Crudité platter (vegetables—dip—olives)

Cheese ball (cheeses, horseradish, nuts—crackers)

Crab dip (crackers)

Deviled eggs (garnish with extras—parsley, red peppers, olives?)

Sun-dried tomatoes and goat cheese on toast (recipe from Bon Appétit)

Cucumber rounds with smoked-trout salad

Mixed nuts (use Mexican bowls)

THE LIST IS WRITTEN IN THE ORDER THINGS ARE TO be made. Carol is working her way through a sink full of washed vegetables, cutting them up for the crudité platter. For now she is putting them in plastic bags. When the buffet is set up at five, she’ll arrange everything on plates. Two dozen eggs are heating up in a large pan of water, the cheeses have been taken out of the fridge so they can soften up for the cheese ball, and all the serving bowls, platters, and crackers are piled on the kitchen table.

The rhythmic but slightly varied nature of her task is soothing. Each vegetable begins in its natural state, then gets transformed to something more regular. Carrots, celery, and red peppers become neat multicolored planks. Zucchinis, cucumbers, and radishes turn into rounds. She bought yellow summer squash instead of green, even though it doesn’t taste as good, because yellow looks better with the other colors, especially the red of the radishes. She focuses on the visual effect as she cuts and stacks the pieces, ignoring the endless question throbbing in her head.

How could he do this to me—again?

The eggs begin to boil, and she steps quickly to the stove to turn the heat down, taking them to a lively simmer. She flips the egg timer stuck to the fridge, then goes back to her cutting board, checking the clock. It’s just after one. Will and Kit should be back from the airport any minute now. Trevor is safe in the basement, watching a video. Upstairs, Margaret is doing Leanne’s nails. There’s a lot to finish, but for now Carol is content to have the kitchen to herself. She doesn’t feel like chatting or listening to Margaret explain how to cut a carrot more evenly or describe a fancier way to garnish a cucumber round. She has her own routine.

How could he do it again?

She could throw parties in Hong Kong. She grapples a red pepper under her knife, slicing it across the equator, and allows a vision of life in Hong Kong to form in her head. She’s heard about it from other pilots’ wives. It’s crowded and busy. The harbor is lined with expensive hotels, shops, restaurants. Westerners live in apartment complexes in the hills above the harbor. Down in the city, there are shanties, street people, urchins eating soup from illegal pushcarts and making a living by snatching purses and jewelry from tourists. But pilots and their families live well. They have elegant apartments and hand-tailored clothes. They have drivers and cooks and nannies if they need them—servants come cheap.

“It’s only freight,” Will said, “and I haven’t even made up my mind yet.” But she could see from his face that he had made up his mind, that he would be taking the job and plotting the move to Hong Kong. And he would expect her, once again, to go along.

She has finished all the easy vegetables. Now she takes up her vegetable brush and starts scrubbing radishes. They seem especially dirty. She holds each one under the water and scrubs around the top, near the stem. The brush is made of brittle plastic, and it abrades her fingertips when she accidentally scrubs her own hand. Probably she should cut off the tops before scrubbing them, but she hates to do that. She can’t stand to open a vegetable until all the dirt has been removed from its exterior.

Twenty years ago, ten years ago, maybe even five years ago, she would have been overjoyed. She would have asked when she could pack. That’s what’s so frustrating. Why couldn’t he have planned something like this when it would have done them some good? Now it can only come as an interruption of her own plans. She suspects that might be the point. An attempt to foil her project, the first project that was going to come to fruition. Picking up a radish and attacking the ring of discoloration at its neck, Carol bites her lip. That’s the foundation of her anger. Will has devised this Cathay Pacific scheme to block her bed-and-breakfast.

But why? she asks herself, moving her radish from the sink to the cutting board and taking up the knife. It’s not as though there was going to be anything unpleasant about a bed-and-breakfast. It would give Will an excuse to putter around the farm and fix things up—the very thing he loves to do. Yet he has taken every possible excuse to stand in its way; and now, when it was actually going to take off, he has thrown up a giant barrier, stopping her dead in her tracks. It’s as if he hated her plan from the start.

