Ann Patchett - Commonwealth

Her father hadn’t read Commonwealth but her sister had.

“There’s nothing particularly libelous about it,” Caroline said to Franny. “He’s covered his tracks.”

“I’m grateful that you don’t review for the Times .”

“I’ll put it another way: I didn’t enjoy it but I’m not going to sue him.”

“You’re hardly even in the book.”

Caroline laughed. “Maybe that’s what irritated me about it. Anyway, if I was going to sue I’d make it a class-action case, get the whole family involved.”

“Well,” Franny said, “that would be one way to get us all together again.”

It was funny how much Franny missed Caroline now. For as much as they’d hated each other growing up, a peculiar fondness had crept in somewhere along the way. Franny and Caroline knew all the same stories. Caroline practiced patent law in Silicon Valley. There was nothing harder than that. She was married to a software designer named Wharton. Wharton was his last name but no one ever called him anything else because his first name was Eugene. Franny believed that Wharton had softened her sister up. He made Caroline laugh. Franny had no memory of her sister ever laughing about anything when they were growing up, at least never in front of her. Caroline and Wharton had a baby named Nick.

Franny got to spend a lot of time with Caroline the semester Leo was teaching at Stanford. Caroline still badgered her about going back to law school, and Franny was able to believe that the badgering came from a place of affection.

“Believe me,” Caroline said, “I know school is miserable. I even know that practicing law can be miserable. But sooner or later you have to do something . If you think you’re going to find one thing that will be perfect for you, you’re going to spend your eightieth birthday reading the want ads.”

“You sound like you’re trying to talk me into a bad marriage.”

“But it doesn’t have to be a bad marriage. Why can’t you see that? Get a law degree and go fight housing discrimination, or go get a job for a publisher and write book contracts for authors.”

Franny smiled and shook her head. “I’ll figure it out,” was what she had said to her sister.

But she hadn’t figured it out, and now she was in Amagansett walking through town in order to avoid the man she loved and his friends. Franny looked in shop windows, and when she saw a newspaper on a bench she sat down and read the entire thing. The light was so soft, so honeyed, that she could almost forgive her houseguests for wanting to stay. She waited until she was sure it was too late for anyone to ask her to make them lunch. She passed the restaurant she and Leo liked, hoping that by some chance she would see him there. Finally she decided to go back. There was nothing else to do. She had planned to sneak up to the bedroom undetected, but they saw her from the side porch and waved.

“Franny, what a day we’ve had without you!” Leo said, as if there had been nothing strange about her leaving or her return.

Astrid, back from Sag Harbor, nodded. “I had to bring the sandwiches for lunch. There’s still some sorbet.”

“And Eric and I went into town and bought things for dinner,” Marisol said.

“Someone’s still going to have to go back into town,” Eric said. “We didn’t get enough.”

Franny looked at them up on the porch, everyone softened by the veil of the screen, by the light that was slanting in behind them, by the bank of yellow lilies that separated them from her. It was not unlike seeing tigers at the zoo.

“Hollinger called,” Leo said. “He’s driving in from the city with Ellen. They should be here in an hour or so.”

“Hollinger?” Astrid said. “You didn’t tell me that. How did he know where you were?” John Hollinger was not Astrid’s client. His novel The Seventh Story had beaten out Commonwealth for the Pulitzer, and both men made a great show of how this fact had not affected their friendship, even though they hadn’t exactly been friends in the first place.

Marisol gave a single, dismissive wave. “It won’t be an hour. He’s always late.”

There was a time when Franny would have been overwhelmed by the thought of John Hollinger coming for dinner, but that time had passed. Now he and his wife represented nothing more than two extra place settings at the table. This brought them up to eight, assuming that Jonas and Astrid would never leave.

“What about you?” Eric said, glancing down at Franny as if finally remembering she’d been gone. “Nice day?”

Franny shaded her eyes with her hand and looked up at him, puzzled. “Sure,” she said. That was all they needed to release her from the conversation.

There were six cardboard boxes on the long wooden table in the kitchen, a half a dozen ears of corn still in their green sleeves. She heard the sound of scratching, and then one of the boxes jerked abruptly forward.

Leo came into the kitchen and stood behind her. “I’m sorry about Hollinger,” he said, kissing the side of her head. “He wasn’t asking. He called to announce his impending arrival. We should have rented a motel room in the middle of Kansas for the summer.”

“They would have found us.”

“I spent the day hiding in the cabin so that everyone would think I was writing a novel. Where did you go?”

“What’s in the boxes?” Franny said, though of course she knew exactly what was in the boxes.

“Marisol thought it would be fun to have lobster.”

Franny turned and looked at him. “She said she was a vegetarian. Does she know how to cook them?”

“I don’t think it’s a science. You just drop them in water. Listen,” he said, putting his hands on her shoulders and looking at her straight on in a way that made him appear very brave. “I have to tell you this and I’d rather not: Ariel is coming out for a couple of days.”

Many things were possible but Franny and Ariel in the same house was not one of them. For Ariel’s sake Franny stayed out of the entire neighborhood surrounding Gramercy Park when she went to New York. It was the single way they respected one another: they did not overlap. “She wouldn’t come out when she knows I’m here,” Franny said. “I answered the phone.”

“I think she really just wants to see the house. I made the mistake of telling her about it months ago. I didn’t think we were going to rent it then. She said she needs a vacation.”

Franny was distracted by the scratching. The boxes, she could see now, were shuffling across the table in microscopic increments. The thought of each separate lobster in the dark was every bit as excruciating as the thought of Ariel Posen coming to Amagansett, either that or she was experiencing some sort of emotional transference. Leo followed her gaze to the table.

“I should have been a pair of ragged claws,” he said, looking at the sad containers trying to get away. “Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.”

“Leo, she hates me. That’s been made clear.”

Leo mustered the energy for a wan smile. “Well, maybe this is the summer she stops hating you and we all get along. It’s got to happen sooner or later.”

“When?” Franny asked. Not When will she stop hating me? — Franny knew the answer to that one — but When is she coming?

He sighed and pulled her to him, the wide, warm chest of literature. “She didn’t know. Probably tomorrow, possibly Tuesday. She said if she got everything together she could come out tonight, but I don’t think we need to worry about tonight.”

“Is she bringing Button?” Button was Ariel’s daughter, the four-year-old granddaughter of Leo Posen, the only grandchild.