Summer with My Sisters (21 page)

T
here were still a few minutes before Poppy had to leave so she busied herself straightening the pile of correspondence on the kitchen counter (another sympathy card had trickled in only that morning) and reminding herself that she had vowed to remove all of her paperwork to the study. On the top of the stack of brochures from the bank, advertising new services, and the odd takeout menu Poppy found the letter from Adams College, requesting her membership on the scholarship committee. Poppy frowned. She was still hesitating about making that commitment. A representative from the committee, a Dr. Dolman, had called her that morning and though he was perfectly polite he made it clear that the committee was eager for her answer. He reminded her that if she turned down the offer of a position they would have to start looking elsewhere for another suitable candidate, and that might take some time. She had promised Dr. Dolman that she would make a final decision very soon. “How soon?” he had asked, to which Poppy had replied, “Very.”

It had been a lot easier to make the decision to attend tonight’s town meeting. Freddie was right. It wouldn’t hurt for her to make an effort to be more of a part of the Yorktide community, at least for the few years she was committed to spend as a resident. Earlier in the day Poppy had spent over an hour on the town’s official Web site, hoping to get educated about the issues most recently debated at the meetings. In addition to the traffic-control question Jon had told her about, tonight’s agenda included a proposed increase in the area required for the development of a privately owned lot of land. That didn’t sound terribly exciting, but as Freddie had pointed out, Poppy’s personal interests weren’t really the point.

Seven o’clock. Time to get going. Poppy checked her bag for the essentials—tissues, lip balm, wallet, and keys—and grabbed a bottle of water from the fridge. She called out a farewell to Allie and her sisters, who, after an early dinner, were watching a movie in the living room, but given the roar of the action on the screen she doubted they heard her.

The lot outside the town hall was already crowded when Poppy arrived twenty minutes later; she got one of the last spots available and hurried inside. Almost all of the seats were filled and Poppy found the din of voices momentarily deafening. A quick glance around the room told her that Julie and her husband, Mack, were there, as was Jon, his father and his brother Clark, and a woman Poppy took to be Clark’s wife. A sudden crisis with one of her longtime clients had prevented Freddie from attending; she had told Poppy she was counting on her to make a full report afterward. (Poppy had come to the meeting equipped with a good old-fashioned pad of lined paper and a pen.) Poppy also recognized Billy Woolrich, the owner of The Clamshell, and the woman who owned the town’s only high-end art gallery. Annabelle and Oliver Higgins had bought several paintings from Anna Ross over the years and Poppy remembered going with them to openings at the gallery. She had found the gallery atmosphere so exciting. She had enjoyed watching people interact, how they studied the paintings and the sculptures. And it occurred to her that in the three years she had lived in Boston she hadn’t gone to one gallery show. And though the city and its surrounding towns offered a large number of museums—the MFA, the DeCordova, the Isabella Stewart Gardner, the museums at Harvard, the ICA—she had probably only visited each one once, if that. How odd.

What the heck was I doing with my spare time for all those years?
she thought, threading her way through the crowd of locals toward a free seat. Shopping. Going out for drinks. Dancing at clubs. Poppy felt a shiver of embarrassment pass over her.
Certainly not being very productive
.

Someone tapped her shoulder and Poppy twisted around in her seat. “Poppy Higgins,” the man said with a smile. “Why I haven’t seen you since you came back to Yorktide! How are things at home?”

“Mr. Hillman, hello!” Poppy offered her hand to the man who had cut her father’s hair for over thirty years. Oliver Higgins’s hair might have been wild, but there was a method to its madness. “Fine, thank you. We’re all doing well.”

When Poppy turned back, the woman seated to her left leaned over. “It’s good to see a representative of the Higgins family here with us,” she whispered. “Stand together is what I always say.”

Poppy smiled in reply. She couldn’t for the life of her recall the woman’s name, but she recognized her from the old-fashioned, independently owned drugstore in town. When Annabelle Higgins had been suffering the side effects of chemotherapy, this woman had kindly recommended a variety of natural remedies to ease the nausea. Violet
,
Poppy thought, probably knew the woman by name.

The meeting was called to order and Poppy was swept up in the opinions expressed and the heated arguments that Jon had warned her would break out. After an hour and a half—which seemed to fly by—one of the Selectmen called the meeting to a close without, it seemed to Poppy, having resolved much of anything. She wondered if all politics, whether in cities or small towns, progressed at a snail’s pace and suspected that it did.

As the crowd slowly made its way toward the door—those who weren’t interested in hanging around to rehash the evening’s high and low points—Poppy saw that Jon Gascoyne was walking toward her.

“Any interest in joining me at The Blue Mermaid for a drink and a bite to eat?” he asked.