“Damn!” The word is out of her mouth before she realizes what has happened. There’s a sharp feeling—not pain exactly, more of a shuddery recoil—in the tip of her thumb. Instinctively, she puts it in her mouth. On the cutting board, the tiny butt end of the radish rolls to a stop. The knife slipped off the end of it and into her own hand. She waits until the jittery feeling stops, then removes her thumb from her mouth to see how bad it is.

A little flap on the top gapes open. She bends her thumb back farther, and the cut opens more, the mouth of a stubby man getting ready to speak. Blood blooms up from the spongy inside and courses down in little rivulets. Carol puts the tip of her first finger on top of the flap, pushing it back into place. It throbs gently, and she can feel the beat of her heart in it, a tiny drumming.

“Damn,” she says again. She isn’t a swearer, but sometimes it helps. With her good hand, she runs water in the sink and moves the cutting board into it, washing off the splatter of blood. Then she rinses both hands under the stream, still holding the flap down with her index finger, and rubs them as best she can on the dish towel. The Band-Aids are in the bathroom.

Carol sits on the edge of the bathtub to wrap a large Band-Aid around her thumb, pinning the flap closed. It will slow her down. But at least it’s her left hand. She holds it up and moves the thumb around. Stiff but workable. She can deal with this. The party is in four hours. A minor injury is not going to stop her.

Still, she sits there for a moment, heavily. Why should Will hate her bed-and-breakfast? Why, for that matter, should she want it so much?

“There’s just no reason for it,” she says out loud. She stands up to go back to work. She glimpses a darkness in the mirror, her body moving past, but she looks away.

“You bite your nails.”

Margaret has Leanne’s hand in her own, inspecting it. Her voice is less scolding than surprised.

Leanne looks down at her own hand. “Yeah, it’s ugly,” she says.

“Have you tried one of those polish things that tastes bad?”

Leanne tightens the corners of her mouth. “Oh, I don’t know,” she says. “Those remind me of things you spray on carpets to keep dogs from peeing on them.”

“That would work, too.”

There’s a pause, and then Margaret smiles. It’s not going to be a lecture after all.

“Okay, what do you want to do with them?” Margaret has dropped Leanne’s hand and opened up their mother’s bathroom cabinet. She pulls a bottle of nail polish off the shelf and frowns at it. “God, when did she buy this, 1978?” She unscrews the top and pulls the brush part of the way out. “Ick. It’s completely gunked up.” She closes it with two fingers and tosses it in the garbage. It lands with a shrill metallic thunk. “So what are we doing?”

Leanne holds her hand up next to her face, so she can see the back of it in the mirror. Her hands, she notices, are darker than her face, which is pale. Her forehead seems almost preternaturally white. “I don’t know,” she says. “I really don’t care. Whatever you think would look good.” Her eyes wander from her face, down her neck, to where her T-shirt tightens over her breasts. People always tell her she has a good body. She never knows what she’s supposed to say to that. Sometimes she feels like a stranger in it.

Margaret stands next to her, surveying the cabinet. She’s shorter than Leanne, with larger hips and a clearly defined waist. She’s heavier but seems tighter and more compact. She might be considered pretty, except she always looks so intense. And her style of dressing always seems like a studied attempt to resist being seen as sexy: tailored pants, boxy jackets, understated jewelry. She sticks to a single style that suggests “elegant” and “unavailable” in the same breath. It’s hard to get past that to see anything as ephemeral as beauty in her. Because that’s sort of what beauty is, a lack of clear direction or shape. You can impose whatever you want on it.

“Well, you shouldn’t do anything bright to draw attention to your nails when they’re in that shape,” Margaret tells her. “Let’s just clean them up a bit and put on a nice matte pink.” She rifles through the cabinet, picking up bottles and examining them before putting them back with a decisive clack.

“You don’t have to do this,” Leanne says. “I can do it myself.”

“Yeah, I know,” Margaret answers, her face still in the cabinet. “But this is some kind of fantasy of Mom’s. A moment of sisterly bonding.” She rolls her eyes and holds up two bottles. “Which one do you like best?”

