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“You’re awfully optimistic given the fact that you’ve known her all of three hours,” I tell him.
“I don’t know. You could be right. I just have a good feeling about her. Maybe she could humble him, you know? Ground him a bit. Bring him down to earth. She said she’s from some small town in Nebraska. She went to school in the Midwest. She’s not like us,” Dash says. “She’s like . . . Kate Middleton.”
I almost choke on my beer. “She’s nothing like Kate Middleton.”
“I don’t mean literally. I mean, she’s an outsider. She might be the breath of fresh air this family needs.”
Breath of fresh air . . .
Liar . . .
Opportunist . . .
Gold digger . . .
It all remains to be seen.
Nicola passes through the sliding glass door to the patio, arms full of bagged marshmallows and Hershey bars. The kids trot behind her, Augustine carrying a box of graham crackers and her brother carefully hauling the roasting sticks with the sharp ends pointed down.
“Dad’s tired. He’s staying in for the night,” Nic says when she places all the items on the table. “Must’ve had too much excitement for one day.” Following our gazes, she asks, “What are you two gossiping about?”
“Your husband thinks Briar is the next Kate Middleton,” I say.
Nicola frowns, and Dash lifts his hands in protest before explaining himself.
“Really, Dash? You’ve always had a thing for Kate Middleton,” she says when he’s done, clearly not caring about his analogy. Now she’s going to worry about Dash’s wandering eye for the next eight weeks.
Nicola and the kids head off to the firepit.
“Sorry,” I tell him.
“You just had to say something, didn’t you?” Dashiell sinks back in his chair, sulking like the man-child he is.
“Oh, come on.” I peel the label off my bottle. “This is our last summer together. We should shake things up a bit and stop trying to be so perfect all the time. And you two need to stop taking every little thing so seriously. Sometimes being around you two is exhausting.”
Dash says nothing.
Then again, there’s nothing to say.
He knows I’m right.
Three months ago, my father was given two to six months to live. The fact that we’re here at all right now is a miracle, and every day is borrowed from the next. The day we have to put him in the ground will likely be the last time my brother, sister, and I are in the same place at the same time—and it’s for the best.
We bring out the worst in each other.
Besides, there’s no law saying you have to be friends with your siblings after childhood—especially a childhood like the one we shared.
“All I’m saying is it couldn’t hurt to not take ourselves so seriously all the time,” I say. All day today, when Nicola wasn’t parading around like mother of the year or looking like she was about to bite someone’s head off, she was on the verge of tears. And Burke has been so much more stoic and devoid of emotion than ever that I’m convinced he’s part robot. My father’s moods are swinging like a pendulum. While Yvette claims it’s a side effect of his newest medications, I know better. It’s nothing more than a side effect of being a Rothwell. “You remember what that’s like, right?”
It didn’t always use to be this . . . intense.
Once upon a time, we were a saccharine and happy bunch—back when Mom was still around. I can easily draw a line in the sand dividing the time before and after her death, and it would perfectly demarcate the good memories from the bad.
Dashiell rolls his eyes and angles himself away from me. “Forgive me for not feeling overly celebratory this summer.”
He’s always had a particular fondness for my father, but I chalk it up to the fact that Dash’s dad died when he was a kid, and his mother never remarried. It was one of the things he and Nicola bonded over since our mom died when we were young, and our father never moved on.
“It’s not like he hasn’t lived a good life,” I say. At eighty-one, my father has lived a longer, better life than most people. Sure, there’ve been tragedies along the way. No one’s immune to that sort of thing. But the way I look at it, he’s lived a long life on his terms, and there’s not much more a man could ask for. Dash heads to the firepit, abandoning our conversation the same way he abandoned my sister at Dartmouth when he knocked her up their junior year. They lost the baby early on, only it strangely made them closer than ever. She may have forgiven him for the way he behaved in her time of need, but I haven’t forgotten.
Once a douche, always a douche.
