This is a place you get stuck. It was what Charlotte thought of Elk Hollow when she left home at seventeen. If someone had told her then that she’d be moving back into the house she grew up in thirty years later, she would have told them to go straight to hell.
The town felt familiar and unfamiliar at the same time, both her past and her present. Driving along the Hollow’s main drag triggered a montage of memories, some of them as clear as if they’d happened yesterday, others fuzzy and distorted by time and self-preservation. In her grandfather’s day, Elk Hollow had been a bustling suburb of Scranton, with homes painted in vibrant Rockwellian strokes of color. But, like those of plenty of other planned suburbs near cities built on coal and manufacturing, the main street of the Hollow was now dingy, lackluster, and gray, filled with shuttered shops covered over in rusted barbed wire, OUT OF BUSINESS signs, and phallic graffiti. Social media reminded Charlotte that the people she’d gone to high school with, the ones who’d stayed in town, were out of work or struggling to cobble together enough gigs to make ends meet as factories all over the Poconos closed and relocated. Those jobs were never coming back, no matter how much Tug Slaughter promised to write legislation that would revitalize the iron and steel mills. According to the policy papers Leila had prepared for her, felony filings had increased by 70 percent in the county in the past five years. Domestic violence statistics had doubled, and drug addiction was at an all-time high. Citizens of the county were twice as likely to kill themselves as the rest of nation. The average family earnings were $20,000 less than the rest of the state, and 30 percent of the homes were vacant. Barstools in Elk Hollow’s two bars were filled by noon with drunk, lonely men, bellies full of $1.50 Coors Light draft beer and pickled red beet eggs, mourning the loss of their place in the world. The minivan drove by O’Puddy’s, the town’s old-man bar that would probably die with the old men. It was legendary for two-dollar mystery shots and fire meat: bologna pickled in vodka and Tabasco sauce and sold for a quarter. Jars of the stuff fermented on top of the cash register and remained a curiosity. When she was a kid her dad’s idea of babysitting had been giving her a Coke topped with a cherry and a roll of quarters to play pinball in the back of the bar while he caroused in the front with his friends and favorite bartender, Linda. Sometimes he picked her up in the garbage truck and let her hang off the back as they drove down the hill they were now driving up to the house where she grew up.
As they unpacked the van in the driveway of her childhood house, Charlotte gazed down the street of single-family homes, more than a few with rusted cars rotting in the yard—the kinds of houses most of her friends and colleagues had only ever seen on TV shows about poor people. Chain-link fences protected parched lawns guarded by mangy dogs tied to stakes in the dirt.
It had felt less dismal when she was growing up, when each of these houses had contained a child within spitting distance of her age and their parents had left their doors unlocked until well after dinnertime. Packs of kids roamed between the yards and kitchens—nothing like the meticulously planned playdates Charlotte attended in California where mommies chatted politely and unironically about the challenges of raising privileged children.
The house she grew up in was smaller than she remembered it. The paint was now dulled by sun and snow and peeling off in large swaths near the roof.
Max dragged the dog over to the cluster of trees around the side of the house to pee. The twins stood tentatively by the car, holding onto each other at the waist, confused about whether this was their destination or just another stop along the way.
“Who’s that lady?” Rose asked, pointing behind Charlotte.
Charlotte whipped her head around to see her sister-in-law hollering at her through the window of her truck as she pulled into the driveway behind them.
Kara slammed the rusty door and crossed the distance between them to wrap Charlotte in a suffocating hug. She was a stout woman who wore her curves with comfortable pride in a pair of skinny jeans and a tight black T-shirt that read I JUST WANT TO DRINK PINOT AND PET MY DACHSHUND. If she made her eyes go soft, Charlotte could still see her as the wild sixteen-year-old who’d sported a bright-red fauxhawk, carried Dr Pepper bottles filled with rum to class, sold weed to the rich kids at Scranton Prep, and gotten a tattoo of Jon Bon Jovi on her left bicep.
“I like your shirt.” Charlotte squinted at the cursive letters as she stepped out of the embrace to take in all of Kara.
“I made it.” When Kara’s face lit up, her deep dimples bounced high on her cheeks. “I’m sellin’ them on Etsy for nineteen bucks. I make my wine money with the shirts, but I don’t tell Paul how much, ’cause then he’d never get a damn job.”