The colors look exactly the same to Leanne. She starts to say so, then stops herself and points to the one on the left. “That one,” she says.

Years ago their father installed a vanity in the master bathroom. Leanne sits on the small gold-painted stool, and Margaret perches on the edge of the vanity surface. She has found an emery board and starts filing Leanne’s nails. Her stroke is regular and brisk, like that of women in nail salons. Leanne had a professional manicure once, at a salon in New York. It had been her friend Julie’s idea for a fun Saturday outing. Leanne didn’t find it fun. She felt weird sitting there, frozen like all the other white girls, while dutiful Asian workers hunched over their hands.

“Do you think Mom and Dad will move to Hong Kong?” Leanne asks.

Margaret snorts, not lifting her gaze from Leanne’s hand. “Not in a million years.”

“Why not?” Leanne is a little surprised at her sister’s certainty, as well as at her scorn. Leanne was always her mother’s baby, but Margaret and Carol would scheme together. They were the ones pushing to remodel the living room, deciding which private school the girls should attend, complaining about the paltry selection at local stores. Margaret absorbed their mother’s dissatisfaction, and then she surpassed it.

“Dad might go,” Margaret says, “if he can. But Mom won’t. She’s really into this bed-and-breakfast thing.” Margaret says the words “bed-and-breakfast” reluctantly, as if they embarrass her.

“You think she’s really going to do it?” Leanne hands over her first hand again as Margaret reaches for the polish.

“I don’t know,” Margaret says, the conviction in her voice lessening. She leans over to get a closer look at one of the nails as she paints. “I’m not sure I even understand why she wants to. But she seems pretty intent on it. She’s already put an ad in the Chicago Tribune.”

Leanne considers this. It’s the first she’s heard of an ad. It’s not that surprising. What’s surprising is that their mother confided in Margaret. It’s Leanne she always used to share secrets with.

Margaret leans back, surveying the result so far. A small furrow of distaste creases her forehead, and she leans forward to correct something. Leanne has the feeling that they are having a moment of sisterly bonding, just as their mother intended. Probably, though, she didn’t mean for it to be about her.

Maybe I could tell Margaret, Leanne thinks. But tell her what? That she has lied to Kit? That she doesn’t want to go to Mexico? Except that wouldn’t quite be true. That she doesn’t really want to marry Kit, perhaps. Or doesn’t know if she does. Margaret wouldn’t understand that. Margaret has always known exactly what she wanted and proceeded methodically to get it. She’d never find herself in such a situation.

A still-unformed understanding of something is arriving in Leanne’s head. It’s like the moment when you’re waiting for the subway to arrive: everything is darkness until, faintly, a dim light appears in the tunnel. Slowly, it grows brighter, but there’s no sign of the train.

It’s not just that they’re different. Leanne and Margaret have never been particularly close. In grade school they played together, which meant Leanne agreed to do what Margaret wanted. When they got older, they grew even more different. They would do things together, but they never shared the kind of intimacy some sisters seemed to have. Margaret had more fun with Eddie, who was her age. Sometimes they let Leanne join them, but more often they told her she was a pain. That was where the nickname “Pester” came from. Occasionally, they were even meaner. Once they built a bike ramp out of a plank and cinder blocks. When it was Leanne’s turn to go over it, one of them moved the plank to the edge of the blocks so that when she went up it, the plank slipped off and she crashed. Neither of them would admit to doing it, but she could tell by how they laughed that they had intended to make her fall. She didn’t cry. She had learned very early that the best way to avoid more teasing was refusing to get upset.

Even when they fed her dog food, she didn’t let on that she was upset. It was a warm September Saturday sometime in junior high. They were watching the Michigan game when Margaret said she wanted a snack. Eddie and Margaret went into the kitchen, and Leanne could hear the blender. When she went in to see what they were making, ice cream and Hershey’s syrup were on the counter, and the two of them were holding jumbo plastic cups from 7-Eleven. Margaret was sucking the straw on hers, but the shake was thick, and her cheeks were caving in with the effort. As Leanne came in, Margaret gave up, pulled out her straw, and lifted the cup to her lips. When she took it away, a slash of chocolate was across her top lip. She smeared the back of her hand against it.

