NET-A-NEWPORT 7H
Submitted via NetaNewport.com
From: gildedage@party.com
Subject: engagement party
Message: was a really nice night and the bride and groom were really happy. Party went on til 3am. Only person not doing the costume theme was (big surprise) cass coventry.
NET-A-NEWPORT 6H
Submitted via NetaNewport.com
From: I like big boats and I cannot lie
Subject: wedding of the year
Message: the reason the coventry utterback wedding is so soon is because the one mom doesn’t want it to happen at all, and the bride and groom need to get it locked up
NET-A-NEWPORT 5H
CONFIRMED Wedding of the Season date SET for Labor Day! Venue TBD. Submit your guesses below.
Around ten the next morning, Hope burst into the bunk room, somehow already out of breath. Maggie is getting married in three months and we don’t have a moment to spare!
After Susie had released the guillotine last night, I’d downed the glass of wine she’d poured me. Then, because it is law that one reverts to their immature selves once at home, I helped myself to the rest of the bottle, drinking it alone as I dangled my feet in the cold pool, watching the party carry on from afar. When the lights finally went off on the veranda, I lumbered back to the carriage house, creeping through the pitch-black, trying not to wake my parents, and threw myself into bed—the bottom bunk, to be exact, after Archer reminded me via text that he had top in perpetuity—without even changing my clothes.
I was paying for it today; I spent a good part of the morning staring blearily at the mattress slats above me, waiting for the ibuprofen to kick in. Blame it on the alcohol or the lack of sleep, but the back of my head was also throbbing. I’d hoped the injury, and the memories of it, would’ve faded by now. No such luck.
Above me, Archer groaned as Hope listed our plans for the day—something about a venue, something about the guest list, something about ice sculptures. And, if I heard correctly, drones? “Maggie brought your stuff over, Cassie—you left it in Susie’s room,” Hope said, letting my bag drop heavily by the headboard. “So, get up already! The appointment is in an hour. They are fitting us in, and we cannot be tardy!” A tabby cat, one ear missing, a pink scar across his nose, glided into the room and began to do figure-eights around my mother’s ankles.
I swung my feet off the bed, still woozy with drink and lousy information, and managed to get one eye fully open. The room, Lord, it was a mess. You’d think a twenty-six-year-old would have more evolved cleanliness habits than an elephant in a dirt pile. With the edge of my foot, I slid aside an empty guitar case that was currently supporting a number of half-drunk water cups. “I was going to go see friends this morning,” I said, hoping this could be an excuse.
“Ha!” Hope barked, startling the cat, who bolted from the room. “You are not.”
It was a flagrant lie. Not even Archer bought it; his laughter wobbled the bunk.
“I smell that you both had a late night, but we’ll drive with the sunroof open,” Hope said as she strode over to the single dormer window, raised the blinds with a hard yank. On the ceiling above her, a brown, globby stain had soaked through the plaster, likely evidence of the roof damage Susie had been referring to. “You can stick your head out. Fresh air does a body good.”
This was my last day, and I didn’t relish spending it having hard conversations while hungover, but maybe it wouldn’t be so hard. Maybe Archer and my parents were tired of living in an creaky, polluted old house! Maybe they’d breeze out of here with some suitcases and a new lease on life! I told my mother something like all right, ugh, fine.
“Hear that, Archer?” said Hope, reaching up to shake his back, still covered in the sheet and blanket. “Your sister is engaging with the family.”
“Stop the presses,” I mumbled. When I lifted myself off the mattress, the structure creaked ominously. We’d used these beds since the early aughts, and even then Hope had purchased them secondhand. By the time I’d left for Columbia, they were in a state I could only describe as rickety, held together with spit and prayers. I just hoped they’d last another night before collapsing entirely. I shuffled over to my bag, which had fallen open by Archer’s telescope, and tugged from the bottom the kind of workout clothes that aren’t for working out.
“Why don’t you want to come with us?” my mother was demanding of Archer.
“I have a meeting later.” Archer sat up in bed, ran a hand over his face and through his hair, apparently giving up on the sleep-in. “With my UFO kooks at the library. Got a guest speaker. Big muckety-muck from the Pentagon. Well, Pentagon adjacent. He’s been in the Pentagon once, is what I’m saying.”
“Would do you some good to be with people who don’t wear aluminum foil on their heads and talk nonsense about 5G networks,” Hope muttered on her way out the door.
“Don’t talk about my friends that way!” Archer jokingly called after her.
I found my cosmetics hiding under my tangle of phone and computer chargers. “God, it’s freezing in here. How did you manage to break through the roof, anyway?”
“You heard about that, huh?”
I winced, but he didn’t seem to notice, or care that Susie had told me.
He lifted his phone to his face. “I was up there one night with the telescope, trying to find some peace and quiet in this circus, and I stepped a teensy bit too hard, and my leg kind of punched through the shingles,” he explained.