“I shop on Etsy all the time.” Charlotte smiled. She’d once bought a reclaimed-barn-wood bird feeder as a housewarming gift on the site, but she was far from a regular. She could hear Josh’s voice in her head: Tell people exactly what they want to hear. Make them feel good about themselves before you try to make them feel good about you.
“I can’t believe I’m finally seein’ youse.” Kara grinned and began helping Charlotte unload suitcases.
Charlotte saw her girls cock their heads at the addition of an s on the word you, a tic of the northeastern Pennsylvania accent that meant “all of you.” It had been years since she’d heard the NEPA accent. Charlotte and Max had both worked hard to eradicate the distinctive vernacular in college, avoiding the use of youse and pronouncing the majority of their consonants.
Kara kneeled in the gravel. “Heya. I’m your aunt Kara. You can call me Kiki like the other kids does,” she said to Ella and Rose, who were old enough to know their mom had a brother who lived far away that they had never met. The girls smiled politely and extended their hands the way they’d been taught to greet strangers. Kara would have none of their niceties. She leaned in and grabbed the two of them into a hug, smushing their faces into her breasts. “It’s so goddamn good to get my hands on you girls.”
“Thanks for letting us move back into the house,” Charlotte said, once Kara released the children.
Kara waved her hand in the air. “Rental market ain’t great lately.”
“You know we’ll pay you for it,” Charlotte insisted.
“I told you not to worry about it.”
Charlotte and Paul’s grandfather had bought the two-story prefab with a $15,000 settlement he’d gotten in 1955 from losing two fingers in a mining explosion. Back then it was a mighty good deal. Everything about Elk Hollow seemed promising during the optimistic days of Pennsylvania’s industrial boom. The house was deeded to Marty and Annemarie after Charlotte’s grandfather passed. When Annemarie died seven years ago, she’d left the house to Charlotte along with two unpaid mortgages. Once Charlotte had paid the debt she’d offered it to her brother and sister-in-law free and clear. Paul didn’t see it as a gift but rather as the tip of the iceberg of what his rich sister owed him. He called it Frack House, convinced someone would pay him to mine natural gas beneath the foundation despite surveyors telling him there was no shale to frack within ten miles of the place. Charlotte’s sister-in-law had quietly fixed up the old Walsh place, filling it with furniture from Goodwill, and tried to manage it as a rental.
Sunlight flashed on Charlotte’s mom’s charm bracelet encircling Kara’s wrist. Charlotte had given it to Kara after Annemarie passed, knowing it would have made her mom happy. Her mother had referred to Kara as “the one good thing my son ever gave me.” The bracelet was covered in tiny charms of places Annemarie would never visit: the Eiffel Tower, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, the Statue of Liberty. “It’s my bucket list,” Annemarie said with a wry smile on one of her good days. “Easier than writin’ it down.” Charlotte fingered the slight gold chain at her own neck that held her mother’s simple gold-plated wedding band. The doctor had handed it to her in a plastic bag when she’d flown home to claim her mother’s body in the morgue after Annemarie suffered a fatal nervous episode. In layman’s parlance she’d committed suicide with a mixture of four different pills—oxycodone, Klonopin, Xanax, and Demerol—all prescribed legally by her doctors for the pain, anxiety, and depression that had gone largely undiscussed from the time Charlotte was a child. Kara had called Charlotte a week before her mother killed herself. “Annemarie’s not pickin’ up my calls. I went up to see her and it looks like she ain’t eating.” Charlotte assured her sister-in-law there was nothing to worry about and said she’d check back in the following week after she finished closing a deal with the largest petrochemical company in São Paulo. “She’ll still be crazy next week.” Except she wasn’t crazy next week. She was dead.
When Annemarie died, Charlotte sold a chunk of her Humanity stock options to contribute $1 million to build a mental health facility in northeastern Pennsylvania and lobbied the federal government to provide a matching grant. Creating a project, making a plan, and executing it prevented Charlotte from dwelling on the fact that she could have seen her mother alive one last time.