Poppy smiled. “Sure. I think I worked up an appetite trying to follow all the arguments pro and con. Plus, I’ve never been to The Blue Mermaid.”

“What? Then come on. It’s the go-to place for us townies, especially after events like tonight’s.”

The bar, located just a few doors away from the town hall, was filling up rapidly. Jon and Poppy grabbed the last table for two in a room decorated with gleaming brass lighting fixtures, a collection of ships’ wheels, and oil paintings of storm-tossed seas set in elaborate wooden frames.

“So, are you glad you came this evening?” Jon asked when they were seated.

“Yes,” Poppy admitted. “I really am. And I have to say, I was touched by the good feeling people showed me, even if it was only because of the esteem in which my parents were held. And it was a bit like theater in some way I can’t describe. Entertaining.” Poppy laughed. “Anyway, if I hadn’t come Freddie would have never let me forget it!”

Jon grinned. “She can be . . . tenacious. So, do you feel like a real member of the community now?”

“I don’t know if I’ve earned that title quite yet! But it felt nice being with all the others. I mean, I haven’t forgotten about the downside of small-town living—I think the small town invented the busybody!—but I think I’m beginning to understand the upside that my parents realized long ago.”

“I’m glad. Life’s too short to be unhappy about things like the town you live in.” Jon nodded toward the bar. “I’ll go up and get us some drinks. For you?”

“White wine, thanks.”

“You know,” Jon said, leaning toward her across the table, “they have the most amazing cheese fries here and you did say you were hungry. Now, before you lecture me on fat and cholesterol, let me just say that life is short and there are occasions on which cheese fries really shouldn’t be rejected.”

Poppy laughed. “Don’t worry, I wasn’t about to lecture you—or to say no to an order of these famous cheese fries.”

“I knew there was a reason I liked you. I’ll be right back.”

Jon dashed off.
Hmm,
Poppy thought, aware that she was smiling.
He likes me.

E
vie was standing at the fryer, her back to the door, when she heard familiar laughter. She whirled around, spatula in hand, to find her parents standing at the counter, placing an order for food. Her father’s arm was around her mother’s waist. Her mother was beaming up at him. The spatula dropped from Evie’s hand and she dashed toward the counter. “Mom! Dad!” she cried. “What are you doing here?” Her parents looked at her blankly. “Excuse me,” her mother said. “But do we know you?” Evie laughed. “Of course you do! I’m your daughter!” It was only then that Evie noted her parents were much younger than they should be, maybe only twenty-one or -two. “We have no daughter,” her father explained, very seriously. “We had one, but she died.” Her mother began to weep and her father hustled her out of the restaurant. “Wait!” Evie cried, wanting badly to hurry after them. But Billy stopped her with a heavy hand on her shoulder. “Let them go,” he said. “Can’t you see they’re grieving?” Evie whirled on him. “But what about me?” she demanded. “What about me?” Billy shrugged and turned away.

And then Evie woke. She was shaking. The dream had seemed so real. But it wasn’t real, she told herself. It wasn’t real. Because she wasn’t the one who had died.

Evie sat up against the pillows and turned on the bedside lamp. No, she wasn’t the one who had died. She was the one who was left to live with the memories.... It was why she hadn’t been able to bear the thought of spending the Fourth of July with Daisy and her family and their friends. All those memories of the annual party on Crescent Way, her father and the neighbor to their left, Mr. Acton, acting as chief grillers, her mother providing quirky decorations from her shop, the Spinelli family bringing side dishes, old Mr. and Mrs. Fitzpatrick, with their ancient dog Buster tagging along, providing the soft drinks. At the end of the evening the families would drive to the little park in the center of town to watch the fireworks display. It had all been so much fun, playing with the Acton and Spinelli kids, sneaking hot dogs to Buster, oohing and ahhing over the colorful fireworks.

But it was all over now. That was the past. It had been much better spending the day at The Clamshell than pretending to have a good time, like she had been pretending for the past three summers. Certainly, going to the pool party with Joel had been mostly a mistake, in spite of his being a wonderful date. How many of the other teens at the party had lost their parents as she had....

The accident had happened in early May. Evie was in history class when the school counselor came to the door of the room, asking for Evie to accompany her. She remembered feeling puzzled but not really concerned. She had done nothing wrong so she couldn’t be in trouble. It was only when the counselor ushered her into his office and Evie saw the policeman and one of her father’s colleagues, a young woman named Emma Travis, that her heart sank into her stomach. Emma suggested that Evie sit. There had been an accident. A car accident. Her parents were in the hospital.

“Dad was driving,” she said to Emma, as if it mattered. “Mom doesn’t really like to drive.”

