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  “Thanks, honey. That’s real sweet of you. Know what, Maggie? You are just as condescending as you were twenty years ago. It doesn’t matter. I have to be in Columbia tomorrow anyway to review the vitamin clinical trials with Geoffrey. I’ll just drive up there tonight and then no one’s inconvenienced.”

  Beth was standing there taking it all in. Allison struggled to say she was leaving as calmly as she could, but anyone could see she was about to blow a major, major gasket. How could the family treat their most famous relative so casually? Did they forget to roll out the red carpet for the Second Coming? Uncle Henry had money but her aunts Allison and Sophie were famous in capital letters, at least in this neck of the woods. For once, Beth agreed with Maggie—Aunt Allison was an egomaniacal pain in the butt. But it was just as true that her Aunt Maggie did egg her on.

  “You just do what you want to do, Allison. You know what’s best for you,” Maggie said in the most patronizing voice she had in her repertoire. “I don’t.”

  “There you have it!” Allison said a little too loudly. “It was good to see y’all even if it was so very, very brief. You coming, Sophie?”

  “Oh dear. Oh shoot. No, I think I’m gonna stick around, Al. I’ll meet you in Columbia Monday if that’s okay with you,” Sophie said.

  “Oh? And just how are you going to get there if I’m taking the car?”

  It was a stupid question, Beth thought. There were any number of ways Sophie could get to Columbia, including hitching a ride with Uncle Timmy since he was headed to Charlotte early Sunday with his clan.

  “Don’t worry about me. I’ll work it out,” Sophie said, and gave her twin a pat on the arm. “Anybody want a glass of cold water? I’m going to get myself one.”

  “I’ll take a beer if you’re buying,” Timmy said.

  “Sure. Come on, Al. I’ll walk you out to the car,” Sophie said.

  Sophie Hamilton was the Smoother, but then she had dedicated her years to ironing the wrinkles out of Allison’s life.

  As they left the room, you could feel the party spirit fizzle because of Allison’s hissy fit. Beth slipped away and back into the kitchen. She had lost her appetite anyway. Too much angst. Cecily was leaning against the sink, picking at her plate of food. Beth looked out the window and watched Allison’s animated rant and Sophie reaching out to calm her at least five times.

  “My entire family is crazy,” she said. “My aunt needs a slap across her Botox face and ten milligrams of something to chill her out.”

  “I ain’t saying nothing,” Cecily said.

  “You don’t have to,” she said. “I think this crowd needs dessert. Something to sweeten them up. What have we got?”

  The microwave pinged and Cecily put her plate down to retrieve whatever was in there.

  “One step ahead of you.” She showed Beth the Pyrex dish of peach cobbler.

  It smelled delicious. Despite the fact that she was still furious with her Aunt Allison, Beth’s mouth was actually watering.

  Cecily said, “See if there’s any vanilla ice cream in that freezer, okay?”

  “Fine,” she said. There was a large unopened tub of chocolate but no vanilla. “How’s this?”

  “Works for me,” Cecily said. “Don’t you want to be out there with all of them? Hey, what’s wrong?”

  “Believe me. I’ll spend enough time with them.”

  By the time Sophie came back into the house they had plated dessert for everyone, Beth’s face was still grim, and Cecily was certain something had happened.

  “Want a hand with that?” Sophie said. “My sister is a nut job sometimes, but she means well.”

  “Whatever. It’s okay,” Beth said, thinking, No, she doesn’t mean well, she’s as mean as a snake. “Who’s Geoffrey?”

  “Allison’s boyfriend. Believe it or not, she has one.”

  Beth wanted to say, Yes, that was extremely unbelievable, but for the sake of the evening, she said nothing more. They carried out the pie and ice cream and when everyone was served, Sophie settled herself in a rocking chair next to Timmy, who flipped off the cap of his bottle of beer with his bare hands.

  That’s impressive, Beth thought, seeing there was no place for her to sit. And no one seemed to notice that she was just standing there. She went back to the kitchen, with the intention to help Cecily straighten up the kitchen. Before she got there Cecily stopped her in the hall.

