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Betsy flopped down on the tufted leather sofa against the windows, a series of thin quilts spread across the seat to cover the cracks in the leather.

Louisa came back into the room and sat beside her, all of them listening to the distant voices of boaters drifting through the window in the silence that followed.

Her mother leaned back in her chair, pressing her bare feet against the desk drawer.

“I want to say no, because I never loved anyone but Charlie.” She twirled a pencil in her fingers like a baton.

“And yet, I have to say yes, sometimes. Your father was a complicated man. He had so much unfinished inside him. I always saw him as a type of Humpty-Dumpty; he’d glued all his pieces back together so seamlessly, and yet I could see the cracks. He could feel them.”

Betsy pressed against the sofa back, feeling like she had to say something in case her father’s spirit was sitting on the edge of the windowsill listening. “But he was good to us.”

Louisa laughed in that condescending way she always did when she found her sisters intolerable. “Oh, Betsy. Being the youngest certainly shielded you from the worst of it, didn’t it?”

“Even though things were complicated with Mom and him, he was good to us,” Betsy said. Something about the way her sister said the worst of it left a swishing sensation in her middle. “Just because you didn’t get along with him doesn’t mean he was a bad person.”

Virgie came to sit beside Betsy, placing a warm hand on her bony knee. “Charlie was a good person, one of the best, but he was layered. Just like we’re all layered.”

“Is that what you would call it?” Louisa’s eyes bore into her mother like a spear. Then she spun out of the room. “This conversation is getting depressing. I’m going downstairs.”

“Okay,” her mother said, nodding.

The pounding of her feet vibrated the cottage as Louisa trudged down the steps.

“I know Dad could be hard at times, and I remember that he would get inexplicably sad,” Betsy found herself saying by way of explanation, “but what about when he would take us on the campaign trail and invite us out to talk to the crowd and tell everyone how proud he was of us?”

“Louisa and I despised that.” Aggie crossed her legs and leaned down in a twisted-up stretch. “It’s like we were his show horses.”

“Or when he’d play tag with us on the beach? Or show up at my college with show tickets? Or how we’d go out on Senatorial ?” Betsy tried.

Aggie swept her eyes around the room. “He took you out on Senatorial , Betsy. We hated that boat. I’m realizing this with men. They all have something that consumes them more than their wives.”

“And what consumes Henry?” Her mother returned to her desk, glancing over her glasses at Aggie.

“His patients,” Aggie sighed. “The practice. The hospital. They always come first.”

Her mother took a fresh piece of paper and rolled it into the typewriter.

This was their cue: it was time for her to work.

Betsy imagined the pages sitting in her bottom drawer, the terrible things her mother had been writing about her father.

“You must admit, Mom. Dad made everything feel special.”

“Oh, honey,” her mother said. “He really did, and he worked hard not to disappoint you, any of us really. You put him on a pedestal, and he loved that. He wanted you to keep him there.”

Betsy didn’t like how her mother had turned around her words, making her father sound insincere. “I’m so confused. Did I grow up with an entirely different man than Louisa and Aggie?”

Aggie began packing her daughter’s crayons, gathering the coloring books into her arms. “It’s hard to see some of the bad when you’re the favorite.”

Betsy pinched her own thigh, hard. “I was never the favorite. The true favorite in this family is the person not in this room.”

Her mother pressed her eyes closed, then opened them. “I need to write, girls, and just so you know, there is never a constant favorite in a family. My favorite child changes every day, depending on how you’re treating me.”

“Well, most of the days of the week you had the same favorite. It was Louisa, and it still is.” Betsy felt a lump in her throat. She’d never said those words aloud, not even when she was a teenager. Now the feelings were real, something that would need to be wrangled with.

Aggie encouraged Tabby to toddle toward the door. “I don’t know, Betts. I think I was Mom’s favorite.”

Her mother exchanged a knowing look with her middle daughter, a lowered eyebrow and an expression that read She has no idea what she’s saying.

But it was true. Everything in their family had always revolved around the tender care of Louisa.

It was Louisa’s school day that her mother focused on when the girls got home from Sidwell Friends.

When Louisa was given a solo in the winter concert in junior year, her mother bragged about it to anyone who would listen.

The morning that they dropped Louisa off at college at Barnard, her mother had sat on the steps of the campus library and cried.

Instead, it was Charlie who had taken Betsy to college, just the two of them driving up the New Jersey Turnpike together from Washington.

It was her father who bragged to his friends at the yacht club about how well Betsy could tack a sailboat in the wind.

Sometimes her father would wake up on Sunday mornings in winter in Washington and take Betsy out for scrambled eggs.

Things with her mother had always felt strained in comparison, like her mother was too tired to pay her much mind because she was busy and the older two had beaten her down.

While Betsy knew her mother loved her, in the same way you know that the sun will be highest in the sky at noon, there had been a hierarchy in the way she and her sisters were treated, with Louisa reigning queen in her mother’s heart, and the rest of them fumbling to remain relevant.

Things had been feeling okay, maybe even good, these last few weeks.

Betsy had received an apology from Louisa.

She was feeling close to Aggie again. She loved her job at the yacht club.

