Emily parked on the street in front of her mother’s house. A quick glance at the driveway confirmed that her siblings had already arrived. Emily was late. As always.
From long force of habit, she kicked off her shoes as she entered the front door, automatically depositing her coat in the hall closet. She didn’t bother calling out a greeting; chaos already reigned in the large sunroom at the back of the house. Instead, she slipped into the kitchen and checked out the contents of the fridge. Yep, there was that horrible cab franc Charlie insisted was fine wine. A six-pack of the black mud Bran said was beer sat on the bottom shelf, already one man down. Half a lime leaked sticky juice onto the counter, crowded by bottles of triple sec and vodka: Mom had already made Anne a cosmo.
Of course there wasn’t any hard cider.
Consequences of being a middle child: Emily was often overlooked in the crush. Of course, middle child syndrome came with benefits as well. Emily had learned to tie her shoes by herself. Same with riding her bike, with working her junior high locker combination, with solving for X. She was able to take care of herself.
For tonight’s dinner, that meant a side trip down to the basement. She’d stashed a few bottles of Woodchuck in the ancient auxiliary fridge last week. Sure enough, they were still there, rolling around in the vegetable crisper. Now that all the kids were old enough to be out on their own, her mother no longer had any reason to hide champagne in the drawer.
Emily was not going to think about champagne.
Instead, she pasted a smile on her face as she climbed the stairs, following the scream of banshees into the sunroom.
Okay, no actual banshees were harmed in the making of Friday night family dinner. No wonder none of her siblings was married. An outsider could never survive in the maelstrom that was the Barton household. Bran had come the closest, with a marriage that lasted for three whole years. His ex-wife probably still thanked her lucky stars she’d escaped the zoo.
Noah was running around the sofa, tugging on her brother’s arm each time he zoomed past, saying, “Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!”
But Bran had his professor look on, his eyebrows knit, his entire body tense as he said to Charlie, “But that’s just it! Faulkner’s non-teleological vision is made explicit in As I Lay Dying!”
Charlie frowned and sipped her tannic poison. “Using a word with seven syllables doesn’t prove your point.”
Bran sighed with exasperation. “Sorry, sister dearest. Sometimes it takes seven syllables to say exactly what I mean. Just because great literature doesn’t fit into your strategic plan of how the world should work…”
“Daddy! Daddy!”
“What do you know about my strategic plan?”
Emily shook her head. They’d be at it until Mom sent them to separate corners. In fact, Mom was already looking up from her craft table across the room, her maternal radar zeroing in on the increasingly heated tones of her two oldest children. She might have intervened then, if Anne hadn’t distracted her by picking up a partially finished gourd figurine. “Mommy? What’s this one going to be?”
Mommy. Anne was the only one who got away with calling their mother that. Charlie had called her “Maria” from the first time she discovered that her mother’s given name got more of a response in a crowded room of needy toddlers. Early on, Bran had gone for a cheeky “Ma.” Emily had found that a normal, everyday “Mom” worked just fine. She suspected that Anne would have given up the “Mommy” years ago, if she didn’t see such fine results.
Even now, Maria Barton beamed at her youngest child’s attention. She picked up the gourd and said, “I’m thinking of painting an endangered species series. This one feels like a giant panda, don’t you think?”
“Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!”
“Strategic plans can actually be applied to any field of endeavor, Bran. Even academia.”
Bran was quoting his hero, William Faulkner, at the same time Charlie spoke: “My mother is a fish. You can’t get more non-teleological than that.”
“I love pandas! Do you remember that time you and Daddy took me to the zoo in Washington?”
Emily leaned against the doorway, basking in the chaos. As a kid, she’d sometimes felt left out as family squabbles ebbed and flowed around her. Now, though, she was comfortable with being an observer. Maybe she didn’t have a ten-volume collection of childhood photo albums like her oldest sister (Charlotte Barton: The First Three Months.) But flying under the radar had meant Emily could skip college without major knock-down, drag-out household fights. And she could change jobs without a family conference. No one even bothered to comment when she showed up at family gatherings solo.
“Aunt Emily!” Noah launched himself over the couch and into Emily’s arms. She narrowly avoided braining him with her bottle of cider.
