“Well, not your room,” Sally said. “’Cause you had a Mormon roommate.”
Her brother nodded. Then he frowned. Had he told his sister that his roommate was Mormon? He tried to remember, but there was nothing there.
“Wait,” said Harrison, “you had a Mormon roommate?”
Beside him, Sally let out a breath. It was only ten in the morning with the rest of the day to get through, somehow, without showing her hand. Or exploding from sheer stress.
“Yes. Very nice guy. We got along great.” Even to himself, he sounded defensive.
“Great with a Mormon,” said Harrison. “That makes sense.”
“What do you mean?” Johanna asked him. “You think your brother’s like a Mormon?”
“No!” Lewyn said, perhaps too quickly.
“Are you?” said Harrison.
“No!” he said again. “But there’s nothing wrong with being a Mormon. It’s no stranger than what we believe.”
“I believe nothing,” said Harrison. “I believe people are idiots with a pathetic need to feel special. Apart from that…”
“Well, that’s not nothing,” Sally observed.
“You know what I mean.”
“Do you not have a pathetic need to feel special, Harrison?”
“Sally,” said her mother.
“I’m going for a walk,” said Sally, and she left the kitchen and went down the old log steps to the beach and began to plow furiously west, grinding her bare feet into the sand. There was a knot of people at Gilbert’s Cove but apart from that she was alone, her thoughts churning. For the first time since waking up that morning, she thought about the fact that she was now nineteen, perilously close to an age without a “teen” at the end of it, and what would that be like? Incontestably an adult, no mitigation of youth available （or tolerated）， no excuse for the kind of unmistakably bad act she was about to commit against her brother, who—she hardly needed to remind herself—totally deserved it. She moved even faster, losing her breath to the wind, putting more and more distance between herself and them. One final year of “teen” and then beyond to the open country of adulthood, where she would be, at last and forever, without the brothers she loathed and that baby she had not enough feeling for even to pity, without deceitful Salo or countdown-to-hysteria Johanna—our parents in their pointless facsimile of family life. Liberated at last. She was terrified.
Johanna shushed her when she made it home; the baby, apparently, was asleep. Our father was still in his little office upstairs, and the boys （she was nonchalantly informed, as if it weren’t a colossal deal） had borrowed her car to go to the Katama General Store in Edgartown.
“I’m sorry, what?” Sally howled.
“Quiet!” her mother said. “I told you, she’s sleeping!”
She’s sleeping. Dad’s in his office. Harrison and Lewyn took my car.
“You let them take my car? I told you, it’s my employer’s, not mine, and I gave her my word no one else would drive it.”
This was not true, but it might have been true!
“They won’t be long,” said our mother, as if this were the relevant point. “I thought I might need the Volvo.”
“Mom!”
She imagined the elderly Ford blowing a tire on a stone in the road, or just giving up the ghost at some random traffic light in Edgartown: a line of Mercedes going wild on their horns, a Vineyard cop requesting the registration and some irate hedge funder calling up Harriet in Ithaca to berate her, all of which was bad enough.