Dream House. Catherine Armsden

’n’ chips place. Then, with an unspoken understanding, they separated and began eviscerating the house room by room, stuffing thirty-gallon garbage bags to be taken to Goodwill or the dump.

      Upstairs, Gina pulled from a blanket chest a sack of hems that their tiny mother had cut from her skirts. She was about to shove it into a garbage bag when she felt something hard; she fished around and pulled out a slender cardboard box, secured with a rubber band. Inside was a scrap of burgundy-colored velvet labeled, “A piece of Gen. Washington’s cloak” and a tightly folded piece of paper with a large tag attached that said, “Lady Martha Washington’s hair.” Carefully, she peeled back the delicate ancient paper to have a look. The tiny nest of dark strands gripped her with a fascination that years of her mother’s reciting the family history had failed to inspire.

      “Cassie! Come here!”

      Cassie bounded up the stairs, and when Gina held out her findings, she drew a deep breath. For a few moments, they beheld their treasure with silent reverence.

      “God!” Cassie finally burst out. “Was Mom hoarding these? Why didn’t she sell them! She thought it was so important that we got to spoon our sugar from Sidney Banton’s silver bowl every morning, and meanwhile, she and Dad could hardly pay the coal bill.”

      Cassie’s tirade so soon after the accident made Gina squirm; though as usual, she completely agreed. Cassie stood and gestured to the leather bound books—several bearing presidential signatures—that they’d cleared from the bookshelf. “And the things here aren’t even the half of it. Do you remember all the beautiful stuff at Lily House?”

      “Only vaguely,” Gina said. She hadn’t been in Lily House since Fran had lived there. When Fran died in the 1970s, the house was sold with all its furnishings to the New England Historical Society. Her parents’ best friends, Annie and Lester Bridges, had been Lily House’s caretakers for years.

      “Annie and Lester really want us to come by,” Cassie said. “I’d like to see them, but . . . you realize that everything in that house should be ours, and going there . . . It’s like salt in the wounds. I know I shouldn’t be thinking this way, but it’s just . . .” Cassie gazed, glassy-eyed, out the window. “Wes didn’t get that job he was so hopeful about last month.”

      Gina stroked her sister’s muscular back. She knew Cassie hated to talk about money; they’d been taught not to. “I know,” she said. “Something will change.”

       Make a place in the house...which is kept locked and secure; a place which is virtually impossible to discover...a place where the archives of the house or other more potent secrets might be kept.

      Christopher Alexander, A Pattern Language

Chapter 2

      By the end of Tuesday, Gina’s parents’ fifteen-year-old VW station wagon was fully packed for the dump. Gina loaded the skunk between the centerboard from a long-gone family boat and several faded bolts of paisley cloth, vintage 1970. She had just put the key in the ignition when Cassie popped out of the house and said, “Damn, the skunk!”

      “Tuesday’s dead animal day,” Gina said.

      “Yeah, but I just remembered the dump closes at three-thirty on Tuesdays.”

      Gina dropped her forehead to the steering wheel. She’d slept only five hours last night and was vibrating with fatigue and frustration. After a few moments, she climbed out of the car and gazed up at the promising blue sky. The weather had no rules, she thought; there could be a sudden thaw, and she would be able to bury the skunk.

      Back in the house, Gina stood above the two-foot-by-two-foot opening in the attic and lowered down boxes covered with dust and bits of tar from a sloppy roofing job to Cassie. At least thirty of the boxes were filled with photographs and negatives from their father’s commercial photography business that he’d operated from home; others held the artifacts of their childhood. Cassie and Gina carried them down to the living room, leaving a trail of black behind them.

      “Check this out,” Cassie said, pulling something framed from a box. She turned it for Gina to see. “My junior year French award. And...” She reached her other hand into the box. “Ta-da! The Miss Andrews Academy Award.”

      “Pretty hot stuff,” Gina said.

      Cassie laid the documents back in the box. “Yeah, well, I remember Mom told me back then not to have them out for people to see because it was too braggy.”

      “I’m sure. But she bragged about us to other people.”

      “Only when we weren’t around to enjoy it. Remember how she’d say, ‘Don’t let it go to your head’? Have you ever, even once, said that to one of your kids? She called it ‘being modest’, but I think she was just jealous.”

      Cassie’s insight was knife-sharp. Their mother was impossible—not just volatile, but childish and manipulative. Gina had always been reluctant to share achievements with her. Now she wondered: how could a mother feel competitive with her children? She’d always hoped that Esther and Ben would surpass her in feeling fulfilled in life.

      “Not to mention,” Cassie said with a snicker, “she hated that boys liked us.”

      A foghorn blew. “Nubble Light, five o’clock,” Cassie said. “Time to drink.”

      She went into the kitchen and called, “Damn! I wanted to pick up some wine.” Gina heard the jangle of bottle openers that hung on the door of the tiny liquor cabinet in the bottom of what had once been the water heater closet. “Vodka, gin, scotch, and vermouth. How about a martini?”

      “Sounds good,” Gina answered, though she didn’t like martinis. She was beginning to feel as if her older sister was the host and keynote speaker of a days-long event at which Gina was a guest.

      Gina stood and shifted to the living room window that framed the cove and harbor. The window! She’d forgotten, during these brooding, interior days, the escape it offered. Their mother had dreamed of replacing the one double-hung sash with glass doors. But Gina had always thought the narrow window made the experience of viewing the waterscape more intimate and poignant because, when standing at it, there was only room for one. The tide was high, and in the late afternoon light, the cove was a gloomy gray. Trees on the shoreline hadn’t yet leafed out, but already someone was sailing a small boat from the harbor. Gina wished she were that sailor, but she was lost on a sea of boxes in a house that seemed far from home.

      With Cassie still distracted in the kitchen, she decided to take her phone into the piano room to sneak in a call to Paul.

      “I have a call to make before my next appointment, so I can’t really talk,” Paul said, when she reached him. “We’re all fine. Esther’s quiet but seems engaged with school again. Check in later if you want to talk to her. You okay?”

      Gina reported that she was and said goodbye, missing her kids even more than before the call.

      In the kitchen, Cassie gave Gina’s arm a playful pinch. “You’re such a helicopter mom! You have to stop this before your kids are teenagers. All the attention you give them might backfire.”

      Cassie had hit a nerve—Paul, too, often accused her of hovering over the kids. “Do you eavesdrop on your kids, too?” she said, regretting that she’d taken Cassie’s bait. She opened the refrigerator and looked at the date on a bottle of green olives. “The olives expired a year and a half ago.”

      “Olives never go bad,” Cassie said.

      Gina chose to believe her about the olives. But while Cassie finished making the martinis, she plucked old jars of mayonnaise, mustard, jelly, pickles, ketchup, marmalade, salad dressing, chutney, and capers out of the refrigerator door and set them in the sink. “Do we have to recycle all these, or are we exempt, under the circumstances?”

      “Save the skunks,” Cassie said, pointing to