I gave my sister her own distinctive ringtone on my phone. When Caroline calls, I hear: trouble trouble trouble. Because she never calls me unless there’s a problem. Never calls to say hello, or happy birthday, or I want to set you up with a friend of mine living in Boston. Nope. When she rang me in June, she was not calling to ask about the weather or my health or my love life. She had an agenda, layered with judgment. That judgment basically just bled through the phone, heavy as a sigh, angry as static. Add my sister to the list of people I continue to disappoint no matter what I fucking do.
I’m sorry, but I can’t always do things on her schedule or on my mother’s schedule. That’s just the way it is when you run a service-based business. My clients call me, or an auction comes up.
Their wine cellar floods, they need replacement bottles. You can say all the time that wine isn’t important, isn’t a priority, but try telling that to a wealthy client. You work on their schedules, not the other way around. But no one really understands being a wine bitch, except guys like Matt Whitaker. His job, and my job, are really just an inch apart. The fact that I make a shit-ton more money only makes it worse; my clients are that much more demanding, and I have to go to greater lengths to make them happy.
Of course, my family is under the impression that I don’t work for a living. Selling wine is, to them, about as difficult as being a golf pro or a lifeguard. Must be nice. Tough life. You can’t complain when you fly overnight to Paris to an auction, then leave the same afternoon to meet a client in California. No one cares that you are exhausted, slightly hungover, and some days so tired of the word grape, the sound of it, the shape of it, that you pick raisins out of the overnight oatmeal the trainer makes you eat and fling them against the wall. No one cares about your shitty fabulous life.
Which is not to say that I don’t enjoy it some of the time. Curating a cellar for someone you respect and enjoy is satisfying, fun even. And I still love discovering new blends, tasting something I can’t quite put my finger on, a fruit I can’t name, layers that unfold. I like a wine that deserves another sip, a second chance.
Anyway, I had to go on standby on the late ferry. I offered to pick up groceries on the way to the house, since I’m bringing my Audi over, but Caroline said no, never mind, in that martyr voice. Just like my mother, doing everything, then blaming everyone else for doing less.
There were lights in the living room and kitchen when I drove up after eleven. No lights upstairs. I thought I saw Caroline up on the widow’s walk, and I went to tap my horn but knew they’d kill me if I woke anyone up. I raised my hand instead, but whoever it was didn’t wave back. Maybe it was just a shadow, just a trick of the moon.
I left my golf clubs and fishing gear in my trunk; I knew that banging those things up the stairs would just irritate Caroline, whether she was already awake or not.
I walked up the back steps, toward the kitchen, hoping it was John who was up and not her.
In the living room, John was watching a Will Ferrell movie on the flat-screen TV I’d bought last year. I told my parents they had to have one in order to keep the rental price high, and Matt backed me up. But, of course, John and I were both thrilled to have it there so we could watch baseball and golf and tennis, three places where he and I intersected. Sports was our connection, and wine, and cigars, and whiskey. Not the mutual love of my sister, although I’m sure we both loved her in our own way. I just wasn’t sure, most of the time, what that way was. She had been a cute kid, always a tomboy. We played together when we were little. But it seems like ever since she was in high school, she’s been a stone-cold bitch. Full of attitude and particular about every damned thing, not easygoing like Mom, not amusing like Dad. Just way too fucking grown-up. She was still attractive enough, with her golden hair and skin and her tennis-trim figure. I saw the way guys looked at her when we took walks into town so she could complain about our parents. But I wanted to warn those guys, the same way I should have warned poor John. Don’t be fooled. She’ll never let you be.
“Yo, Bro,” John said, muting the movie.
“Don’t let me interrupt.”
“Please, I know it by heart.”
“Shake and bake,” I said and laughed. We all knew it by heart. I pulled a bottle of cabernet out of my bag. “Brought you something.”
“Ooh,” he said. “What year?”
“Before you lost your virginity.”
“That recent?”
I smiled. “I’ll get glasses. Unless you want to just brown-bag it.”
I went into the kitchen and rooted through the cupboards for the decent wine globes I’d bought the year before. Tired of drinking out of my parent’s chipped thimbles. Tired of using what was here instead of what was right. It was too much like camping. But it was so, so very Mom and Dad.
We finished the bottle, and I opened another one. We went outside and smoked cigars on the front porch, and that, I suppose, was our first mistake.
A few minutes later, my sister was standing next to us in her Lilly Pulitzer pajamas.
“That shit is wafting through my window,” she said.
“Welcome to Nantucket,” I said. “Nice to see you too, Sis.”
“It’s a cigar, not a joint, honey,” John said.
“Jesus, you didn’t bring that too, Tom, did you?”
“No,” I replied. “Would you like to root through my luggage? Maybe do a cavity search?”
John smiled, and Caroline made the scrunched-up face she always made when someone referred to a body part or sex. She actually looked like she could smell the imaginary weed. Poor John, I thought. Poor fucking John.
“Can I get you a glass?”
“No.”
She sat down next to us and proceeded to launch into a schedule for the next two days. When Mom and Dad arrived. When dinner would be. When we should go out in the boat. When Dad had his therapy. When Mom needed some down time. If I should take Dad fishing. When I should take Dad golfing. When I could meet with Matt to go over the repairs needed on the house. And whether we needed to go to some kind of township meeting about something or other with our neighbor’s lawyer who sent a letter over blah blah blah blah.