“What do you want?” she asked, and Leanne said, “Can I have one?”

Margaret was about to say something, but Eddie slipped down off the countertop where he had been sitting.

“I’ll make you a shake,” he said to Leanne. “Go watch the game. Call us if Michigan scores.” Margaret shrugged and looked bored, so Leanne went.

When the two of them came back into the TV room, Margaret handed Leanne a plastic cup, her eyes on the game.

“What’s going on?” Eddie asked, throwing himself into the armchair. Margaret went to the other end of the couch and curled up, feet tucked under. Leanne took the proffered cup and let the first gulp slide, shockingly cold, down her throat.

“How is it?” Eddie asked.

“Okay,” she said. The two of them shrieked with laughter.

“Oh my God, you ate dog food!” Margaret gasped, and Leanne’s throat constricted. I will not throw up, she told herself. I will not cry. She set the cup down on the coffee table. I will not take that to the kitchen, she thought. They can do that. And the cup sat there, sweating circles onto the table, through the afternoon, through Margaret and Eddie’s spontaneous bursts of laughter, through Michigan’s pathetic loss, until their mother came and said, “Time to go.” Then Margaret silently picked up the cup and carried it to the kitchen, and Leanne felt that something, no matter how small, had been won back.

“There,” Margaret says. She holds Leanne’s hand up in front of her, as if she’s incapable of lifting it herself. “What do you think? Do you want another coat?”

Leanne looks at her nails. They’re still stubby and gnawed at, but Margaret has smoothed the edges to a nice curve, and the pink gives them a finished quality.

“They look great. Thanks,” Leanne tells her.

“The thing is,” Margaret says, “Mom has always wanted to go somewhere else. But that was before. I’m not sure she wants that anymore. I think she wants something of her own.”

“Something of her own?”

“You know, like a business.”

“But she’s always said she wanted that,” Leanne says, waving her hands in the air to dry them, “and she’s never followed through on it.”

“Well,” Margaret says, “she got pretty close, with the children’s clothing store.” She stops suddenly, turning to put nail polish bottles back in the cabinet. There’s something too deliberate in the set of her shoulders.

Leanne looks down at her hand. “Dad didn’t give me my seed money, did he?” she says. “It was Mom’s. For her store.”

Margaret turns back, and from the honest misgiving on her face, Leanne can see that she didn’t make this revelation on purpose.

“You didn’t know that?” she says.

Leanne shakes her head. She doesn’t trust herself to speak. She crosses her arms in front of her.

“Watch out for your nails,” Margaret says, pointing.

Leanne extracts her hands gently and examines them for damage. “They’re okay,” she says.

They both stand there. They should turn and walk out, head downstairs to help out. But something unsaid hangs in the air. Leanne blows on her fingernails again, lightly, with pursed lips, so the thin stream of air tickles her fingers. She waits for Margaret to say something. She can feel Margaret waiting as well.

“Girls!” Their mother must be at the bottom of the stairs, yelling up. “I could use your help with the deviled eggs!”

“Eggs.” Margaret raises her eyebrows and the corners of her mouth in a mirthless grin, then sighs herself into motion. Leanne finds herself nodding, even though Margaret has said nothing that might require agreement. Margaret points at Leanne’s nails one more time before heading out the door.

“Don’t knock them against anything for two hours,” she says.

Someone must need Will somewhere. Party setup is in full swing, and he has already done the one job he was assigned: to deliver Kit’s mother, Bernice, from the Grand Rapids airport. She’s not quite what he expected. He had in mind a plump, gray-haired matron in a dress and jacket, perhaps sporting a hat or a hairnet—someone like David’s mother—but Bernice is nothing like that. For starters, she’s tall—not just tall but statuesque—and she has blond hair cut in a fashionable chin-length style. She wears a pantsuit with a large scarf draped across it, adding to the impression of height and giving her a vaguely bohemian aspect. Magnifying the effect is her attitude of uninhibited, uncomplicated warmth for everyone and everything around her. She behaves like a movie star turning on the charm for her fans.