  “Okay, I can feel you seething. You gonna tell me what happened or do I have to squeeze it out of you?”

  “Oh, shoot. It’s nothing. My Aunt Allison is only the most insensitive woman on the planet, that’s all.”

  “And why?”

  “She referred to my father, who just died a few years ago, as a filthy rotten son of a bitch.”

  “Oh no. Not nice.”

  “Not nice at all. In front of everyone. I mean, even if he was one, it’s not for her to say. And he wasn’t.”

  “Come on. There’s a story here, right? I’m like the Sphinx. You can tell me anything and it stays right here.”

  “Thanks, I’m okay,” she said, and then choked up. “Look, my father was everything to me…” And Beth’s tears began to flow.

  “Oh, honey, I’m so sorry,” Cecily said.

  “And no one understands.”

  “Well, I do. Come on now, let’s get you a tissue and we can talk about it.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it. They’ll know we talked and then it will be a big discussion and everyone will have something to say. I just…I just want to get through tonight. She’s gone. I’m okay.”

  “We can talk when they’re all gone.”

  “Thanks but I’m all right. Really.”

  They pushed open the swinging door to the kitchen and in front of them was the second shock of the evening. The kitchen was immaculate. Every hair on Beth’s body stood up and a chill ran through her from the top of her head down to her toes.

  “This is impossible,” Beth said. “Wait! You did this!”

  “Humph.” Cecily examined the sink. “Ain’t been done by my hand. No ma’am.” Her eyes were wide in honest astonishment.

  Beth opened the refrigerator and there were all the waiting leftovers wrapped neatly in waxed paper, something she hadn’t used in her entire life. For some reason, the room smelled like lemons.

  “Oh my God! What do you think about this?” Beth said. “Livvie? For real this time?”

  “For real. Guess she didn’t want to miss the party, ’eah? But looky here! We still have glasses and the dessert dishes to wash,” Cecily said in a shaking voice. She opened the garbage can, which was full. “She never did like to take out the trash.”

  “I’ll do it,” Beth said, and pulled the bag out after tying the top corners tightly together. “Holy crap.” She still had the shivers.

  “Holy crap is right. I’ll go get the rest of the dishes,” she said. “And see if anyone wants coffee.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  Brave as Beth considered herself to be, she was spooked and she wasn’t too sure she wanted to stay in the kitchen by herself for longer than two seconds. So she scooped up the heavy bag and raced down the back steps as quickly as she could to the larger garbage can, praying the bag wouldn’t spring a leak on the way. Dinner parties were too much work, she decided. And this one was bordering on science fiction. And a little hand-to-hand combat.

  “I gotta go walk my dog,” she said to Cecily, glad to see her back in the kitchen.

  “Well, I’m almost ready to go,” Cecily said, and turned on the dishwasher. “Hey, I’m so glad I got to meet you! And thanks for all your help.”

  “Sure. Me too. See you when?”

  “Tomorrow afternoon. You gonna tell them about the cleanup?”

  “What’s the point of that? Aunt Maggie and my mom will probably know anyway when they see the waxed paper, and the rest of them would just say we’re nuts or something.”

  “You’re right. And Beth? Just hang on, honey. Time cures
a lot of things.”

  “Yeah, I know. And some people are just stupid. And mean.”

  “That is for true!”

  Beth put Lola on her leash and after saying good night to every member of the family, she took her over the dunes to the beach. As it turned out, Lola was quite taken with the beach, which was fortunate because Beth loved to walk.

  It was beautiful and clear and the flickering stars overhead were millions upon millions of tiny lights against the vast deep sky, as if she needed anything else to make her feel small. Beth had a case of the blues and she couldn’t shake them. It wasn’t about being stuck on the island for a year. It was what her Aunt Allison said that had triggered an entire emotional episode. Her eyes began to burn with frustration and tears for the second time. It wasn’t that she didn’t like her stepfather. He was a nice enough guy and her mother was crazy about him. Well, as crazy as people their age got over one another. They probably even had sex once in a while, which she tried not to think about because it was completely disgusting to even consider what people their age looked like naked.

