Nestled in the Chesapeake Bay, Brodie Island is charming, remote, and slow to change. For eleven generations, Abby Brodie’s farming family has prospered there. Now, years after leaving to make her way on her own terms, Abby is coming home to see her ailing grandmother, with her teenage daughter and a wealth of memories in tow. Yet as family members gather at the old farmhouse, Abby realizes this visit offers more than a chance to say goodbye.

After decades of feeling she was a disappointment as a daughter, Abby is beginning to see that her mother, too, has struggled to feel a sense of belonging within the Brodie family. Celeste, Abby’s self-centered sister, is far from the successful actress she pretends to be, and needs help that only Abby and their half-brother, Joseph, can give. But most surprising of all is the secret that Grandmother Brodie has been carrying—one that will make each woman question her identity and the sacrifices she’s willing to make to gain acceptance.

With her trademark emotional honesty and insight, Colleen Faulkner lays bare the challenges at the heart of a family—learning how to forgive, connect, and let ourselves be truly known at last.

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“She looks dead.” My fifteen-year-old daughter leans over her namesake to get a better look. “She’s not dead.” I sound more certain than I am. Sarah’s observation is pretty accurate. My grandmother already looks dead. Of course I know she’s not because the hospice nurse just left. The nurse would have known if Mom Brodie was dead, even if none of us were sure.

I take a step closer, coming to stand beside my daughter. I can’t take my eyes off the collection of skin and bones in the bed that barely resembles my grandmother . . . or any other human being, for the matter. I suppose this is what I’ll look like someday if I’m lucky enough to live to be a hundred. I stare at her comatose body; her eyes are closed, her thin, gray lips slightly parted. Her arms are pressed to her sides, making her look awkward, like she’s about to march up and out of the bed.

My grandmother’s marching days are over. Cancer. Eaten up with it, is how Birdie put it. Whatever that means.

With great care, I take Mom Brodie’s hand in mine, almost afraid it will shatter if I squeeze it too tightly. Her hand is cool to the touch, her skin wrinkled and so thin that I can see the gnarled blue lines of her veins like the protruding roots of the old poplar tree where I used to swing on a tire in the backyard.

Sarah leans closer, studying the shrunken body lost in the folds of clean sheets that smell the way only line-dried clothes can. Like sunshine and something more elusive. Less tangible, but nonethe- less present. The smell of bed sheets instantly takes me back to my childhood on the island. This house. A part of me wants to embrace it, to bury my face in the pillow and inhale the scent of all it means to be a Brodie. A part of me wants to run from the house, screaming.

The truth of the matter is that I’m not ready for this.

I’ve been preparing myself for years, of course. I knew Mom Brodie would die. We all die. Typically before we reach three digits. I can usually be pretty logical about things like this, but not here, not now. I want to shake her awake and holler, not yet, not yet. I want to beg her not to leave me. I want to be her little girl one more time and curl up in the bed beside her and smell her peppermint breath and listen to her talk about people on Brodie Island, some I know, some who are long dead. Some I suspect might be born totally of her imagination.

“Mom,” Sarah says in the teenager tone that makes it clear she thinks I’m an idiot. She’s not in the least bit upset by her great-grandmother’s condition. All my worry about bringing her here for this vigil was for nothing. “She definitely looks dead. And kind of . . .” She takes a step back as if studying a piece of artwork on the wall of a museum. She wrinkles her heavily freckled nose. “Kind of flat . . . like Tiger after he got run over by that car.”

I brush the tears from my eyes and lower my grandmother’s hand to the bed. Back to marching position because that’s the way the nurse left her.

I can’t believe I was concerned it would frighten Sarah to see her great grandmother this way. Clearly, she’s not upset. “She’s not dead,” I say, trying not to sound impatient. But what mother doesn’t lose patience with her teenage daughter? Particularly when said teenager is comparing her great-grandmother to a dead cat. And Tiger wasn’t even our cat; she was the neighbor’s. “Not yet.”

I pull the flowered sheet up a little higher, covering my grandmother to her knobby chin that’s spiked with gray hairs. Mom Brodie has always been modest. In the forty-four years I’ve known her, I don’t think I’ve ever seen her bare arms above the elbows, or legs above the kneecaps. She always wore a calf-length flowered housedress, with a full apron in a competing flowered pattern over it. Now she’s in a baby blue hospital gown.

