By the time they turned into the driveway of their new house, it was already late in the day. A band of children was playing kickball in the street, and when Sally got out of the car she waved and the children waved back, each and every one of them. A robin was on the front lawn, pulling at the grass and the weeds, and all up and down the street, lights were being turned on and tables were set for dinner. The scent of pot roast and chicken paprikash and lasagna drifted through the mild air. Sally’s girls had both fallen asleep in the backseat, their faces streaked with dirt and tears. Sally had bought them ice cream cones and lollipops; she’d told stories for hours and stopped at two toy stores. Still, it would take years before they forgave her. They laughed at the little white fence Sally put up at the edge of their lawn. Antonia asked to paint her bedroom walls black and Kylie begged for a black kittycat. Both of these wishes were denied. Antonia’s room was painted yellow, and Kylie was given a goldfish named Sunshine, but that didn’t mean the girls had forgotten where they came from or that they didn’t long for it still.
Every summer, in August, they would visit the aunts. They would draw in their breath as soon as they turned the corner onto Magnolia and could spy the big old house with its black fence and green-tinted windows. The aunts always made a tipsy chocolate cake and gave Antonia and Kylie far too many presents. There were no bedtimes, of course, and no well-balanced meals. No rules were put forth about drawing on the wallpaper or filling the bathtub so high that bubbles and tepid water sloshed over the sides and dripped down through the ceiling of the parlor. Every year the girls were taller when they arrived for their visit—they knew this because the aunts were seeming smaller all the time—and every year they went wild: they danced through the herb garden and played softball on the front lawn and stayed up past midnight. Sometimes they ate nothing but Snickers and Milky Ways for nearly the whole week, until their stomachs began to ache and they finally called for a salad or a glass of milk.
During their August vacations, Sally insisted on getting the girls out of the house, at least in the afternoons. She took them on day trips, to the beach at Plum Island, to the swan boats in Boston, out into the blue bay in Gloucester on rented sailboats. But the girls always begged to return to the aunts’ house. They pouted and made Sally’s life miserable, until she gave in. It wasn’t the girls’ bad temper that convinced Sally to turn back for the house, it was that they were united in something. This was so unusual and so delightful to see that Sally just couldn’t say no.
Sally had expected Antonia to be a big sister in the same manner she herself had been, but that wasn’t Antonia’s style. Antonia felt no responsibility to anyone; she was nobody’s caretaker. From the very start she would tease Kylie without mercy and could bring her little sister to tears with a glance. It was only at the aunts’ house that the girls became allies, perhaps even friends. Here, where everything was worn and frayed, except for the shining woodwork, the girls spent hours together. They collected lavender and had picnics in the shade of the garden. They sat in the cool parlor late in the day, or sprawled out on the second-floor landing where there were thin bands of lemony sunlight, playing Parcheesi and endless rounds of gin rummy.
Their closeness may have been the result of sharing the attic bedroom, or only because the girls had no choice of playmates, since the children in town still crossed over to the other side of the street when they passed the Owens house. Whatever the reason, it brought Sally great joy to see the girls at the kitchen table, heads bent near enough to touch as they worked a puzzle or made a card to send off to Gillian at her new address in Iowa or New Mexico. Soon enough, they’d be at each other’s throats, arguing over petty privileges or some nasty trick of Antonia’s—a daddy longlegs left under Kylie’s baby blanket, which she continued to be attached to at the age of eleven and even at twelve, or dirt and stones slipped into the bottom of her boots. And so Sally allowed the girls to do as they wished, for that one week in August, even though she knew, in the end, it was not to their benefit.
Each year, as their vacation wore on, the girls always slept later and later in the day; black circles appeared around their eyes. They began to complain about the heat, which made them too tired to even walk to the drugstore for ice cream sundaes and cold bottles of Coke, though they found the old woman who worked there fascinating, since she never said a word and could make a banana split in seconds flat, peeling the banana and pouring out the syrups and marshmallow whip before you could blink your eyes. After a while, Kylie and Antonia were spending most of their time in the garden, where belladonna and digitalis have always grown beside the peppermint, and the cats the aunts love so dearly—including two ratty creatures from Sally’s childhood, Magpie and Raven, who have simply refused to die—still dig in the rubbish heap for fish heads and bones.