Dot had died in November, and the air was sharply cold outside when she was buried next to her parents. After the funeral, Dot’s friend Martha from church had hosted a gathering at her house, and there were snacks and there was coffee, and people Laurie knew as well as people she didn’t know at all walked through and kissed her on the cheek. Then Laurie and her parents and her brothers had packed into the SUV her father, Dennis, had rented—with Laurie, as always, climbing all the way into the very back so she wouldn’t have to be compacted between her brothers. She hated to be compacted. They went back to Dot’s house and sat down around her dining room table. Barbara poured decaf, and Barbara and Dennis sat at the ends of the table. Laurie suspected they took some pleasure in the fact that all their children were in one place, which hardly ever happened anymore.
“We have some things we need to figure out,” Barbara had said. She explained as economically as she could that in Dot’s will, she—Barbara—was named as the executor. But they were estimating it would take at least six months for the estate to be probated so that they could clean out and sell the house, and Barbara, who was already skipping a lot of her regular activities because of hip pain, was rather inconveniently scheduled to have surgery right at the beginning of the summer. Dennis wasn’t doing much better, and not long after that, he had some long-delayed back surgery. It was just bad luck, that was all, but they had to figure out what they were going to do about the house.
Dot’s estate was to be divided up equally among her four nieces and nephews. The only real value, they figured, would lie in the house itself, which Dot had grown up in and inherited from her parents when they died. No one in the family was clamoring to live in it, and in order to sell it, they would have to empty it of ninety-plus years of Dot’s belongings, going back to her childhood. This job would probably land on the family around May or June. “It’s going to be a big job,” Barbara had said. “None of you has to do it, but nobody else in the family is going to do it. Most likely, our choices are to figure it out among the seven of us or to turn a lot of the work over to somebody we would pay. But we can pay somebody if we need to, so don’t worry about that.”
Patrick had spoken up first, in the confident tones of doctor privilege as well as with the authority of the eldest—Number One, Laurie always called him. “I could get maybe a couple of days off,” he said, “but with the kids and the hospital and Marianne starting her business, I can’t take it on. I’m sorry.” Patrick’s kids were ten and twelve, and his wife Marianne had just started doing some kind of IT consulting that Laurie didn’t understand.
“Unfortunately, I can’t either,” Joey said. For him to speak up next made sense, since, despite being Number Four, he was the most competitive with Patrick. The two of them had had closely aligned interests in sports and science when they were growing up, and Joey had once burned a hole in the couch trying to prove that Patrick’s science fair project was flawed. “I’m not organized enough, I hate paperwork, and there’s no way I could get that kind of time off.” Joey did not have a wife and didn’t have kids （yet, as Laurie’s mother would have rapidly added）， but he did have a very demanding boss he called Brutus and a job he had been in for only a couple of months. He was a business consultant who worked with medical device companies, which was why every time they got together, Laurie asked him if he was working on any new sex robots.
Scott, who was Number Two, shook his head and held up both hands. “Sorry to play the new baby card, but: new baby.” Scott had been in trouble for about the first twenty-five years of his life, until he started looking after his mental health, but right now, he was the most assertively domestic, the one with a new baby. Her name was Lilac. （Dot’s exact words on this development had been, “How fragrant.”）
Ryan looked over at Laurie, then at his mother. Then he took a deep breath. “If we’re lucky, Lisa’s going to be pregnant then. If we’re lucky. It’s just the worst timing.” Ah, Number Five. The baby who wanted his own baby. “Plus,” he added, “I hope I’ll be working.” Ryan was a New York actor, and he was regularly out of work.
They looked at Laurie, and Laurie looked around the room. Every closed cabinet door was holding back piles of vinyl records, piles of papers, piles of magazines. On one shelf alone, she could see and count twelve egg cups. There was upstairs, too. There was a basement. There was an attic. There were four bedrooms. There was a garden shed outside.