I fight a sob that lodges in my throat. I need to be strong for Sarah. For my Sarah. To show her that dying is a natural part of living.

But they’re both my Sarahs. I need to be strong for them both.

Releasing the sheet, knowing there is nothing really to be done, nothing I can do, but stand vigil, I exhale and step back from the bed. My mother ordered the bed from a medical supply store on the mainland last week when my dad decided to bring Mom Brodie home from the hospital to die. I’ve heard about the bed in great detail in phone conversations with Birdie over the last couple of days: the extravagant cost, what insurance will and won’t pay, its electric hi/low elevation feature, and the trouble with making it with sheets from the linen closet. I talk to my mother often on the phone, but never about things that matter. Never about things I imagine mothers and daughters should talk about. We only discuss trivial stuff like the features of a leased hospital bed. It’s Mom Brodie who’s been my confidant since I was a little girl, and now I can never talk to her again.

“It’s just how a body looks when . . . when it’s slowing down,” I tell my daughter. I cross my arms over my chest and stare down at the silent, motionless body that really could be a corpse. The only indication Mom Brodie is still alive is the slightest, rise and fall of the sheet over her.

I can’t believe Mom Brodie is really dying. I was awake all last night going over it in my mind, trying to grasp it. How could she die and leave me? Who will I be without her? Because more than anything else, more than a daughter, a wife, or even a mother, I’m Sarah Brodie’s granddaughter. She’s been my identity since I was aware of my existence and my relationship to others, somewhere around four years old. She’s been the identity of all of us Brodies.

And what about all the others? What will Brodie Island be without the matriarch who’s reigned over her for more than eighty years? Will the island just vanish, like on the TV show Lost? Will all of the descendants of the Brodie family disappear in the blink of an eye with her and the island? Even those of us who live on the mainland? Will my life end when hers ends?

When I speak to my daughter again, I use my parent voice. The tolerant, understanding one, not the irritated one. “I told you it would be this way. The body’s organs all slow down, almost as if going into hibernation and then eventually . . . they just shut down. She’ll stop breathing.” I take a deep breath and go on. “Her heart will stop beating and that will be the…” my voice catches in my throat—“and she’ll die in her sleep.”

Sarah takes one more good look at her greatgrandmother and then backs away from the bed. She glances around the room with its ugly, dated wallpaper and too many pieces of miss-matched furniture pushed again the wall. It used to be Mom Brodie’s sewing room when I was a little girl, back in the days when many of the women on the island still made their own clothes.

Sarah looks at me with an innocence born of having not yet lost a loved one and I have the sudden urge to hug her tightly. I don’t. I stand right there, hugging myself. Sarah has made it clear that she needs me to respect her space. No touching unless invited, which is hard for me. I’m a huggy, touchy person, particularly with my children. Maybe because my mother never was. I’ve never been to a psychiatrist, or even had counseling, but I’m pretty sure that would be the conclusion at the end of a long billing cycle.

It was Mom Brodie who hugged and kissed me, growing up in this house. She was the one who wiped the blood off my scraped knees and gave me a grape Popsicle to ease the emotional suffering of a fall from the chicken house roof. She was the one who told me it was okay when I didn’t win the state spelling bee in the seventh grade when I misspelled totipotency. Mom Brodie was the one who took me to the movies, driving me all the way to Salisbury, the night Billy Darlen escorted Tabitha Parker to my junior prom instead of me. I still have the blue dress I never wore.

Sarah picks up a photograph from the bedside table of Mom Brodie and my grandfather, Big Joe. It’s a faded black and white photo, him in a porkpie hat, slender, dark tie and suit, and her in a flowered dress and hat. The most interesting thing about the photo is that Mom Brodie appears to be wearing lipstick; she never wore lipstick. The photo was taken in the mid-forties, I would guess from the style of their clothes. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen the photo before. I wonder where my mother found it.

Sarah regards the photo for a moment. “She was really pretty.”

“She had freckles like yours,” I tell her. Sarah’s freckles are a constant source of worry and complaint these days. She’s heavily freckled across her nose and cheeks, unlike me, who just got the usual ginger curse of a splattering of freckles everywhere.

