The Rest of the Story(14)

“You work at a market?” I asked.

She looked surprised I knew this, then glanced down at her uniform top. “I forgot I had this thing on! Usually take it off the second I get in the car. Yes, Conroy Market. Only grocery store in North Lake. I’m an assistant manager.”

I took a big bite of the quesadilla: I hadn’t realized how hungry I was until I’d begun eating. “This is really good,” I told Celeste.

“You want another one?” She started to get to her feet. “It’ll only take a second.”

“Oh, no,” I said quickly. “I’m fine. Thank you, though.”

While I ate, I could tell she was trying not to stare at me, my presence still so surprising. Finally she got to her feet, taking my now-empty plate and Gordon’s. “I can do those,” I said as she started to run water into the sink, crammed with all those dishes.

“Oh, no,” she said. “You’re a guest.”

“I want to,” I said, wanting to add that it had been driving me crazy all day. “You cooked, I clean. That’s the rule in our house. Please?”

Celeste looked at me for a second. “Okay,” she said finally. “But know this: you start washing dishes in this house, you’ll never stop.”

In response, I stood up and walked over to the sink, pulling the faucet aside and turning it all the way hot before beginning to sort everything into categories. I knew I probably looked like the weirdo cousin, but as I added soap to the water, finding a scrub brush in the nearby dish rack, I felt more in control than I had since that call in the dark from Bridget twelve hours earlier. I was in a strange place, feeling strange even to myself, but this task was one I knew well, and I took comfort in it. So much so that when I finished, I turned to see both Celeste and Gordon had gone, leaving the Allies book and the lake as my only company.

I always did a lot of good thinking while washing dishes, and Mimi’s sink had been slam full. By the time I was done, I’d decided to look at my time here at North Lake as a kind of organizing. So back up in my room, once I unpacked my suitcase and put my clothes away, I pulled out the one notebook I’d brought with me. MIMI + JOE, I wrote at the top of a blank page, with CELESTE and WAVERLY each under a vertical line beneath. From those, I drew more lines, adding in my dad beside my mom’s name, and mine underneath it. Then I did the same with Trinity, Jack, and Bailey under Celeste’s, realizing as I did so I had no idea who her husband was. I’d be here three weeks, though. I had a feeling I could fill in the gaps.

Just then there was a whirring sound from outside, distant, and I turned to see a motorboat puttering from the shore to the floating platform I’d seen earlier. Then I saw another from the corner of my eye, followed by one more, all of them converging to the same spot from varying directions. The first pulled up alongside, and a dark-haired girl in a yellow bikini top and shorts jumped out, her phone to one ear. As the others docked as well, more people joined her. Within moments, between the boats and those who had arrived on them, you couldn’t see the raft at all.

Downstairs, the screen door slammed—this sound was becoming familiar—and I heard someone come into the kitchen, then start up the stairs.

“. . . told you, I was at work and couldn’t answer,” a guy, maybe my age by the sound of it, was saying. “Taylor. Don’t start. Seriously.”

The bathroom door closed, and I heard water running, along with more of this conversation, now muffled. As the screen door slammed again, I thought how much this place would have driven Nana crazy: she treated her house like it was fragile, with doors and drawers eased shut, gently. You slammed, you scrammed. That was a direct quote from my dad.

“Jacky?” Mimi yelled from the kitchen. “You here?”

“One sec,” the guy yelled back from the bathroom.

“Jacky? Hello?”

“ONE SEC,” he replied, louder. This time, she didn’t say anything, but a moment later I heard the fridge opening. I looked back at my family tree, full of gaps, and went downstairs.

“There you are,” Mimi said when she saw me. Still in her tie-dye, she’d ditched her sandals and put on fuzzy slippers in their place. A can of Pop Soda was in her hand. “I wondered where you got off to.”

“I fell asleep after Dad left,” I told her. “And then saw Celeste and Gordon.”

“Oh, good,” she said, turning back to the fridge. “You want a soda?”

“No, thanks,” I said. As the kid of a dentist, they’d been so forbidden in my early life that when I finally could have them, I’d lost interest.

“Oxford’s holding down the office until dinner, so I was just getting ready to watch my shows,” she said, grabbing a bag of potato chips from the top of the fridge. “Want to join me?”

Upstairs, Jacky—Jack?—was talking again. “Sure.”

She started down the hallway, to the living room we’d passed on the way in. The walls were lined with long couches—one leather, one dark blue corduroy—and there was a huge TV set, surrounded by shelves of family pictures. Off the back side of the room was the screened-in porch I’d seen earlier from outside, separated by a door with a glass pane that had been covered with a tacked-up towel. The result was a dimness that would have made the room feel cold even if the A/C hadn’t been going full blast, which of course, it was.