“Did you hear me?”
“Not really,” I said and sighed. John suppressed a cough next to me, which I’m sure he would pay for later, interpreted as a snicker. “Why don’t you type up an itinerary and tape it to our doors?”
I knew her next words would be this isn’t funny, and I was close. So close.
“This isn’t a joke, Tom.”
“Well, if it is, it goes like this: the good news is Dad survived cancer; the bad news is Mom’s gonna kill him.”
“Mom needs our help. I don’t know if Dad is as bad as she says or if she is just losing it too, but you know the indomitable Alice Fucking Warner would never ask for help unless she was really, truly in the shit.”
“Okay, okay. You’re right.”
“And the new neighbor behind us is building a three-fucking-story quote-unquote pool house and is claiming our widow’s walk is out of code and built too high and needs to come down.”
“What?”
“You heard me. John has the letter.”
“So you’re opening Dad’s mail now? Mom tell you to do that too?”
“You would have done the same thing.”
“Doubtful.”
If there was one thing I was sure of, it was that my sister and I did not possess the same instincts about anything.
“Is the widow’s walk out of code? It was built so long ago. I think I was in college. Maybe the codes have changed?”
“Who knows?”
“I’m sure Matt knows.”
“Matt’s not an engineer.”
“The widow’s walk interrupts this guy’s new view,” John said. “That’s what this is about. Not being out of code. It’s about not backing down.”
“Well, we have to help Mom with this too. She doesn’t need any more to deal with. So you make a tee time on Friday, and you call Matt, and I’ll make dinner reservations one night—”
“Okay, okay! But please, let’s not go to that stupid place Dad likes.”
“What, because you don’t like their wine list, we can’t go somewhere and have a burger for your father who had cancer?”
“They serve Turning Leaf, Caro. They don’t even have a list.”
“So drink beer. Suck it up.”
“Can we just go to the club?”
“Fine, if you let me drive.”
“All right,” I said with a sigh. She always thought we drank too much. Sankaty Golf and Beach Club was only a few miles away, but she always made it seem like it was light years. It’s an island, I wanted to scream. Everything is around the corner. We could ride our bikes home, for God’s sake.
“If I’d had cancer, I’d want to drink and eat whatever I wanted,” John said.
“You do drink and eat whatever you want,” Caroline said.
“Well, since we’re all dying, just slowly, why not?” I asked.
She sighed. “I’m going to bed,” she said, but she didn’t move.
“Do you want a glass?” I asked.
“Maybe.”
John handed her his.
“Wait, did you already brush your teeth?” he asked. “It won’t taste good if—”
“I’ll live on the edge,” she said.
“Ooh, such courage,” I said. “Maybe you should be the one to call Matt.”
“Have you always been such an asshole? Or am I just noticing it, truly, now?”
I stopped to consider this. I thought about my years in lower school, middle school, boarding school. I thought about kicking the winning soccer goal and screaming “Suck it!” I thought about the time I got picked up for public drunkenness and flirted with the policewoman. I thought about hitchhiking and stealing the man’s quarters from his ashtray when he went to the men’s room. I thought about the friends I used to have who I don’t anymore, the girls I dated, the fiancée who dumped me after I got thrown through the plate-glass window of a bar.
“It’s possible,” I said.
“It’s probable,” John replied.
She stood up to leave, and I smelled what I’ve come to think of as her own smell—shampoo and soap and deodorant, all mixed together. Lavender and rose. Not unpleasant, but not sexy, just hers, my sister. I would know it the instant I entered a room. And I wondered if I had a smell. If she could tell where I’d been, if I left a trail as obvious as hers.
“Hey, Caro, were you up on the widow’s walk when I drove up?”
“What? No. Put your cigars in water before you come up. You don’t want the house to burn down.”
“Thanks, Mommy,” I said.
“You’re welcome, asshole,” she replied.
We stayed up late, watching the lights go out, one by one, on all the big houses across the street. You could look in their windows and watch their big-screen TVs; you could practically see the petals on the enormous flower arrangements in their empty foyers. Down the road, catty-corner, the old Grinstaff house had the same sprawling, dark exterior. Renovated twice, and still the arrangement of windows had an unfriendly look to it, no shutters, the pattern of lights inside forming a menacing jack-o’-lantern. But if you stayed up late enough, all the lights went out, even over there.
We talked about fishing, about politics, about business, about everything but family. That was one of the things I loved about John, how he knew not to poke the tender places. The world needed more people like him and fewer people like me, and I knew that. I also knew my sister married him because she thought he would always be on her side, not mine. Shows you how wrong she was.
I stood up, stretched, and looked at all the cars, all the houses, all the boats. Everyone was here waiting for the Fourth. Everyone was in bed, resting up. The summer was just beginning, after all. John said good night, and I went up to the widow’s walk with my last cigar. I expected to smell traces of my sister still, the lotion from her hands lingering on the ladder, the hatch, the railing. But there was nothing. Maybe she wasn’t lying about being up there. Who knew?
It was too dark to see anything but stars and the glowing end of my cigar. I didn’t finish it. After a while, cigars make me feel sick, just like everything else.