The Hopefuls(10)

“Aunt Beth, look.” Grace held up the bracelet so that I could see. I walked over to them and squatted down.

“Oh, I like that one,” I said. “I love the blues and greens and how it’s on an angle like that. I used to know how to do that.”

Lily put her hand on my arm. She was seven, a year younger than Grace. “Grace can teach you. She’s teaching me.”

Grace nodded in a businesslike way. “She’s doing a good job, too.”

“Girls, don’t monopolize Beth,” Jenny called. “Let her breathe.”

“I’ll be back,” I told the girls, running my hand down Grace’s hair.

I adored my nieces. They were probably my favorite members of the whole Kelly family. When I first married Matt, I often felt awkward around everyone, not sure where I belonged. Grace and Lily were a great distraction—if I was holding a baby or chasing around a toddler, it gave me something to do and made me feel useful. They were the greatest buffer anyone could have asked for.

Jenny and Nellie were always grateful to have me take a baby from them—Babs wasn’t the kind of grandmother who gave bottles or offered to change diapers—and I was always eager to do it. The first time I went on vacation with all of the Kellys, I shared a room with Grace, who was just a baby. (We weren’t married yet, so there was no chance of me sharing a room with Matt.) I still remember the relief of waking up to her little smiling face staring at me, how she offered her spitty hand to me through the bars of the crib, and laughed when I held it in mine. I remember thinking that at least one person in the family really liked me.

“Sorry about that,” Nellie said, as I sat down with them. She made a face. “They’ve been talking about showing you the bracelets all week. Be careful, because I have a feeling I know what you’ll be getting for your birthday.” She and Jenny laughed and I smiled.

Michael and Will were only a year apart—forty and forty-one—and they were often mistaken for twins. Jenny and Nellie had been friends since high school, and now co-owned a store in Chevy Chase called Pink Penguin, which sold ribboned headbands, flip-flops adorned with flowers, and painted bobby pins. The store had a monogram machine that they used on everything you could imagine. Until I met them, I didn’t own anything with my initials on it, and now I had monogrammed slippers, towels, sweaters, blankets, beach bags, and clutches.

My sisters-in-law were always friendly to me, and made a point of inviting me to lunch or dinner with them, which I appreciated. But I always felt a little bit like the third wheel with them. They’d been friends for over twenty years, lived two blocks away from each other, and had three children each (two boys and one girl), who all went to the same school. Their lives were so intertwined, and no matter how much time I spent with them, I was always on the outside.

“Where’s Matt?” Nellie asked. “Did Babs steal him?”

“Yep. He’s inside telling her every single thing that happened to him this week. No detail too small to leave out.”

They laughed, and I sat back in the chair. The basis of my relationship with Jenny and Nellie was that we all understood how ridiculous our mother-in-law was with her boys. They were the ones who taught me not to be scared of Babs, not to get upset when she said something insulting, and I was forever thankful for that. When Nellie was seven months pregnant, Babs had watched her walk into the house and commented that Nellie was gaining “a great deal of weight” in her legs. Nellie had laughed and said, “No kidding.”

The two of them resumed the conversation they’d been having before I got there, and I half listened as Jenny talked. “So, what I was saying is that Emma’s mom—remember Emma? She’s the one with the bowl cut? Well, her mom, Susie, just wouldn’t admit that Emma had a learning disability, when it was so obvious to everyone that she did. Anyway, they finally figured out that she was dyslexic or something, but in the meantime, Emma developed a stutter. Like, a really bad one. I know, the poor thing. Like it could get much worse? Anyway, then she started seeing a speech therapist and then we find out that Susie is having an affair with the therapist. And now she’s leaving her husband for him. Do you believe it?”

The two of them laughed and wiggled, but also made sympathetic noises to pretend they cared about Emma. Poor Emma, I thought. Poor little dyslexic Emma. Jenny and Nellie were horrible gossips, and hearing stories like this made me pity the other mothers in the school.

After they’d laughed enough about the speech therapist scandal, Nellie turned to me. “So, how’s everything going?”

They’d asked me this same question about thirty times since I’d moved. I think they could tell that I was unsure about DC, that I missed New York. But they’d grown up there, and I didn’t want to insult the city they were from, so each time I just said, “It’s going really well!”

We chatted for a while and sipped our wine, watched as Lily and Grace wove the colored thread. The sky had just started to change color when Rebecca stepped outside, still holding Jonah on her hip. Unsmiling, she said, “It’s time for dinner. Babs is requesting your presence inside.”

—

In the kitchen, Babs and Matt were still talking and Patrick was taking containers of food out of the diaper bag and getting ready to warm them up for Jonah’s dinner. They always brought separate food for Jonah, because he had a dairy allergy, and Rebecca had just told me that they also thought he had a sensitivity to wheat. Babs dismissed these food restrictions as pure nonsense and was always trying to sneak ice cream and yogurt to Jonah. When Patrick would stop her, she’d throw up her hands. “How can his stomach get used to it if he never eats it?” she’d say.