Page 31

Louisa twirled the diamond stud in one ear. “We’re coming to you in the exploratory phase.”

He cracked his knuckles. “Do you know what you owe?”

“First, we’d like to know what we need, what documents we must gather, to apply for the loan.” Aggie bounced the baby in her arms, shifting her weight from one huarache sandal to the other. Her blue eyeshadow made her light eyes pop.

The lights blinked on and off on the banker’s phone. He folded his arms on the desk.

“Is it just the three of you applying?”

Mikey’s gentle protests grew into a high-pitched howl. “Sh, sh, sh. Yes, the three of us.”

He spoke over the baby’s cries. “There will be no husbands on the loan.”

Louisa turned to Aggie, her voice sharp. “Maybe he needs a diaper change?”

“I can change him,” Betsy offered, her thoughts sliding away. You have six hundred dollars in a sock in your top drawer. You can go to a clinic if you need to.

Aggie popped a binky in the baby’s mouth, nodding for Louisa to keep talking. “What documents do we need to apply?”

Mr. Erwin scribbled a list on a piece of notepaper. “W-2s. Any real estate holdings your family has, stocks.”

“I don’t believe our mom has much savings at all,” Betsy said, her voice frantic. “I couldn’t find anything in her records other than a joint bank account. There are two loans we’re trying to pay back that total $150,000.”

Mr. Erwin lowered his pen. “Well, I hope your mother has some savings.”

Her mother had three hundred dollars in her account; Betsy had seen her checkbook.

Mr. Erwin stood abruptly from behind the desk. “Listen, girls. I’m afraid I can’t help. If your father owes $150,000 and your mother is in the red and two of you don’t have real jobs…”

“This is what I make.” Louisa wrote a number on a notepad and turned it around for him to see, keeping it out of view of Aggie and Betsy. “My sisters have some savings. What do we need to do to get a loan for $150,000?”

He returned to his desk, sitting and clicking a silver pen a few times, then set it down. “I’m sorry, but this isn’t going to work. A note shared by three sisters, two of whom don’t even work real jobs—that is a red flag to us.”

Betsy felt like she was disappearing into the scratchy fabric of the chair. “You’d at least consider our application, wouldn’t you?”

“You’re welcome to apply.” Mr. Erwin pulled out his bottom drawer, licking his fingers and unsticking pages to slip into a packet thick with information about bank rates and requirements.

“The law says anyone can apply. But the law can’t measure the amount of risk, and this doesn’t feel like a traditional setup.

What if Louisa loses her job tomorrow? How will the two of you pay? ”

They left his office, walking into the teller lobby with Tabby smiling at them. A sense of failure permeated all three of the sisters’ moods as Betsy closed the screen door to the bank. They walked toward the harbor in silence, sitting on a rock with a plaque about the earliest settlers.

“Here’s what I don’t get. Mom and Dad told each other everything. He must have told her he was taking out these loans.”

“That’s the strange part, Betts. He didn’t have to. Mom’s name isn’t even on the deed of the house, even though she is the one that inherited it. The deed is registered to Charles Whiting.”

“Good God. Property is just one more way that women are disenfranchised in this country.” Louisa got that self-righteous grimace on her face, like she was the only who could see the hypocrisy of the world.

“It happened all the time when property transferred. Women couldn’t own it on their own or it wasn’t deemed acceptable for them to, so it was easiest to put real estate in their husband’s name.

You realize, right, that single women could only get a mortgage as of like four years ago. ”

“You’re not the only one who read Mom’s article.

” Aggie flicked her sister in the shoulder.

Her mother had written a series of articles in the early seventies about the audacity of banks not to give single women credit cards or a mortgage; it had started a debate in Congress and likely helped turn public opinion to pass the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, a law that established a single woman’s right to apply for credit.

Betsy’s mind hadn’t left her father. “But why wouldn’t he tell her he was taking these loans? Was he in some kind of financial trouble himself?”

“Mom seemed to think it was more that he needed to keep up appearances of the life they’d had when he was in the Senate, and he planned to pay it back.”

“That theory is just self-preservation on Mom’s part.” Louisa seemed confident of as much. “You can convince yourself of anything if it means you’ll sleep better at night.”

Still, the theory that her father likely planned to pay it back was in line with Betsy’s thinking.

