Barefoot: A Novel

but I don’t understand why you care. The man is cheating on you.”

“You know nothing about it,” Melanie said.

Brenda sliced a fig in half and tried to feed it to Blaine, who “yucked” and clamped a hand over his mouth.

“I know nothing about it,” Brenda agreed. “I didn’t write a note because I was busy with the kids. We were on our way out to buy groceries. You were asleep. Vicki was asleep. I was left to captain the ship by myself and I . . . just forgot. Honestly, it flew out of my mind.”

“I hope you didn’t tel him I was pregnant,” Melanie said.

“Oh my God, of course not.”

“Or even hint at it. I don’t want him to know. And I mean that.”

“I didn’t hint at anything. I was very vague. I didn’t even tel him you were asleep. Al I said was that you were unavailable. You should be thanking me. I did a great job.”

“Except you didn’t tel me he cal ed.”

“I had my hands ful !”

“Bren,” Vicki said.

Brenda whipped her head around. When she did that, her hair was a weapon. “Are you taking sides?”

There can’t be any sides this summer, Vicki thought. I am too sick for sides. But she knew it would be fruitless. There was Brenda, her sister.

There was Melanie, her friend. They didn’t have a single thing in common except for Vicki. Already Vicki felt herself splitting down the middle, a crack right between her diseased lungs.

“No,” she said.

Vicki had come to Nantucket with the hope of re-creating the idyl ic summers of her youth. Had those long-ago summers real y been idyl ic? Vicki remembered a summer with one hundred mosquito bites, and another summer, or maybe the same summer, when she had a gnat trapped in her ear overnight, and one year Vicki fought with her father about long-distance phone cal s to her boyfriend Simon. But for the most part, yes, they had been idyl ic. Vicki and Brenda left school and friends behind in Pennsylvania, so the summers had starred only them and, in a hazy, paral el adult world, their parents, Buzz and El en, and Aunt Liv. The sand castles with moats, the smel of a real charcoal barbecue—it had al been real. And so, even as Melanie pouted on the living room sofa and Brenda huffed around the kitchen—they were like boxers back in their corners—Vicki peeled a banana, eyed the sunlight pouring through the cottage windows like honey, and thought: It’s a beach day.

This sounded like a simple idea, but it took forever to get ready to leave. The children had to be changed into bathing suits and slathered with lotion. (Skin cancer!) Brenda found plastic sand toys, bleached white by the sun, in a net bag in the shed. The toys were covered with years of dust and cobwebs and had to be rinsed with the hose. Then, lunch. Vicki suggested, for the sake of ease, picking up sandwiches at Claudette’s, but Brenda insisted on a picnic hodgepodged together from the bizarre ingredients she had brought home from the market: bread and goat cheese, figs and strawberries. At the mention of these provisions, Melanie gagged and ran for the bathroom. Vicki and Brenda listened to her throwing up as they folded the beach towels.

“Try not to upset her,” Vicki said.

“She’s pretty sensitive,” Brenda said.

“She’s going through a lot,” Vicki said.

“You’re going through a lot,” Brenda said. She stuffed the towels into a mildewed canvas tote that had belonged to Aunt Liv. “What are we going to do on Tuesday, when I take you for your port instal ation? The doctors said it would take al morning. There is no way she can handle both kids by herself al morning.”

“Sure she can.”

“She cannot. I could barely do it myself. And, I hate to bring this up, I mean, I’m happy to help with the kids and al , that is why I’m here, but I was hoping to get some work done this summer. On my screenplay.”

Vicki took a breath. Brenda was so predictable, but maybe only to Vicki. Vicki heard Ted’s words: Your sister says she wants to help, but she won’t help. She’ll be too busy reading to help. That was how it always went. When Vicki and Brenda were children, Brenda had been excused from al kinds of chores—setting the table, folding laundry, cleaning her room—because she was too busy reading. Even if it was only the newspaper, when Brenda was reading, it had been considered sacrilegious to ask her to stop. Buzz and El en Lyndon had done a thorough (if unintentional) job of labeling their girls: Vicki was the go-getter, organized and hardworking, whereas Brenda had been blessed with the kind of rarefied genius that had to be coddled. Although Brenda was only sixteen months younger than Vicki, nothing was expected of her. She and her “great mind” were tiptoed around like a sleeping baby.

Melanie came out of the bathroom, wiping at her lips. “Sorry,” she said. “Can I just have a piece of bread, please? With nothing on it?”

“Sure,” Brenda said. “My pleasure.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

Okay, Vicki thought . Okay?

The morning sparkled. Vicki, Brenda, and Melanie rambled down the streets of ’Sconset toward the town beach. Vicki was carrying Porter, who kept sticking his hand into her bikini top and pinching her nipple. She had tried to give him a bottle that morning, but he threw it defiantly to the floor.

Then he lunged for Vicki, fel out of the high chair, and bumped his head on the table. Tears. The subsequent fussing over Porter made Blaine irate

—he proceeded to march out the front door and urinate on the flagstone walk. Lovely.