The Dutch House(39)

“You cut off your hair!” I said once we were out of earshot.

Maeve reached up and touched her neck just below the place where her dark hair ended in an abrupt bob. “Do you like it? I thought it made me look more like an adult.”

I laughed. “I would have thought you’d be sick of always looking like the adult.”

She linked her arm through mine and dipped her head sideways to touch my shoulder. Her hair fell forward and covered her face for an instant, so she tossed her head back. Like a girl, I thought, and then remembered Maeve was a girl.

“These will be the best four days of the year,” she said. “The best four days until you come home for Christmas.”

“Maybe for Christmas you’ll come see me. I came to see you for Easter when you were in college.”

“I don’t like the train,” Maeve said, as if that were the end of that.

“You could drive.”

“To Manhattan?” She stared at me to underscore the stupidity of the suggestion. “It’s so much easier to take the train.”

“The train was a nightmare,” I said.

“Was the girl a nightmare?”

“No, the girl was fine. She was a big help, actually.”

“Did you like her?” We were nearly to the door that led out to the parking lot. Maeve had insisted on driving in to get me.

“I liked her as well as you like the person you sit next to on the train.”

“Where’s she from?”

“Why do you care where she’s from?”

“Because she’s still standing there waiting and no one’s come to meet her. If you like her then we could offer her a ride.”

I stopped and looked over my shoulder. She wasn’t watching us. She was looking in the other direction. “Now you have eyes in the back of your head?” I had always thought it was possible. Celeste, who had seemed so competent on the train, looked decidedly lost in the station. She had saved me from a lot of luggage handling. “She’s from Rydal.”

“We could spare the extra ten minutes to drive to Rydal.”

My sister was more aware of her surroundings than I was. She was also a nicer person. She waited with my bags and sent me back to ask Celeste if she needed a ride. After taking a few more minutes to scan the station for some member of her family—it had never been made clear which one of them was supposed to pick her up—she asked me again if she wasn’t going to be a huge imposition. I said she was no trouble at all. The three of us walked to the parking lot together while Celeste continued to apologize. Then she crawled into the back of my sister’s Volkswagen and we drove her home.

*

“You were the one who said we should give her a ride,” Maeve said. “My memory on this is perfectly clear. We were going to the Gooches’ for Thanksgiving and I needed to get home and make the pie, then you said you’d met this girl on the train and promised that I’d drive her home.”

“Utter bullshit. You’ve never made a pie in your life.”

“I needed to go the bakery and pick up the pie I’d ordered.”

I shook my head. “I always took the 4:05 train. The bakery would have been closed by the time I came in.”

“Would you stop? All I’m saying is that I’m not responsible for Celeste.”

We were in her car and we were laughing. The Volkswagen had been gone for years, replaced by a Volvo station wagon with seat heaters. That car chewed through snow.

But on this particular day it was only cold, not snowing. The lights in the Dutch House were already lit against the dark. This was part of a new tradition that came years later: after Celeste and I had dated and broken up and come back together again, after we had married and after May and Kevin were born, after I had become a doctor and stopped being a doctor, after we had all tried for years to have Thanksgiving together in a civilized manner and then had given up. Every year Celeste and the kids and I drove to Rydal from the city on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. I left the three of them at her parents’ house and went to have dinner with my sister. On Thanksgiving Day, Maeve served lunch to the homeless with a group from church and I went back to eat with Celeste’s enormous and ever-expanding family. Later in the evening, the kids and I would go back to see Maeve in Jenkintown. We’d bring refrigerator dishes heaped with leftovers and slices of pie Celeste’s mother had made. We ate the food cold while we played penny-ante poker at the dining-room table. My daughter, whose dramatic nature was evident in earliest childhood, liked to say it was worse than having divorced parents—all the back and forth. I told her she had no idea what she was talking about.

“I wonder if Norma and Bright still come home for Thanksgiving,” Maeve said. “I wonder if they married people Andrea hates.”

“Oh, they must have,” I said, and for an instant I could see how it all would have played out. I felt sorry for those men I would never meet. “Pity the poor bastards brought to the Dutch House.”

Maeve shook her head. “It’s hard to imagine who would’ve been good enough for those girls.”

I gave my sister a pointed look, thinking she would get the joke, but she didn’t.

“What?”

“That’s what Celeste always says about you,” I said.

“What does Celeste always say about me?”