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Since the fight with Christine after the barbecue, Christine had kept a large berth from Susan. When Susan walked past her bedroom, she heard her in conversation with someone on the phone. The conversations were tense and mean-spirited, at least on Christine’s side. Susan had to assume that they were with Frank. Like all of Christine’s relationships, this seemed to be a ticking time bomb. It hurt Susan’s heart—but it also lined up with every single thing she knew about her sister. Christine had never been one to stick to someone for long. In high school, she’d danced through boys easily, forcing them to chase after her and beg for her until she dumped them and allowed it all to happen again.
Now, at the age of forty-one, with just the one ovary, a dramatic history of drinking, and a closed-up restaurant and no job, Christine seemed to be at the end of her rope.
There was still no word from Lola. Susan hustled out onto the porch and winced in pain. She perched at the edge of the porch swing and flipped through her purse to find her weed pen and her phone.
Susan: Lola, hey. I haven’t heard from you. Just wondering if we can expect you in the next few days? We want to go through all of Mom’s stuff and clean up the house a little bit. Christine is here and the Vineyard is prettier than ever.
When she finished the text, she sighed, closed her eyes, then took several hits from the weed pen and dropped her head back, falling into the goodness. The cloud of no-feeling fell over her. She felt all light, as the pain slowly subsided. It was like her body started to become numb all over.
And then, the porch door creaked open. Christine’s voice sprung out. “What are you smoking?”
Susan was far away for a second. She dragged herself back and opened her eyes to find Christine hovering over her, her hand wrapped around a glass of wine and her eyes in their own state of fogginess.
“It’s nothing,” Susan sputtered. She dropped the pen into her purse and righted herself, tending to her hair. She was a bit too high to care about what happened, but she didn’t need Christine to learn everything. Not like this.
Christine chuckled and dropped onto the swing. “You were always such a goody-two-shoes, it’s hard for me to believe that you’ve dipped yourself into the world of herb.”
“World of herb? Listen to yourself,” Susan said, laughing. Actually, she laughed a little too hard.
“Suit yourself, girl. I have never been one for weed. Not since college, which, you might remember, I dropped out of. Largely because I liked the green stuff a little too much. No, I’ll stick to wine, thank you. No sharing required,” Christine said.
Weirdly, it seemed that Christine discovering this small part of Susan’s secret, had built a doorway for them to speak through again.
“Is Dad still at the Inn?” Christine asked.
“Yes. Till six,” Susan said.
“He’s a little too sick to work there during the day, don’t you think?”
“Maybe. Not yet. He loves it so much. I can’t imagine telling him to leave for good. We’re a small staff at this point, so we need him occasionally at the desk.”
“Listen to yourself. Using the word ‘we’”. You’ve included yourself on the staff roster, free of pay, I guess,” Christine said.
Susan shrugged. “I told you. I don’t have anything else. I feel like I owe it to Dad. Or if not to Dad, to Mom.”
Christine’s mischievous smile fell from her face. She tipped herself forward to make the porch swing sway. “I haven’t missed her as much as I do right now in years. Sometimes, I will be walking down the street in New York and I’ll just have the weirdest idea that I want to call her. It’s crazy because I don’t remember calling her much when she was alive. She was always just a few rooms or a few streets away. And I don’t even know what we would talk about now. She lived her entire life on the island. She married our dad when she was very young and started having kids immediately. Bang. Bang. Bang. The way you did.”
“Ha. True,” Susan murmured.
“I wish I would have. Gosh, I just... There was so much I didn’t know about myself. And now, it’s all too late.”
Susan and Christine didn’t speak for a long time. Out on the water, Stan Ellis shot his little boat across the blue to find a perfect fishing spot. Susan had seen him nearly every day since that first one, but never on land.
“I think Dad misses her, too. Mom. He brings her up as much as possible,” Susan said.
“That doesn’t change what he did,” Christine returned.
“I just think, if we don’t find a way to forgive him before he... before it’s too late, we’re going to regret it for the rest of our lives,” Susan said. “I know that sounds dramatic and stupid to you. I know you haven’t wanted to think about our family for a long time. But it’s fact.”