“How’s my favorite nephew?” she asked, hugging him close and breathing in the sunny smell of his hair.
“I’m your only nephew!”
“Then you’re my least favorite, too!”
“Hey!” The little boy scowled until Emily tickled him. “Aunt Emily?” he asked.
She made a questioning noise.
“What does bodacious tatas mean?”
Emily choked on her cider. “Where did you hear that?”
“At recess. Kyle said his older brother said it at the dinner table and had to leave the room until he could be civil. I already asked Aunt Charlie when she picked me up from after-school care, but she said I should ask you.”
Emily cast a dirty look at her oldest sister. “Well, I think that’s one of those things fathers are better at answering. Why don’t you ask Daddy on your way home tonight?”
“Okay,” Noah said agreeably. “Aunt Emily? What about the tooth fairy?”
“What about the tooth fairy?” Emily asked cautiously.
“Is she real? Carson says the tooth fairy left him five whole dollars, but Zach only got one. And Zach’s a lot nicer than Carson, so I told Ava I thought the tooth fairy was really dumb, and Ava said the tooth fairy isn’t real, because how would she get to the houses of all the kids in the world? But the Easter Bunny gets to every house on Easter, and Santa gets everywhere on Christmas, and not all kids lose their teeth on the same day like Easter and Christmas, so the tooth fairy can totally be real. Right?”
Emily said, “I think that’s another thing Daddy knows best. Add it to your list.”
“Okay.” Another easy agreement. “Aunt Emily?”
What was it going to be now? Where did I come from? Why are girls different from boys? She braced herself and applied the tried and true technique of distraction. “Hey! What did you learn in school today?”
“We looked at an orr-er-y. That’s a model of the solar system. It has nine planets, including Pluto. But Pluto wasn’t a planet when I was born. Want to see me do a somersault off the back of the couch?”
“I don’t think Grammy would like that.”
“I’m really good at somersaults.”
“I’m sure you are. Why don’t you show me what you’re making at your gourd table?”
Abandoning his plans to join Cirque de Sunroom, Noah slipped his hand into hers and led her over to the knee-high craft table Mom had set up in the corner. When Emily had been his age, her mother had been a respected professor of English literature, writing authoritative essays on early nineteenth-century British novels. Together, her parents had been the focal point of a huge circle of academic friends, the best and the brightest from Mom’s English Department and Dad’s Sociology Department.
By the time Emily was in high school, though, Dad was conducting field studies on Male Mid-life Crisis and the Pursuit of Inappropriate Younger Mates. Emily’s last four years in the family home had been marked with increasingly bitter fights between her parents. Everyone had been relieved when Dad moved out over Spring Break of Emily’s senior year.
His departure had seemed like the master class in the subject Jon had launched that spring. Jon left Emily to hook up with Kaylie. Dad left Emily to hook up with Brandi. Or Candi. Or Misti. It was hard to remember who’d been first.
Men left. If they didn’t get exactly what they wanted or they got bored or they got lazy, they moved on. And if you’d been stupid enough to hand over your heart before they walked out the door, then you deserved the aching hole that was left behind when they were gone.
At least if your name was Emily Barton. Other women seemed to do just fine landing the man of their dreams. She only had to look at her best friend Rachel to see that.
“Look,” Noah said. “It’s a pirate ninja Batman!” He proudly displayed a painted gourd. It looked like he’d used a gallon of black paint to cover the thing, and the glued-on cape was distinctly crooked. But Emily oohed and aahed over the treasure. “Grammy says she’ll take me to the next craft show in Winchester. I can help her set up her table, and she’ll let me count the money!”
Emily grinned. Mom had gone through her own mid-life transition, trading in academic robes and publish-or-perish requirements for a peripatetic life of attending craft shows up and down the mid-Atlantic seaboard. President of Virginia’s Guild Gourd for the past seven years, she’d thrown herself into her role of craft queen with all the fervor she’d formerly applied to climbing the ivory tower of academe.
“Emily!” Mom exclaimed. “I didn’t see you come in!” Emily collected a maternal hug. “How are things at Harmony Skeins?”
