“There’s a meeting tonight. You should come—”
“No,” Lena said simply. “I don’t think book club is for me.”
Lena caught Annie’s glance at Rachel’s photo. Her brow knit together for a split second.
“You want to know something funny?” Annie said quickly. “I was on Rachel’s swim team and came to a team dinner here. You’re how I learned about this neighborhood.”
“What a coincidence.” Lena managed a tight Mona Lisa smile that caused Annie’s insides to feel as pressurized as a shaken soda can. “Isn’t life funny?”
Annie took a small bite of a tea cake. It had an almond flavor, which had never been her favorite, but she forced herself to chew and swallow. The pieces tumbled down her throat like a rockslide.
“Yes,” she said. “It is.”
* * *
From the craft room window, Lena watched Annie walk-run down the hill with the homely dog, a jaunty bounce in their steps.
I was on Rachel’s swim team.
She’d said it so casually.
A tiny little tremor of a phrase that caused a tsunami of memories: the should I quit swim team phases when Lena had pushed Rachel through, the obsessed years when Rachel had been so consumed that Lena wondered if quitting might have been healthier, how Lena’s fingers had been constantly on fire with the prickly mint of muscle balm for Rachel’s left persnickety shoulder or the sting of oranges sliced for meets, how Rachel’s suits would commandeer the mudroom sink, drifting and submerged like octopi.
The night Tim died, summer practices had just started up again.
Rachel came home late for the Meekers’ party, dripped water on the kitchen floor, idly reached out a damp hand to snatch a cube of cheese from the board, as if she had all the time in the world.
“Are you working the party,” Lena had snapped, “or watering it?”
Back then, Lena had been worried that Rachel was turning out spoiled, with an underdeveloped sense of personal responsibility. They had been fighting for weeks about whether Rachel, who had just turned sixteen, deserved a brand-new car. The decision felt life-or-death, like Lena was waging a battle for Rachel’s very soul.
What was that elementary school corrective for when the children got bossy?
Worry about your own soul, Lena.
Lena would now give anything in the world to erase that imperious comment—are you working the party or watering it—and replace it with anything Rachel’s heart desired.
Rachel had returned the cheese cube to the tray, gone upstairs, emerged not long after in that white flowered dress that she would never wear again, her hair slicked into a messy wet braid.
Maybe Lena’s barb had rolled off Rachel’s back. Or maybe she had decided to save it up as ammunition for some future argument about the car that never got to happen. She had silently finished setting up the food table without complaint, and then—
Lena forced herself to flatten the memory like it was an empty cardboard box.
She certainly didn’t want to think about what happened after that.
CHAPTER FIVE
It was Abe who remembered.
“Don’t you have book club tonight?” he asked Jen in a half shout. His headphones were on.
“I’ll skip.”
“What?”
Jen tapped her ear and he pushed off the right earpiece.
“I’ll stay home with you guys,” she said.
In the hours since the expulsion, the three of them had been cocooned in the den. Paul worked, Jen pretended to, and Abe had played a loud and violent game of Foxhole, his favorite multiplayer video game.
All games of Foxhole were loud and violent, but they were also, Jen and Paul told themselves, extremely interactive and thus not a total wash. Going forward, could Foxhole count as PE?
“I’m fine,” Abe said. “Holla123 says being homeschooled is actually kind of fun.”
“Go to book club,” Paul said to Jen.
“Yeah, go,” Abe said, “it’s your one thing, Mom.”
Jen trotted out her book club membership when she wanted to appear normal. Jen’s mother fretting aloud （again） about how Jen didn’t have a support system since the move? I’ve met some lovely women at book club, Mom!
Paul breezing in from a business trip with stories of the outside world and pausing to ask gently if Jen talked to anyone, anyone at all while he was gone, about something other than Abe?
Book club! Everything’s fine, nothing to see here.
The actual club discussions were fine if a little stale, ditto the reading selections, which were, truth be told, a little on the commercial side for Jen’s tastes, but it was worth her while to attend. Someone in the group had found out that Jen had a Ph.D. and the way they all now looked to Jen for opinions and subtexts?