She said she wasn’t, and she didn’t seem to be. In fact, the mildness of Rochelle’s response made Lewyn worry more than he had at any time since that strained trip to Palmyra earlier in the summer. Rochelle had plenty to take care of on campus, like packing up her summer room and getting early access to Triphammer, the cooperative house she’d finally decided on for sophomore year. Where was the family retreat to be? she wanted to know, and Lewyn, caught off guard, and thinking, perhaps, of Harrison, said something about New Hampshire. The White Mountains. （Or were they the Green Mountains?）
“Oh, that sounds nice,” she’d said. Then she went back to her book.
When they were together again he was going to tell her. He was. Because he had to and also because it was the right thing, and because he had suffered under the lie every single day since that early morning in the back of the bus. And then he would apologize. A lot. And he’d tell her he wished he’d made a better choice, back when he’d had the chance. And sure, he’d try to shift the blame, or some of it, to Sally, who had denied him long before he’d denied her back. That Sally had chosen not to tell her roommate he existed was painful, of course, but it was no excuse for his own lack of disclosure. Now, he wanted to go forward with transparency, if Rochelle would absolve him and allow it. Honesty, complete honesty, from this point forward.
He and Harrison carried the Champagne inside and promptly separated, Harrison to their room upstairs and Lewyn to the back porch, where Johanna had the baby on her lap.
“Oh good,” said our mother. “I wasn’t sure that car could make it all the way to Edgartown and back.”
“No, it was fine,” he said. “A truly vintage driving experience.”
When the people from Lobster Tales pulled into the driveway a few minutes later, Lewyn was conscripted to haul coolers, bins, and the big rectangular firebox down to the beach. He alone, it appeared: Harrison declined to emerge from the bedroom （though he could hardly have missed the big truck in the driveway beneath their window） and Sally had apparently gone off somewhere in the Volvo. Our mother, after greeting the caterers, had retreated. He didn’t know where Salo was.
When they got the cast aluminum pan settled on the sand, Lewyn stood back to watch them work. They lit the wood fire and started to layer in the corn, clams, mussels, lobsters, and seaweed. It was far too much food for the five of them, and he wondered again how Johanna had decided on this particular form of festivity, but he could only imagine they must once, in the misty past, have appeared to enjoy some similar event. Johanna was a collector of moments like that, Lewyn knew. Sally favored a certain green T-shirt: she must have an Emerald City–themed party! Harrison went through a pretentious bow tie phase: off he went with Salo on a father-son trip to Savile Row, to have matching three-piece suits made! （Where was an eight-year-old supposed to wear a three-piece suit? Plus, he outgrew it in a matter of months.） Our mother, as long as Lewyn could remember, had hoarded and imbued with great significance such tiny moments, all while seeing so little of who the three of them actually were, and even less as they’d each learned to deflect her oversight. Johanna had been happiest when they were small, he thought, all three dependent on her and competing for her attention. He wondered if the baby had made her happy again, but he suspected not. He suspected our mother was slipping down a long and rough decline, grabbing as she went and very possibly calling for help. And all of them—himself, his brother and sister and father, and even the impervious toddler, herself—were watching Johanna slide away and doing not a thing to stop it.
These were Lewyn’s thoughts as the last of the summer sun departed and, upstairs in their bedroom, Harrison typed away at an email to Eli Absalom Stone, detailing the recent revelation that his sister was apparently gay and his brother, Lewyn, the chubby one （chubby no longer, in fact, though Harrison left this out）， was claiming to have found himself a girlfriend in college, and it was a sad, sad day when one had to confront the notion that one’s family were wholly uninterested in the dire impact of a generation of liberalism on a once robust notion of American integrity and so forth, and he could not wait to get back to Roarke and impart some of his ideas for the project he and Eli had （eagerly） agreed to take on for the Hayek Institute, a coauthored collection of essays in which two young conservatives addressed the deficiencies of liberal American academia. Johanna was also upstairs, rigid on her back in bed with her arm slung across her eyes, grasping at sleep as she listened to the baby. The baby was banging away on a toy xylophone across the hall, the single Oppenheimer whose state of being approached anything remotely like contentment.