Before Emily could reply, a loud buzzer sounded from the kitchen.
“Hold that thought!” Mom said. “Come on, everyone. Dinner’s ready!”
As a kid, Emily had endured countless meals modeled after her mother’s Bronte heroines. Sausages of suspicious origin had been roasted over open fires. Steak and kidney pie—heavy on the kidney—had been tested, pie after pie after disgusting, gloppy pie, until Mom declared her recipe perfect. Holidays were marked with tough goose and watery quince jelly.
But all that had been thrown out the door when Dad took his unscheduled leave of absence. Mom had chucked out her recipe book of nineteenth century culinary torture mechanisms. Instead, she branched out to international cuisines: stir-fry chicken with Hunan-style vegetables, sag paneer, homemade kimchi guaranteed to clear even the most stubborn sinuses.
Leading the way into the kitchen, Emily spied one of her favorites in the heavy enameled pot on the stove: pork and green chili stew. Setting her cider on the counter, Emily reached for a hand-thrown pottery bowl. She scooped in a healthy serving of rice, spreading the grains before she ladled up a generous portion of stew. She went back for a couple more bites of potato and a handful of tender carrots.
“Sit by me!” Noah commanded from the dining room, sliding into his booster seat. Emily pushed him close to the table before she obliged.
Before long, they were all gathered around the scrubbed oak table. Emily could remember sitting there as a child, extending her hands to Bran and Charlotte, watching her wretched food get cold as Dad intoned a formal grace. That was another tradition that had disappeared the instant Dad split.
Emily put her napkin on her lap as her mother said, “So, Noah. Why don’t you start us out. What are you grateful for this week?”
Gratitude. It had replaced grace. And it guaranteed there’d be plenty to talk about during dinner.
“I’m grateful we don’t live on Mercury, because the side that faces the sun gets to be four hundred thirty degrees. In Celsius! And the other side always faces away from the sun, so we’d be burning up or freezing if we lived there.”
Mom nodded seriously. “That’s a lot to be grateful for.” She helped herself to a bite of stew before she nodded at her middle daughter. “Emily? What are you grateful for this week?”
I’m grateful I haven’t murdered Matt Dawson.
Yeah, that would be a little hard to explain to Noah, who was still at an age where he took everything literally. So Emily took a page out of Joyce Horton’s book and figured out how to cast a positive light on her thoughts. “I’m grateful that Save Our Stores is off to such a good start.”
“That’s not what I heard,” Bran said, with his typical tact.
“What do you mean?”
“I heard that Matt Dawson is cleaning up at American Discount.”
“You heard wrong,” Emily said. “In fact, I have it on the best authority that his opening day was a real failure.”
“Opening day, maybe,” Bran said. “But he’s having specials every day this week. He’s got a big display right inside the front door, one that made me think of you. He made this sort of flower out of yarn, all different autumn shades. The petals go from yellow to orange to red to brown and all the way back to yellow. The center is made with knitting needles that—”
“Spike out with the longest ones in the middle.” She finished the sentence, even as rage flooded her, hotter than the green chili that formed the base of the stew she’d been enjoying.
“Yeah. How’d you know that? I thought you swore never to set foot inside that place.”
“How did you know about Matt Dawson’s displays?” she countered. “I thought I could at least count on my big brother for a little support.”
“Your big brother needed some ball-point pens. It was stop at American Discount or raid the supply closet at Charlie’s office.”
Charlie looked disconcerted. Emily was furious. “You’ve managed to avoid pen emergencies for thirty-two years, Bran. Every dollar you spend at that store is a dollar less for a true Harmony Springs merchant.”
He shrugged. “Relax! It’s not like you sell pens at Harmony Skeins.”
“But I sell yarn. And I just set up a display yesterday. Like a flower made out of yarn, all different autumn shades.”
Oh. Bran mouthed the word and sank back in his chair.
“Okay,” Emily said. “This means war.”
Mom looked disconcerted. “I don’t think you should talk about war while we’re still going through our gratefuls.”