Her father took some of the money out, planned to return it before anyone noticed, and then…

Well, then he was gone. A small plane careening through the sky, nothing but a pile of ash when authorities discovered it in the New Jersey cranberry bogs.

“Can we get ice cream, Mama?” Tabby asked, spying a little boy and his brother licking at melting ice cream cones.

“Sure,” she said, and as Tabby and Aggie joined the line outside the nearby sweet shop, Louisa turned to Betsy. Lines deepened across her forehead.

“I wanted to tell you first, because I know you’re as upset as I am, but the house is in foreclosure. I found the notification in Mom’s office yesterday.”

“What?” The words hit Betsy like ice in a glass, sending a chill up her spine.

Louisa ran her hand up her slender arm, rubbing at it like it hurt. She pulled a folded-up piece of paper out of her purse, holding the page out to Betsy. “It says that we need to pay back the loan or vacate the house by the fifth of August, or they’ll send the sheriff to evict us.”

“Why wouldn’t Mom tell us?” Betsy imagined their couch on the lawn. Her father’s books in stacks on the steps. A policeman taking out armfuls of sheets and towels and tossing them outside.

“Jesus, Betsy,” Louisa snapped. “You always ask the most obvious question.”

“Can you relax? It was rhetorical.” Because keeping the kicker of the story a secret was typical Virgie Whiting. She was direct with everyone except her own family.

That gave them only two weeks to save the house.

The day’s tumult had settled into Betsy’s nerves, particularly because she still didn’t have a pregnancy test in hand.

The last thing she wanted to do was watch Carol Burnett, which was what her sisters were doing.

Instead, she carried a light sweater and a box of chocolates to the back patio.

She wouldn’t admit it out loud to anyone, but she’d picked a lounger facing the harbor, and the small spit of green beyond, so she could make out James’s illuminated window.

She popped a chocolate filled with lush crème de menthe into her mouth, closing her eyes.

It was funny to think about the moment their childhood friendship grew into something more, but she remembered it clearly.

They’d been skipping rocks in the curve of land near his house.

He was doing that thing where he talked fast about something scientific, like why puffer fish blow up in self-defense to protect from predators.

When he got into science facts, she would just wait for him to take a breath, swim a lap, finish tossing a stick as far into the water as he could, and finally really talk .

That day, after he’d skipped probably a hundred rocks, he’d turned to Betsy and said, “Can I call you sometimes when you go back to Washington this year?”

“That’s what you were so worried about saying?

” Betsy remembered how she’d fallen backward on the floral sheet they’d opened on the beach in the sunshine, how she’d rolled onto her side with her head propped up on an elbow, her long brown hair falling around her face.

“Yes, James Sunday, I, Betsy Whiting, would love to talk to you after the summer ends.” His eyes had smiled back at her, and then he had switched on his beloved transistor radio and pretended to play air guitar.

Those phone calls had changed things between them, too, since suddenly James was in her life all year long, and the following summer, when she’d arrived on the island at age fifteen, he’d rowed up to the shore a few doors down to pick her up.

He was three inches taller, his hair doing that thing where he let it flop about his face, but he couldn’t come around the house.

By then, her father had discouraged her from seeing him; sneaking phone calls after school had been easy when your parents didn’t get home until seven o’clock every night.

That day, though, she’d sat down on the metal seat of his little boat after not seeing him for nine months, surprised when she felt his lips on hers.

Fluttering her eyes open, Betsy saw that his were still closed, and she’d slowly closed hers again, realizing that it was finally happening.

They were officially going to be a thing.

After the kiss—a kiss that she had fantasized about but never had the guts to do herself—James had motored her to a small, secluded cove near a house without summer people yet and anchored them, the boat rocking gently as they lay on their backs and watched the clouds pass.

It felt like they could remain that way for the rest of their lives.

And they might have, too, if time and distance and summers spent elsewhere hadn’t driven them apart. And, of course, if James had answered the letter she wrote to him junior year, the one where she told him she wanted to be with him forever.

Her cheeks burned at the memory.

A firefly landed on her arm then, and she tilted her chin, watching its tiny abdomen light up gold. She carefully tried to slide her finger under it, raising the lightning bug to her face.

“I can’t stop thinking about one very true thing,” Betsy said aloud, staring down at the insect’s glow, her eyes burning with overwhelm. “Every man I’ve ever loved has left me behind.”