  Beth was remembering the period of time when she thought her parents were going to get back together. That was the ground zero of her pain. Her father, Tom, was deathly ill from prostate cancer but ambulatory and struggling to maintain a good face. He had broken up with his girlfriend and was spending more time with Beth and Susan. It was Christmas 1999 when he appeared on their doorstep. He had brought a new computer for her mother, which was thoughtful as money was pretty scarce all around. He gave Beth a generous allowance for a shopping spree, which was just completely stunning because she bought her clothes with babysitting money, which was to say not much and not often.

  Beth gave them—him really—an album of photographs that she had worked on for months. Every picture was chosen for the sole purpose of making them remember how happy they had been when they were all living together as a family. She thought, no, she knew that when her parents looked at those pictures they would fall in love again, and whatever time her father had left, he would be spending it with them. And she had thought, hoped, and prayed that their love for each other would somehow cure him.

  It didn’t work out at all. Her plan that was so carefully thought through, all those novenas and trying to cut a deal with God, it had all failed miserably and completely. Oh, he loved the album; they both did. They even got all choked up when they went through it. But the album, the petitions to God, and what she wanted most was not enough to reunite them. Her efforts were not powerful enough to change anything. In fact, her father went back to his ridiculous girlfriend, betraying her mother and abandoning Beth one more time. He actually preferred that life to having one with them. Did either one of her parents or any of her relatives ever think about how that made her feel?

  He was in remission, he announced, and shortly afterward he moved to California with Karen. Things were all right for a while but then he got sick again and died in no time at all. Gone forever. Just like that. Her mother, who organized the whole funeral because Karen didn’t have the brains or the wherewithal to do it, appeared to recover in record time and then she turned around and married Simon. They were living happily ever after. Good for them, Beth thought, because I am surely not.

  When the discussion of families would come up, Beth would say to her roommates, “What good is a commitment to a marriage if one person doesn’t honor it and the other one doesn’t seem to care? It’s all so stupid. The whole marriage thing is a bunch of hyped-up bull.”

  One thing was certain, or at least she thought so. She was never going to let herself get sucked into a delusional world of white picket fences and minivans that depended on someone else’s honesty. Her mother had jumped off the cliff headfirst, not once but twice. Beth didn’t know how Susan coped with all that fantasy because in her mind there was nothing more dangerous than what her mother called love.

  She’d had her share of boyfriends. But none of them had ever amounted to a serious relationship because she was so very guarded. Besides, Beth or the object of her affection always seemed to be headed somewhere else—college in another state, summer jobs, internships, or just studying until all hours. These things were surely obstacles between Beth and love, but mainly it was her thick wall of self-protection. She told herself that she probably had not met the right guy yet. Besides that, it just seemed to her that people her age were all hooking up without a relationship and that was just too weird to her. Not that Beth Hayes didn’t have an appreciation for some acceptable degree of shallowness, but she had seen the damage an anything goes kind of attitude could do, and she couldn’t see any reason to change. Read: If her mother found out she had turned into a slut, she’d murder her in cold blood and her Aunt Maggie would turn her bones into a lamp. Nice thought.

  She had walked the whole way to the water tower around Station 25 and she knew it was getting late. When the tide was low and the breeze was so nice it would be so easy to keep ambling along until she ran out of island. But soon, thinking her mother might start to worry that she had been raped, murdered, and thrown to the sharks, she turned around and began to walk back toward the house. Lola was whining. She knew her little dog was exhausted from all the excitement of the night and picked her up.

  “Momma can carry you, baby. It’s okay.”

  When she got close enough to see the house, there were the silhouettes of her Aunt Sophie and her mother, on the porch rocking back and forth in the moonlight. Their laughter echoed across the dunes. It warmed Beth to see them so obviously enjoying themselves. This was what was good about families, she thought.

