Calypso(14)

Tiffany would have inherited money from our father someday, though she likely would have burned right through it. “You want a car?” she’d have said, perhaps to someone she met in a parking lot. “I’ll buy you a fucking Bronco or whatever. Is that what you want?”

Word would have gotten out that some lady was buying people Broncos, and in no time she’d have been penniless again and feeling just fine about it.



An hour before arriving at the beach, Hugh stopped at a fast-food place called Hardee’s so I could get a coffee. The town we were in was small and grim, and the restaurant was deserted except for us. Inside the front door stood a Christmas tree, over-decorated in a majestic combination of red and gold.

“How long has this been up?” I asked the black woman behind the counter.

She scratched at the tattoos on her left forearm, initials that looked like they’d been done at home with a sewing needle. “Since last Tuesday maybe?” She turned to the fellow cleaning the grill. “Do that sound right?”

“Just about,” he said.

“Will you have a tree at home?” I asked. “Have you put it up yet?”

This is the sort of thing that drives Hugh crazy—What does it matter if her Christmas tree is up?—but there was no one in line behind me, and I was genuinely curious.

“I think it’s too early,” the woman said. “My kids is all excited for one, but we ain’t even had Thanksgiving yet.”

Gretchen ran her good hand over the false hair on top of her head. “Will you cook a turkey on Thursday or go for something else?”

“Are you two happy now?” Hugh asked when we finally returned to the car. “Need to go back in and learn what everyone’s doing for New Year’s, or do you think we can leave?”

Gretchen propped up her broken arm on the narrow window ledge. “If he thinks we’re bad, he should spend more time with Lisa.”

“That’s true,” I agreed. “Lisa’s the master. I left her at a Starbucks for ninety seconds last year, and when I returned the woman behind the counter was saying to her, ‘My gynecologist told me that exact same thing.’”

I normally don’t believe in drinking coffee in the car. Most often, I spill more than I swallow, but without it I’d have fallen asleep and then had to revive myself once we reached the house. It was after eleven when we arrived, and I was pleasantly surprised by all the changes. The place we bought is two stories tall and divided down the middle into equal-size units. You can pass back and forth between one half and the other by way of a hotel-style connecting door in the living room, but it’s inconvenient if you’re upstairs. The two kitchens are another problem, as we really only need one. Our initial idea was to knock down some walls and transform it into a single six-bedroom home. Then I recalled our last trip to the beach and the number of times I found my brother lying on the sofa with his shoes on, and decided that two separate halves was probably a good idea. The left side, which was softly lit and decorated with carefully chosen midcentury furniture, was mine and Hugh’s, while the junky right side was for everyone else. Of course other people could stay in our half, but only when we were there to monitor and scold them.

Because everyone was coming for Thanksgiving, the house was going to be full. The family was arriving in dribs and drabs, so for the first night it was just the three of us. On the second day, late in the afternoon, Lisa pulled up. I helped her unload her car, and then we took a walk on the beach. It was cold enough to see our breath, and a strong wind was blowing. “Did I tell you I got Tiffany’s toxicology report?” she asked a while after we’d left the house. “They also sent me her death certificate, and apparently—”

At that moment a Labrador retriever bounded up, tail wagging, a middle-aged woman in a baseball cap trotting behind it. “Brandy, no,” she scolded, adding as she unfurled her leash, “I’m sorry.”

“For what?” Lisa gathered the dog’s head in her hands. “You’re beautiful, aren’t you?” she trilled in the melodic voice she uses for things with tails. “Yes, you are, and you know it.” She turned to the owner. “How old is she?”

“Two years this February,” the woman said.

“I have one that age,” Lisa told her. “And she’s a real handful.”

I have no patience for this kind of talk and turned to face the ocean, waiting for the conversation to end. Hopefully then I could learn what our sister had used to kill herself with. We figured she had taken pills—Klonopin, most likely—and though it technically didn’t matter if she’d mixed it with other things, we still wanted to know.

Behind me, Lisa was telling the strange woman that the Newfoundland water dog she had before the one she has now died after swallowing all her husband Bob’s high blood pressure medication.

“My God,” the woman said. “That must have been awful!”

“Oh, it was,” Lisa told her. “We just felt so guilty.”

The woman with the Labrador wished us a happy Thanksgiving, and as she headed down the beach, Lisa continued her story. “So they sent me the death certificate, and the cause isn’t listed as a drug overdose but as asphyxiation.”

“I don’t get it,” I said.

She sniffed her hands for dog and then stuffed them into her coat pockets. “After taking the Klonopin, Tiffany put a plastic bag over her head.” Lisa paused a moment to let that sink in. “I wrote to the state trooper who found her body and sent him a picture of her in her twenties, the pretty one we ran with her obituary. I just wanted him to know she was more than what he walked in on.”