What Makes a Family Read online

  Cora doesn’t answer. I let go of her hand. “Fine. Go home by yourself then.” I walk away, but I’m not looking at my friend anymore.

  A boy has caught my eye. No, not a boy like my cousin’s friends with their peach-fuzz chins. Older than that. This is a man. He’s taking tickets from a father and his son who wear matching wool newsboy hats. As the man takes their tickets, he looks at me and not them. He’s the most handsome man I think I’ve ever seen, as foreign to my girlish Indiana eyes as the Ferris wheel. He’s wearing a jacket made of black leather and a flat hat cocked on his head that later he’ll tell me is a beret he bought in Paris. My beautiful man has a thin black mustache above his upper lip.

  “Sarah Agnes,” Cora whispers loudly. She’s staring at the Ferris wheel man, too. She sounds as if she’s about to have an apoplexy. Her feet are still glued to the ground where I left her.

  I take a step closer to the Ferris wheel. The man’s eyes are still on me, and I feel as if he’s drawing me toward him with a golden thread, leading me to the destiny I know is mine.

  The man and the boy in the matching hats have climbed onto one of the benches on the Ferris wheel, and they’re slowly rising up and out of my line of vision. I feel my face getting hot. The way the man in the leather jacket looks at me . . .

  I walk toward him, feeling like I’m floating on a cloud.

  “Bonjour, mon amour,” he says in French.

  Of course he speaks French. I only know what French sounds like because Aunt Lorraine took me to the picture show in Gary to see All Quiet on the Western Front for my fourteenth birthday a month ago.

  I feel as if I’m melting in my shoddy oxfords as his gaze meets mine. He has dark brown eyes . . . eyes so deep you could drown in them.

  “Would you care to ride?” He says it in English, but with a French accent, and I feel dizzy, like I’ve already ridden round and round on the carousel I see in the distance.

  “I . . . I don’t have a ticket,” I hear myself say. I feel Cora standing behind me now, so close the hem of her dress is brushing against mine and her breath is hot on my back.

  A mosquito lights on my ankle, but I don’t even swat it. I just stand there, looking at him, and hoping he’ll let me ride the Ferris wheel. Let me ride it. I’ll die if you don’t let me.

  He glances around, as if looking for someone, and then reaches out and takes my hand. His touch makes me feel like the time I got shocked trying to turn on an electric lamp in the parlor of our old house. Only that time it was one big sting. Now, I feel like a current is moving from his fingertips to mine, and it makes me hot in my belly.

  “Lucky for you, mon amour, it is free today for girls with red hair.” Still holding my hand, he reaches back and pulls a big lever, and the Ferris wheel stops. The father and son rock gently, high in the sky, almost to the top. “What’s your name?” the Frenchman asks. His voice is silky, his words only for me.

  “Sarah Agnes,” I manage, the words sticking so hard in my throat that they don’t sound like my own when they come out all breathy. “And . . . this is my friend,” I add boldly. “Cora. Could . . . could she ride, too, even though she doesn’t have red hair?”

  “Bonjour, mademoiselle.” He nods in her direction, but he never takes his eyes off me. “Of course your friend can ride.”

  He lifts the bar on the bench that will take us high into the sky, and I’m almost disappointed when he helps me up because I’m torn between wanting to ride up into the sky and wanting to stand here and have him hold my hand forever. Cora hops up next to me fast, and he lets go of my hand to lower the bar.

  The man high above us is shouting something. I think he wants to know why he’s not moving.

  The Frenchman snaps the bar into place. “Enjoy your ride, mon amour.” He winks at me, and I realize this is the second time in five minutes that someone of the opposite sex has winked at me, and I somehow feel transformed. I always suspected my life in Bakersville was a mistake. A monumental error. Not really on God’s part. I know God doesn’t make mistakes, but somehow . . . I just know I’m not where I’m supposed to be. I know Sarah Agnes Hanfland isn’t who I’m supposed to be.

  The Ferris wheel slowly begins to turn, and I’m lifted, miraculously, up and away. In any other circumstances, the ride would have been the most amazing thing I’ve ever done in my ordinary, boring life, but now it’s completely overshadowed by this Frenchman. This beautiful Frenchman. We’re a good story over him when I lean down and shout, “What’s your name?”

