Page 28 of Play Nice

The sky is blue and cloudless, the sun high and yellow, and the entire world is incapable of telling me no. It makes me feel like a god. Powerful, bored, dangerous.

Dad puts his arm around my shoulders. “We can get into the finances of it. What makes sense to invest into the house.”

“Whatever’s invested I’ll make back. I’m playing with house money, literally.”

“Not necessarily,” he says. “It adds up. You’d be surprised. That house wasn’t in great shape when Alex bought it almost twenty years ago. Probably needs a new roof, HVAC, et cetera. It’s not all fun stuff, like paint and furniture.”

“It isn’t?” I ask, all Pollyanna.

He shakes his head. “You’ll see.”

“Then I’ll see.”

“I’m proud of you for wanting to take this on. I don’t doubt you can do anything you set your mind to. But this is your project. Not mine. Not Daphne’s or Leda’s.”

“I know,” I say. Amy’s shoes don’t fit me right, and I feel a blister forming at my heel. The friction siring something ugly.

“I don’t want them over there. I worry about that.”

“You don’t worry about me?”

“You’re less sensitive than your sisters. Emotionally, I think it would be hard for them to be back there in a way it won’t be hard for you.”

“What if it’s haunted?”

He laughs.

He laughs so hard and so loud that it fills the whole neighborhood. So hard and so loud it occurs to me that I might not have been joking.

Usually, I love the sound of his laughter. Usually, making my dad laugh is my favorite thing.

It’s not my favorite right now, though.

He pulls me in for a hug, kisses me on the forehead. Daphne and Amy catch up to us. We encounter a neighbor walking their sweet, slobbery golden retriever. Dad and Amy argue about adopting a dog as we circle the block and get back to the house. Everyone gathers in the family room to play a board game. I lie and say I have a headache to get out of Monopoly or Clue—it hasn’t been decided. Amy insists on making me tea. I take it upstairs with me, close my bedroom door, lock it for the first time since I was seventeen and would make out with Natalie Ruggerio when we were supposed to be doing homework.

Dad and Amy were cool about Daphne, but I always suspected they would take my not being totally straight as proof that Alexandra turned us into man-haters. Which she tried. But I love men. I just don’t trust or respect them.

I take the book out of my suitcase, climb into bed, and start to skim the second chapter, titled “The Girls.” She doesn’t use our names, which I suspect was less about protecting us and more about not wanting to end up back at odds with Dad, who likely would have made it an issue, threatened legal action. We’re referred to as Elle, Dee, and Cici.

Elle and Dee pick the big upstairs bedroom to share. Cici wants the downstairs room across the hall from Mom.

Thinking back, that’s not how I remember it.

I remember wanting to be upstairs near Daphne and Leda. They’re closer in age, and when we were kids, before Leda’s teenage angst, the two of them were thick as thieves. They played with me like a doll, but I was never in on any of their jokes or secrets. They left me out on purpose, an older sibling power move. I eventually retaliated by feigning independence, which then calcified into legitimate independence.

But, yeah, I remember wanting the room next to theirs, the room that would become the office. There was more natural light upstairs, a bigger window with a better view of the front yard, the green of the trees.

And I remember Mom guilting me, saying something like “You’re going to leave me all alone downstairs?”

Conveniently, she left this out of the book. Or maybe what’s written is faithful to her recollection, to how it played out in her mind. One person’s truth is another’s fiction.

All I have is a fraction of a memory, edges frayed. I don’t recall agreeing to the downstairs bedroom, but that’s where I ended up. Did I do it to make her happy? Did I do it to show my sisters that I didn’t care about being part of their little club, even though I did? I don’t know, will never know.

The book in my hands becomes a bad idea, a piece of half-rotten fruit. Do I eat around the dark, mushy parts? Do I throw the whole thing out? I’m not sure that I even want to read it, that I care about her version of events. The uncertainty frustrates me.

But I can’t help myself. I can’t stop now that I started.

The first night with my girls in the house, I made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for dinner and let them eat in front of the TV—something they weren’t allowed to do at their father’s. I knew they would report back and that he wouldn’t approve. For as long as I’d been a mother, I’d been made to feel like I was a bad mother. My relationship with my ex-husband shifted after Elle, our eldest, was born. I couldn’t get her to latch, and my failure to nurse her became indicative of my failure as a parent. I appreciated that he loved our daughters, but it came at my expense. I was never good enough for them in his eyes.