The business with Sally wasn’t particularly straightforward, either, but we all got there eventually. Sally, still in dogged pursuit of her therapy goals, was doing a lot of internal excavating of her own, and with just about every member of her family. She cried a lot with me when we worked together in Ithaca that summer, and she cried with our mother when Johanna came up to visit us in late July. She cried when Stella forgave her for following Salo to Henry Darger’s opening-night party at the museum （though Stella kept insisting there was nothing to forgive）， and she cried each time she introduced another member of her family to her partner, Paula, a woman who （like Lewyn’s former roommate, the first Mormon he’d ever met） had come from far away to Ithaca, New York, in order to become a vet （large animal）。
Ironically, to me at least, she never cried on the job, not even when a house we were working on was itself choked with sadness. I learned pretty quickly that I didn’t share my sister’s remarkable ability to wade into muck, to shovel years of layers of unspeakable detritus into plastic bags, nor to deal calmly and professionally with the embittered families that always seemed to surround （and sometimes, unfathomably, live in） these houses. I spent most of that summer becoming acquainted with a broad range of filth （and taking long showers at night, as hot as I could stand, to wash it away）， and getting to know Paula, and working my way through the reading list Roarke had sent （to redress some of the lacunae it had identified in my Walden education）。 At the beginning of September, I flew to the Vineyard to help our mother get things ready.
The woman I found when I got to the cottage was a person I had not yet had the pleasure of meeting: her hair was longer, her clothes were looser, and there was an utterly unfamiliar look of calm on her face. The hug she gave me when I got out of the taxi was entirely without agenda, as far as I could tell. Somewhat to my own surprise, I hugged her back.
“Are you thirsty?” Johanna said. “I made some iced tea this morning. With PG Tips.”
“Wow,” I said. “Thank you.”
There was a pile of yarn in a basket on the floor beside the staircase that looked as if it wanted very much to be a sweater of some kind. “Is that…” I said, gobsmacked.
“I’m taking a knitting class in Edgartown,” Johanna said, picking it up. “This sweater was going to be for me, but something’s gone wrong, and it’s going to end up tiny. I’d better give it to Rochelle.”
I could only gape at her. “Well … that’s…”
“Oh I know, I know,” my mother laughed. “Don’t worry, I’m fully aware. It’s just fun. ‘Stitch and Bitch,’ they call it. And the group’s only about half summer people.”
She said “summer people” as if she weren’t one, herself.
“That’s cool, Mom. I think Rochelle will be really touched.”
“And then I’ll make one for you! You’re going to need something warm in that ridiculous place, while you’re milking the goats.”
She had not lost her disdain for Roarke, she’d been very clear about that. “Great,” I said.
I took my things upstairs. My room was the one at the end of the corridor, the one our father had once used as an office. There was still a desk from Salo’s time, but Johanna had cleared everything else out one July when I was away at camp, and I’d returned to the current arrangement of yellow calico bedspread and a pair of squat pink armchairs. It wasn’t attractive, necessarily, but it was summer.
“Phoebe,” Johanna called, “I’m out on the back porch.”
“Okay,” I yelled back.
It was around three in the afternoon. From my window I could see a mother and a little kid far down the beach, both of them slathered with white sunblock, standing about ten feet above the waterline. Every time a wave came in the two of them went bouncing down to touch it, then turned and ran back to the same spot. The wind and the water took away the sound of their laughter, but I watched them do it again and again, the activity somehow every bit as entertaining the tenth time as the first. Then I finished stacking my books on the bedside table and stowed my bag in the closet and went downstairs.