Suddenly, there was a dramatic crash from inside the house. Susan and Christine rose to see the door that led to the driveway wide open to reveal a picture-perfect angel, the woman of their forever dreams. There, standing in the doorway, was their mother: Anna Sheridan.
“Are those my girls?” the voice cried out.
“Lola,” Susan murmured as her hand covered her mouth in surprise. She rushed through the door from the porch to view her gorgeous youngest sister: thirty-eight years old, fresh out of Boston as a journalist with the entire world at her feet. She was dressed in bohemian fashion, was incredibly trim, and her eyes were glowing with excitement. Although Susan hadn’t seen her youngest sister in years, it was entirely Lola-esque to surprise them, rather than tell them when she planned to arrive.
Immediately, the girls threw their arms around each other. For the first time in twenty-five years, the three Sheridan sisters had come together. Tears trickled down Susan’s cheeks. When she drew back, she noticed that tears had struck each and every one of them.
“You kept it from us!” Christine cried. “I can’t believe you.”
Lola grinned wider. “You know how I love an entrance.”
The three sisters returned to the porch. Christine opened another bottle of wine. The conversation both bubbled and broke, depending on the moment. Sometimes, all they could do was gaze at each other in disbelief. Again, Susan felt herself dwell in sadness. She had seen Lola for only a few hours at dinner a few years before, but beyond that, Susan had left the island when Lola was only around twelve or thirteen. Lola had had to remain on Martha’s Vineyard without their mother for years, constantly surrounded with old and painful memories.
Maybe this was part of the reason Susan had always felt extra guilty about Lola. She should have stuck around, if only for her. She’d had to fend for herself.
“I brought presents!” Lola cried suddenly. She whipped out her artsy-looking, bespoke purse and found three little jewelry boxes. She passed two of them to Christine and Susan, who opened them to find little unique stones hanging from leather necklaces. Lola said that she had just done an interview with a local artist coming up in the Boston art scene, who’d given her the necklaces at a really good rate.
Nothing about the necklace screamed “forty-four-year-old mother of two and grandmother of two, without a husband and with no real hope for the future,” but that almost made Susan love it all the more. She hugged Lola tight and thanked her.
After that, Christine and Susan tried to update Lola on the situation at the Inn.
“So Dad’s really lost it, huh?” Lola said. She sounded kind of flippant about it, as though Wes Sheridan was just someone she’d heard of a few times, rather than the father she had spent a lot of time in that house alone with.
“He’s losing bits of pieces of himself all the time,” Susan affirmed. “But I’ve decided to stay on here at the Inn, at least until we decide what to do. Maybe, who knows, we sell it? I don’t know.”
Both Christine and Lola sat with this. Susan had hardly admitted this to herself. But when she really looked at the reality of the situation, what other choice might they have?
“I don’t know. Mom put so much of herself into that place. I just...” Lola stuttered for a second, lost in thought. She then drew a fist and smashed it on her knee. “I don’t know! Man, this is the hardest thing in the world, isn’t it? But look at this island. Look at this place we grew up in! I try to describe it to people. That we had a little hideaway from the rest of the world, but you really can’t envision it until you’re encircled by it.”
Just before six, Susan announced that Wes would be home soon. Lola’s face changed. She and Christine made heavy eye contact and then returned their gaze to Susan.
“I just don’t know if I’m fully ready to see Dad right now,” Lola said. “I couldn’t wait to see you two, but a night with Dad?”
“He’s really a lot more gentle than you’re giving him credit,” Susan said. “He just wants his family to be together.”
“It’s just been such a long time. So much pain,” Lola said. “I don’t know if I can face him and pretend that everything is okay.”
“But, we’re all here, Lola.” Susan felt anger and adrenaline swirl in her stomach. “He could be gone soon. We have to make peace. We have to face this. Otherwise...”
But before she could finish, they heard the door crank open near the driveway. Wes Sheridan, the father of the three Sheridan sisters, now home for the first time together in twenty-five years, called out, “Girls? I’m home!” Just as he’d done years and years before.
Lola’s eyes became huge, like saucers. She then exhaled the breath she had been holding. “All right. Let’s do this. I guess there’s no turning back now.”