Sarah sets the framed photograph down beside a glass of water and several prescription bottles.

I wonder absently why the pills are still there. Mom Brodie is past the point of swallowing pills. We have an eyedropper of morphine to ease her passing.

Sarah looks up at me. “Did we miss dinner? I’m hungry.”

“Supper was at five.”

“Five? Who eats at five?” Again, she wrinkles her nose, far too indignant for such a trivial matter. My children seem to thrive on indignation, this one in particular.

“Your grandmother and grandfather do. We always had supper at five. Everyone on Brodie Island eats at five. It’s . . . the farm way.”

Sarah ambles to the doorway. In the last six months, she’s gone from moving like a giraffe, with awkward, long limbs, to moving lithely, like some kind of freckled jungle cat. Her newfound grace is harder for me to accept than the stilt-leg phase was. She looks so adult-like all of a sudden with her poised presence. So . . . sexual that I find it startling. Sarah wears no make-up, her pale red hair is piled on top of her head like a bird’s nest and she’s wearing a paint-splattered T-shirt. Her freckles, which I think make her model-beautiful, are the first thing anyone sees. She looks like a woman and I wonder when that happened and where I was as it was happening.

“No one who has field hockey practice eats at five,” she points out. “Doesn’t anyone play field hockey at Brodie High?”

“There is no Brodie High anymore.” I walk to the foot of my grandmother’s bed, wondering if she can hear this inane conversation. If she could open her eyes and see Sarah, would she ask who stole my sweet baby girl and left this nimble feline in her place? Or would she even notice?

My grandmother and Sarah were never close; not the way I had hoped they would be. My husband Drum says it’s my fault. (Not in an accusing way. He’s not that kind of husband. But he is the kind who calls it as he sees it. No sugar coating.) He thinks that my avoidance of my mother has kept our kids from having relationships with the rest of my family. He might be right, but I don’t have time to feel guilty about that right now. There are more pressing guilt trips for me to take this weekend.

“Everyone goes to Princess Anne for middle school and high school,” I explain. “Just the little kids go to school here, now.”

Sarah shrugs. “You said it was a crappy school, anyway.” She walks out of the tiny room that’s beginning to feel claustrophobic. “Birdie!” she calls down the hall. “You have anything to eat?”

“That’s Mom-Mom to you,” I tell my daughter. “You shouldn’t call her by her first name.”

“You do. And it’s not even her name,” Sarah throws over her shoulder. “If I was going to be disrespectful and call her by her first name, I’d have to holler hey, Beatrice!”

I don’t respond and Sarah vanishes from my view, down the hall. I know I should call her back and ask for an apology. Drum says I shouldn’t let her talk to me that way, but sometimes . . . I just don’t have the energy to fight her on every little thing. Pick your battles. That’s what Mom Brodie always told me and I’ve tried to live by that. You pick your battles, not just with your kids and your mother and your boss. You pick your battles in life. You keep in mind what’s really important and what’s not. Ask yourself, “Will this matter in five years?” It might be one of the sagest pieces of advice she ever gave me.

I return my attention my grandmother. Mom Brodie hasn’t moved since we got here and I have to stare for a minute to confirm that she’s still breathing. I’m relieved she is. I’d feel bad to have to call the nice hospice nurse who just left. She’s the one who will call Mom Brodie’s death when it comes. Gail. She lives all the way in Salisbury, though, and it’s Friday night. I’d hate to have to ask her to turn around and drive back.

I sigh and walk to the single window in the room, unlock it and give it a shove. I don’t care that the air conditioning is running in the house; my mother probably has the vent closed in the room. She closes them all the time, to save on the electric bill, which makes no sense to me, but then little my mother does makes sense to me.

It takes two tries to ease the window up a couple of inches. The house is more than a hundred years old, built by my great-grandfather Joe Brodie, Sr., Mom Brodie’s father-in-law. A house this age always needs work. I don’t know why my parents don’t have the windows repaired. Or replaced.

They certainly have the money to do it. I don’t know what they’re worth. It’s not something we Brodies talk about—money. Because my grandparents lived through the Great Depression, my mother wears her Ked knockoffs until the rubber soles fall off them, my father carries a ten-year-old wallet and they wash and reuse Ziploc bags. I suspect their net worth is in the millions.