Still, Annemarie was a subject she rarely talked about, even with Max. Their youngest daughter was named partially in honor of Charlotte’s mother. Annie was a name close enough to her mom’s to assuage Charlotte’s guilt at not doing more to save Annemarie, but not so close she would ever resent her little girl. Charlotte hadn’t been back here to Elk Hollow since her mother’s funeral. Walking away from the grave that day, Paul had asked Charlotte if he could have the remainder of their mother’s oxycodone. “Now that Mom’s in the corpse house, you know . . . she’d want me to have them. For my kidney stones,” he explained half-heartedly about the medical condition he didn’t have.
“I’m not a fucking moron,” she said. “If you want to get high on Mom’s pain pills, then ask me if you can get high on Mom’s pain pills.” She’d told him to take what he wanted and later regretted not flushing them down the toilet.
She’d never mentioned it to Kara, but thought about it now as she cleared her throat and asked after her brother.
“How is Paul?”
“Same. Thinks the man has it in for him.” Kara rolled her eyes.
Before Charlotte could ask anything else Max rounded the corner of the house, a bag of dog poop in one hand and Annie in the other.
“Goddamn, Charlie, that child is gorgeous,” Kara whistled.
Not a day went by when someone didn’t remark on what a strikingly beautiful child Annie was. Strangers grinned politely at the older girls, who took after Charlotte, with their chestnut hair and sweet smiles, but Annie took people’s breath away. Charlotte often wondered how beauty would shape her youngest. It thrilled and worried her in equal measure that her daughter would be the type of woman for whom good looks would be a defining characteristic for better or for worse.
“She takes after Max.” Charlotte reached her hands out to her husband to take the toddler.
Kara sauntered over to Max with a sassy sway in her hips and smacked him square in the ass. “Bet you never thought you’d be back here, Maxie.”
He slung an arm around her broad shoulders. “I sure as hell didn’t.” Max loved Kara, but he didn’t have an ounce of nostalgia for Elk Hollow. Charlotte knew nostalgia, in general, pissed him off. He hated any book or movie where the hero returned to small-town America to shed the sins of big-city living.
Together they made their way up the concrete stairs attached to a screened-in porch and through the front door, which had been painted a defeated shade of green as long as Charlotte could remember. The movers had beat them there. Boxes filled with clothes and toys and computers filled the small living room. Charlotte touched the light-gray walls of the downstairs hallway. Kara had ripped out the floral wallpaper and gotten rid of the brown mold that grew in the corners of the ceiling. There used to be family photos on the wall above the sofa—pictures of Charlotte missing a tooth, Paul at age eleven with a trout as big as his leg, the two of them in the tree house in the backyard, the one Paul built for her out of two-by-fours and tires when she was six and he was eight. It became their sanctuary, a place to hide when Annemarie was in one of her moods and Charlotte became a target. Back then, Charlotte and Paul had still been allies, confused kids trying to survive a dysfunctional childhood. Those survival skills had served Charlotte well as she built a life outside the Hollow. Why did I make it out and he didn’t? It was a thought that had plagued Charlotte since she graduated college—a version of survivor’s guilt that made her feel angry and lucky and sad all at the same time—when she let it. That was the thing about coming home—it was like you never left.
Anyone looking at that wall of photos would have imagined Charlotte’s mother meticulously printing the pictures and selecting the frames from the local Woolworth, hanging them with care. In truth, it was Charlotte who’d done those things after seeing similar walls of photos in her friends’ homes. Creating an organized wall of photographs required a focused energy Annemarie Walsh never could have mustered.
Charlotte planned to move herself and Max into her old room and put the girls in the one where Paul used to sleep. The third bedroom would be an office. Charlotte couldn’t bear anyone sleeping in the room where her mother had died. As she walked in, she noticed Kara had kept the heavy curtains in that room, the ones Annemarie always tied shut to keep it as dark as possible. Charlotte fingered the thick fabric now and held her breath.
“Could we take these down?” she asked herself as much as Kara. The curtains evoked a sudden despair and sadness she hadn’t anticipated. For a brief moment Charlotte saw herself back in that room forty years ago, a nervous little girl thinking she was being helpful to her mother by opening a window.
“It’s such a nice day, Mommy. I want you to see the sunshine. It’ll make you feel better.”
