Around the inside of the front door was a clarion call from the old house’s distant past: a frieze of faded paint depicting a chain of pineapples. Pineapples. It caught him and let him go, then it caught him again, and held. Five above the door frame. Ten at least on either side, descending almost to the floor. They had been preserved in a strip of negative space, around which the rest of the wall had been repainted that Pepto-Bismol pink.
“Oh my god,” he said out loud.
“I know.” Sylvia was shaking her head. “So tacky. Betty wouldn’t let me paint over them. We had the biggest fight.”
“It’s a stencil,” said Betty. “I saw the same thing once at Sturbridge Village, just like this. Pineapples all around the door and up around the tops of the walls. It goes back to when the house was built, I’m positive.”
“We compromised. I had to leave a strip unpainted. It looks crazy.”
It did look crazy. It was also one of the only things left under this roof that might have deserved the word “restoration.” Had it been, in any sense, restored.
Sylvia said: “I’m going to touch it up, eventually. I mean, look at the colors. So faded! If we have to keep it at least I can overpaint them. Honestly, every time I look at my door I think, why would anybody put pineapples on their walls? This is Vermont, not Hawaii! Why not an apple or a blackberry? They actually grow here!”
“It means hospitality,” Jake heard himself say. He had not been able to look away from them, the faded chain of them, because he was reeling. All of those disparate pieces spun around him, refusing to land.
“What?”
“Hospitality. It’s a symbol. I don’t know why.”
He had read it somewhere. He knew exactly where.
For a long moment, none of them said a thing. What was there to say? And why hadn’t it occurred to him, way back in his office in Richard Peng Hall, that Parker’s first attempt at a novel would probably describe the people he’d known best, in the house they’d once shared? It was the biggest cliché of all that a writer’s first book was autobiographical:
The mistake, a product of his own arrogance, had cost him months.
This had never been about an appropriation, real or imaginary, between two writers. This had been a far more intimate theft: not Jake’s at all but one Evan Parker himself had committed. What Parker had stolen was something he must have seen up close and very personal: the mother and the daughter and what had happened between them, right here, in this house.
Of course she was angry. Not for one minute had she wanted her story to be told, not by her close relation and certainly not by a total stranger. That much, at long last, he finally understood.
Gab had parents: a mom who “struggled” and a dad who came and went. She had a sister with CF and a brother whose autism was so bad he sometimes had to be tied to his bed. She had, in other words, a home life so desperate and sad that even Maria’s domestic circumstances must have seemed like something out of a family sitcom. She was a year behind Maria, allergic to nuts and obliged to carry an EpiPen everywhere, dull as dishwater, and headed exactly nowhere.
Maria, at least, was marginally nicer to be around once Gab became a fixture. Samantha credited herself for being not a prude, not a religious freak like her own parents, and not a controlling asshole in general, so she tended to see the advent of her daughter’s relationship as having a positive impact on these final years. It had all passed so swiftly that sometimes, when she was first waking up in the morning, in her parents’ old bed, in her childhood home, she actually thought of herself as the person counting down the days to departure, and then she would encounter Maria and Gab at the kitchen table eating leftover pepperoni pizzas from the night before, and remember she was a nearly thirty-two-year-old mom about to say a permanent sayonara to the only child she was likely to have. Here and gone as if none of it had ever happened, and she was catapulting backward, ten years, thirteen years, sixteen years to this same kitchen table with her mother and her father and her own lost hopes, and the classroom where she had once vomited on her problem set, and the very clean room in the College Inn where Daniel Weybridge had promised her he couldn’t get her pregnant, not even if he wanted to.
