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that.”
    Wrong,
Mom!
    “I can turn
into a prima donna if you want,” Sarah offered lightly. “Watch and
see. It’ll be fun for all of us. A breath of fresh air. The other
sister being difficult.”
    I want my
nervous breakdown, and I want it right now!
    It was funny,
she didn’t feel like this very often, she got on with her life,
good things happened, but then suddenly it would come, as if it had
been there all along – the resentment, the feeling that she’d been
short-changed.
    “Sarah, I’m
being nice!”
    “Okay, I know
you are.” Feeling her mother’s arms tight and warm around her, and
bear-hugging her back, however, Sarah wanted to challenge that
word. Nice. Was Mom nice?
    She had a good
heart. She wanted the best for people. She never hurt anyone on
purpose, even people she didn’t like. But she was temperamental,
governed by energy levels that swung wildly. She had been a pro
tennis player in the years when Chrissie Evert was Mrs Lloyd, she’d
once gotten as high as six in the ATP rankings, and she still
coached part-time. She parented the same way she played, with
flashes of erratic brilliance and a tendency to lose concentration
at the wrong moments in the game.
    Sarah
remembered some startling, wonderful childhood days, like the time
they’d lit a campfire to cook potatoes and hot dogs in their
suburban New Jersey back yard and almost set the whole garden on
fire. Mom had loved that part of it most of all. “Let’s not call
911 yet! We can put it out ourselves!” Steam and ash hissing and
boiling in the air, the smell of butter and salt and hot potato
skin, ketchup around their mouths sticky and vinegar-sweet, smoke
stinking up their hair. Sarah and Emma had been beside themselves
with excitement, filthy as chimney sweeps, round-eyed at Mom.
    Other days,
Mom had been bored and lethargic and mentally absent, couldn’t get
motivated, craved some good sets of tennis, forgot various vital
supplies for school, withheld unpleasant news to spare people’s
feelings and then blurted it out at the worst possible time. ‘Nice’
implied a parenting style that was steadier, Sarah thought, but she
never doubted Mom’s sincerity or goodness or love.
    “I know you’re
nice,” she repeated belatedly. “You’re fabulous. And it’s been a
tough day.”
    “An insane
day. I so wanted to see Charlie in that stupid airplane
blindfold.”
    “It wasn’t a
good look on him. Not in tandem with the freeze-up and unnatural
calm.”
    “When did Emma
forget how to laugh about things like that?”
    “You know
when,” Sarah said.
    “Yeah, but
does it have to haunt us forever?” Mom hunched her shoulders, and
got that hunted look that said she thought she was the most to
blame.
     
    Upstairs, Emma
lay in bed and listened to the music while she cried.
    Oh, God,
Dad!
    Fire and Rain.
Hallelujah. Norwegian Wood. Classical Gas. Moon River. Sunshine on
Leith. All her favorites, the ones she always asked him for, the
ones with little kicks of melody and poetry in them that made her
dance or cry.
    Oh, God,
Dad!
    She was crying
too hard to go down and thank him for it. They would all get too
worried about her if they saw her face this bad, saw her this
imperfect and torn apart. She knew Dad never liked to be thanked
for things anyhow. Tomorrow would have been her thanks to him for
the entire life project of being her father, of doing so much of it
right, even when she’d stuffed everything up so badly in
London.
    She would have
thanked him by taking his arm down the aisle to the altar at St
James, where he would have given her to Charlie.
    Charlie.
Charlie.
    They wouldn’t
be doing that, now, she and Dad, so he was playing his guitar for
her instead. Thinking about you, sweetheart, said his music. Not
judging you. Just thinking about you.
    She sobbed
harder. He played Horse With No Name and Heart of Gold and sleep
ambushed her sobs and slowed them and flattened them until they
went away. In sleep, she forgot what had