“Where’s your goddamn father?” her mother grumbled, rubbing at her red eyes, her hair unwashed and clinging to her clammy forehead. “I told him to keep you the hell out of here.”
“I should’ve gotten rid of them.” Kara stood behind her and placed her chin in the crook of Charlotte’s shoulder. “I’ll get ’em down. Let’s go see the rest of the house. I put some of my grandbabies’ toys in the rooms for the little ones. There’s quality hair products in the bathroom—Paul Mitchell. I wanted to make it real nice for youse.”
“You did a great job. You shouldn’t have to do anything else. I’ll order blinds.” Charlotte swallowed the lump in her throat.
“Hey, girl. You cheer up now. Take a few hours to get settled and then come on over to our place for dinner. See your brother. The two of you need to make peace,” Kara said, spinning Charlotte around to face her. “It’s time.”
Talk to Paul was one of the forty-seven things on Charlotte’s to-do list for the month, but it was the last thing she felt like crossing off. With six months to go until she officially announced her campaign, making up with her brother hovered well below finding a campaign headquarters, organizing town halls, hiring thirty staff members, and kissing the asses of the local pols who could lend her their constituent mailing lists and vouch for a stranger from California.
“How would Paul feel about me coming?”
“It’s my damn house, too.”
“Kara?”
“You know how your brother is. Right now he’s got a bee in his bonnet about you runnin’ for Senate. He thinks youse guys need to hire him to work on your campaign. Thinks you’ll pay him big money to work for you.”
“We don’t have big money. The campaign doesn’t. I just started fundraising.”
“How much money you gonna raise?”
Charlotte didn’t want to say the actual ridiculous number out loud.
“More than a million.” It was what she needed to raise by the end of September. “We have a big staff, door-to-door canvassers, mailings, television ads, yard signs, a lot of expenses I never even thought about. It adds up.”
Kara whistled. “Whooooeeee. Must be tough. Askin’ folks for money.”
“It’s the worst part of the job. But look, I’m sure there’s something Paul could do.” Charlotte chose her words carefully. The last thing she needed was Paul running around town and maybe even talking to the press, crowing about how his rich sister wouldn’t hire him.
“He’ll be disappointed you can’t pay him a gazillion dollars. It’s all he’s been talkin’ about.” Kara’s laugh echoed through the empty room. “Come over tonight. Tell him you love him, you missed him, and you ain’t payin’ him shit.”
“I don’t know, Kara. Everyone’s so tired from the drive. Maybe another time.”
“You’ll be just as tired if you try to unpack and make your own dinner. I ain’t takin’ no for an answer.” Kara turned and began to make her way back downstairs. “Hey, Max,” she yelled. “Youse comin’ for dinner tonight.”
Charlotte heard Max clear his throat. “I was going to go for a run.” Before they’d left California Max had announced his plan to train for an Ironman taking place next December, which seemed to Charlotte the least reasonable thing to do when your wife is running for Senate and you’re the primary caretaker for three small children, but she bit her tongue and let him have his thing.
Kara held Charlotte’s hand and pulled her back down the stairs. She stepped right into Max’s face. “Running’s for horses. I’ll see you at the house at six. Bring some buns. I got meat.”
Charlotte looked at Max and shrugged her shoulders at his wary smile.
“This should be interesting.”
*
“Thank God my relatives all moved to North Carolina,” Max said as they crossed Kara’s lawn to her front door, balancing a tray of brownies and plastic-wrapped supermarket roses.
“You paid for your mom and uncles to move to the beach,” Charlotte reminded him. Family was as sore a subject for Max as it was for Charlotte, and early on they’d bonded over their shared dysfunctional upbringings. His dad had taken off a week after his son’s third birthday, absconding with the family’s entire meager savings and leaving his mom so broke she moved in with her older brother and then eventually with a string of deadbeat boyfriends and then again with her older brother. When he was twelve, Max learned his father had died in a car accident in a suburb outside of Tampa. Not realizing how young he was, the Pasco County morgue sent him a box with the contents of the car: a plastic digital Timex, a pack of playing cards with women in bikinis on the back of them, and a Walther P99 semiautomatic handgun, which his mom pawned for two hundred dollars. Much in the same way Charlotte didn’t like to talk about Annemarie, Max didn’t talk about his father. The one and only time he’d mentioned it was in the hospital the day after the twins were born. Charlotte had fallen asleep after forty-seven hours of grueling labor, and when she woke, both tiny babies were asleep on his bare chest, their bodies hardly bigger than his palms. She looked over at him and saw tears in his eyes. “How could he have just left?” he asked. They both understood he meant the father he’d never known.
