Джули Салливан - Friends and Strangers

“It’s overwhelming if I think about it too much,” Gwen said. “Stephanie added me to that Facebook group for moms who live in town. She’s sort of the queen of the whole thing. It’s deeply annoying. I had to mute it.”

Elisabeth looked at Nomi. “I didn’t know there was a Facebook group for moms here,” she said.

She had been so consumed with BK Mamas that she hadn’t even thought to look.

Gwen turned to Nomi. “Sorry. My life isn’t usually this much of a soap opera. I must sound crazy to you.”

Nomi smiled. “No,” she said. “You sound like one of us.”

—

Two weeks later, Elisabeth and Andrew went to Faye and George’s.

Faye made pot roast. The four of them sat at the table longer than usual, talking and eating.

It would be their last dinner together in this house. Faye and George were moving in a few days, to a two-bedroom condo in town. It was a small miracle that they found a buyer. They hadn’t gotten much for the place, but they were out from under.

Faye said it was a relief, mostly. Though she would miss the garden she had planted out back; and the signs of a younger Andrew that she still saw everywhere—the old treehouse, the pencil notches on the basement door frame, denoting his height over the years.

All around them were cardboard boxes, full or half full, labeled in black marker: KITCHEN GADGETS, G’S TOOLS, A’S YEARBOOKS. Gil wandered from one open box to another, removing items, before he settled on a metal potato masher, which he then banged against the linoleum floor for ten minutes.

When the plates had been cleared, George excused himself and slipped into his office to do some packing.

“He’s not packing,” Faye said. “He’s working. He’s still at it. He and the guys from his discussion group are planning yet another protest. Ever since that article in the Gazette about them, people are calling and asking for their help.”

Faye shook her head. “I’m proud of him. But don’t tell him I said so.”

Elisabeth got up to use the bathroom in the hall. When she came out, instead of turning left to go back to the kitchen, she went right and knocked at George’s office door.

“Come in!” he called.

He grinned when he saw her there. “Lizzy,” he said, “to what do I owe the pleasure?”

“I want to apologize,” she said.

“For what?”

“I made a huge mistake when I gave that money to my sister. If it hadn’t been for that, we’d have it to offer you, to save this house. Now it’s too late. I’m so sorry.”

George shook his head. “We never would have taken it.”

“Aren’t you going to miss this place?”

“Yes,” he said. “But everyone I’ve spent time with here, everyone I love, is still with me. So who cares about a house?”

It occurred to Elisabeth then that she had spent so much time worrying about the dark legacy of her own family that she hadn’t considered that this too would be Gil’s inheritance. Good men like George and Andrew. She hoped he would turn out like them.

“Have you heard from Sam at all since she left?” Elisabeth asked, trying to sound noncommittal; just making conversation.

George shook his head.

She felt relieved.

“Did you two make up?” George said.

“Not yet.”

“You should. She’s a great girl.”

“She is.”

“And so are you,” he said. “That goes without saying.”

Elisabeth smiled. “Thanks. Faye mentioned that all these people are coming to you for guidance after that article in the Gazette, ” she said. “I’m proud of you, George.”

The part of her fight with Sam that played over and over in her mind was what she’d said about Clive having no money.

He doesn’t have two pennies to rub together.

You don’t know anything yet.

It shocked Elisabeth, how much she sounded like her parents then. The meddling was like them too. So certain that she knew best. Sam had recognized this. How could it be that Elisabeth had made it her mission in life not to become them, and yet somehow, still, she’d done just that.

The hardest lessons were the ones you had to learn over and over again. So again, she was going to try. She’d deactivated her membership to BK Mamas, then deleted her Facebook account altogether. She had no idea whether Sam had taken the job in Brooklyn, or gone to London to be with Clive, and no intention of finding out. Best to seal off this past year in her mind and move forward.

Sam had often spoken of her summer abroad. A time out of time, in between, when she became some other version of herself. Elisabeth had started to think of the months they spent together in this same way. There was no other year of life when the two of them could have grown so close, or fallen out so spectacularly. Secrets that ought to remain hers alone would move about the world inside of Sam now too. Sam had the power to tell them, or not.

Elisabeth glanced at a stack of library books on George’s desk: Workers’ Rights as Human Rights; Labor’s Untold Story; Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America.

Another thing Sam had been right about. Elisabeth and Andrew didn’t dismiss the Hollow Tree because it was silly and obvious, as they always said, but because it implicated them. They had been blind to something. They’d chosen to be blind.

What would you give anything to stop thinking about? her agent had said.

Her shame and anxiety about her family’s wealth made her never want to discuss it, as if by not mentioning money, she could make all the complexity go away. The same could be said of the conveniences they relied upon to get through a day, a week, a year.

That was why she’d never asked him to elaborate. Because it might be too painful.

Elisabeth put her hand on top of the books.

“George,” she said. “Tell me.”

—

They stayed late that night.

They took photos in Andrew’s childhood bedroom. He showed Gil where he’d carved a shamrock into the floor of his closet, and where he used to stand and sink baskets on the hoop attached to the back of the door.

His parents’ voices drifted up from downstairs. Elisabeth thought of what it must have been like to be a little boy alone here, listening.

A pang of remorse shot through her.

Eventually, Gil rubbed his eyes, and Andrew picked him up, carried him over to the window. They rocked back and forth, the baby’s head on his shoulder.

“That’s the Big Dipper,” Andrew whispered. “The really bright one is Venus. And I think that one over there is the one I paid to have named after my girlfriend freshman year of high school. Got a certificate and everything.”

Elisabeth sometimes wondered if she belonged in her own life, a strange sensation. She still didn’t think she was very good at it. But she cherished the little family she had made beyond reason. For years to come, she would remember this sight: her Gil and her Andrew, staring out at a sky full of stars.

EPILOGUE 2025

IT WAS ISABELLA WHO INSISTED they go to their tenth reunion. Neither of them had attended the fifth, feeling that five years were too few for anything significant to have happened to anyone.

But ten years felt impossible. How could so much time have passed so quickly?

“Do you think everyone will be married with children?” Sam said on the phone.

“Only the tragically boring people,” said Isabella, who was herself married with two boys under three.

“Will you bring Steve and the kids?”

“No way. This is for us.”

“We could go somewhere on our own,” Sam said.

They did this once a year, met up in Jamaica or San Francisco or Maine for three or four nights. Years had passed since they spoke often. In their first jobs, they exchanged several emails a day, paragraphs long, about how busy they were. Now they were too busy to do anything like that. But when they saw each other in person, they clicked right back into place and talked nonstop until it was time to part ways, making up for all the lost conversations they should have had.