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.
“Does it feel hot in here to you?” Mimi asked as I thought this. I was about to say no, and try not to do it vehemently, but then she was over at the A/C unit, adjusting it from 67 to 65. “That’s better. I hate a warm house. Have a seat.”
She was already doing just that, lowering herself onto the leather couch and putting her soda into the built-in cup holder on its arm. Even though the couch was huge, I didn’t want to crowd her, so I moved to the blue one.
“Now, let’s see,” Mimi said, pulling up a list of recorded programs. “What are we in the mood for?”
As I looked at the screen, scanning the titles, it was clear there was only one answer to this question: home improvement. Everything listed—Fix and Flip, Contractor: You!, From Demo to Dream House—shared this same subject. I said, “I take it you like renovation shows.”
“They’re my therapy,” she replied, scrolling through the titles before picking an episode of something called 3 Flip Sisters. “Have a hard day with everything breaking down all around you, then come and watch somebody else fix something up nice. I can’t get enough.”
She sighed contentedly, taking a sip of her soda as the show began. “One family,” intoned the announcer as the screen showed a trio of blond women, all with long hair, wearing matching plaid shirts, “three opinions, one firm deadline. This is 3 Flip Sisters.”
Just then my phone beeped in my pocket, the first noise it had made since my dad texted from the airport an hour earlier to say he and Tracy were boarding their plane. This time, it was Ryan. She’d been incommunicado since arriving at Windmill a couple of days after the wedding.
Testing testing. Anyone out there?
I smiled, quickly typing a response. Your phone works? I thought you were in the middle of nowhere.
I am, she replied after a moment. But if I climb this hill and stand on one foot, I have a signal. For now anyway. What are you and Bridget doing?
I filled her in, as succinctly as I could, while the TV showed a montage of the sisters and Bill and Shelley looking at various properties. By the time I hit send, they’d settled on a ranch house with hideous green linoleum floor in the kitchen that Angie, the sister Realtor, said was priced to sell.
“They’ll end up putting an arch in there someplace, mark my words,” Mimi said as the TV cut to a commercial. “Paula loves an arch.”
My phone beeped. Holy crap. Is Bridget’s grandpa okay?
Haven’t heard from her since she left, I wrote back. So not sure.
Are you okay? What’s it like there? I’ve never even heard you mention having another grandmother.
Even though Mimi was on the other couch, a fair distance away, I tilted the screen to be sure she couldn’t see it. The desire not to hurt her was that strong, even as I knew that I, too, could have claimed injured feelings, considering. Where had she been all this time? It was one thing if my mom had kept her at arm’s length—notoriously private, she got even more so when she was using—but five years had passed since her death. Had my dad run interference, thinking Mimi and all the rest of the Calvanders would be too much for me to handle?
Plus, my mom had never talked much about her family. It was Nana—my grandfather died young in his forties—who was consistently there for holidays and birthdays. Other than the funeral, which was a blur, the only trip I’d ever taken to my mother’s home was so long ago I didn’t even remember it. Yes, I had the Lake Stories, but they were never about people as much as a place.
“Arch!” Mimi said, pointing at the TV. “What did I tell you?”
Sure enough, on the screen, Paula was gesturing at a small, cramped living room as a computer graphic showed what it would look like with that shape as an entryway. “You told me,” I said.
She cackled, and I looked back down at my screen at Ryan’s question. What was it like here?
Unclear, I told her. Stay tuned.
I heard thumping, then footsteps crossing the kitchen. A moment later, a tall, thin guy with red hair, a baseball hat, shorts, and a faded NORTH LAKE T-shirt passed by in the hallway, his phone to his ear.
“Jacky,” Mimi called out, and he stopped, turning to peer in at her. “Didn’t you hear me calling you before?”
“I was taking a shower,” he said, sliding his phone into a back pocket.
“Well, say hello to your cousin Saylor.” She nodded at me. “She’s staying awhile.”