Charlotte was sure that at least some of Max’s drive and success was meant as an “F you, I didn’t even need you” to his absentee dad.
Max shrugged. “That was money well spent. Keeps them happy and out of my hair. Besides, I like the Outer Banks, and none of them has asked me for money since. You should have done the same with Paul.”
“He would have kept asking for more.”
Charlotte rang the doorbell.
“It’s open,” Kara hollered.
The inside of the house was neat and homey, decorated with comfortable things and messy in a good way, lived in, enjoyed. Photos of children covered every available surface. The wine-colored carpet could hide any imaginable stain. Cat scratches crisscrossed an overstuffed plaid couch.
They found Kara in the kitchen. She’d changed into a pink cowl-neck sweater woven through with a sparkly thread. Two chubby dachshunds panted happily at her feet. Through the screen door Charlotte could see Kara’s grandkids bouncing on the trampoline in the backyard—two boys and two girls with Charlotte’s chestnut hair.
“I got the grandkids more often than I don’t got ’em,” Kara said, shooing the twins outside to meet their cousins. Max followed them, helping each girl onto the trampoline.
“I like havin’ them, though. Keeps me young.”
Charlotte kept herself from saying We are young. We aren’t even fifty. Instead she asked “How old are they now?” It struck Charlotte that Kara had been caring for children, her own and her children’s children, without a break for thirty years. Charlotte had been fifteen when Paul got Kara pregnant for the first time. Kara’s devout Catholic mother had called the baby a blessing from heaven and insisted Paul move in with them so she and her husband could help take care of the baby. Kara and Paul had stayed in that house for the next thirty years and had two more kids. Charlotte always wondered how different Kara’s future would have been if her mother hadn’t been so insistent about her sixteen-year-old daughter keeping her baby. Kara and Paul’s premature responsibilities had made Charlotte uncomfortable as she watched the frightened teenagers turn into uncertain adults overnight. Kara grew up. Paul acted out.
“Mattie’s twelve, Bella’s ten, Mikey’s seven, Little Marty’s five, Hailey and Jada are four.” Kara ticked each child off on a different finger. “Six! Can you believe it? The littlest four are here now. Are you gonna send the girls to Elk Hollow Elementary? It’d be nice for ’em to be with their cousins.”
Josh had already made the declaration that the Walsh kids would attend the local public school, the same one Charlotte had gone to forty years earlier. Max groused about how it couldn’t compare to their school back in Atherton, but Charlotte maintained mixed feelings about the $50,000-a-year private school the twins had been in since they were two. The Wonder School was one of those alternative-learning institutions reserved for the offspring of Valley titans, where children who still pooped in their pants studied things like Greek mythology, Indo-African pottery, and how to forage for mushrooms in the wild. Two months earlier she’d sat through a thirty-minute G-rated interpretation of Antigone for the school play. Several times every month Charlotte wondered if the Wonder School would make her children unable to function as normal people when and if they were released into the harsh reality of the world beyond Silicon Valley.
“They’ll start next week,” Charlotte said. “Ella will be fine. She finds friends everywhere. I’m worried about Rose, though.”
Kara pointed out the window at the smallest of the boys, his face covered in mud or chocolate. “Little Marty will be in their class. He’ll watch out for the girls. I love ’em all but he’s my favorite. He’s a foul-mouthed little delinquent and he’s the best of ’em.”
Kara heaved a cardboard box onto the kitchen counter in between a ragged Elmo doll missing his left arm and a five-gallon water jug filled with grimy pennies and nickels. The surface was piled high with grocery store circulars, Bass Pro Shop catalogs, and unpaid bills. “I got a present for you.” She plucked T-shirts from the box. “You can pick which one you want. She handed Charlotte a black scoop-neck tee that read NETFLIX, NACHOS, NAPS. Charlotte shook her head. “I don’t think that’s exactly the image the campaign wants me to portray.”
