to pick up some wine.” Gina heard the jangle of bottle openers that hung on the door of the tiny liquor cabinet in the bottom of what had once been the water heater closet. “Vodka, gin, scotch, and vermouth. How about a martini?”
“Sounds good,” Gina answered, though she didn’t like martinis. She was beginning to feel as if her older sister was the host and keynote speaker of a days-long event at which Gina was a guest.
Gina stood and shifted to the living room window that framed the cove and harbor. The window! She’d forgotten, during these brooding, interior days, the escape it offered. Their mother had dreamed of replacing the one double-hung sash with glass doors. But Gina had always thought the narrow window made the experience of viewing the waterscape more intimate and poignant because, when standing at it, there was only room for one. The tide was high, and in the late afternoon light, the cove was a gloomy gray. Trees on the shoreline hadn’t yet leafed out, but already someone was sailing a small boat from the harbor. Gina wished she were that sailor, but she was lost on a sea of boxes in a house that seemed far from home.
With Cassie still distracted in the kitchen, she decided to take her phone into the piano room to sneak in a call to Paul.
“I have a call to make before my next appointment, so I can’t really talk,” Paul said, when she reached him. “We’re all fine. Esther’s quiet but seems engaged with school again. Check in later if you want to talk to her. You okay?”
Gina reported that she was and said goodbye, missing her kids even more than before the call.
In the kitchen, Cassie gave Gina’s arm a playful pinch. “You’re such a helicopter mom! You have to stop this before your kids are teenagers. All the attention you give them might backfire.”
Cassie had hit a nerve—Paul, too, often accused her of hovering over the kids. “Do you eavesdrop on your kids, too?” she said, regretting that she’d taken Cassie’s bait. She opened the refrigerator and looked at the date on a bottle of green olives. “The olives expired a year and a half ago.”
“Olives never go bad,” Cassie said.
Gina chose to believe her about the olives. But while Cassie finished making the martinis, she plucked old jars of mayonnaise, mustard, jelly, pickles, ketchup, marmalade, salad dressing, chutney, and capers out of the refrigerator door and set them in the sink. “Do we have to recycle all these, or are we exempt, under the circumstances?”
“Save the skunks,” Cassie said, pointing to the garbage can.
She handed Gina the martini and they returned to the living room where Cassie took stock. “Well? There are the portraits and the Civil War weapons, books, and some good silver here that would be more valuable melted down. Not all that much.”
Silently, they continued sorting through boxes; for Gina, the martini created a pleasant haze between her and their situation.
When the landline rang, it startled them both. Cassie jumped up to get it.
“Annie!” she said into the phone, “Yes, we’re buried. Okay, sure, thank you—we’d love to. See you soon.”
“I thought you didn’t want to go to Lily House,” Gina said, thinking, I certainly don’t.
Cassie slugged the last of her drink. “I’ve had a martini. Things look different.”
Gina and Cassie drove past the stone wall built by the Historical Society to buffer Lily House from the road. At the end of it, a modest sign hung from a post.
Lily House
Home of Sidney Banton
Built 1785
Open to the Public
(By appointment only)
In her mind, Gina saw her mother shake her head at the sign with disapproval.
Cassie sighed as she pulled into Lily House’s driveway. Though it was more than a hundred years older than the rental, it was evident that the generous-sized Georgian colonial, with its bright yellow clapboards, black shutters, and welcoming wide porch, had been much better cared for.
As the sisters climbed the porch steps, Cassie asked, “When was the last time you were here?”
Gina tried to answer but her breath caught in her throat.
“Cassie! Gina!” Annie beamed when she opened the door. “Lester? They’ve come!”
Annie wrapped an arm around Cassie and then Gina, reeling each of them in for a hug. Gina felt small and limp next to her. At five-foot-nine, Annie was eleven inches taller than Gina’s mother, and Gina always imagined those inches balanced the power in their friendship. When Annie pulled back from them, she wiped tears from her eyes. “Oh, you girls,” she said.
Lester appeared at the end of the hall with a broad smile. “Well, well! Cassie and Ginny! How wonderful!” He made his way toward them on one metal crutch, his companion since childhood polio.
“Gina,” Annie corrected Lester. “She hasn’t been Ginny in years.”
Cassie grabbed Gina’s wrist and squeezed. “Wow, it’s exactly as I remember it!” she exclaimed, stepping into the living room ahead of Annie and Lester.
The darkness that had enveloped Gina all week suddenly deepened. The last time she’d been in Lily House was thirty-five years ago, the day her Aunt Fran committed suicide here. That the arrangement of furnishings had been frozen in time by the Historical Society seemed macabre. She tried to maintain the slight blur from the martini to keep her mind skittering along the surface of things.
But Cassie’s big eyes widened. “Wow!” she exclaimed. “I think I remember every single thing in here. The Shaker chairs . . . the gorgeous tea set? It was Martha Washington’s.” She ran a finger along the belly of the teapot. “And the lolling chair that George Washington sat in when he came here,” she said, her hand brushing the velvet seat. “We never got to sit in it because it was always ‘Fran’s chair.’”
“Welcome to your family museum!” Lester said. “We’d love to entertain you here in the living room but it’s off-limits, of course—no sitting allowed.”
They followed him into what Gina remembered her mother calling the “piano room,” though now it was clear to her that it had been built as a library. “This is Annie’s and my living room.”
“So which rooms can you and Lester actually use?” Gina asked.
Lester explained they used the piano room, the large kitchen, and as their dining room, the sunroom. They slept in the “summer ell,” an addition off the kitchen that originally had been built for summer guests but had since been winterized.
“How about a glass of wine?” Annie offered. Gina was about to say, no, thank you, but Cassie said, “We’d kill for a glass of wine!”
Cassie winked at Gina, and Gina resigned herself to whatever Cassie had in mind. At least she’d always liked Annie and Lester. When she was young, she’d recognized them as unusual: a mother with a profession playing violin in the Maine Symphony, a father who worked as a high school guidance counselor. Both tall, they filled a room, and
