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walked out on them, Josh and Kathryn had spent a lot of time together. They stayed close to home, ostensibly reading and watching TV, but really keeping an eye on their mother as she tried to piece together a life for the three of them after the divorce. But eventually the strain of that became too much. “I’m sick of worrying about her,” Josh told Kathryn. “I can’t live this way.” He became methodical and disciplined; he started going to the library to do his homework after school and, though not a natural athlete, threw himself into sports. Kathryn felt the same, but her anxiety manifested itself differently. She spent hours at Jennifer’s house, began smoking pot, went to keg parties down nameless dirt roads when her mother thought she was spending the night with a friend—anything to avoid coming home to that quiet house soaked in their mother’s sadness.
The difference in ages between Kathryn and Josh was like dog years in high school; the three grades that separated them might as well have been decades. When Kathryn left home, the divide only widened. Josh grew more conservative as he got older, joining the Young Republicansin college and eventually becoming president of the club. Meanwhile, Kathryn was living in a group house in Washington, D.C., subsisting on tofu stir-frys and working for one left-wing cause after another. When Josh moved to New York and became a mortgage broker and she returned to Charlottesville for graduate school in English, the distance between them seemed too great to bridge.
It had been years now since one of them picked up the phone to call the other without a birthday or national holiday as an excuse. Kathryn didn’t even tell Josh about her divorce—she knew her mother would do it, and she wasn’t in the mood to explain her personal life to this brother she hardly knew anymore. She was sure that Josh—who dated only model types and lived in a modern high-rise on the Upper East Side and once said he found what he called her “starving artist shtick” utterly incomprehensible—would be less than understanding about what she was going through. But one night about a month ago she came home to a phone message from him that caught her by surprise. “I just heard,” he said. “I’m sorry. I may not be there, but I’m here for you. I mean that.” They played phone tag for a while and that was the end of it, but it was nice to know that he cared enough to call.
Kathryn straightens a picture on the wall—a cheaply framed photo of the Bangor High basketball team, with Josh’s head half obscured by somebody taller—and leaves the room, pulling the door shut behind her. Then she makes her way downstairs to the kitchen, where she pours herself a cup of coffee from the Thermos her mother has filled. Sitting at the round breakfast table, she leafs through the Bangor Daily News. The paper is a microcosm of the town: old-fashioned Yankee conservatism, homegrown rural pragmatism, liberal intellectualism (reflecting the influence of the state university in Orono, ten miles up the road), and a dash of hippie utopianism, which dwindled in the eighties but now seems stronger than ever, under the guise of New Age. Thumbing through the pages, Kathryn notices that the paper has jazzed up its headings, adding computer graphics and color, changing the Women’s Page to a more inclusive Style section.
“Good morning,” her mother says cheerfully. She’s come in from the back wearing thick gardening gloves, a dirty apron, and an acid-green visor.
“You’re out there early.” Kathryn closes the paper.
“It’s not so early anymore,” she says, glancing at the clock. “But I’ve been in the garden off and on since six-thirty. It’s age.” Kathryn grins. “You’re not that old.”
“I think it has something to do with menopause. I get up earlier every year.” Her mother peels off her gloves and takes off the visor, then fluffs her hair. “Whoo. It’s really warming up.” She