“You’re going on top of the house now?” My feelings of guilt were replaced with concern. “You’re not just looking for stars, Archer, you’re looking for trouble.”
“Says the girl who destroyed the top of Dad’s old convertible when she—” I halted him with a slice of my hand. He was correct—I didn’t have much credibility when it came to youthful risk-taking. “You should be proud of me,” he continued, his focus still on his screen, his fingers flying. “I confessed to Susie, and promised to pay for the repair.”
“Save your money,” I said as I left the room.
There was a time when I believed we would’ve been a whole lot better, and happier, if the carriage house burned down, rending all evidence of past lives into ash, so we could move somewhere completely new, start fresh. I hadn’t gotten my old wish, obviously. The house was still standing, but it was several steps removed, I was realizing, from the state of genteel disrepair when I’d left.
My descent down the narrow stairs built for smaller feet was hampered by precarious towers of paperback books, vinyl records, and plastic storage bins containing all manner of items. How I made it upstairs the night before without causing an avalanche would be forever a mystery. At the bottom, I turned smack into a ceramic umbrella stand. Over it fell with a crash, spewing five umbrellas of different sizes over my bare feet. I cursed, began to right the thing, though I surmised, judging from the state of the rest of the hallway, my parents were in the habit of simply kicking aside messes like this with the assumption that someone would get to it later.
Indeed: “Oh, leave it,” Hope called from the kitchen.
Slowly, I traversed the hallway’s literal obstacle course of bins, boxes, stacks and piles and entered the kitchen. A hundred years ago, it had served as the offices of the groundskeeper, the coachman, the groom. It was a simple kitchen, unchanged since we’d moved in, L-shaped, with cream cabinets, wood drawer pulls, and white Formica countertops. Not that you could see much of them through the clutter.
My parents were the type to save everything, from other people’s wedding invitations to my great-grandmother’s French linens, but the house was much more congested than the last time I’d visited. True, I hadn’t been able to reheat pizza in the oven because my mother had been using it as storage for her collection of vintage Pucci shoes, but at least you could see most of the wide-plank floors.
My father sat in front of a tray with bonsai, sand, pebbles, and the world’s tiniest rake, as Hope jammed containers of cut-up fruit into the already-stuffed refrigerator. The tabby cat I’d spotted upstairs was napping in a patch of sun next to him.
“Morning, Chicken,” said my father, cheery. “How did you sleep?”
“Bad.” Over my father’s shoulder, I noticed that the door to the little cubby under the stairs where my parents once held the liquor I regularly drained in high school was no longer accessible, blocked by a stack of cardboard boxes. Maybe it was the hangover, combined with the hard jolt of seeing the state of the carriage house in the light of day, but I felt a strange flickering in my brain.
I never promised that they could rent it forever, doing whatever to it and treating it the way it’s been treated.
“I need a shower,” I managed.
“The shower doesn’t work in the kids’ bathroom here,” J.P. said, adjusting his glasses on his nose, his attention drifting from me to his bonkei. “Archer uses the one in the pool house. Didn’t Maggie tell you?”
It took me overly long to summon the words. “She did not.”
“Or you can use Mom’s and mine,” my father said, studying something on his tray with a magnifying glass. “Just gotta keep it under five minutes. That’s all the water heater can take these days. Poor old girl.”
“It’s fine.” Hope closed the refrigerator, its handles smudged with fingerprints, its door plastered with paper, take-out menus, calendars, photos, invitations, one of which appeared to be to my cousin’s wedding two years prior. This cousin, second, I believe, had parlayed her famous name into a lucrative textile business that sold knobby blankets and robes and three-wick candles for obscene amounts of money, and the invitation, thick as a piece of deli cheese, indicated wealth that was still liquid. “It is on the to-do list,” she added.
I wandered from the kitchen to the family room—the long, vaulted space that spanned the rear of the house. More books covered the lumpy leather couch on which we all used to crowd for after-school television and family movie nights. On the floor: baskets with ceramic trinkets, baskets of tarnished doorknobs and drawer pulls. On the coffee and side tables: clay pottery, chinoiserie vases and ginger jars, Staffordshire figurines, a very old mantel clock that looked to have been dissected for science. Oil landscape paintings and watercolors within gilded picture frames leaned against the set of wide, arched carriage doors. The walls were lined with glass-doored armoire cabinets, choked full of oddities and ornaments. And the pièce de résistance—resting on one of the original deeply weathered floor-to-ceiling beams—a portrait of five-year-old Archer Coventry-Gilford, dressed preposterously like Little Lord Fauntleroy. Some of this, the latter included, I recognized from the time we lived in the Cottage, but most of it was entirely unfamiliar.