They could build a new house if they wanted. Something single-story and smaller, more manageable. That had been the plan at one time. My brother Joseph, the fourth, and his family were going to take this house and Dad and Birdie were going to live in the new house. Then Joseph’s marriage fell apart and so did the house plans, I guess.

I take a deep breath, closing my eyes. It’s still August and we’re in the heat of the late summer, but I exhale and inhale deeply, filling my lungs with the briny, salt air of the Chesapeake Bay and all that it means. The good and the bad.

I stand there breathing in the evening air, listening to the insect song and the distant croak of frogs. I can’t imagine ever living anywhere but on the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay. Drum keeps talking about moving to the ocean, maybe a little place on the Delaware shore. He doesn’t understand what it’s like to be conceived, born and bred here. He doesn’t understand that the bay is in my blood.

Realizing I’m not alone in the room anymore, we’re not alone, Mom Brodie and I, I open my eyes and turn quickly to the doorway. It’s my mother. For her size and weight, she’s stealthy. She can walk soundlessly when she wants to; she’s like a big mouse in a flowered apron. She listens in on conversations not meant for her ears. She’s a shifty one, my mother. Always has been. I remember once, as a teenager, demanding furiously why she was listening in on one of my phone conversations, why she was so prying and underhanded about it. She said it was the only way to survive in this house, growing up. I never quite understood what she meant, but the truth is, I never asked her to explain, either.

It was my grandmother who brought Birdie to Brodie Island. As Mom Brodie told the story, she found Birdie in an orphanage in Baltimore and brought her home to help with housework. Growing up in this house, she was some sort of cross between a hired girl and a stepdaughter, I guess. I never really understood it; my grandmother’s pat explanation had always been “things were different here in those days.” My mother never gave any explanation at all.

As the years passed, Mom Brodie realized she had the perfect opportunity to raise a good Christian woman to become her son’s wife. Mom Brodie taught Birdie how to cook and clean and grow a garden and be a good wife to a Brodie man. And when my mother turned eighteen, she married Mom and Pop Brodie’s only living child, my dad.

“She doing okay?” my mother asks.

I study her.

Birdie is short and round and lumpy the way women who eat biscuits and bacon for breakfast in their sixties are. She has a helmet of old lady gray hair, pale blue eyes, and a sourpuss. That’s what Mom Brodie used to call it. A sourpuss. Right to her face. Mom Brodie was the only person I ever knew who called my mother on her behavior, on the terrible things she says sometimes.

Birdie wears her usual uniform: faded stretch pants, a nondescript beige top and a full colored apron over it. And cheap, canvas shoes with stained toes. My mother is by no means an attractive woman. Some might call her ugly. No amount of make-up or designer clothing could make her beautiful. She looks older than her years. Always has. But a nice pair of capris, sandals, and a decent haircut would go a long way. I gave up years ago trying to get her to dress better, maybe use a little foundation to even out her ruddy complexion.

“She doesn’t seem to be in pain,” I say. My voice sounds breathy and far off. I feel like I’m on the verge of a crying jag but I don’t know why. I didn’t feel like this until Birdie came in.

Birdie walks to the bed and straightens the sheet beneath my grandmother’s chin. The sheet that doesn’t need straightening. The interesting thing about the gesture is that it seems tender. And tenderness isn’t something I’ve ever seen in my mother. That’s not to say she isn’t a good person, because she is. In a lot of ways, she’s a better woman than I’ll ever be. Any of us Brodies will ever be. She’s a good Christian with respectable morals. She’s the first one to volunteer in her Methodist women’s circle, the first one to send a card for a new baby, and the first in line at a viewing. But tender, my mother is not.

“Air’s on,” she says, pointing her chin in the direction of the window. It’s an accusation; I hear it in her tone. Birdie is all about tone and she’s the master of it.

“You need to lower the thermostat, open some more vents. Something.” I close the window slowly, already missing the smell of the bay. I think maybe I’ll go for a walk later. After I’ve gotten a chance to talk to Daddy for a few minutes. After Sarah retires to our room to text her friends. “It’s hot as hell in here, Birdie.”

