Less than twenty-four hours, she said to herself. We can leave after breakfast tomorrow.
A deerfly buzzed around her sweating head and Clara waved her arms so wildly she knocked the rest of her sandwich off the stone wall and into the perennial bed below. The answer to an ant’s prayers, except the ones it fell on.
“Claire hasn’t changed,” said Peter’s mother.
“Neither have you, Mother.”
Peter tried to keep his voice as civil as hers, and felt he’d achieved that perfect balance of courtesy and contempt. So subtle it was impossible to challenge, so obvious it was impossible to miss.
Across the scorching terrasse Julia felt her feet begin to burn in their thin sandals on the hot stones.
“Hello, Peter.” She closed her mind to her smoldering feet and crossed the terrasse, air-kissing her younger brother. “You’re looking good.”
“So’re you.”
Pause.
“Nice weather,” he said.
Julia searched her rapidly emptying brain for something smart to say, something witty and intelligent. Something to prove she was happy. That her life wasn’t the shambles she knew he thought it was. Silently she repeated to herself, Peter’s perpetually purple pimple popped. It helped.
“How’s David?” Peter asked.
“Oh, you know him,” said Julia lightly. “He adjusts to anything.”
“Even prison? And here you are.”
She searched his placid handsome face. Was that an insult? She’d been away from the family so long she was out of practice. She felt like a long retired parachutist suddenly tossed out of a plane.
Four days ago, when she’d arrived, she’d been hurt and exhausted. The last smile, the last empty compliment, the last courtesy wrung from her in the disaster that had been the last year, during David’s trial. Feeling betrayed, humiliated and exposed, she’d come back home to heal. To this cozy mother and the tall, handsome brothers of her magical, mystical memory. Surely they’d take care of her.
Somehow she’d forgotten why she’d left them in the first place. But now she was back and was remembering.
“Imagine,” said Thomas, “your husband stealing all that money, and you not knowing. It must have been horrible.”
“Thomas,” said his mother, shaking her head slightly. Not in rebuke for the insult to Julia but for saying it in front of the staff. Julia felt the hot stones sizzling beneath her feet. But she smiled and held her ground.
“Your father,” Mrs. Finney began, then stopped.
“Go on, Mother,” said Julia, feeling something old and familiar swish its tail deep inside her. Something decades dormant was stirring. “My father?”
“Well, you know how he felt.”
“How did he feel?”
“Really, Julia, this is an inappropriate conversation.” Her mother turned her pink face to her. It was said with the tender smile, the slight flutter of those hands. How long had it been since she’d felt her mother’s hands?
“I’m sorry,” said Julia.
“Jump, Bean, jump!”
Clara turned and watched as Peter’s youngest sister leapt across the manicured lawn, feet barely touching the ground, and behind her ran Bean, beach towel tied at the neck, laughing. But not jumping. Good ol’ Bean, thought Clara.
“Whew,” puffed Marianna stepping onto the terrasse moments later, sweat pouring off her as though she’d run through a sprinkler. She took a corner of a scarf and wiped her eyes. “Did Bean jump?” she asked the family. Only Thomas reacted, with a dismissive smirk.
Clara’s bra itched in the heat and humidity. She reached down and tugged it. Too late, she looked over. Peter’s mother was again watching, as though equipped with a special radar.
“How’s your art?”
The question took Clara by surprise. She assumed it was directed at Peter, and occupied herself by trying to pick off the tomato seeds now baked to her breasts.
“Me?” She looked up into Julia’s face. The sister she knew the least. But she’d heard the stories from Peter and was quick to put up her guard. “Oh, you know. Always a struggle.”
It was the easy answer, the one they expected. Clara the failure, who called herself an artist but never sold. Who did ridiculous works like mannequins with bouffant hair and melting trees.
“I remember hearing about your last show. Quite a statement.”
Clara sat up straighter. She knew many people managed to ask the first, polite, question. But it was the rare person who asked a second.