  “Henri,” he calls back.

  And then he smiles a smile that’s for no one but me, and I know in an instant that he’s the love of my life. And I’m his. He’s my destiny. This is what I’ve been waiting for. He’s what I’ve been waiting for.

  The ride is a blur. From the top, where I’m higher than I’ve ever been, even higher than the silo I once climbed, I see the field and the carnival with its midway and rides and a bunch of tents, big and small. I see the buildings of the town, and even our house, and the people look like miniatures. But in my mind’s eye, all I can see is Henri and the way he looked at me. Part of me wants to stay up here forever. But a part of me can’t wait for the ride to be over, just so he can take my hand to help me down.

  Eventually, Henri slows the wheel and stops it. Again, he takes my hand. Cora jumps down on her own, but I barely see her.

  “You should come back, mon amour.” He eyes Cora, then looks back to me. “Alone . . . ?”

  “Sarah,” I murmur. “Sarah Agnes. I’m Sarah Agnes.”

  He cocks his head to one side, his eyes still holding mine. “You don’t seem like a Sarah Agnes,” he tells me with his French accent. “I think I will call you . . . Sarry.”

  “Sarry,” I whisper. “Oui.”

  “Sarah Agnes, come on,” Cora calls anxiously. “We should go. We have to go.” She sounds like she’s on the verge of tears. “I just saw my brother. We have to go home. He’ll tell on us both.”

  I look at her and back at my Henri. “I’ll be back,” I whisper. “I promise.”

  And then my fate is sealed. Henri lifts my hand and kisses my skinned knuckles, his gaze never leaving mine.

  “Sarah Agnes,” Cora whines.

  I let go of his hand, even though I don’t want to, and Cora grabs my other hand and pulls me away. “We have to go home,” she whispers harshly under her breath. “We shouldn’t have come. My papa is right. It’s a bad place. Full of sin and, and . . . sin.”

  I barely hear her as she rushes me off. I barely see the midway beginning to fill with people. All I see is my Henri.

  3

  Abby

  I spoon the last bit of creamy broth from my bowl of homemade chicken and dumplings into my mouth and savor the rich, salty taste of it. I never make dumplings at home, and I never eat them except when I come home to Brodie Island. Otherwise, I’d be a dumpling. Birdie makes some of the best chicken and slippery dumplings I’ve ever eaten, and if there’s one thing I know as a girl born on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, it’s slippery dumplings.

  Licking my spoon, I look up at Birdie. She’s hovering around the kitchen table, watching me. It used to bug me that she does this, pacing the kitchen linoleum, watching us eat, but never eating herself. Mom Brodie would do the same thing, but she’d sit down with us. Sometimes she’d even take a spoon from the kitchen drawer and stick it in my bowl and have a taste. Having rolled out the dumplings with her own rolling pin, and being my grandmother, she believed she had a birthright to the last dumpling in my bowl.

  Thinking of Mom Brodie with her spoon in my bowl, me a teenager and her already in her late sixties, makes me smile. But it’s a bittersweet memory because I know she’ll never do it again.

  I look up at Birdie again, then around the familiar room. It’s a typical farmhouse kitchen on the island, though bigger than most. And the appliances are more expensive. There’s a big, six-burner Viking gas stove, dating to the early eighties. A porcelain farmhouse sink my great
-grandfather salvaged from the original Brodie house, built in the mid-eighteen hundreds right here on this same spot. Mom Brodie once told me that they used the timbers from the old house to build the new. The Brodies are a frugal bunch; at least they were before my generation, when according to Birdie, everything went to hell. Only she says “heck.” My mother is the leader of the Dorcas Circle at the Methodist church where we were all baptized and will eventually be funeraled. Birdie doesn’t curse.

  I study the green medallion wallpaper that must be as old as me. And then the sturdy hickory table that seats twelve. My grandfather didn’t put a dining room in the house. We’re not dining room people. But the kitchen is bigger than the kitchens and dining rooms combined on the street where I live in Oxford.

  I can hear Sarah’s voice drifting in from the back porch; she’s talking to someone on her cell phone. I can’t make out what she’s saying, but I hear giggling. Drum is concerned that she has a boyfriend and she’s not telling us. I’m letting him bear the weight of that worry for now.

