That’s when my dad chimed in and said, “Yeah, good job, Jere.”

All of a sudden, I wanted to cry. I didn’t want to beat Conrad ever again. It wasn’t worth it.

After all that stuff back at the house, I got in my car and I just started driving. I didn’t know where I was going and part of me didn’t even want to go back. Part of me wanted to leave Conrad to deal with this shitstorm by himself, the way he’d wanted it in the first place. Let Belly deal with him. Let them have at it. I drove for half an hour.

But even as I was doing it, I knew that, eventually, I would turn back around. I couldn’t just leave. That was Con’s style, not mine. And it was low, what I said about him not being there for our mom. It wasn’t like he knew she was gonna die. He was at college. It wasn’t his fault. But he wasn’t the one who was there when everything got bad again. It all happened so fast. He couldn’t have known. If he had known, he would have stayed home. I know he would have.

Our dad was never gonna win a Father of the Year award. He was flawed, that was for sure. But when it counted, there at the end, he came home. He said all the right things. He made our mom happy. Conrad just couldn’t see it. He didn’t want to.

I didn’t go back to the house right away.

First I stopped at the pizza place. It was dinnertime, and there wasn’t any food at the house. A kid I knew, Mikey, was working the register. I ordered a large pizza with everything, and then I asked him if Ron was out on a delivery. Mikey said yeah, that Ron would be back soon, that I should wait.

Ron lived in Cousins year-round. He went to community college during the day and he delivered pizzas at night. He was an okay guy. He’d been buying underage kids beer for as long as I could remember. If you gave him a twenty, he’d hook you up.

All I knew was, if this was gonna be our last night, we couldn’t go out like this.

When I got back to the house, Conrad was sitting on the front porch. I knew he was waiting for me; I knew he felt bad for what he’d said. I honked the horn, stuck my head out the window, and yelled, “Come help me with this stuff.”

He came down to the car, checked out the cases of beer and the bag of liquor, and said, “Ron?”

“Yup.” I hoisted up two cases of beer and handed them over. “We’re having a party.”

chapter twenty-seven

After the fight, after Mr. Fisher left, I went up to my room and stayed there. I didn’t want to be around when Jeremiah got back, in case he and Conrad went for a second round. Unlike Steven and me, those two hardly ever fought. In all the time I’d known them, I’d only seen them do it, like, three times. Jeremiah looked up to Conrad and Conrad looked out for Jeremiah. It was as simple as that.

I started looking around in the drawers and closet to see if there was anything of mine left there. My mom was pretty strict about us taking all our stuff every time we left, but you never knew. I figured I might as well make sure. Mr. Fisher would probably just tell the movers to throw all the junk out.

In the bottom of the desk drawer I found an old composition notebook from my Harriet the Spy days. It was colored in pink and green and yellow highlighter. I’d followed the boys around for days, taking notes in it until I drove Steven crazy and he told Mom on me.

I’d written:

June 28. Caught Jeremiah dancing in the mirror when he thought no one was watching. Too bad I was!

June 30. Conrad ate all the blue Popsicles again even though he’s not supposed to. But I didn’t tell.

July 1. Steven kicked me for no reason.

And on and on. I’d gotten sick of it by mid-July and quit. I had been such a little tagalong then. Eight-year-old me would have loved to have been included in this last adventure, would have loved the fact that I got to hang out with the boys while Steven had to stay at home.

I found a few other things, junk like a half-used pot of cherry lip gloss, a couple of dusty hair bands. On the shelf, there were my old Judy Blumes and then my V. C. Andrews books hidden behind them. I figured I’d just leave all that stuff behind.

The one thing I had to take was Junior Mint, my old stuffed polar bear, the one Conrad had won me that time at the boardwalk a million years ago. I couldn’t just let Junior Mint get thrown out like he was junk. He’d been special to me once upon a time.

I stayed upstairs for a while, just looking at my old stuff. I found one other thing worth keeping. A toy telescope. I remember the day my father bought it for me. It had been in one of the little antique stores along the boardwalk, and it was expensive but he said I should have it. There was a time when I was obsessed with stars and comets and constellations, and he thought I might grow up to be an astronomer. It turned out to be a phase, but it was fun while it lasted. I liked the way my father looked at me then, like I had taken after him, my father’s daughter.

He still looked at me that way sometimes—when I asked for Tabasco sauce at restaurants, when I turned the radio station to NPR without him having to ask. Tabasco sauce I liked, but NPR not as much. I did it because I knew it made him proud.

I was glad he was my dad and not Mr. Fisher. He never would have yelled or cussed at me, or gotten mad about spilled Kool-Aid. He wasn’t that kind of man. I’d never appreciated enough just what kind of man he was.

chapter twenty-eight

My father rarely came to the summer house, for a weekend in August maybe, but that was pretty much it. It never occurred to me to wonder why. There was this one weekend he and Mr. Fisher came up at the same time. As if they had so much in common, as if they were friends or something. They couldn’t be more different. Mr. Fisher liked to talk, talk, talk, and my dad only spoke if he had something to say. Mr. Fisher was always watching SportsCenter, while my dad rarely watched TV at all—and definitely not sports.

The parents were going to a fancy restaurant in Dyerstown. A band played there on Saturday nights and they had a little dance floor. It was strange to think of my parents dancing. I’d never seen them dance before, but I was sure Susannah and Mr. Fisher danced all the time. I’d seen them once, in the living room. I remembered how Conrad had blushed and turned away.

I was lying on my stomach, on Susannah’s bed, watching my mother and her get ready in the master bathroom.

Susannah had convinced my mother to wear a dress of hers; it was red and it had a deep V-neck. “What do you think, Beck?” my mother asked uncertainly. I could tell she felt funny about it. She usually wore pants.

“I think you look amazing. I think you should keep it. Red is so you, Laure.” Susannah was curling her lashes and opening her eyes wide in the mirror.

When they left, I would practice using the eyelash curler. My mother didn’t have one. I knew the contents of her makeup bag, one of those plastic green Clinique gift-with-purchase bags. It had a Burt’s Bees chapstick and an espresso eyeliner, a pink and green tube of Maybelline mascara, and a bottle of tinted sunscreen. Boring.

Susannah’s makeup case, though, was a treasure trove. It was a navy snakeskin case with a heavy gold clasp and her initials were engraved on it. Inside she had little eye pots and palettes and sable brushes and perfume samples. She never threw away anything. I liked to sort through it and organize everything in neat rows, according to color. Sometimes she gave me a lipstick or a sample eyeshadow, nothing too dark.