is bold but I think it’s interesting. But I’ve heard from a few other neighbors that they preferred the original color. That may be why they don’t like you.”

“They don’t like me?”

He put down the roller that he was fitting together. “That was rude of me to say. I thought you knew that they felt antagonistic. You admitted that they get mad about your yard and I know that you don’t talk to them. They didn’t even know your name.”

“I don’t care that people don’t like me.” Their feelings shouldn’t have been surprising, either, not with how much crap I’d gotten in the form of anonymous notes left in my mailbox. “I don’t like them right back. All of them with their perfect little yards, their perfect little roofs.”

“Their roofs?”

“It’s been suggested to me that I need a new one. There’s a problem in the back.” It was a growing problem which I’d solved with a tarp, but I’d get around to repairing it soon enough. It was my business, not theirs.

He handed me a roller. “I’ll cut in if you handle this. I am sorry I said that, anyway. I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.”

“You didn’t,” I assured him, and started to roll a little too aggressively. I backed off when I saw the splatter. “I hear a lot of noise about how I live, from neighbors, from my sisters, and from my parents. I tune it out.”

“How do you live?”

“Like I want and I’m very happy with it, but no one else is,” I said. “Just today, my mother was accepting condolences about me. I heard one of her friends ask if I had gotten any better. She implied that whatever is wrong with Grace is what I have, too, like laziness is some kind of contagious illness.”

“Grace is lazy? I know that you aren’t, unless you’ve changed a lot.”

No, I hadn’t changed very much, and I still wasn’t lazy. “Grace is Grace. When she wants something, she can go after it. She just doesn’t want the things that the rest of us do, like stable employment and independence. She has a lot to figure out. It’s really hurtful to hear my mother go on about how I…” I stopped. “I don’t care what she thinks, though. I never have.”

“I remember,” he said, and I stopped rolling to look over at him.

“What do you remember?”

“That you two didn’t get along. She didn’t understand you very well,” he responded. He carefully brushed around the window. “It was like you were speaking different languages to each other.”

“It’s still that way. She lets Nic boss her, and she tolerates Addie stepping in. Juliet and Patrick are perfection, as always, and Brenna and Grace are afterthoughts. I’ve always been an obstacle that she can’t overcome.” I sighed. “I should have dressed up more today. My clothes only made me stand out and I didn’t want to.”

“What are you wearing?”

“These are coveralls,” I explained. Did he really not know? “They’re from an old gas station, I think. I got them in high school.”

“In high school, you also dressed up. Not fancy, but like you were wearing costumes,” he clarified.

“I didn’t wear costumes! I wore whatever I wanted because I didn’t feel the pressure to fit in. I wasn’t like other people, who tried out for teams to make friends.” I stared at him pointedly.

“Yeah, I kept thinking there must have been a sport for me. I kept searching for it.”

Danny hadn’t found that sport but he’d looked hard. Football, basketball, baseball, wrestling, track and field—nothing had panned out. Most of the time, he’d struggled to get to practices because he worked so much and there was always the stuff with his dad to deal with.

“Here, I can reach.” He took the roller from my hand, because he didn’t need a ladder to get to the top of the wall under the crown molding. “I improved once I got bigger. I play tennis now, and I shoot hoops a lot.”

“Good for you,” I said, and I was genuinely glad to hear it. He’d always felt so bad about not being able to join a team, except for the ones that let him sit on the bench for a while.

“You know, my dad was an athlete.” He loaded the roller with paint and then passed it back to me.

“Really?”

He nodded. “He went to Notre Dame on a football scholarship. He was really good at baseball, too, and he also played basketball.”

“I can’t imagine.”

“He changed a lot after he graduated from college. He had a hard time keeping a job and he isolated himself.”

“How did he meet your mom?” In all the years we had been friends, that person hadn’t been a topic of discussion, and I didn’t know much about her except that she was gone.

“They may have met at a restaurant on the East Side.” But he shrugged. “It’s only a guess, because he never said much about her. I found an old job application for the place with her name on it, partially filled out. I found an old menu from there, too. Maybe my dad ate at the restaurant or maybe he saved the menu since it was important to him because of her. Of course, he had also saved shoe boxes and old coffee cups, so I don’t know. I only know that she died when I was really little.”

I had an idea. “What was her name? I could look her up for you.” He went and found the restaurant job application and I took a picture. “It’s a good thing that you didn’t throw everything away, or you wouldn’t have gotten even that little bit of knowledge,” I said. “There might be even more information to find.”

“I guess it’s good. It makes me feel terrible, though, to see those boxes. Every time I open my garage door, I get worried. Anxious,” he explained. “I used to try to clean our house and it’s the same feeling I had then, like junk is taking over and I’ll never get it straightened up.”

“Your garage is very neat and organized,” I reminded him.

“Still, it’s a lot of crap.” He seemed anxious right now, and he changed the subject and started talking about his job. That also interested me, because when I’d known him, he wasn’t anything like handy and now he was doing construction.

“I worked for a general contractor in Maryland, too, for the man I told you about,” he said. Yes, I’d found a lot of information about that guy, his daughters, and his grandchildren. “Building was what I did in the Army, too, so I was prepared. I found out that I like making stuff, fixing it. It gave me focus.”

“Do you want to go out on your own and start a business?”

He considered before he spoke. “No, I think I’ll keep working for Connor at Hayes Construction. He’s a solid guy and I like him. He has a ton of work.”

“Good,” I said. “I’m glad for you.”