  I watch my mother. She uses the hem of her flowered apron to wipe an imaginary smudge from the door of the white refrigerator. “You must be tired,” I say, pointing at the chair nearest to me. Her chair. There’s an interesting hierarchy in the Brodie house when we all sit down to eat dinner together, and it’s all about your designated chair. “You should sit. Rest.”

  “He’ll be back soon, I expect. Your father.” She ignores my suggestion that she join me at the table. “Had an errand to run in town, he said. Done?” She sweeps my bowl and spoon out from under me, not waiting for me to answer.

  I sit back in my chair, that’s actually Daddy’s chair when we eat together. The head of the table, his chair since my grandfather died all those years ago. The only chair I’ve ever seen my father sit at in this kitchen.

  I wipe my mouth on the paper towel. In my house, we use cloth napkins and cotton dish towels. There’s nary a roll of paper towels to be found in my house. Drum is big on protecting the environment. Having grown up here, it was hard for me to get on board when we were first married, but I’ve adjusted. For the most part, I follow my dear husband’s “rulebook of recycling” as my kids call it. But secretly, I’m enjoying the rough feel of the paper towel on my lips. There’s something childishly satisfying about it. (I secretly hoard Chick-fil-A napkins in my car.) Recycling hasn’t caught on, on Brodie Island yet; there’s no recycling pickup. We have a drop-off site, my brother’s pet project, but then everything has to be hauled to the mainland. My siblings and I joke about the fact that Brodie Island’s twenty-five miles from civilization and twenty-five years behind.

  Birdie takes my bowl to the sink and washes it and my spoon and lays them in a dish rack to dry. She rarely uses the high-end stainless steel dishwasher Daddy bought her a couple of years ago for Christmas. She seems to distrust dishwashers; she says dishes are cleaner when she washes them by hand.

  I play with the ceramic pepper shaker in front of me that looks like a rooster; I line it up behind the hen salt shaker. The salt and pepper come out of holes poked in their heads. Birdie collects chickens. I wonder if they’re the same salt and pepper shakers that I remember from my childhood. They have to be. Surely there can’t be more than one set of these hideous things.

  “I should check on Mrs. Brodie,” Birdie says absently. “Do you think I should keep a bowl of chicken and dumplings out for Celeste? She doesn’t eat enough. She’s too scrawny. I worry about her.”

  My sister is always on some crazy Hollywood diet. She’s done them all: cabbage soup diet, ice diet, cookie diet. I don’t think she tried the cotton ball diet, but only because, when she told me about it, I threatened to bury her in private and not publish the obituary she’s written and revises regularly. Celeste doesn’t need to diet. She already has to stand up twice to cast a shadow. That’s what Mom Brodie always says. Said.

  “Celeste probably won’t want any chicken and dumplings,” I say. What I don’t say is that what my sister would probably like is a fifth of vodka. Right now, the idea appeals to me, as well.

  My mother and grandmother are proper Methodist teetotalers. My father is usually a geographical teetotaler. He abstains when within a mile of his mother. My brother and I are drinkers; we’ve been known to stop at the diner in town, get a Styrofoam cup of sweet tea, pour out the sweet tea, and fill it with beer to have at a family picnic. Celeste is probably an alcoholic. I’ve seen her drink straight vodka from a flask from her handbag in the back pew of church on Easter Sunday. Secretly, I admire her a little bit for that kind of rebellion. I’ll give her one thing. She’s got some cojones. And the thing about Celeste is that she doesn’t care what anyone thinks about her. I hate that. And I admire it.

  “I thought she’d be here by now,” Birdie fusses, looking out the window over the sink. She gazes out through the red gingham curtains, bordered in chickens, onto the back lawn that leads down to the bay. It’ll be getting dark soon. “You think she had a flat tire?”

  Celeste doesn’t have a car. Hasn’t had one in years. You never know what she’ll arrive in. You can’t hire a taxi or get an Uber to bring you to Brodie Island all the way from the dinky Salisbury airport. She’s come in a hired car, on the back of a motorcycle, and once in a black stretch limo. Another time she rented a red Mustang convertible.