But she could feel a vibration, a negative sound pushing some long-held belief out of the broken recesses of her heart, and as much as Betsy didn’t want to say anything to stir up emotions right now, the words were already leaving her mouth.

“Do you remember that day that I sailed in the regatta off Cape Cod, Mom, and you came to cheer me on? I think I was fourteen.” Betsy waited for her mother to look up from her work.

When she did, her mother’s crystalline eyes brightened with recognition.

Betsy continued. “I was so excited that you’d come to see me, and as I rounded the point by the lighthouse, I looked for you, thinking you’d be on your feet, clapping.

But you were sitting on the beach, at the center of a circle of women, talking about something so important that you didn’t even bother watching the race.

I came in second! Maybe it wasn’t first, but it was still good. ”

Her mother lowered her pen. “Betsy, honey, where is this coming from? Why am I the bad guy in this story?”

Betsy felt her stomach swirl like she was spinning on a terrible carnival ride. “Because everyone acts like Dad was never around. That he was absent, that he was so complicated . But Dad was here more than you were. He always paid attention. He was always clapping.”

“Betsy! I was there for everything. Everything you did.”

“You didn’t come to my college graduation! That was a biggie, Mom. You didn’t even come to that dance performance I did at the theater.”

“Those are two events in an entire lifetime.” Her mother rose, reaching her slender fingers out to squeeze Betsy’s elbows. “Was I supposed to turn down a meeting with the president?”

“Yes, Mom. You were supposed to turn that down. I wanted you at my graduation.”

“That’s not fair, Betsy. Your father missed so much, and I missed one thing. In dedication to the movement.”

“Two things,” Betsy said, holding up her fingers in the peace sign.

She ran out of the study, leaving her mother with her face contorted into a tight ball, and hid out in the hall bathroom, sitting on the lid of the toilet, willing herself to take a breath.

She sniffled, squeezing her dry lips with her calloused fingertips rough from rigging boats, and she stared at the browning grout in the floor.

The house would be considered a fixer-upper by real estate agents.

She could see the listing already: Charming summer cottage in need of some TLC. Great views!

Her eye returned to the brown grout. It was disgusting; years of dirt built up. Her mind skipped to a different kind of brown that she hadn’t uncovered in her underwear that week or the week before. Another swirl of nausea took hold of Betsy then, her spine tingling with a certain kind of panic.

No one brought up the tension or the conversation again after it ended that afternoon, the weight of their mother and father’s complicated legacy making all three sisters retreat to the television that night.

They squeezed onto the living room couch and watched One Day at a Time, Alice , and The Jeffersons .

Her mother went to bed just before Betsy’s favorite, The Mary Tyler Moore Hour .

Betsy barely paid attention to what was going on in the show, her mind doing the mental math repeatedly.

Her last period was early June, or was it end of May?

She’d been so busy with her thesis paper to remember exactly, and she remembered having some spotting in June.

Did it even count as a real period? Earlier she’d consulted the Steamship Authority calendar pinned to the pantry door, each month featuring a picture of the ferry crossing, and if her last period was a phantom one, then she would be several weeks late.

She could have chalked it up to stress, except for the strange swirling in her stomach she’d been feeling.

She’d been eating crackers in bed some nights, which she hadn’t thought odd until now; hadn’t Aggie been hungry around the clock when she was pregnant?

If Betsy was, in fact, pregnant, she had to be about nine to ten weeks.

After her sister discovered she was having her second, Aggie had told Betsy that the doctor said the fetus was the size of a lima bean.

Betsy swallowed down the sour taste of bile.

Being pregnant would be an impossible turn. What the hell would she do?

“Calm down,” Betsy whispered to herself, and Louisa turned to her in the glow of the television, a curious look passing over her face.

“Did you just say something?”

Betsy’s lips tightened, then she smiled, not wanting to give away her nerves. “I was telling Mary to calm down. On the show.”

Louisa turned her attention back to the television. A laugh track erupted, Aggie chuckling along with it.

Betsy recoiled at the inevitable. She was going to have to buy a pregnancy test. It wouldn’t be the first time she’d taken one.

Her mother had made her go on the Pill at sixteen, which had been one of the biggest arguments she’d ever heard her parents have.

A screaming match in their Washington bedroom, her father saying that giving their youngest the Pill was like Virgie giving their daughter license to go out and bed a boy.

He’d actually said “bed a boy,” which had given teenaged Betsy and Aggie the giggles as they listened from the bottom of the rowhouse’s steps.

“Don’t tell me you think your precious Betsy will wait until she’s married.

No woman does, and she shouldn’t have to. ”

Her mother did that sometimes. Called her “your precious Betsy.”

Still, after Betsy had lost her virginity to James on an ocean beach one August night, her period hadn’t arrived that September.

She’d panicked, taking the Metro to a doctor’s office near Howard University—where she was the only white person in the lobby—and she’d gone in to pee in a cup, waiting for the results by phone: “Negative,” the office said.

The whole ordeal had been traumatic enough though that Betsy had been extra careful when she was with Andy.

Which was why she was so confused sitting there watching Mary Tyler Moore . How could anything have happened?

I don’t know anything yet , she reminded herself. She would pick up a test tomorrow after work, and she would put her mind at rest.