She closed her eyes and pictured her parents in their inflatable easy chairs, spinning slowly across the pool in their modestly landscaped yard on the Main Line, fingers loosely intertwined, navels safely tucked away. If they ever complained about anything, it was swaddled in a thick blanket of tipsy humor. “It was so funny,” her mother would chortle, “the way that radiologist was staring at my blouse. The last thing he needed was a new X-ray machine!” Mary Ellen grew up understanding that “so funny” was usually code for something unsavory, but the code protected them, insulating them from prickly revelations that might puncture those floating chairs.
And the truth was, Mary Ellen loved her parents’ equanimity; it was something she’d cultivated in herself. Why make life harder than it already was, they’d always said, and they were right. When something had happened with her father’s secretary—what, exactly, Mary Ellen would never know—there had been a few evenings without happy hour, when her mother had locked herself in her bedroom and refused to make dinner. But eventually, she’d pulled herself together, and to Daddy’s and Mary Ellen’s great relief, things quickly returned to normal. In fact, happy hour wasn’t just reinstated; it began earlier and lasted longer.
Mary Ellen stood up and looked in the mirror, smoothing her hair and running her fingers lightly under her eyes. The secretary situation had happened during her freshman year of high school, which meant she was now the exact age her father had been at the time. The incident had never been spoken of and was never, as far as she knew, repeated. Always an enthusiastic collector of Audubon prints, Daddy had suddenly decided to take his hobby to a new level, traveling to auctions and visiting dealers every weekend, causing small wrinkles to appear between Mommy’s eyebrows when she reviewed the checkbook register. “It’s his stress relief,” she would sigh, and it was only now that Mary Ellen recognized that some sort of silent bargain had been struck.
It seemed to work; they were happy together for many years. Then Mommy died of a heart attack in her sleep, leaving Daddy alone with his Audubon prints for nearly a decade. He’d seemed content; Mary Ellen had visited him several times a week at first, then on occasional weekends. Things had been so busy around the time of his accident that she hadn’t been to the house in nearly a month. The neighbors had called the police when they noticed the newspapers piling up.
Mary Ellen shook her head and washed her hands thoroughly, with lots of soap, and held them under the dryer until her skin began to burn. Don’t dwell on it, she told herself for the thousandth time. You’ll ruin everything.
She returned to the table, where Sydney and Shelby were engrossed in their phones. She refrained from making a comment about devices at the table, knowing what the answer would be—what it always was. Muddy sneakers in the living room? “Dad lets us.” Going to school in pajama pants? “Dad lets us.” Oh sure, she’d taken a stand a few times, on the big issues (boys sleeping over, underage drinking), but on the whole, Matt made the rules while Mary Ellen was at the office.
“It’s going to be strange when you’re gone,” she mused, resting her cheek on her fist. “Just me and Dad in that big, old house.”
“Less laundry,” Shelby pointed out.
“Dad’s probably going to try to get you to take up squash or something, so he has someone to coach,” said Sydney.
“Ha,” Mary Ellen half laughed. “No chance.” She picked up a butter knife and polished it with her napkin. “I’ve been thinking, actually, that I need to do something artistic. Seeing those studios today, I don’t know. It brought back a lot of memories.”
“Like painting?”
“Maybe.” Mary Ellen frowned. “Or photography? There’s a class at UArts I’ve been thinking about.” She’d received a brochure about the class a few weeks ago, and after a brief fantasy about becoming one of those artsy continuing education types, she’d tossed it into the recycling. Now, though, it occurred to her that it might be helpful to have a distraction—something tidier than painting, perhaps, but still creative. A chance to reconnect with that long-haired girl she hadn’t thought of in so many years.
The twins nodded, then their eyes wandered back to their screens. Mary Ellen sat watching them—the way Shelby’s eyebrows pinched together in a way that reminded her of her mother; the way Sydney’s cheekbones were beginning to emerge from her face’s girlish softness. They seemed so much older than she’d been at this age, so much more complete. Maybe they weren’t the exact people she’d expected to end up with, but they were their own people, after all. The best thing she could do for them was to just stay out of their way.
“Will there be anything else?” asked the waiter. The girls looked up from their screens, faces blank. “Dessert?” They shook their heads.
“Thanks,” Mary Ellen said, “but I think we’re all done.”
3
The graduation tassel, Ivy noticed, was hanging at a crazy angle from the rearview mirror, pointing toward the car’s back window instead of the floor, like in one of those optical illusion rooms at the carnival. She wasn’t sure how the car was managing to hang on to the side of the ravine at this angle, but she figured her only way out of this was to take her foot off the brake and stomp on the gas and hope like hell the car could pull itself back up onto the road.
Ivy sucked in her breath and lifted
