“I don’t know how I’m expected to cook without spices,” she muttered as she opened one of the upper cabinets, rising up on her toes to check the contents, her feet turned out in a perfect first position. My mother was a former professional ballet dancer, and though a tendon injury had sidelined her in her twenties, she still looked like she’d be able to reenter the studio at any moment. “Taylor,” she said a little more sharply, causing me to look at her.
“What?” I asked, hearing how defensive I sounded, as I straightened a teaspoon.
My mother sighed. “Can you stop it with the pouting, please?”
If there was a sentence designed to make me pout even more, I didn’t know what it was. Even though I didn’t want to, I could feel myself scowling. “I’m not pouting.”
My mom glanced through the screened-in porch out to the water, then looked back at me. “This summer is going to be hard enough for all of us without this… attitude.”
I closed the silverware drawer harder than I probably needed to, now feeling guilty as well as annoyed. I’d never been my mother’s favorite—that was Gelsey—but we’d always gotten along fairly well.
“I know you didn’t want to come here,” she said, her tone softening. “But we have to try and make the best of it. All right?”
I pulled the drawer open, then pushed it closed again. I’d been in this house for only a few hours, but already I was feeling claustrophobic. And the presence next door of an ex-boyfriend who hated me—with good reason—wasn’t helping. “I just,” I said, a little haltingly, “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do here all summer. And—”
“Mom!” Gelsey stomped into the kitchen. “The crib is still in my room. And the lights aren’t working.”
“The Murphys probably took the lightbulbs, too,” she muttered, shaking her head. “I’ll go look.” She walked out behind Gelsey, her hand resting on my sister’s shoulder, but stopped at the kitchen threshold and turned back to me. “Taylor, we can talk about this later. In the meantime, why don’t you or Warren go pick up a pizza? It doesn’t look like I’m going to be cooking anything here tonight.”
She left and I stayed in the kitchen for a few minutes longer, my eyes drawn to the plastic orange prescription pill bottles that lined the counter. I looked at them for a moment longer, then headed off in search of my dad, since I knew wherever he was, Warren would be as well.
I found them both—not that it was a very long search, in a house this small—sitting around the dining table, my father with his glasses on, a stack of papers and his laptop in front of him, Warren with a huge book that he was frowning importantly at, making notes on a legal pad as he read. Warren had gotten in early-decision to Penn, and was already planning on the pre-law track, but to look at him, you’d think that he was already an equity partner, and that law school—not to mention college—would just be a formality.
“Hey,” I said, poking my brother in the back as I took the seat next to my dad. “Mom said to pick up pizza.”
Warren frowned. “Me?” My father shot him a look and he got to his feet. “I mean, sure. What’s the name of the place downtown?”
I turned to my dad, and so did Warren. My brother might have had a photographic memory, but it was my father who always remembered the important things—events, dates, names of pizza restaurants.
“The Humble Pie,” my dad said. “If it’s still there, that is.”
“I’ll find out,” Warren said, straightening his polo shirt and walking to the door. He stopped after a few steps and turned to us. “You know that pizza was developed as a way to use leftovers, starting in Italy, in the fifteenth—”
“Son,” my dad said, cutting him off. “Maybe over dinner?”
“You got it,” Warren said, flushing slightly as he walked out. A moment later, I heard the front door slam and the sound of the car engine starting.
My dad looked at me over his computer screen and raised an eyebrow. “So, kid. Your mother really asked your brother to get the pizza?”
I tried to hide a smile as I pulled at a loose thread at the end of my T-shirt and shrugged. “She may have suggested either of us. I delegated.”
He shook his head, smiling slightly as he looked back down at his papers. He hadn’t stopped working when he was diagnosed, claiming that he was just going to finish up a few loose ends, but I knew that he wouldn’t have been happy if he wasn’t working. He’d been a partner at his law firm, specializing in appeals. He went into the office every Saturday, and most Sundays as well. It was just normal that he was only at dinner one or two nights a week, working the rest of the time. I’d gotten used to the phone ringing late at night or early in the morning. I’d gotten used to hearing the faint hum of the garage door opening and closing at four a.m. as he headed into the office early, someone’s last hope at a second chance.
“What are you working on?” I asked, after he’d been typing in silence for a few minutes.
“A brief,” he said, glancing up at me. “I’ve been working on it for a few weeks now. Would have had it done sooner, but…” He let the sentence trail off, and I knew what he meant. A few weeks ago—three to be exact—we’d found out what was wrong with him, which had derailed everything for a while.
“That doesn’t sound so brief,” I said, trying to lighten the mood, and was rewarded when my dad smiled.
“Nice,” he said approvingly. My father loved puns, the more groan-inducing the better, and I was the only one who tolerated them—and, for that matter, tried to respond in kind. “I just…” He looked at the screen, shaking his head. “I just want to get this right. It looks like it might be my legacy.”
I nodded, looking down at the scratches on the wood table, totally unsure how to respond to that. We all knew what was happening with my dad, but we hadn’t really talked about it since my birthday, and I had no idea what to say.
“Well,” my dad said more quietly, after a pause. “Back to it.” He started typing again, and even though I’d intended to leave and start unpacking, it suddenly felt wrong to just leave my dad working alone on his last case. So I sat next to him, the silence punctuated only by the tapping of the keyboard, until we heard the crunching of the car’s tires on the gravel, and my mother’s voice, calling for us to come to dinner.