Yes, that was plain. She was jerking wineglasses off the shelves and slapping them down on the countertop, which was marble and probably not a good surface to slap things made of glass down onto.
“Mom, listen, I should have mentioned this, but I have a friend I just picked up at the ferry. She’s upstairs. I wasn’t sure she’d come. I mean, I invited her, she didn’t just turn up, but I wasn’t certain she’d actually get here.”
Johanna turned to her. “You invited her for your birthday? Who is she?”
“She’s my roommate. Rochelle. I don’t think you ever met her, but we’re friends.”
That only sounded additionally aggressive. You, my own mother, never met her and yet we still managed to become friends?
Johanna nodded. “Okay. But why didn’t you tell me she might be coming? Those sheets on the other bed in your room, I have no idea when they were last changed.”
“Don’t worry about that,” said Sally. She thought, inevitably, of Rochelle’s own Ellesmere home, so unclean that Sally hadn’t even been allowed inside. “The bed’s probably fine, and if it isn’t we’ll change the sheets. And I’m sure there’s plenty of food.”
“I’m sure there is,” said Johanna, sounding a little sad. “I might have forgotten how much it takes to feed us when we’re all together. When were we last all together?”
Sally considered. The conversation had taken an unexpectedly morose turn, but at least Johanna didn’t seem angry at her.
“And I might have said we were six people, when I talked to the caterers. I always think: I have four children, as if Phoebe could put away a lobster and a couple of ears of corn.” She paused to smile, more to herself. “So yes. We have enough.”
“Okay,” said Sally.
They both heard a door open upstairs, and the slap, slap of shoes heading along the corridor. Too heavy to be Rochelle, Sally thought. She braced herself for her father, but it was only Harrison, pulling on the bright red sweater with the Anglophilic crest he’d brought back from Virginia. He’d worn it constantly since he arrived.
“Oh,” Harrison said to Sally when he entered the kitchen, “I thought you were in your room. I just heard you upstairs.”
“I have a friend visiting.”
“A friend,” said her brother with a distinctly lascivious edge.
“Yes. I do have them, you know.”
“Do I know that?” Harrison considered.
“Harrison,” our mother said, “do you think wineglasses are okay? We only have four Champagne flutes, and we’re six adults. I don’t think it matters.”
Harrison grinned. “You’re right. It doesn’t matter. Except, there is a right way to drink Champagne, and it isn’t in a wineglass. If it had been, the flute wouldn’t have been designed to enhance carbonation by reducing the surface area for it to escape.”
There was no limit to what her brother Harrison could convert to pure assholery, Sally thought.
“You’re right,” our mother said sadly. “I’ll take down the four flutes and two wines. Daddy and I will take the wineglasses. You three, and your guest, should be able to toast your birthday properly, even if we won’t all match.”
“It’s too bad. Appearances are so important at a clambake, too,” Harrison observed, arguing against himself for the pure pleasure of it.
Johanna picked up the baby and zipped her into her woolly cardigan. “Try to get your father out of that room,” she told them. “And Lewyn.”
“Lewyn’s down there already,” Harrison said. “He’s not upstairs, anyway.”