  She walked across the yard and her mother stood up to greet her. “Hey, baby! You were gone so long we were about to call the Coast Guard.”

  “Yeah, well, your granddog likes to stop and inspect everything.” She climbed up the steps and gave her a hug. “What are y’all talking about?”

  “We are solving the problems of the world, my beautiful niece. That’s all,” Sophie said. “Come sit here.”

  She sat in the rocker next to her aunt and Sophie reached over and patted the back of her hand.

  “I should really put Lola in her crate,” Beth said. “She’s had it.”

  “Give her to me,” Susan said. “I’m going to bed anyway. I’ve had it too.”

  Beth gave Lola a nuzzle and handed her over. “Night, baby. Thanks, Momma. See you in the morning.”

  Susan said Love y’all, blew them kisses, and closed the screen door carefully so that she wouldn’t wake the others. The house was quiet then. Sophie and Beth rocked for a few minutes, back and forth in silence.

  “So what did I miss while I was out there?” Beth said.

  “Well, we sliced up my twin pretty good.”

  “Yeah, that’s the dangerous part about leaving early. People get vicious and talk about you. Especially if you deserve it.”

  “That’s every family, sweetheart. Anyway, Allison has me worried lately.”

  “Why’s that? Not that she doesn’t seem even more bitchy than ever. Excuse me.”

  “Right? No, I agree with you. She’s practically insufferable.”

  “So what’s new?”

  “Well, when we started our business, the workout studios were one thing, then it was infomercials selling DVDs and that’s still a good source of revenue for both of us. But now that we’re getting into these herbal supplements, Allison is popping more pills of unknown and unapproved substance than I think is healthy for her. Her boyfriend, Geoffrey with a G, thank you, is her new guru. I mean, she’s the company guinea pig and it’s obviously taking its toll on her. She’s got mood swings like the one you saw tonight, and—”

  “Maybe it’s stress.”

  “Yeah, no doubt. But she’s become insanely ambitious, and once we launch Vita-Supp, she’s talking about taking our whole business public. Don’t tell that to anyone, though, okay?”

  “Who am I gonna tell? Lola?”

  “Still. Anyway, she told me she
wants to be a billionaire. A billionaire. Who in their right mind thinks we can make a billion dollars doing this?”

  “Geesch. Pretty crazy.”

  Sophie said, “Well, that’s the thing. She might actually be crazy. But enough of that. Tell me how you are.”

  “Reasonably miserable in my boring pathetic existence wondering why I actually deferred my scholarship to babysit this crazy house for a year.”

  “Well, that’s obvious. This house needs a sitter because if some responsible person wasn’t here the haints might take over.”

  They both giggled about that. Whatever haints occupied the Island Gamble were, in the family’s opinion, reasonably harmless and just something else to talk about late at night on the porch.

  “Seriously, right?”

  “You’re awfully good to do this, Beth. Your mother is half out of her mind with excitement over going to Paris.”

  “I know, I know. That’s why I’m doing it. But you know what?”

  “What?”

  “I worry that this is a slippery slope. I could wind up with frosted hair wearing little sundresses covered in tiny flowers if I don’t watch myself. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but I don’t want to be that girl. I’m pretty sure I don’t want this life.”

  “Gotcha. You want to be yourself, is that right? An individual with your own mind? Your own taste in things?”

  “Exactly.”

  “So what do you think it’s like to have an identical twin?”

  “Weird, but I’m just guessing.”

  “Weird like you can’t imagine. We even have freckles in the same spots.”

  “Really?”

  “Really. So you want to know what I did? I got a tattoo. Even Allison doesn’t know. So if you tell, I’ll have to kill you.”

  “How cool are you? Let me see it!”

  Sophie stood up and pulled down the waistband of her skirt. There, in the darkness of the porch, Beth could make out a tattoo of a butterfly on her left hip.

  “Branded! When did you do this?”

  “Like ten years ago. I was pretty sick of being exactly—and I mean exactly—like someone else.”