Emily could have argued. She could have pointed out that she was grateful Matt Dawson had found Harmony Skeins worth targeting. She could have said she was grateful Save Our Stores had almost two thousand dollars in the business account she’d set up at Farmer’s Trust. She could have sworn she was grateful she was going to kick Matt Dawson’s butt.
But she was fully aware that the world didn’t rotate around her. So she apologized to her mother and forced herself to sit back and listen to her siblings’ gratitudes. After a few minutes, she got up to serve herself seconds on the stew and she refilled Bran’s bowl as well, just to show she harbored no ill will.
Besides, she already knew she was only going to be at Harmony Skeins for another month or two. Sure, she was proud of the autumn display she’d set up, but it wasn’t the last thing she was ever going to do in Harmony Springs. It wasn’t the sum of her existence.
That’s the way Emily did things. She was flexible. Relaxed. She could roll with the punches. That’s what came from being dragged to Charlie’s ballet classes and Bran’s soccer practices when she was still too young to have her own events. That’s what she’d learned when the entire family turned out for Anne’s piano recitals, because they were the last ones her parents would ever attend, because Anne was the baby. Whatever. None of that bothered Emily. For family, for the people she loved, Emily was willing to do just about anything.
But for Matt Dawson, she would show no mercy.
“Right, Emily?”
She realized she’d zoned out, missing everyone else’s gratitudes. She looked up to find Anne eying her expectantly.
“I’m sorry. What?”
“I said, you must be trying to figure out where you’re going with Matt Dawson on your second date.”
Again with the blushing. This was ridiculous. Emily was acting like she was back in high school. She leveled a steady gaze on her baby sister. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Rachel told us all about it at Yoga Night. This past Monday.”
Damn. Emily knew she shouldn’t have blown off Yoga Night, but she’d been busy designing the neon pink flyers for American Discount’s grand opening. She’d resigned herself to missing an evening of girl-time and gossip. She just hadn’t counted on being the object of her friends’ speculation.
“Oh,” Mom said. “I didn’t realize you girls still got together for Yoga Night! Do tell!”
Anne glanced at Noah, who immediately exploited the attention to ask, “Can I be excused?” Traitor. If little pitchers stayed at the table with their big ears, Emily could avoid talking about big-league pitchers who’d come home to ruin her life.
“May I,” Bran corrected.
“May I be excused?”
“Yes,” Bran said. He waited until Noah had trotted out to the sunroom before he said, “Go on. I’ve always wanted to know what you talk about in that hair salon.”
“Yoga studio,” Emily said, just to be difficult. Maybe she could lure Bran into an argument and avoid answering Anne altogether.
But Anne homed in on her evasion. “Whatever. Where are you taking Matt on your second date?”
“There will be no second date.” Emily heard the iron certainty in her voice.
“What’s this about second dates?” Mom asked.
Anne’s eyes glinted. “Rachel made Emily promise.”
“Anne—” Emily warned.
“Promise what?” Bran pounced on the words as if they were a Barbie doll with long blond hair ripe for the cutting.
Anne spread her hands, “Are you going to tell them or am I?”
Emily hesitated. It wasn’t like she was ashamed of her two-date maximum. That just proved she was independent. Strong-willed. But she somehow suspected Bran wouldn’t see things that way. Mom either. And while Bran would tease her for the rest of her natural life, Mom’s quiet disappointment would be a thousand times worse.
Salvation came from an unlikely corner. “If she doesn’t want to share her secrets, she doesn’t have to.” Charlie. Placid as a judge.
So the conversation moved on. Charlie, good old solid Charlie, was traveling to Silicon Valley for a conference about some minute aspect of project management that Emily couldn’t begin to understand. Anne was thinking about adding matzoh ball soup to her menu, but she just couldn’t get the matzoh balls fluffy enough. (“Chill them after you add the oil,” Mom said, as if she’d earned her PhD in ethnic cooking instead of English Literature.) Obviously bored by the kitchen talk, Bran pushed back from the table and wandered into the kitchen. Emily heard the refrigerator door open and the clink of beer bottles.
