“Who that?” he says.
“Ha-ha.”
He turns around and kisses the tip of my nose.
“My mother is requesting vodka. One ice chip.”
“Roger that. You?”
“I’m going inside to find where Andrea has hidden the decent wine.”
“I’ll whistle three times if I see her coming.”
I let myself in the kitchen door. I have always loved the Dixons’ kitchen—the poppy-red floorboards, the worn breadboard counter, the musky smell of Band-Aids and cumin and glasses of ginger ale. Every time I’m in this kitchen I have an urge to pull a stool up to the counter and eat a bowl of cornflakes with milk and heaps of white sugar. I open a cupboard above the sink, grab a wineglass. High up on a shelf is a yellowing Cuisinart base that probably hasn’t been used since 1995. Beside it, an old Salton yogurt maker gathers dust. Seeing it makes me think of curdled milk, sanctimony, and other people’s parents having sex.
There’s a just-opened bottle of decent Sancerre in the fridge. I fill my glass and wander into Dixon’s study. Beyond the windowpane Peter brings my mother a can of Spanish peanuts. He has stolen the vodka bottle from the bar and hands it to her. She takes it without a flinch, glugs. Hands it back. He laughs, sits down on the arm of her Adirondack chair. Lights a cigarette. Whispers something in her ear that makes her swat him. But she is laughing, too. No one else can make my mother relax into her old self the way Peter does. He has some perfect combination of kindness, mean-spirited wit, and I-don’t-give-a-fuck that makes her happy. In a way, Peter saved her all those years ago, after Leo disappeared, after her baby died, after she found my journal. Peter woke her up from a daze, turned the lights back on in our old apartment. Made all of us feel it was safe to be happy again.
Maddy and Finn come running over and clamber around him, flocking to him like baby ducks. He swats a mosquito that has landed on his left arm, opens his palm to show the kids that he got it. And in that tiny gesture, I feel an overwhelming sense of relief. And of gratitude.
I head past the living room to the upstairs bathroom. A few of the older crowd have come inside. They are sitting around a fire, engrossed in a conversation about birdcalls.
“For me, it’s the chickadee. Chick a dee dee dee . . . So sweet. Like little hopping bits of corn,” someone is saying.
“The chickadees are disappearing from our property in droves,” I hear Andrea say. “I’m convinced it’s the neighbor’s cat. They refuse to bell it. I’ve called the National Park Service, but they insist there’s nothing to be done.”
“I’m partial to the blue jay’s screech.” I hear Martha Currier, her deep, raspy southern accent. “Though I know that puts me in a minority.”
Dixon’s house has two staircases. The wide stairs I climb now lead to the formal part of the house—the grown-ups’ side. Here the rooms are beautiful, elegant. Each of the guest rooms has antique wallpaper—sprays of pale rosebuds or lily of the valley against a robin’s-egg blue. The master bedroom has always been my favorite room in the world. As a child, I used to dream that one day I would have a room exactly like it. Hand-painted wallpaper with lush white peonies drooping in jade-green leaves; a romantic canopy bed, eyelet curtains, a worn wide-board floor; a fireplace with a neat stack of wood and kindling beside it; a claw-foot tub in the bathroom.
The kids’ stairs are steep and dark with no banister—just the close press of walls on either side to steady you. They lead directly from the kitchen to the “dorm”—a loftlike room with high windows and bunk beds lining every wall. This was the sleepover house when we were kids, the place where we could sneak in boys for spin the bottle, smoke clove cigarettes. The only way to access the dorm from the grown-ups’ part of the house was through a Jack and Jill bathroom that we could lock from our side.
The guest bathroom is occupied, so I go to use the one in Dixon’s bedroom. When I open the door, my heart sinks. Andrea has redecorated. The old-fashioned peony wallpaper has been stripped, the room painted in an eggplant tone. The beautiful canopy bed is gone, replaced by a beige-linen upholstered bed, plank floors tastefully covered in herringbone sisal. There are matching mid-century dressers and Simon Pearce glass lamps. I could kill Andrea. I only need to pee, but I’m tempted to take a shit in the toilet just to make a point.
Instead, I go down the long hallway to where it dead-ends at the Jack and Jill bathroom. I am locking the door behind me when the dorm-side door opens and Gina steps inside.