She ignores my swear word, as she calls it. I guess Birdie knows something about picking her battles, too. The thought is intriguing, but I’m too upset and too tired to contemplate the complexity of it right now.

“I don’t want her to catch a chill,” Birdie says. She’s still looking down at my grandmother, studying the wrinkles on wrinkles of her face.

It’s on the tip of my tongue to say It’s not like it’s going to kill her, but I don’t say it. I’m really not that person. That spiteful person who says mean things just to be mean. Not usually. That would be my sister Celeste’s modus operandi. But there’s something about my mother’s constant judgment that puts me on edge . . . and sometimes pushes me over it.

“What made you decide to put her in here?” I ask, walking over to stand beside my mother, who is several inches shorter than me. “Instead of her room?”

Had it been my choice, I’d have wanted her to die upstairs in the bedroom she’s slept in since the day she arrived on the island as a new bride at eighteen years old. If possible, I’d have tucked her into the bed she shared with my grandfather for forty years before he died in the bed in his sleep of a heart attack.

“Stairs,” my mother says. The puss again. “Arth - ritis is acting up.” She rubs her hip. “Change in weather coming I imagine.”

“Well, I’m here to help. To do whatever I can to make things easier.” I gaze down at my grandmother’s face and I feel the tears well up again. I don’t want to cry in front of my mother. Birdie doesn’t cry. “Celeste, too. She texted me. She’s on her way.” I give a little a laugh. “Of course we know what that means. She could be here in five minutes or five weeks.”

“I’ll be glad to have her here to help me. Celeste. She works too hard,” Birdie frets. “I worry about her.”

I hold my tongue on the issue of my sister’ ability to be helpful. The facts behind the works too hard statement, too. I’m not here to fight with my mother. For once, I feel like I need to play nice. We should be on the same side. All of us: Birdie, Celeste, Sarah, me. The Brodie women. We’re here for Mom Brodie, to help her pass quietly, without pain and with the dignity she deserves. The same dignity I hope some day my children and grandchildren will give me. Looking down at my grandmother, I realize this is where I want to die, too. In this house. Maybe even here in this sewing room.

“I gave her some macaroni and cheese and some fruit salad. Sarah.” Birdie tugs at the bed sheet again, this time re-tucking it under the mattress, sealing Mom Brodie a little tighter in her sheet tomb. “Didn’t want chicken and dumplings.”

“She’s a vegetarian.”

Birdie sniffs. “So she said. Nothing but nonsense. God put chickens on this earth for us to eat. Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you,” she quotes.

“Genesis,” I say.

“Nine three.” Satisfied with the sheet, Birdie stuffs one hand in her apron and pulls out a crumpled tissue. She leans over and gently wipes beneath my grandmother’s nose. “Mrs. Brodie will need to be bathed tomorrow. She was always one for takin’ a bath.”

“I can do it,” I say.

She looks at me doubtfully. “It’s a privilege to do for family when they’re this way.” She shakes her head. “But that don’t mean it’s easy. See a woman like her unclothed, like a newborn babe.”

“I can do it. Celeste and I will do it. You’ve got enough on your hands.”

My mother still gets up at five every morning. She tends to her chickens and makes my father a full breakfast: eggs, scrapple, pancakes and bitter black coffee. She usually hand washes the dishes even though she has a dishwasher and then she straightens up. In this day and age she still has a designated day to do things: laundry on Mondays and dusting on Tuesdays. Mid-morning, five days a week, Birdie tends to our friends and neighbors who she deems are in need. She’s all over the island in her tan Buick. She drives women to the doctor, delivers homemade chicken noodle soup to the sick, and sits with the elderly to relieve caretakers. Every day of her life she either feeds my father lunch at the house or delivers it to him in a brown paper bag wherever he is on the island, here on the farm or in town. The afternoon brings more cleaning and then she makes supper and cleans up all that. The next morning, she gets up and does it all again. I don’t know where she gets her energy or her stamina. I can’t imagine that there’s another sixty-six-year-old woman who gets done what my mother can get done in a day.

“You have to wonder,” Birdie says, breaking the silence of the room.

“What’s that?” I ask.

She lifts her chin in the direction of Mom Brodie. “What’s going in her head. You think she knows she’s dying?”

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