She should have been suspicious when Bran didn’t immediately come back to the living room. As it was, she was taken completely by surprise when he appeared in the doorway of the dining room. In one hand, he held Mom’s massive pair of kitchen shears. In the other, he clutched a disreputable stuffed animal, a rabbit that had once been blue but now was a dusty shade of grey beneath his faded denim overalls.
“Tell us about the second date, or Mr. Bluejeans gets it!”
“Bran!” Anne shouted, leaping up from the table so fast that she knocked over her chair. She and Mr. Bluejeans had been inseparable for the first ten years of her life.
“You have until the count of three!” Bran flourished his weapon. “One!”
“Give him back!” Anne screamed.
“Daddy!” Noah raced in from the sunroom and added his shriek to the chaos.
“You’ve got to be kidding,” Emily said.
“Two!” Bran opened the blades of the shears.
“Tell him!” Anne cried.
“What are you?” Charlie asked, but it wasn’t clear if she was talking to her brother or her sister. “One year old?”
Bran shoved Mr. Bluejeans’s neck into the V of the shears. “Two and a half!”
“Rachel dared Emily to ask men out on dates!” Anne sobbed. “One man each month. For at least three dates!”
“You witch!” Emily shouted, automatically substituting the word she wanted to use, because Noah was staring at all the crazy grown-ups, his jaw practically dragging on the floor.
“He wasn’t going to do anything,” Charlie said, like she knew everything in the world.
“Patrick Branwell Barton, stop teasing your sister!” Mom’s voice cut through the chaos. “Give her that stuffed animal this second. And Anne, you should be ashamed of yourself. Honestly, I think Noah is more mature than you are some days.”
Anne hugged her rabbit close to her chest, smoothing his overalls as if they were some sort of designer fashion. Designer fashion. Right. The stupid rabbit was about as fashionable as the window displays at McCall’s General Store.
And that gave Emily the lie she needed to save face.
Applying decades of practice, she kept her voice perfectly cool as she addressed the table. “Guilty as charged. Rachel made me promise on my birthday. One new guy every month. A minimum of three dates. More, I guess, if things end up going well.”
“And Matt Dawson is your first guy?”
Bran couldn’t know what he was saying. Matt Dawson had been her first guy, back in high school. Okay, they hadn’t gone all the way, but that moment beneath the apple tree when the feelings inside her had exploded like the pink-white petals raining from the tree, and after, when he’d stopped her from unbuttoning his jeans… That had been a lot more intimate than the, um, anti-climactic confusion when she finally had lost her virginity.
Bran went on. “Shoot for the top, why don’t you?”
“Matt Dawson is hardly the top,” Emily said. “Besides, he’s not my three-date guy.”
“He isn’t?” Anne asked.
“Not after he told me about American Discount.”
“Then you gave up on the dare?” Anne’s incredulity was almost a tangible thing. Everyone at the table knew Emily Barton had never backed down from a dare in her life.
“No,” Emily said with annoyance. “I didn’t give up on the dare. But Matt Dawson is hardly the last unmarried guy in Harmony Springs.”
“Then who are you asking out for October?”
She looked at Mr. Bluejeans’s overalls again. At the overalls that looked like they could have hopped out of the front window at McCall’s General Store any time in the past three decades. Mr. Bluejeans was a gift from the gods.
“Simon McCall,” she said.
“Really?” That was Charlie, unable to stay silent, even though she pretended to be above her siblings’ squabbles.
“I’m asking out Simon McCall. Our first date is tomorrow night. At Carlisle’s.”
And it would be. Just as soon as she gave him a call.
“Grammy?” Noah asked, when her family just stared at her in disbelief. “Do I get dessert? I ate all my stew. Even the carrots.”
The question seemed to break the spell Emily’s words had cast over all the adults. Mom looked at the little boy’s empty bowl. “I see,” she finally said. “That is an empty bowl. Well let’s get this table cleared, and then we’ll see about dessert.”
Mom stood and collected her bowl. Everyone else followed suit, carrying things back to the kitchen. Emily stared at Mr. Bluejeans, propped up on Anne’s chair, and she wondered what exactly she was getting herself into.
At least no one was asking her any more questions. For the first time that night, it seemed, they weren’t talking about Matt.
And that was why Noah really was her favorite nephew.