“Thank you. Seriously, thank you. I love you.”
“I love you too, Maisie. Say hi to Jack for me.”
We talk for another few minutes, because although we might be Irish American, we’re not great at Irish goodbyes, and then I’m left sitting at my kitchen counter, surveying my tiny box of a studio. I mean, I actually have a Murphy bed, like in one of those cartoons. In this light, my studio doesn’t look like much. I really do have the kind of life I can upend at a moment’s notice for a three-week-long trip.
That used to feel refreshing. Like an escape. But I can’t decide whether I like it anymore.
There’s just one string tying me down, and I give a fond tap to the top of his lid.
“It’s not you, it’s me, Fred. You had a good run. I did make bagels with you that one time.”
They turned out flat, but I don’t feel the need to add insult to injury. Fred’s life is about to be cut short. Let him pretend the bagels were good.
There’s no direct flight from Seattle to Asheville, and because it’s beyond last minute, I get stuck taking a red-eye through Chicago, arriving at the crack of dawn on Saturday. Jack and Maisie pick me up at the airport, Maisie with a sign propped on her bump that says, Congrats on leaving your cult. Welcome to ours.
We always greet each other at the airport with wackadoodle signs—an O’Shea sisters tradition. The message on this one stirs something in the back of my mind. An old memory. Something I meant to write about before the next big dating craze took over my headspace. But it’s there and then gone before I can grasp the thread. Because I’m already shoving the sign at Jack, who’s a good sport, bless him, so I can hug my sister. She looks gorgeous, her curly red hair long and untamed, that baby glow at peak capacity.
I pull away and grin at her. “You look fantastic.”
Then I tug Jack into a side hug, because I love him too. He’s made her super happy, and besides, he serves as evidence that not every guy has a weird collection of used women’s underwear or prides himself on his ability to correctly guess a woman’s breast size.
“I feel like a beluga whale,” Maisie moans.
“Why a beluga whale?” I ask. “Why not a killer whale or a humpback?”
“Because we watched a documentary on them last week,” Jack says with a smile.
“Rookie mistake. No whale documentaries for pregnant ladies. Especially not animal-obsessed pregnant ladies. Because an animal always dies in one of those documentaries, and it’s usually, like, one of the babies.”
“Huh.” Jack rubs the back of his neck. “You’re right.”
“Of course she is,” Maisie says, actually reaching for my bag, which—no way. I’m not a light packer, and I’m staying for three weeks, after all.
Jack picks it up instead, and I let him. As Maisie is fond of pointing out to anyone and everyone, he has these amazing arms that can easily handle my very heavy suitcase.
On the way to their house, I pepper Maisie and Jack with questions about the brewery and the dog shelter, which will be overseen by Maisie’s coworkers while they’re out of town. It’ll be a trial run for when she’s out for three months with the baby.
I haven’t visited the old O’Shea house for a while. Maybe about a year. Okay, it was for Maisie’s wedding, and it’s been more like a year and a half.
It had already started changing.
For a long time, Maisie lived here with everything as it was from our childhood. Our parents’ room sat untouched, like some kind of museum exhibit, and there were still marks on the wall from where Dad had measured our heights—Mary’s with purple ink, Maisie’s with green, and mine with pink. Coming home was so painful it baffled me that my sister could actually live there, constantly surrounded by reminders of everything we had lost. Of the life that had seemed perfect until it wasn’t.
But then she met Jack, and she finally started to put our parents’ things away. Give them to charity. Buy new furniture. Shift things around.
Which, thank goodness. It was time for her to move on. It’s nice that going home is no longer a sucker punch of memories. It feels like I’m visiting my sister, not the O’Shea Family Museum, which always felt so weird and wrong to me for reasons I’ve never shared with Maisie.
And yet…
Part of me feels a strange sense of loss.
Before I know it, we’re walking up to the porch, where Maisie and Mom and Mary and I used to sit out on the rockers and drink lemonade while Dad strummed his guitar in the grass, and then Jack opens the door, and Ein and Chaco burst out, pouncing on my lower legs with their little paws, Chaco actually peeing with excitement.
It’s good to feel this wanted, and something sparks inside of me as I shower my canine niece and nephew with love.
“I can tell you’re going to do just fine together,” Maisie says with a long sigh of relief. Or maybe her baby just kicked her a good one. “Thank God for you, Molly. You’re a lifesaver.”
“Lifesaver Molly. I could get used to that.”
They take me inside, go over their instructions for the dogs (they’re especially long for Ein), and before I know it, I’m waving to them as they drive off in their new Subaru Forester. Maisie finally traded in Dad’s old Jeep, something that made me feel proud but pained. I’ll be bombing around in Jack’s beat-up old Prius for the next few weeks, which is kind of a fun idea, given that I don’t have a car back in Seattle.
I head back inside, suddenly wondering what I’m going to do here, besides watch the dogs, of course. Three weeks. That’s almost a month.
I give myself a tour of the house, even though Maisie and Jack already showed me around, and linger in the doorway of my old bedroom, which is now the baby’s room.
It feels strange to see a few of our old things woven into the tapestry of this new home Maisie and Jack have made for themselves, but at least my sister is no longer treating them like holy objects, meant to be worshipped. That’s never sat well with me. I hover in the doorway of the happy couple’s bedroom, which is a pretty weird thing to do, I guess, but it’s also our parents’ old room. (Maisie finally made the switch to the master suite.) As my attention shifts from the painting on the wall, which is old, to the new carpet, something catches my eye—a book on one of the nightstands.
The cover is black, the title a bright blue and white, and something about it calls to me. That strange pop of color in the darkness, maybe.
I find myself stepping into the room, as if drawn by it, the dogs following at my heels.
“The Bad Luck Club,” I whisper aloud, “by Augusta Glower.”
This is it.
This is the gold nugget that slipped away from me in the airport. Years ago, Maisie’s friend Blue was in a club called the Bad Luck Club, which I’d joked—well, I sort of meant it—sounded like a cult. What was most intriguing about it was the absolute secrecy of it. Blue refused to reveal any of the club’s secrets, and so did her now-husband, who was also wrapped up in it. I’d thought there was a story there, one I wanted to tell, but it was exactly the kind of thing Constance had no interest in publishing. No one wants to read about a cult unless it’s a weird sex thing, Molly. Except she was wrong, because it looks like someone else got there first.