The Last Romantics. Tara Conklin

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       Chapter 5

      IT WAS AUTUMN 2004. An election year, long enough after 9/11 that we no longer spoke of it every day but close enough that the Manhattan skyline still looked broken. I had agreed to help Caroline clean out her new rental house in the small town of Hamden, Connecticut. I’d seen Caroline and her family infrequently since she and Nathan had left Bexley. In twelve years they’d moved four times, from one university town to the next in search of Nathan’s Ph.D. in biology and a permanent teaching position. The Skinner-Duffys now numbered five: Nathan, Caroline, ten-year-old Louis, and the twins, six-year-old Lily and Beatrix. Their most recent moves had been to cities where one of Nathan’s siblings lived—his brother Terry in Columbus, his sister Maddy in Austin. We’d assumed they’d settle there in Texas, the kids growing up with drawls and a fondness for BBQ, but last month Nathan had received a tenure-track offer from Hamden College, a cozy liberal-arts school located thirty minutes from Noni in Bexley and an hour’s train ride from me, Renee, and Joe in New York City.

      Caroline was finally coming home.

      “I’m happy to help with the move,” I told Caroline. “Whatever you need me to do.”

      “Oh, Fi, thank you,” said Caroline. We were on the phone, Caroline in Austin, me in my apartment in Queens that I shared with Jenji and Beth, two friends from Vassar and a third, Umani, we’d found on Craigslist. I was twenty-seven years old and worked as an editorial assistant at an environmental NGO called ClimateSenseNow! My job sounded good at dinner parties, but it required little more than correcting the maddening typos of my boss, Homer Goshen, Ph.D., and writing the occasional high-minded press release. Because of this, and because I was paid less per hour than an adolescent babysitter, I felt justified in taking regular sick days. Inexplicably, Homer allowed it. Hope that ankle heals up, he’d say over the phone, or That must be a nasty bug. A guilty pang always followed these calls, but rarely was it strong enough to make me go to work.

      “The Goats are useless,” Caroline continued. “No one can come, even for a few hours. They’re all so busy getting married or finishing their dissertations or whatever. Emily showed at New York Fashion Week, did Noni tell you?”

      Emily was Nathan’s second sister, a recent graduate of FIT, prone to wearing foodstuff as clothing.

      “She hasn’t mentioned it,” I said, although of course Noni had. “It’s hard to keep up with the achievements of those Duffys.” In the background I heard one of the twins singing a nonsense song and Louis calling, “Mom, where’s my oboe?”

      “I’m glad you’re moving back east, Caroline,” I said.

      “God, so am I.” There was a muffled pause as she spoke to Louis, and then she returned. “And, Fiona,” she said, “we need to talk about Joe.”

      “Sure.” I was hungover, eating potato chips out of the bag, and I paused to lick salt from my fingers. “Joe, sure,” I said, and then we spoke a bit longer about flight arrivals and train times, and then I hung up the phone.

      I didn’t think much about why Caroline had mentioned our brother. It was one week before Joe’s engagement party, and I assumed she wanted to discuss the wedding. He was set to marry Sandrine Cahill, a popcorn blonde who worked as an accessories buyer at Barneys. Sandrine grew up outside Chicago, the only child of an industrious midwestern family that presided over the manufacture of something ubiquitous but boring, like computer paper or parts of a car. Sandrine was not objectionable in any obvious way. She came from sensible money, and she worked hard to build on it, yet there was something ruthless in her pursuit of the good life. New York did that, I think, to some people. Sandrine wanted prestige and fancy things. She wanted recognition, and she wanted you to know exactly what she possessed: a front-row seat at Marc Jacobs, perfect abdominals, a position in the Junior League, a dinner reservation at Nobu. I couldn’t stand her, nor could Renee, but Caroline the eternal optimist insisted we were being unfair. Surprisingly, Noni tolerated her, too. I think our mother secretly admired Sandrine, even after the engagement fell apart, for her collection of achievements. I couldn’t help but feel Noni’s comparison and judgment: If only Fiona were such a go-getter! Think what she might accomplish.

      On Tuesday morning I took the train from Grand Central Station through the city bustle and vacant lots and gray, low urban sprawl, out past the suburbs proper, and into the wider expanses of green until we reached the small middle- and working-class towns like Danbury and Woodbury and Hamden.

      Caroline, in a red coat, waved at me from the platform. “You’re so skinny,” she said as we hugged, and it was neither a compliment nor a complaint. I’d lost another twenty pounds since she’d seen me last Christmas. It was now October.

      “Just wait until you see the house,” Caroline said. “It looks exactly like a castle. I think this will be it. Our forever home!” She winked. The forever home had been her black swan for years now. After the third move, from Mississippi to Ohio, Caroline began talking about the forever home the way first-graders talked about the tooth fairy. Could it possibly exist? Would she ever see it?

      We drove alongside the Metro-North train tracks and rows of beaten-down bungalows, through Hamden’s low-lying downtown, then past the green college quad and sports fields and into the residential neighborhood where professors lived in rambling old homes with poster boards of KERRY-EDWARDS ’04 perched on every lawn. Caroline accelerated and slowed as she squinted at house numbers. It was late morning, sunny and crisp, trees capped with bright orange leaves. Hamden reminded me so much of Bexley: the same splintery homes, pavement surging with tree roots, the same pumpkins with the same toothy faces. Along the sidewalk, a girl kicked sullenly at leaves, her body thick beneath a pink parka, her legs stout and round as logs. As we passed her in the car, I felt an ache not of nostalgia or grief but something in between the two.

      “Here it is,” Caroline said at last, and pulled in to a short, gravelly drive.

      The front yard of Caroline’s forever home was covered with damp, unraked leaves and flanked by a row of overgrown shrubs. A fallen tree branch long as the car. A side bed of brittle, brown daisies. A white plastic bag stuck on a bush that flapped in the breeze. Caroline’s eyes swept over the mess, but she didn’t comment on it, just tilted her head back to take stock.

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