The policeman nodded.

Emma took Evie home after that. Evie had only a very vague memory of that afternoon and of the days immediately following. She knew she had been numb most of the time; she didn’t remember crying, but she might have. They—all these strangers!—hadn’t let her see her mother at all, and she had only been allowed to see her father two days after the first emergency surgery to save his left leg. He was too sedated to say anything and Evie couldn’t even be sure he recognized her.

Emma moved in to the house on Crescent Way just until Evie’s parents’ condition became clear; Emma had her own family obligations to return to. It felt weird being alone in the house with Emma, even though she knew Emma from her father’s company picnics and Emma and her fiancé had been to dinner at the house a few times. But Emma was respectful and slept on the couch in the living room—not in Evie’s parents’ room—and she was very quiet and didn’t ask Evie questions she couldn’t answer, stupid questions like “How do you feel?” and “Are you hungry?”

And then had come the news of her mother’s death. Emma told her with tears streaming down her face. She had been Evelyn’s friend, too. Only then had Evie demanded to know the details of the accident. And that was when she decided that her father had killed her mother. “Dad’s a murderer,” she had said coldly. She remembered that moment now with some shame and a bit of regret. Her words had shocked poor Emma. “Don’t say that!” the woman had cried. “It’s not true!” A better instinct had kept Evie quiet then, but the words and the conviction that fueled them continued to echo in her head, even now, even three years on. Brutal, damning words. A brutal, damning conviction. But was the conviction a truth?

Unsettled by that question, Evie threw back the covers and got out of Nico’s guest bed. There was no point in trying to go back to sleep so she might as well get up and do something productive. Like clean the bathroom. It was the chore she hated the most and she had been avoiding it for the past week. But what if Nico suddenly showed up? What sort of new trouble might she be in then?

“W
ait a minute,” Poppy said, turning from the whiteboard in the kitchen. “It’s Thursday. Why didn’t you ask me for a ride to Pine Hill on Tuesday? Aren’t you working this week?”

Daisy felt a wave of embarrassment come over her. She didn’t look directly at her sister when she said no.

“Since when do volunteers get vacation?”

“They don’t,” Daisy said. “I quit.”

“You quit? But why?” Poppy asked. “I thought you really liked working with the elderly.”

“I did. A lot. But you were making such a stink about having to drive me there and back. . . .” Daisy couldn’t go on. She thought about the good conversation she and Poppy had the other day, when she had been honest about the resentment she had felt when Poppy moved to Boston, and wondered why she was acting so childishly now.

“You didn’t have to
quit
!”

“Well, what was I supposed to do?” Daisy asked, simply unable to check her irrational irritability. “Just go on arguing with you all the time?”

Poppy took a deep breath. “Call Pine Hill and tell them you want to come back to work. I’ll drive you and I won’t complain. If for some reason I really can’t be available I’ll find someone else to take you or pick you up.”

“Thanks,” Daisy said. “Really. Sorry I raised my voice just now.”

Poppy looked at her watch. Oliver’s watch. “Gosh,” she said. “If I’m going to make the bank before it closes I’d better get going. I’ll be back by five, okay?”

Daisy nodded and sank into a chair at the table. What a mess she had made. She had felt bad about quitting her job at Pine Hill from the moment she had gotten off the phone with Ms. Beverly, the volunteer coordinator’s administrative assistant. But she had been too embarrassed to call back and say that she had changed her mind. She had suffered because of the impulsive decision—she missed talking with Muriella and Bertie—and so had the nursing home, which was always short of volunteers. It had been a totally infantile thing to do. In some stupid way she had wanted to punish her sister, but she had only succeeded in punishing herself and other, innocent people.

But I am a child,
Daisy thought.
Not an infant, but a child. Except I’m not allowed to act like one anymore
. Because how could you be a child when there was no parent? One defined the other, didn’t it, like there couldn’t be right if there wasn’t wrong? Poppy might be her legal guardian, but she could never be a true parental figure for Daisy—someone she could totally rely on for things both big and small, someone she could be comforted by, someone she could learn from and admire. Daisy frowned. Wait a minute, she thought. Why
couldn’t
Poppy be a true parental figure? Maybe she hadn’t been giving Poppy enough of a chance; maybe she had to put some faith in her. It had been scientifically proved that praise and appreciation went further in motivating a person than complaints and criticism. It certainly always had for Daisy. She decided. She would make a real effort to thank her sister for the good things she did for the family, rather than point out the things she had failed to do. And just for good measure she would finally dust the baseboards in the upstairs hall. It was only something she had been promising Poppy she would do for the past week.

Daisy leaped to her feet before she could change her mind.