The Misfortunes of Family by Meg Little Reilly

Author:Meg Little Reilly
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MIRA Books
Published: 2019-11-18T14:55:26+00:00

* * *

When Mary-Beth awoke, the sun was low in the sky and her stomach was growling. It must have been dinnertime, though she heard not a peep from downstairs.

She slipped into flip-flops and went down to the kitchen. It was sparkling clean again. A bowl of peaches sat on the counter, a handwritten note tucked beneath it.

Went with Dad and the guys to the wine store. Mom’s at yoga. We’ll get takeout for dinner on our way home. Love JJ.

Mary-Beth fished her book from her purse and decided to head down to the waterfront to do the only thing she wanted to do at the lake house this summer: read in peace. But when she walked through the back door to the deck, she saw Chelsea standing down at the shore. She sighed to herself and kept walking toward the water.

“Is everyone gone?” Mary-Beth asked as she approached the shore.

Chelsea jumped and turned. “Jesus, you scared me. Most of them are gone, yeah.”

“Sorry.”

Mary-Beth stood beside Chelsea and tried to see whatever it was that she was looking at on the water. “It’s nice when it’s quiet here, huh?”

She hated how square she felt beside Chelsea, how neat and orderly her appearance seemed against Chelsea’s messy coolness. It felt like a false advertisement for the person Mary-Beth was. She wasn’t as prim as she seemed. And yet here she was, dressing and speaking and acting like a middle-aged prude. How, Mary-Beth wondered, does a person get so accidentally swept up in a tide that she doesn’t know she’s in? She didn’t mind aging, but she hated to think she’d been passive in the trappings of age. Seeing Chelsea made her feel that way. Chelsea made her aware of all the old-person habits she’d mindlessly adopted over the years without questioning their necessity.

Mary-Beth was about to sit in the lounge chair and open her book when Chelsea turned to her.

“Mary-Beth, I feel like I need to say...” Chelsea looked at her toes in the wet sand. “I’d like to say that I’m sorry.”

“For what?”

“Just for being here. I know that what happened to your boys is a big deal, and I feel like you deserve some privacy now that you’re all back together. You don’t need some random outsider here right now. And, for whatever it’s worth—which probably isn’t much—I’m working on leaving. Anyway, I’m just sorry for crashing this private family thing.”

Mary-Beth smiled slightly. Chelsea had apologized for precisely the thing that Mary-Beth had been resenting her for. But as she articulated her apology for the non-crime of her presence, Mary-Beth realized that Chelsea wasn’t the impediment to her privacy. Her husband was—he and the rest of his family. Because privacy was the thing that none of them wanted, even under these circumstances. They were the ones who’d invited a documentary filmmaker there, and gone on Good Morning America and answered the phones to dozens of reporters. If Mary-Beth was going to feel mad at her open-book family life, it shouldn’t be at Chelsea.

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