Chapter 4

This day feels like it’s been forever, Liza thought. Everything happened so quickly, yet in slow motion. Julia, who’d been so shocked by the death of her employer that it took her hours to recover enough to drive home, had just left, after one last tearful embrace with Liza. Now Liza sat in the kitchen of her childhood home on Willow Lane, drinking a glass of white wine and eating a handful of roasted peanuts, after a long, sad day of comings and goings, the official business of death involving mountains of paperwork and quick decisions, most grim. At one point, Liza was supposed to fax all three Sweeney sisters’ signatures to some state office so her father’s body could be cremated. She didn’t even bother trying to track down her sisters, both of whom were in transit; she signed all three names in decent forgeries, scanned the documents, and emailed them to the proper state agency. Liza knew her sisters would understand.

Her phone pinged. It was a text from Maggie saying that she was waiting at the Southport train station for Tricia. There in ten. Hang in. xoxo.

Out of habit, Liza looked around the dated kitchen and started adding up the cost of a remodel. It was something she did in almost every house she walked into, from her clients’ Greek Revivals to her in-laws’ early American saltbox. Do I want this place? Is the house even worth renovating? Her own home was a few blocks away, an easy walk that she had done a million times since she married Whit and moved into the three-story Victorian on Westway Road. The Peppermint Ice Cream House, they’d called it as kids because it was all sorts of pink and green, but not the charming versions of those colors. When she surprised her family (and maybe even herself) by settling down at age twenty-two with local boy

turned investment banker Whitney Jones III, she set her sights on the house, practically willing aged Mrs. Jennings to relocate to an assisted living facility. The house never even went on the market. Whit stepped in and made an offer and Liza set to work reviving the place. Now a traditional white on the outside, but airy and open on the inside, it was the sort of house people drove by when they wanted to impress out-of-towners. Liza loved looking out the front windows and seeing people on the sidewalk holding up their phones and taking pictures.

She’d talked to Whit only briefly today. He was in North Carolina for work when he called between meetings. “I’m sorry, hon. Do you need me to come home right away? Your sisters will be there, right? When’s the funeral?” All valid questions, but she wished Whit had said he was getting on a plane that night to be with her and that he’d do anything she needed.

Even though he and her father never really clicked, they tolerated each other. Whit admired William Sweeney’s intellect and convictions and Liza thought her father admired Whit as a good provider and a good father—that is, when he was in town. But she never really knew for sure. The Sweeneys weren’t a family that poured out their emotions unless whiskey was involved. Still, Liza thought Whit could have been more proactive in his response.

Plus, the kids were meant to leave for camp next week, but events like that rarely pierced Whit’s psyche when he was in the middle of a deal. He’d barely been home the last two months. If she didn’t get the two of them on that camp bus, she’d have to drive them to Maine herself. She hoped the twins, Vivi and Fitz, were coping with Whit’s mother, Lolly, who had agreed to take them overnight. She hated not being there with them. They’d been very close to their grandfather, often walking down the lane to bring him dinner, or fish or swim with him off this dock. Like so many men of his generation, Bill Sweeney was a more attentive grandfather than father. This was the first time they’d been through loss of any kind—even their yellow lab, Bear, was still alive, pushing fourteen, a year older than the twins.

Lolly not only took the twins, she volunteered to drop off dinner. “You should be with your sisters.”

There was Lolly’s trademark attribute: graciousness. She never made a false step and always knew exactly what to say in any social circumstance, what to write in the thank-you note and what dish to bring to the book club.

Lolly Jones and Bill Sweeney had gotten along like a house on fire. Lolly

could tell a wicked dirty joke in private and Bill loved that Lolly had actually read his work and wasn’t afraid to disagree with his essays in the cleverest terms. That was the first of many holes that Liza would identify now that her father was gone: no more family dinners with too much wine and lively discussions about all the subjects you weren’t supposed to talk about in polite society, from politics to sex to religion. Or the intersection of all three, like when her father got started on the Trump administration. Liza had always made her children clear the table to shield them from the nicknames Bill Sweeney had for the Cabinet secretaries. Lolly, who held her own biases, barely blinked at such talk. Now it would just be the Jones family sitting around the table, and Whit’s father, Whitney, was no substitute for her father. Frankly, neither was Whit.

Sometimes Liza wondered if she stayed with Whit because his mother was so lovely and she would hate to offend her in any way.

Finally, Liza heard car wheels on the gravel driveway. They were here, her sisters. Liza wondered, Are you considered an orphan if you’re in your thirties? She didn’t know, but tonight she felt alone in a way that she hadn’t before. She called to her father’s old golden, left behind and bewildered:

“Let’s go, Jack. It’s Maggie and Tricia. The sisters. Let’s go say hi.”

The Sweeney Sisters were back on Willow Lane.

“In a million years, did you ever think William Sweeney would die quietly in his sleep?” Tricia asked her sisters while they were standing out at the end of the dock, the boats of Southport Harbor to the left and the open waters of Long Island Sound to the right. Liza had taken them both through all the details of the day, from Julia discovering him in his bedroom midmorning to the call from Cap informing Liza that there was a short paragraph in their father’s will about scattering his ashes at high tide. The details didn’t make the reality any more real. Their father being gone at age seventy-four wasn’t something for which any of them was prepared.

In pairs or all together, they’d had conversations over the years about what to do about Dad, but the implication was always that they needed to work something out for the future, not next week. Nothing seemed imminent. Though no one would accuse Bill Sweeney of taking good care of himself, physically he’d cut back on drinking lately and still walked five miles a day, taking the long way to Southport Beach and back with Jack the golden retriever. His father had always walked and always had a golden.

Their mother had been sick for so many years, her death at age forty-five seemed like an inevitability—but he seemed like a guy who would never fade away. And certainly not without fanfare.

“The guy who couldn’t go to the post office without turning it into a piece for Esquire slips off this mortal coil without a word,” Tricia observed.

“I wish we’d had a chance for one more conversation,” Maggie said. It was the tritest of sentiments, but it was true. All the sisters fell silent, thinking about what that conversation might have been for each of them, had they known it was the last. For Liza, maybe her father would have issued an apology for taking out all his anger about Maeve’s illness on her.

For Maggie, a declaration of support for her work and her talent would have been the final words to carry her forward. For Tricia, a détente would have served the two of them well, allowing them both to be right for once, especially about their ongoing battles over the law versus social justice and the merits of baseball versus basketball. William Sweeney had been better in print than in person when it came to digging deep and baring his soul, usually through fictional characters. The sisters knew any imagined conversation would be more satisfying than the real thing.

“Do we know it was a heart attack?” Tricia preferred facts to speculation.

“The EMT said it looked to be a heart attack. Why?”

“I was thinking about his years of depression.”

“He was fine. He wouldn’t have hurt himself,” Liza said.

“You know that for sure?”

“Well, I’m not a psychiatrist,” Liza responded, annoyed by Tricia’s implication that, somehow, she had missed signs that her father was on a downward spiral.

“I know, I’m sorry. I had to ask.”

“I saw him two days ago and we talked about giving Julia some time off this summer so she could go home to Puerto Rico. He had made plans to drive up to the lodge place in Vermont where he’s gone for the last fifteen years. He had reservations in August.”