Bittersweet Read Free Page B

up.
    “What happened?” I asked, when she’d finally calmed.
    For a moment it seemed as if she might start sobbing again. Instead, she fished out another cigarette and lit it. “My cousin,” she said, as if that told the whole thing.
    “What’s your cousin’s name?” I didn’t think I could stand not to know what was breaking Ev’s heart.
    “Jackson,” she whispered, the corners of her mouth turning down. “He’s a soldier. Was,” she corrected herself, and her tears spilled all over again.
    “He was killed?”
    She shook her head. “He came back last summer. I mean, he wasacting a little strange and everything, but I didn’t think …” And then she cried. She cried so hard that I slipped off my parka and jeans and got in bed beside her and held her quaking body.
    “He shot himself. In the mouth. Last week,” she said finally, what seemed like hours later, when we were lying beside each other under her four-ply red cashmere throw, staring up at the cracked ceiling as if this was what we did all the time. It was a relief to finally hear what had happened; I had started to wonder if this cousin hadn’t walked into a post office and shot everyone up.
    “Last week?” I asked.
    She turned to me, touching our foreheads. “Mum didn’t tell me until last night. After the reception.” Her nose and eyes began to pinken in anticipation of another round of tears. “She didn’t want me to get upset and ‘ruin things.’ ”
    “Oh, Ev,” I sympathized, filling with forgiveness. That was why she had snapped at me after the party—she was grief-stricken.
    “What was Jackson like?” I pushed, and she began to weep again. It was so strange and lovely to be lying next to her, feeling her flaxen hair against my cheek, watching the great globes of sorrow trail down her smooth face. I didn’t want it to end. I knew that to stop speaking would be to lose her again.
    “He was a good guy, you know? Like, last summer? One of his mom’s dogs, Flip, was running on the gravel road and this asshole repair guy came around the curve at, like, fifty miles an hour and hit the dog and it made this awful sound”—she shuddered—“and Jackson just walked right over there and picked Flip up in his arms—I mean, everyone else was screaming and crying, it, like, happened in front of all the little kids—and he carried her over to the grass and rubbed her ears.” She closed her eyes again. “And afterward, he put a blanket over her.”
    I looked at the picture of the gathered Winslows above my desk, although it was as silly an enterprise as opening the menu of a dineryou’ve been going to your whole life; I knew every blond head, every slim calf, as though her family was my own. “This was at your summer place, right?”
    She pronounced the name as if for the first time. “Winloch.”
    I could feel her eyes examining the side of my face. What she said next, she said carefully. Even though my heart skipped a beat, I measured my expectations, telling myself that was the last I’d hear of it:
    “You should come.”



CHAPTER FOUR
The Call
    “D o they know we’re coming?” I asked as Ev handed me the rest of the Kit Kat bar I’d bought in the dining car. The train had long since whistled twice and headed farther north, leaving us with empty track and each other.
    “Naturally.” Ev sniffed with a trace of doubt as she settled, again, on top of her suitcase under the overhang of the stationmaster’s office. She regarded my orange copy of
Paradise Lost
disdainfully, then checked her cell phone for the twentieth time, cursing the lack of service. “And now we’ll only have six days before the inspection.”
    “Inspection?”
    “Of the cottage.”
    “Who’s inspecting it?”
    I could tell from the way she blinked straight ahead that my questions were an annoyance. “Daddy, of course.”
    I tried to make my voice as benign as possible. “You sound concerned.”
    “Well of course I’m concerned,” she