  “She has a cell phone,” I say. “She’d call if she had car trouble.”

  My mother turns to me and leans against the sink. “She won’t live out the week,” she says.

  It takes me a moment to realize she’s talking about Mom Brodie and not my sister. I sigh and sit back in my chair, feeling sorry for myself again. “That what the doctors said?”

  “I want you to be nice to her. Your sister. No bickering,” she instructs.

  We’re back to Celeste again. She’s my mother’s favorite. Growing up, Celeste was her favorite; I was Mom Brodie’s. “I’m not the one who starts it.”

  “You’re the oldest,” Birdie answers, as if that’s reason enough.

  I look away, strangely close to tears again. I promised Drum I wouldn’t fight with them. With my mother or my sister. Not this week. This week I swore I would keep my mouth shut and go along with whatever they say. I just have to get through this; that’s what Drum said. Get through it and come home to sanity and my black bean burgers. “Why do you always do that?” I ask, looking at the rooster pepper shaker. I give it a push, propelling it across the table. “You always take her side.”

  “She looks up to you.”

  I make a face. “She does not. I edit boring textbooks for a living. I work in sweatpants and a Mickey Mouse T-shirt. She’s a New York City actress.” I gesture with a flourish. “She’s the one who’s rich and famous.”

  Celeste is neither rich nor famous, but everyone on the island either thinks she is, or, like her, pretends she is. Celeste was an actress, once. In her heyday, she played the best friend of a major character on a marginally successful soap opera. It ran for four years. That’s her claim to fame. And it went off the air six or seven years ago. Since then, the only acting she’s done, as far as I know, is a few regional commercials selling recliners and attic insulation. At forty-one years old, she shares an apartment with two roommates she found on Craigslist and works at a department store in Brooklyn, at a makeup counter. I’m not judgey about the job. A job is a job, in the economy of today. It’s the fact that she pretends to be a successful, working actress that bugs the hell out of me. And the fact that my mother believes the lie.

  Aye . . . and there’s the rub, my Drum would say. Though I’m pretty sure Will Shakespeare said it first. Drum works as a chemical engineer, but his undergraduate degree was in British literature. He knows the Bard well. He also totally gets my mother, which I’ll never understand. She’s a mystery to me, and I’ve known her for four decades.

  I press my fingertips to my forehead, suddenly feeling profusely guilty. “I’m sorry,” I say softly. “I don’t mean to . . . be cros
s with you. I’m just upset. About Mom Brodie.”

  My mother doesn’t say anything. She just stands there looking at me, her face blank. I feel tears burn the backs of my eyelids. I wish she’d come over and hug me. I wish someone would hug me.

  I hear the back door open and glance up. Saved from this awkwardness that is me and my mother. It’s existed since she gave birth to me in the bed she shares with my father. There was no bridge between Brodie Island and the mainland in those days. Birdie had Celeste and me, and the little boy who didn’t survive, right here in this house where my father was born. We entered the world by way of a midwife. Mom Brodie didn’t trust doctors when it came to “women’s business.”

  “I didn’t hear Daddy’s truck,” I say, starting to get out of my chair. Feeling my spirits lift.

  My brother bursts through the doorway, surprising me.

  “My favorite sister!” he hollers, looking genuinely happy to see me.

  The fact that he also calls Celeste his favorite sister doesn’t bother me.

  Joseph throws out his arms to me, and I feel myself relax in them. He’s a good hugger, the kind who makes you feel like things are going to be okay. Of course I know very well they’re not going to be. I mean, this week can only end one way, and that’s with all of us dressed in black standing graveside.

  “You okay?” he whispers in my ear.

  I nod several times, fast.

  “Yeah?” He leans back, looking into my eyes, still holding on to me. He smells good: of soap and grain and the salty air.

  I start to tear up again and fight it. Why am I so emotional? I want Mom Brodie to die. I’ve been praying for this for months, since she was diagnosed with cancer. I want her to be free of her pain and these earthly coils and all that.

  But I guess I don’t really want her to die. I just don’t want her to be sick anymore. Or old.

  Joseph lets go of me and turns to his mother, the only mother he has ever known. “Mom.” He walks over to her, folds his tall frame downward, and kisses her cheek.