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Edgartown, Massachusetts

Betsy lugged her enormous suitcase and knapsack of textbooks out of the taxicab and onto crowded Main Street in Edgartown, thinking that the air was positively chilly for June.

Summer was always a slow start on this tiny island off the coast of Cape Cod, but by July, the temperatures would soar, the frigid waters growing tepid.

Then there would be beauty all around, showing itself in different colors of hydrangeas, a shoreline that drew a jagged line to blue, soft sand lining the endless ocean.

“Two dollars, miss.” The cabbie’s front teeth overlapped at the center. “Are you going to see your family?”

“My mother.” Betsy felt inside her macrame tote for cash; the bag was jammed with two romance novels she’d purchased on a whim in the Amtrak station, even if she knew she should save her money.

Already this trip was costing her a fortune.

Tourists stepped around Betsy’s luggage, a row of pretty shops lining the sidewalks, some selling pastel-colored sundresses and others stocking Jaws T-shirts, since the movie had catapulted Martha’s Vineyard to celebrity status since its release three summers before.

“But I’d rather be spending the summer alone. ”

“Don’t be smart now. Everyone needs their people—it’s like a good dose of medicine.” He reached for her five-dollar bill, handing her back her change.

“You obviously haven’t met my mother.” Betsy smirked. “Or my sisters.”

There was the sickly-sweet smell of fudge, tourists in thin cashmere sweaters browsing the shops, their doors open to the fresh air.

Betsy traipsed along the sidewalk with the rest of the ponytailed summer crowd, walking down the one-way street to her parents’ summer house.

Here comes Betsy , she heard a voice in her head, crawling back home with her tail between her legs.

She’d given her landlady notice earlier that day, sliding a typed letter under the old woman’s door after Betsy had stuffed every belonging worth keeping into her suitcase.

She’d brought the textbooks so she could rework her final paper, even though she’d convinced herself during the journey to New England that there was no point in returning to grad school come fall.

The only thing that had kept her going these last few months was Andy.

Maybe she wasn’t cut out for psychology after all.

She was tired of her male classmates accusing her of being too emotional when they discussed a clinical case, tired of them leaving her out of study groups and talking in those obnoxious scholarly voices when they attempted to one-up each other in class.

A few minutes’ walk from Main Street, Betsy could see her family’s familiar white clapboard cottage on South Water Street, its historic green shutters standing proud with a flag flapping off the small front porch.

Her father wouldn’t be in the house, only his things would be, and she didn’t want to be here without him.

Last May, after he died, no one bothered to travel to the Vineyard, the summer months overtaken with the funeral and memorials and checking in on their grief-stricken mother in her Georgetown apartment.

She paused in front of the house’s white picket gate, a memory of her and her sisters holding a lemonade stand on the sidewalk.

She could see Louisa blowing bubbles, her and Aggie chasing after them while running their fingertips along the fence slats.

How Betsy would always call after Aggie and Louisa to wait up, how she’d always felt like she couldn’t keep pace.

It hadn’t occurred to Betsy how much she missed the island until now.

Betsy let herself in, stepping into the sunny living room, the house smelling of her mother’s jasmine perfume.

She was relieved to see that the cottage and its rooms were identical to how they’d left them.

The room was a time capsule. How many books had Betsy read on the well-worn navy couch with throw pillows emblazoned with goldfinches?

The large model sailboat she and her father had built a decade before remained on display on the mantel, the opposite wall covered in framed photographs of her and her sisters with their arms pretzeled around each other at various stages of their childhood.

They were on the beach, on the porch, on Senatorial , in a backyard dressed up with ribbons in their hair.

There was Betsy at four, Aggie at eight, and Louisa at nine, and so on, until Louisa turned fifteen and the pictures stopped.

Almost like the family had ceased to exist after 1965.

“Mom?” Betsy’s voice drifted through the empty living room, past the faded wallpapered dining room where her mother had insisted on squeezing in a mahogany table for eight many years ago.

“In here.”

Betsy stopped short in the doorway to the kitchen.

There was no sign of her mother, only her eldest sister, Louisa, standing at the faux-brick counter with her shoulder-length light hair in a headband, her signature braided belt cinching the waist of a white shirtdress.