Kara thought for a moment and grabbed another shirt. RED, WHITE AND BOOZE. . . . “Not this one. Okay. I got it.” The last shirt said simply WAKE UP, KICK ASS, REPEAT. Charlotte tried to picture herself wearing it. Maybe on a run.
“I love it. Thank you.”
Kara busied herself making coffee while Charlotte hopped onto a barstool facing the linoleum counters, Annie in her lap.
“Now, remind me why you’re runnin’ for office again?” Kara asked as she poured the old grounds down the drain. “Politics is nasty. I watched all seven seasons of The West Wing. I know what it’s like.”
Charlotte laughed a real laugh. God, she’d missed this woman. “I promise you real-life politics isn’t all fast-paced dialogue from adorable liberal optimists with perfect hair.”
“What do I know? Politicians ain’t never gonna do nothin’ for someone like me, so I don’t get involved.”
“Who’d you vote for in the last election, then?”
“You ain’t allowed to ask me that, are you?” Kara’s eyes narrowed.
Charlotte felt her face flush. “Oh, you don’t need to tell me.”
“I’m just fuckin’ with ya. I voted for Tom Hanks. Wrote him in and everything. But for real. Far as I can see you have a right perfect little life in California with a big fancy job and a big fancy house and sunshine and palm trees and beaches and movie stars.”
“That’s Los Angeles, not San Francisco.”
“Still prettier than here. Why would you want to give it up to audition for a job that don’t sound all that great?”
“Nice weather makes people boring anyway.” Charlotte tried to make a joke. “I want the girls to be proud of me. I don’t want my tombstone to read ‘She made a lot of money for a big corporation and then she died.’ ”
“First woman president’s still up for grabs.” Kara chuckled. “I’m lucky. I don’t have to do much to make the kids think I’m the queen.” She curtsied with a Rubenesque grace.
“Where’s Paul?” Charlotte accepted a cup of coffee as Kara plunked down a cylinder of powdered creamer and a box of Sweet’N Low.
“Takin’ a nap. He was up half the night watchin’ Netflix and playing PS2. I’m gonna wake him up in a few.”
Charlotte’s stomach did a flip and she released the air from her lungs in a sharp burst. “He didn’t know we were coming?”
Kara rolled her eyes. “I’ve been tellin’ him for weeks we got to have you over. He don’t care, Charlie. He ain’t mad at you. It’s just that the two of youse went too long without talkin’. He’s gonna be happy to see ya.”
“Is he working these days?”
“What do you think?”
Through her research on voters in Pennsylvania’s northeastern corridor, Charlotte had learned Kara wasn’t alone in using Etsy as a side hustle to support her family. In the past ten years, working-class women in America had been screwed over in equal measure to working-class men, probably more so. Humanity’s automation software alone had been responsible for the eradication of hundreds of thousands of cashier, bank teller, and customer service jobs typically held by women. Those women didn’t get headlines. Instead, they took part-time gigs or became entrepreneurs on Etsy selling T-shirts, jewelry, and crocheted reindeer. They slogged through seasonal work in distribution centers for online retailers like Amazon or Stitch Fix that had moved into the formerly abandoned warehouses in the Lehigh Valley, patrolling miles of cement corridors on foot for twenty cents an hour above the minimum wage with no benefits. They enrolled in job retraining courses funded by the previous administration seven times more often than men. When Charlotte visited the state meeting voters last spring as she was trying to decide whether to run, she was faced with plenty of working-class men who demanded their old jobs magically reappear. There were hundreds of men who told her they were holding out for a coal comeback. The women never complained. They’d found ways to make it work. Charlotte was sick to death of being told to feel sorry for the working-class white man. Being a mediocre white guy doesn’t mean you deserve to be crowned a king, get a job, or get laid. The cavalry is not coming for you. Of course, she could never utter these thoughts out loud to anyone.
Charlotte felt the fine hairs on the back of her neck tingle and knew without turning that her brother was standing behind her.
“Youse talkin’ about me?”
Max walked back in the screen door and crossed the kitchen to give his brother-in-law a pat on the back. “Hey, man.”
“Hey, asshole,” Paul said with genuine affection.
