Hello, Sunshine

I think my sister never forgave me for that. She forgave him for having the rules. Maybe she figured he couldn’t do anything to get rid of them. But she felt that I should have helped to maintain them—helped her not have to maintain them all on her own.

She was furious at me for leaving Montauk and going away to college. She, after all, had made the opposite decision upon graduating from high school. But as angry as she was that I left, she was even angrier that I hadn’t done what I needed to do while I had been there to pretend my father was functioning, to make our lives work under his regime of crazy.

Which led us to our current relationship, or lack thereof. It explained why we had seen each other a grand total of five times since our father’s funeral nine years before. The first time was to go over the will. There was no money to divide, only the house to consider. The second time was for my wedding to Danny. Rain was a fan of his, probably because our father had been. The third time was for her wedding to the man that would become Sammy’s father. He was a professor at Southampton College—Rain’s continuing-education professor at Southampton College—and it was our best reunion, Rain too happy to focus on hating me. The fourth time was when Sammy was born. Sammy’s father, who had left a pregnant Rain for a different student, was gone by then. And the fifth time was when Sammy was two months old. Danny was working on a house in East Hampton. I made the mistake of telling her that was why I’d come to visit. She made the mistake of not seeing it as a gesture, nonetheless, and telling me to leave, Sammy a delicious little baby, held tightly in her arms as she closed the door.

All these years later, my sister still didn’t know how to forgive me for leaving her alone to handle our father. She still wanted to close the door and walk away.

I still hadn’t forgiven her, either, but for the opposite thing. I hadn’t forgiven her for spending so much time taking care of our father and his rules, even though she was the only mother figure I had, that she had stopped taking care of me.

My sister thought I left her. But, if she was paying attention, she’d see that she had stopped being around for anyone to leave.

19

Sammy read her novel during breakfast, not engaging with me at all.

When we got back to the house, she went up to her loft, and I walked into the bedroom to find Rain fresh from the shower, putting on her clothes for work.

Rain was a senior manager at the Maidstone, a sweet little hotel in East Hampton. She had worked there since she was twenty-one, starting off at the front desk. She now practically ran the place. And there was nothing wrong with her job, except how wrong it was for my sister. For one thing, she hated people—and she had to deal with them all day. For another, she had graduated number one in her class at East Hampton High and was nothing short of a math genius. Harvard had wanted her, and Princeton. She could have gone anywhere and done anything. She could have taken a job in some think tank where she never needed to be nice to a single person ever again. She should have gone somewhere other than down the street.

She crossed her arms over her chest, not trying to hide her disdain for me.

“Where’s Gena?” she said.

“She never showed up,” I said. “You really might want to rethink your childcare choices.”

She shook her head, walking toward her closet. “Sammy has got to stop lying to me.”

“How is Thomas?”

“He’ll be okay.” She sighed, clearly upset about him, and clearly uninterested in discussing it. “Did she make you take her to John’s?”

“Yep,” I said. “Karen McCarthy was there. She’s pleasant.”

She laughed. “She called you out? That must have been fun.”

“Your daughter doesn’t seem to be a fan.”

“She’s a smart girl.”

“Right? She read through her whole breakfast. I mean, I don’t know what most six-year-olds do, but . . .”

“How would you?” she said, clearly not interested in my interest. Nor in the familiarity of my question. Then she dinged me for it.

“There was a USA Today at the hospital,” she said.

I looked away, trying not to engage her further.

“I think the headline read: ‘THE PRINCESS OF COOKBOOKS REVEALED TO BE A PAUPER.’?”

I shrugged, pretending it didn’t upset me. “They’ve done better.”

“I could do better right now.”

She reached into her closet, pulled down a scarf. “They focused mostly on the affair, actually, which I think sucks. Who you’re sleeping with shouldn’t be the issue. The issue is that you can’t cook worth a nickel.”

I didn’t correct her, though sh

e was missing the point. There were definitely people who cared that I couldn’t really cook. Everyone else cared about something more primal—that they’d decided they knew me, and then decided they were deceived. That was the transaction we had traded in. I was supposed to have let them in to my lovely marriage, my gorgeous home, the recipes I warmed it with. And, in their minds, that was what I’d robbed them of.