She was barefoot, and still, she carried herself like a woman shopping for fine jewels at Tiffany’s. Discerning, doubting. “Hi,” she said.

“Oh, hi.” Betsy darted her eyes to the white metal cabinets and the old fridge her mother refused to part with.

She’d been preparing for the strangeness of seeing Louisa, poised to act as though nothing ever happened between them, in order to keep the peace for her mother, but a bitterness rose up in Betsy’s throat.

“I didn’t know law firms gave vacations. ”

“Only to those that work the hardest.” Louisa didn’t miss a beat, even as she sliced the lemons. She stopped, her knife splaying to one side, and she briefly met Betsy’s eye. “I have a week or so. How have you been?”

Betsy looked away, trying to decide what to say to someone you hadn’t spoken to in a year. Louisa had written her a letter in April, but Betsy hadn’t bothered to read it. “Fine. You?”

“Fine.”

The black-and-white wall clock ticked, its cat shape and bulging eyes comical.

She and Louisa had always squabbled, even with five years between them, while kindhearted and generous Aggie, a year younger than Louisa, played the role of mediator.

Their father always said she and Louisa had clashing temperaments: Louisa’s fiery nature was easily irritated by Betsy’s easygoing one.

Her mother saw it differently, though, once telling Betsy that she’d never be happy unless she found a way to stop competing with her eldest sister.

After a year of psychology classes, Betsy had a different theory: Louisa was annoying.

Louisa squeezed the lemons into a pitcher. “I can’t believe you actually came.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

The smallest of smiles curled Louisa’s thin upper lip. “You’re just always so busy .”

“Shut up. I am busy.”

Opening the cabinet, Betsy pulled down a glass, turned on the tap and drank down a glass of water.

Why did Louisa’s hair always have to look so perfect, shiny like a summer day and with layers that fell softly around her angular face?

Betsy was proud of her own bangs though, a bold decision that she’d decided made her look like the actress Jane Birkin.

Betsy even owned a striped tank she’d seen Birkin wear, and she often let her hair blow about her face loose and carefree like the actress. “Are we really selling the house?”

Louisa sighed. “It appears that way, but Mom hasn’t said much yet. I got here last night. Aggie’s outside with the babies.”

On the second night of her father’s wake last May, Louisa had accused Betsy of trying to pick up a boyfriend.

It had infuriated Betsy. She and Aggie had been circulating as they were expected to, merely being polite, and Betsy couldn’t get out of a conversation with a handsome young Senate aide about her father’s outsized influence on his career.

Her mind had blurred at what he was saying, but when he departed, Louisa had cornered Betsy in a spray of funeral flowers.

“I picked the coffin, the headstone, organized the catering, and now I have to babysit Mom too. The least you could do is take a turn holding her arm like I have all night, instead of trying to find a boyfriend.” Louisa had wrapped her black blazer around her loose black dress.

“You never think I’m doing the right thing.” Betsy snatched her arm from Louisa’s grip.

“Well, it’s not enough, Daddy’s girl.” Louisa had stormed off, giving her the cold shoulder for the rest of the funeral, and Betsy had given her the cold shoulder since, an anger festering and growing into something bigger than the fight.

“Where is Mom?” Betsy managed.

“She’s up in the study, working on some article, like always.”

The previous year sat between the sisters like a wall too tall to climb. “At least she’s writing again,” Betsy said.

Louisa nodded. She stirred the sugar and water into the lemonade pitcher, resolution knitted in her eyebrows. “Anyway, we’re here now, so we might as well be cordial.”

“Isn’t that convenient?” Betsy wouldn’t let her off that easy. She wanted an apology. What her sister had done had hurt her so deeply at a time when her heart had been bruised; it had felt, and still felt, unforgivable.

“Fine, have it your way.” Louisa added ice to the pitcher, stirring once more. “But no comments about the five pounds I put on. I already feel like a hippo.”

Louisa had been top of her class at Barnard, then attended Harvard Law, where she’d earned an editor job on the Law Review and had her pick of gentlemen admirers. Why would she mention her figure?

“To me, you look like nothing but an overworked constitutional lawyer,” Betsy said. She switched on the small transistor radio in the window, the chorus of “Stayin’ Alive” lightening the moment.