Charlotte blinked as she took in the middle-aged man in front of her. What had happened to him? Paul was a tiny person, a head shorter than Kara, but now he seemed even smaller. He’d aged quickly since she’d seen him last, and even though he was practically the same age as Max, he looked ten years older. His nose was long and red at the tip. He had a small black mustache, a goatee, and a day’s worth of stubble that covered a weak chin. He wore an Eagles jersey two sizes too big for him and black jean shorts with high-top sneakers like an overgrown teenager. When he sat, his shorts crept up his legs, exposing pale white thighs crisscrossed with blue veins.
“Charlie Mary Grace.” He turned to her and nodded, using the names no one had used since her father died. Mary Grace had been Marty Walsh’s mother’s name. Charlotte wasn’t supposed to be named Charlotte at all. In fact, Annemarie told the nurse her daughter’s name was Scarlett, for Scarlett O’Hara from Gone with the Wind, Annemarie’s favorite movie. But the nurse had heard Charlotte and wrote that on the birth certificate. Annemarie was too exhausted and afraid to correct her, and Marty was already at the bar.
“Git me a beer,” Paul barked at Kara as he led them outside and settled down at the white plastic patio table.
“Git it yourself,” she barked right back, sitting down next to him and placing her bare feet up on the table, the soles black around the heels. “How many beers you gonna have today?”
“A couple. Two, three.”
“Git me a wine while you’re at it. There’s a box in the fridge. Charlie, you want wine? It’s nice stuff. They put nice stuff in a box these days. Better than the jug.” Kara winked at her. Charlotte managed a sad smile in return and sat next to her. Annemarie used to polish off half a jug of Carlo Rossi before Paul and Charlotte got home from school. Uncertain which version of her mother would be there to greet her, Charlotte had never invited friends over. One day Annemarie would be pleasant and smiling and watching Donahue like a completely normal person, and the next she’d be sprawled on the kitchen linoleum in just a ragged T-shirt and her underwear at three in the afternoon.
“I’m good with the coffee.” A few yards away she could see the twins attempting forward flips on the trampoline, and her heart fluttered every time they jumped into the air. Annie stretched her arms toward the older girls from Charlotte’s lap. “Me play too, Mommy.”
“You’re too little. Maybe I’ll take you on later when the big kids get down.”
Paul returned with three beers and a juice glass filled with wine. Kara stood to get an actual wineglass and scowled at her husband. “Nice of you to get your doopa out of bed in time for dinner.”
Charlotte muffled a laugh at local slang word for backside. It had been years since she’d heard anyone use the word doopa.
“I’m allowed to be tired. I watched a seven-part series last night on geniuses on the Discovery Channel,” Paul said, his eyes just glassy enough that Charlotte felt confident in her assumption that he’d taken something before gracing them with his presence. “You know Mom and Dad never got me tested to find out if I was a genius or not. I bet they tested you.” Paul shot an accusing glare in Charlotte’s direction.
“I have no idea.”
“They did, because they put you in all smart classes. Anyways, then I found all these tests online that tell you whether or not you’re a genius and you know what? I scored off the charts. I’m like one of those, what you call it, a prodigal.”
“A prodigy?” Max gently corrected him, and opened one of the beers from the middle of the table with an expensive polished antelope horn he kept on his key chain expressly for that purpose. He took a long sip that must have drained half the can.
“Yeah, one of those. And all these years no one has had any idea.”
“Oh, I always knew you was somethin’,” Kara muttered under her breath, used to this kind of talk.
“It got me thinkin’ that I need to do something with all of this genius I got in my brain and how I should be running your campaign for youse.” Her brother placed his right index finger inside his nose and felt around for something inside the nostril while he talked.
It was a wonder to Charlotte that Paul’s ego and self-importance had never resulted in the ability to succeed at anything other than becoming a professional waster of time. She cast a glance at her husband. They’d placed bets on how long it would take for Paul to insist she give him some cash. “You win,” Max mouthed ever so slightly, his mouth half hidden by the beer. Charlotte wagered that Paul would hit her up before anyone had had a single bite to eat.
She was prepared. “You know, we’ve got a campaign manager already. I wish I’d known you’d be interested in something like that,” she said in a voice she hoped sounded genuine.