He smiled. “You always celebrated my successes. You used to bake me little cakes on my birthdays and whenever I did anything minorly decent.”

“You did a lot of things that were more than minorly decent.” I covered a large section with the blue shade. “Addie told me that you used to do community service, volunteer stuff.”

“Yeah,” he agreed. “Here, I’ll reach that.” He took the roller again, painted the wall above my head, and returned it to me reloaded with color. “I still do volunteer work. I see the same kid every week.”

“What’s his name?”

He told me all about the boy, who was actually a teenager. They couldn’t have known each other for very long, since Danny hadn’t been back in town for more than a few months. But he did seem to know a lot, like all the details of the kid’s family life, his grades and education, and his hopes for the future. I listened, asking some questions and typing a few more notes into my phone.

We painted for a while, one coat on every wall, and I saw that it was just like when we were in high school: we worked well together. One thing that had changed was that I wasn’t so much in charge anymore. Like, I’d been the president of the Spanish club while he’d been the VP; I’d been the editor-in-chief of the newspaper and the yearbook, and he’d been on the staff. It had just worked out that way, I supposed. Maybe it was because I didn’t have my contractor’s license or maybe it was because it was his house, but I was definitely not in charge of this project. It was more of a team effort and that was fine by me.

I would have given anything for my prior painting jobs to be over. When Addie had cajoled me into putting the pink on the outside of my house, I had been praying for thunder, lightning, brimstone, or any other phenomenon that would have gotten me out of it. Now that Danny and I had finished, however, I didn’t want to go. I wanted to stay here, talking and hanging out. It was silly since he had work the next day and I would probably work for the rest of this night. It was definitely better to leave.

I still hesitated as I watched him wash the brushes. “My mom was asking about you earlier. She was teasing Addie that the two of you will get back together now that you’re in town.”

“No, that won’t happen,” he answered immediately.

“That was what Addie said, too. She has a serious boyfriend and they’ll definitely get engaged soon. Brenna has been hinting around about what gemstones everyone likes and what settings they would choose, and I’m sure it’s for Addie’s ring.”

“Addie’s boyfriend went to Brenna for help?”

“She has the best taste out of all of us,” I said, “so it makes sense, and she’s sneaky enough to get the information. She’s not as good as Grace, but Addie hasn’t noticed anything strange. She said she loves emeralds because she loves the color green. Brenna even got her to look at settings by making fun of some girls online, so Addie had to defend them and she did pick her favorite.”

“Is that what women want when they get engaged? They don’t want to be surprised?”

“Most women plan to wear those rings on their fingers for a long, long time, so it’s nice to have something that you love. Nicola didn’t pick hers but she loves it anyway. Addie’s boyfriend Granger is trying to split the difference. You know, surprise her with something that she’s happy with.”

Danny appeared to mull this over.

“Are you thinking about proposing to Carrington?”

He seemed very startled by that. “We haven’t been together for very long.”

It wasn’t a “no,” though, and he’d also just been talking about how much he liked kids. That was clear when he discussed the teenager he was volunteering to help and before, he’d mentioned how he would look to his former boss as a role model if he were a father himself. It made sense that he would have picked Carrington, his young and probably fertile girlfriend, and that marriage would be on his mind.

I moved the subject back to something less emotionally charged. “Grace said that she wants her ring to be a total surprise, and I was shocked that she wants to get married at all. Her relationships have lasted as long as her jobs have.”

He laughed.

“Brenna said that Grace should choose something from a vending machine, because she’ll lose it. Brenna herself wants a princess-cut diamond with tapered baguettes, and she has several pictures. She has every inch of her wedding planned and the ring is part of it. The pictures are very nice,” I had to admit.

“What about you?”

“Me? Oh, they know not to ask me.”

“Are you opposed to wedding rings or jewelry in general?” He looked at my hands. “No, because you’re still wearing your grandma’s ring on your right hand.”

I twisted it around my finger as I spoke. “I mean that my sisters know not to bother asking me about that stuff since I won’t ever be engaged. I’m done with it.”

“With what?Fiancés?”Danny smiled.

“I had a bad experience and I’m not dating anymore,” I answered. “If you were wondering why I’m still single, it’s by choice. I’m out of that entirely.”

“When you say ‘bad experience,’ do you mean that someone hurt you?”

“Not physically,” I assured him. “I realized that I don’t need to waste my time with it. I’m done.”

He seemed to understand immediately, as opposed to how long it had taken my sisters. They’d spent years arguing before they’d accepted this simple fact and my mother never would. “As long as you’re happy,” he commented, and I nodded and said that I was. I totally was.

When I finally made myself leave his house, I went home to research. No, I wasn’t working on the projects that paid me, even though a large chunk of my savings had walked away with Juliet today. Instead, I was looking up the kid that Danny volunteered to hang out with, Bruno, and his family. It was a sad situation and I studied it all for quite a while before I wrote up bios on him, his mother, his father, and the aunt he currently lived with.

Then I moved on to Danny’s family. I hadn’t done this before, not ever. I hadn’t had my job back when we been friends and in the intervening years, I hadn’t thought about him.

Ok, maybe I’d thought about him a few times, but I hadn’t stopped what I was doing in my busy life to go and research him. Now I found all kinds of things. I read the information again and again, but I didn’t start any dossiers. I sat there for a while longer and thought, and when I finally went to my bed, I thought about it even more. It was a long time before I slept that night as I considered what to do, but I never came up with a good answer.