“I should have been thinking about you, though. I apologize. Actually, why don’t you do me a favor and take a single apology for everything at once, spare me having to give you an itemized list. I stipulate to everything.”
I shook my head. “I’ve hardly led a deprived life, Mom.”
“In most ways, no. But I could have done better. And not just with you. Which is ironic, since making my family happy is pretty much all I’ve thought about for the past four decades. There’s a lesson there, probably.”
“Is there? What is it? Secure your own oxygen mask first?”
Johanna considered. “Maybe. Yes.” She picked up her proto-sweater again and looked at it. Then she put it to the side.
“I think we should stay in tonight,” she said. “Plenty of excitement when people start arriving the next couple days. Let’s just take it easy.”
I nodded. “Let’s. Good.”
From across the dune, we heard a dog barking, one of the neighbor’s schnauzers.
“I’m thinking about staying on for the fall,” my mother said suddenly. “Maybe longer. Apart from the years before you entered preschool, it’ll be the first September since 1986 that I won’t have a child at Walden. Maybe it’s time to see what autumn looks like somewhere else. Why not here?”
I looked at her. “What about the house?”
“I thought I might offer it to Lewyn and Rochelle. Her place is fine for a single person who works all the time, but it reminds me of the apartment your father and I lived in when we were married, on Third Avenue. They should have something beautiful to start their lives together. And if they have children they’re going to need the room. I can use the basement apartment if I come back for something, or just to visit. I don’t think Harrison would ever want to live in that house, and I don’t think Sally’s leaving Ithaca. But would it be all right with you? It’s your home, after all.”
“It’s our home.” I smiled at her. “So yes. So long as they let me stay when I come back for vacations.”
“That school of yours hardly takes vacations, if I’m remembering,” my mother said. “I can’t believe I’m losing another of my children to a flock of chickens.”
I chose to leave this comment alone.
The others began to drift in over the following days, by which time most of the details had been settled: black-eyed Susans, and the wine, and beds for every one of Salo’s children and—where pertinent—their partners, and a Klezmer band from Woods Hole. I finished the last of my Roarke reading list. Lewyn and Harrison took their brother for a walk through the Camp Meeting Grounds in Oak Bluffs and an impromptu ride on the Flying Horses （where Ephraim managed to grab one more brass ring than Harrison）。 Johanna hired Lobster Tales to come and cater the rehearsal dinner on the tenth, which was also the triplets’ birthday, though she did acknowledge certain humiliating associations with this plan. （In fact, the proprietors of Lobster Tales had not forgotten the family debacle of seventeen years earlier. But they were professionals. And besides, they did the best clambakes on the island—that was just a fact.） The following morning, Lewyn and Rochelle were married near the still-warm ashes by a rabbi from the Hebrew Center of Vineyard Haven, and the anniversary of Salo’s death became, as well, the anniversary of his son Lewyn’s great ongoing happiness. So life goes.
Some of them left quickly after that. Paula had classes starting at Cornell, and Rochelle had a trial beginning later in the week, and Ephraim, new in his job and frantic to maintain a good impression, rushed back to the Times. The rest of us—all three of the Oppenheimer triplets, and our mother, and myself, of course—remained. There was another dinner on the back porch—too many leftover lobsters, too many ears of corn—and a day in Edgartown, laying in a year’s supply of PG Tips and procuring a pair of heavy work boots, which Harrison insisted I would need. The next morning, still together, we departed: to the ferry, and the mainland, and north to the parking lot of an old diner in Concord, New Hampshire, where the last of the Oppenheimers met her bus and held her family—most of her family—close, and then let them go.