“Too bad. Because I woulda been real good at it.”
Of course you think that. Of course you think that’s not the kind of job that requires years of experience or high-level thinking or the ability to speak in complete sentences without sticking your finger up your nose.
He finally found what he was looking for and wiped his finger on the bottom of the patio table before setting to work on something on the inside of his left ear. Charlotte looked away, knowing she’d crinkle her nose in obvious disgust if she continued looking at him.
“But I could be some kinda advisor. I could give you advice on things. You remember that poem Dad used to tell us all the time—the one about the bird and the worm.” He extracted his finger from his ear, its tip tinged with something orangey-brown, cracked open a second beer on the side of the table, and flicked the cap into the grass. She did remember. It was a Shel Silverstein poem from Where the Sidewalk Ends. She still read that one to her girls.
If you’re a bird, be an early bird and catch the worm for your breakfast plate. If you’re a bird, be an early early bird—But if you’re a worm, sleep late.
“You’re the bird, Charlie, and I’m the worm and you need a worm. I sleep late and I think about things in my sleep, Charlie.” Paul tapped his temple with his index finger.
She felt seized by a desire to tell him exactly what he could do with his advice, grab her children, and get the hell out of there. Instead, she made her voice low and soft and sweet to disarm her brother. “Great. We’ll let you know when we need it.” Kara raised a skeptical eyebrow.
Paul cut to the chase. “And is it a thing youse pay someone for?”
“Most of our staff are volunteers.”
“Why the hell would anyone work for free? Don’t they know you’re rich?”
“They want to work in public service, I guess.” Charlotte made an effort to keep her voice even.
Paul stood, walked around the table to her, put her in a headlock, and rubbed his fist into her hair. “Remember when I gave you noogies? Oh, you hate that, don’t you? We’ve had our differences, but I always support you. You could use a man like me.” To do what? Sell my staffers bad weed and prescription pills? You’re disgusting. I don’t know how we came out of the same woman. She felt intense shame over how ashamed she was of her brother.
She cast a glance at Max. Save me. But he was tapping away at his phone, ignoring the fact that she was drowning. She looked at Kara. “So, what are we having for dinner?”
“I’m just gonna throw some burgers on tha grill and I got a tray of pizza I can nuke,” Kara said as she rose and began to walk toward the kitchen. “Plenty a fixins, too.”
“I’ll help.” Charlotte stood and followed her, hoisting Annie onto her shoulders, feeling the little girl’s body vibrate as she giggled.
Her brother called after her. “I’ll bet we can work somethin’ out, Charlie. I scratch your back and you scratch mine.” It was a favorite saying of Paul’s, one he’d picked up from The Sopranos. “I can make being back here real easy for you.” He paused. “Or I could make it real hard.”
Is he threatening me?
“I’ll see about it.” What was it worth to keep him quiet and moderately well-behaved? Would she pay five grand? Ten grand of her own money to shut her own brother up?
“Ignore him. You know how he gets,” Kara said once Paul was out of earshot. She pulled an industrial-size vat of macaroni salad, large enough to feed a family of eight, out of the refrigerator. “I got this on sale down the Acme.”
Charlotte used her fingernail to pick at a smudge of food stuck to the counter. “He makes me nervous. There’s going to be a lot of press coming around. Was he threatening me?”
“He’s harmless. That’s how he talks. He thinks he’s a gangster and not just some dingus who got fired from the junkyard last month ’cause he couldn’t even guard da junk.”
“Ted Slaughter’s gunning for me. He’ll be looking for ammo. If Paul does one stupid thing . . .”
“I can keep him in line. I’ll kick him right in the doopa if he does one wrong thing.”
Kara reached over to smooth Charlotte’s hair out of her face.
Her touch released something in Charlotte. She leaned into the rough, warm hand and felt tears prick the corners of her eyes. Charlotte wasn’t a crier, but less than five hours back home had her nerves wound tight as guitar strings. One pluck sent vibrations of fear through her entire body.
“He could ruin this for me. Paul could.” His words rattled around in Charlotte’s brain with a pestering persistence: I could make it real hard.
Paul was a liability, that much was clear. And he wasn’t the only one.