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“Get some that work, then.”
The three little boys arrived on the back porch, piling against a screen that was already starting to bulge. They yanked the door open and tumbled inside, breathless and overheated-looking. “Is it supper yet?” Petey asked.
“Boys, you remember your Great-Aunt Merrick,” Abby said.
“Hi,” Petey said uncertainly.
“How do you do,” Merrick said, extending her hand. He studied it a moment and then raised his own hand to give her a high five, which didn’t quite work out. He ended up accidentally slapping the backs of her fingers. His brothers didn’t attempt even that much. “We’re hungry!” one of them said. “When’s supper?”
“It’s all ready,” Nora told them. “Go wash up and we can sit down.”
“What: now?” Merrick asked. “Don’t I get a drink?”
Everyone looked at Abby. Abby said, “Oh. Would you like one?”
“I don’t suppose you have any vodka,” Merrick said happily.
There was a moment when it seemed that Abby might say no, but then some sort of hostess instinct must have kicked in, and she said, “Of course.” (They had it because of Merrick.) Red and De
As she and Red and Merrick left the kitchen, Petey was heard to say, “But we’re starving!” and Nora murmured something in reply.
“I haven’t had a chance to sit down all day,” Merrick told Abby as they crossed the hall. “It’s exhausting, getting ready for a trip.”
“Where are you off to?”
“We’re taking a cruise down the Danube.”
“How nice.”
“Wouldn’t you know, Trey is being a bore about it. He’d rather go golfing somewhere. Oh! Brenda! There you are! God, she looks dead, the poor darling. What happened to Father’s clock?”
Abby glanced from Brenda, stretched out on the cooling hearthstones, to the clock on the mantel above. A crack ran across the glass of its case. “There was a little mishap with a baseball,” she said. “Won’t you have a seat?”
“Boys are so hard on houses,” Merrick said, folding herself into an armchair. She had been shadowed by Heidi, who settled expectantly at her knee. “And why are there so many of them? Did I count three?”
“Oh, yes,” Abby said. “There are three, all right.”
“Was the third one pla
“Not really,” Stem said cheerfully. He gave off the scent of Dial soap as he crossed the room to a chair. “How’re you doing, Aunt Merrick?”
“I’m exhausted, I was just saying,” Merrick told him. “It seems preparing for a trip gets more tiring every year.”
“Why not stay home, then?”
“What!” she said in horror. Then she sat up straighter; De
Merrick took a deep swig of her drink and breathed out a long “Ahh.” She asked De
“Who’s Sarah?”
“Sarah your daughter.”
“Susan, you mean.”
“Susan, Sarah … Is Susan here too?”
“She’s coming down for the beach trip.”
“Oh, God, not that everlasting beach trip,” Merrick said. “You’re like lemmings about that beach! Or spawning salmon, or something. Don’t you all ever think about vacationing any place else?”
“We love the beach,” Abby told her.
“Really,” Merrick said, and she drew her sharp purple fingernails languidly across the top of Heidi’s head. “Sometimes it amazes me that our ancestors had the gumption to make it to America,” she told Red.
“Excuse me?”
“America!” she shouted.
Red looked confused.
“Mother and Father never traveled at all, if you’ll remember,” she told him.
“Well, you have certainly made up for that,” Red said. “You seem to need more than one house, even.”
“What can I say? I hate winter.”
“In my opinion,” Red said, “going to Florida for the winter is kind of like … not paying your dues. Not standing fast for the hard part.”
“Are you calling Baltimore summers the easy part?” Merrick asked. Then, as if to prove her point, she said “Whew!” and left off petting Heidi to bat a hand in front of her face. “Can somebody turn that fan up a notch?”
Stem rose and gave the fan cord a tug.
“I can see why you might want two houses,” De
“Well … I guess,” Merrick said.
“Before you open your eyes you think, ‘Why does it feel like the light is coming from my left? I thought the window was on my right. Which house is this, anyway?’ Or you get out of bed at night to go pee and you walk into a wall. ‘Whoa!’ you say. ‘Where’s the bathroom gone?’ ”
Merrick said, “Well …” and Abby took on a worried look. Evidently De
“I love that feeling,” he said. “You don’t know your place in the world; you’re not pegged; you’re not nailed into this one single same old never-ending spot.”
“I suppose,” Merrick said.
“You think that might be the reason people travel?” he asked. “I’ll bet it could be. Is that why you travel?”
“Oh, well, it’s more like I’m just trying to get as far as possible from Trey’s mother,” Merrick said. She swirled the ice in her glass. “The old bat just celebrated her ninety-ninth birthday,” she told Red. “Can you believe it? Queen Eula the Immortal. I swear, I think she’s staying alive just to spite me. It’s not only that she’s a pill herself; I blame her for making Trey such a pill. She spoiled that man rotten, I tell you. Gave him every little thing he ever wanted: the Prince of Roland Park.”
Red put a hand to his forehead and said, “This is so eerie! Is it déjà vu? Why do I feel like I’ve heard this someplace before?”
“And the older he gets, the worse he gets,” she went on obliviously. “Even when he was young he was a hopeless hypochondriac, but now! Believe me, it was a dark day in the universe when the Internet started letting people research their medical symptoms.”
She might have gone on (she usually did), but at that moment Petey came into the room. “Grandma,” he said, “can we have the last of that fudge ripple?”
“What: before supper?” Abby asked.
“We’re already eating our supper.”
“Yes, you can have it. And take Heidi when you go, will you? She’s sneezing again.”
It was true that Heidi had started sneezing — a whole fit of sneezes, light but spattery. “Gesundheit,” Merrick told her. “What’s the trouble, honeybunch? Coming down with something?”
“She does this all day long,” Abby said. “You wouldn’t suppose sneezing would be such an irritation, but it is.”
Petey said, “Mom thinks it’s on account of she’s allergic to Grandma’s rugs.”
“Well, I wouldn’t bring her to visit, then, poor baby,” Merrick said.
“She’s got to visit. She lives here.”
“Heidi lives here?”
“She lives here with us.”
“You live here?”
“Yes, and Sammy’s allergic, too. All night he breathes dramatically.” Merrick looked at Abby.
“Take Heidi to the kitchen, Petey,” Abby said. “Yes,” she told Merrick, “they’ve moved in to help out; isn’t that nice?”
“Help out with what?”
“Well, just … you know. We’re getting older!”
“I’m getting older too, but I haven’t turned my house into a commune.”
“To each his own, I guess!” Abby sang out merrily.