Out one of the square windows nestled between the back doors, I saw the goat pen. It was ramshackle, made of different kinds of boards and beams and pieced-together netting. Growing up, my father had built us a chicken coop in the garden and we’d raised hens and a rooster. Hope had taken in stray cats; Granny Fi, Hope’s mother, once kept a capuchin monkey in the folly. But never a goat.
As I made my way back to the kitchen, I had the urge to rub my eyes—was I the only one seeing this? I watched my mother squeeze behind my father to adjust a café curtain rod that had gone askew in the window—now opaque with salt frost and brine. She’d neglected to brush the back of her hair; against her scalp it looked like a stack of kindling and just as dry.
“Mom,” I said, “this is—” I swept my arm across the room—pots of herbs, most having seen better days, surrounded the sink and the windowsill above it.
But Hope interrupted me. “Before the weekend slips away from us, I could use your assistance. Nothing major, but rather pressing.”
“Sure,” I said, letting my arm drop. “I will absolutely help you burn that painting of Archer. Where do you keep your firewood?”
“You stop,” said J.P. “Your mother loves that painting.”
“I told J.P. to tidy before you got here. Seriously. Archer,” she said, hearing my brother on the stairs. “Tell Cassie, just how many times have I told J.P. to tidy.” Archer pretended not to hear this question. He mumbled something about forgetting his phone and skipped back up, taking the stairs two at a time. My mother had kicked from her path—wait for it—a basket of smaller wicker baskets, and was washing her hands vigorously in the sink. “Maggie said last night she wants to cap the guest list,” Hope said over the sound of the water. “But your father’s extended family is close to eighty people in and of itself. You have to convince her to go as big as possible.” She turned off the water and dried her hands on her skirt. “I don’t want anyone snubbed. Claiborne Pell was left off a guest list once, and in retaliation he passed a bill in Congress that specifically taxed horse stalls as income properties. Completely ruined the poor woman and her dressage pony business. True story.”
“Ma.” I edged forward, cautiously, though my mind was doing its best to sputter to life. “Have we considered a cleaning service? A dumpster? An industrial vacuum?”
Hope ignored this, pulled the tall trash can out from under the sink, and started going through a pile of receipts while, at the same time, listing off the names of relatives we’d need to invite, far-off cousins, some aunts on my father’s side I’d never met, Granny Fi’s elderly sister, Abigail, in Phoenix, who—I was shocked to discover—was still alive. As Hope prattled on, I considered broaching the topic of their pending eviction. But my gaze fell back on my dad at the table, his glasses sliding down on his nose, the tiny tools in his fingers, the evidence of his life—of our, his children’s lives—ready to tumble down onto his hunched shoulders, and I decided, wisely or cowardly, to wait. My father hated conflict, to be put on the spot, anything that would disturb the tenuous equilibrium of the family. For someone who really despised emotional mess, he certainly looked comfortable living in mayhem.
Just then, my sister burst through the screen door, calling Hope’s name.
“What do we think about a Dangerous Liaison–themed rehearsal dinner?” Hope shouted toward her.
“Complete with duels and smallpox?” said my father, snipping at his bonsai.
Maggie navigated the crammed hallway and entered the kitchen with much more grace and dexterity than I had. She was around more, certainly; perhaps, if the piles had grown slowly, it would’ve been less noticeable to her.
“The groom’s family does the rehearsal, Mama,” Maggie said. I checked her face for signs of worry, signs of strain at being in the carriage house. But if she believed this was anything other than normal, she didn’t show it. Weirdly, this provided me some relief.
“Fine, but I want to project a slide show. Tell Susie.”
“What pictures are you planning to project?” Archer, evidently deeming the coast mostly clear, clomped down the stairs and joined me in the kitchen. Though it was ten o’clock in the morning, he had in his hand a single-serve bag of chips.
“Good question,” I said. Most of my toddler years were spent naked—I’d been the type of child who preferred being in the nude—and I didn’t fancy seeing that displayed ten feet high in front of a crowd who considered peep-toe pumps revealing.
“Gosh, I was thinking the one you posted on Instagram the other day of the pigeon on your fire escape with the vape pen,” said Hope, drenched in sarcasm. “Pictures of family! What else?”
“You can talk to Susie, Mama,” said Maggie. “It doesn’t all have to be routed through me.”
“She won’t hear from me after the thing with Darren and Leno.”
There was some back and forth between Maggie and Hope about the slide projector and Susie, but eventually I interrupted them. “Can someone please point me to a bathroom that does work?”
“Technically,” my father said after a brief pause, “we have two working bathrooms. Just that some components in those bathrooms work better than others.”
“That one is good.” Archer pointed to the downstairs one, pink tiled and bare-bulbed, in between the pantry and the living room. “Though the shower warbles like an opera soprano.” He popped a stack of neon orange chips into his mouth and crunched down with a grin.