“So Leanne tells me you’re a pilot,” she said to Will in the car. Kit was in the backseat. “And also of your attachment to your farm. I must say, I find that very humanizing.” Will was unsure how to respond. What did it mean to call someone humanized? Bernice has a distinct British accent. He’s sure Kit said his mother has lived in the States for over thirty years. That’s often true of English people. It’s as if they hang on to their accents on purpose. Will didn’t say much for the rest of drive, just nodded and gave short answers to her questions.

Now they’re home, and Bernice has met everyone and been shown to her room to “freshen up,” as Carol puts it. Kit has gone outside to deal with the birdcage. Will roams around downstairs, looking for something to do. He passes Leanne on her way to the dining room, a stack of table linens balanced on two flattened palms.

“What are you doing?” he asks.

“This is all they’ll let me do,” she says, moving past. She betrayed him this morning, and now she won’t answer a simple question. She’s holding out on him, they’re all holding out on him, angry about the Cathay Pacific revelation. He’s officially the villain now. He listens to her rustling in the dining room. It makes him feel helpless and somehow bereft. He puts a hand on his neck and rolls his head right and left, cracking it.

In the kitchen, Carol is peeling eggs and passing them to Margaret, who is slicing them in two and popping the yolks in a metal bowl. Both of them are frowning, intent on their tasks, and Will pauses in the doorway, surprised at how alike they look from behind.

“What can I do?” he asks. He senses a stiffening in Carol as he speaks. So she’s going to continue with the cold treatment. Her voice is level, the tone that offers him nothing.

“Probably you should just stay out of the way,” she says.

Margaret glances up. There’s something edgy in the way she’s moving—it’s been there since she arrived, but it’s clear she’s going to acknowledge nothing, at least not to him. Her eyes meet his briefly, her expression carefully blank, before she goes back to her task.

“So David’s not coming for the ceremony, either?” Will asks.

She looks up again, and this time there’s a flash of something, perhaps anger, perhaps fear. “He just couldn’t,” she says. “He’s completely swamped.”

Carol moves a step closer to Margaret. “I think we should use the large blue plate for these,” she says. “You finish the eggs. I’m going to get going on those garnishes.”

“We’ll have to make space in the fridge.” Margaret turns away to look at the fridge, and Will fears he’s overstepped the line and made her cry. He stands there, unsure whether to retreat or try to contain the damage.

“You know what you could do, Dad,” Margaret says, turning around. She is not crying. She looks as composed and determined as ever. “You could go help Kit paint the other birdcage. It’s sitting out in the garage.”

“Oh yes, get it, please,” Carol adds. “Help him take it out to the barn, so he doesn’t get paint all over everything.”

“He already went to the barn with it,” Margaret tells her. “I saw him heading out there about an hour ago.”

“Oh.” The two of them pause, coming to an agreement without language. Will feels stupid as he waits. A transaction has occurred, but he has missed its import. Clearly, they’re casting about for reasons to dismiss him, but he can’t point that out because both of them would feign innocence and ask him what on earth he could mean. He would then be accused of bothering them with silly distractions and making trouble when there was work to do.

“Why don’t you go entertain Trevor for a little while?” Carol says. “He’s in the basement, right?” She looks quickly at Margaret.

“Is he? I didn’t take him down there.” Margaret stops what she’s doing. “I thought he was upstairs.” She wipes her hands hastily on a dish towel. “I’ll go and check on him.” She hurries out of the room.

It’s Trevor. Whatever is bothering her has something to do with Trevor.

“I’m sure he’s just playing somewhere,” Carol says, more to herself than to Will. She glances up at him and sighs, obviously finding it harder to ignore him with Margaret gone.

“How long are you going to be mad at me?” he asks. Immediately, he regrets saying it. She’ll take it as provocation and be even madder.

To his surprise, she merely presses her lips into a thin line.

“I’m not …” She shakes her head. “I don’t know what to say.”

“I kept meaning to tell you about the job. But I wasn’t sure it would come through. I thought it would be a nice surprise.” Even he can hear the false edge in his voice. He kept his secret because he was afraid of her anger; both of them know that. He lifts his hands in a helpless gesture. “I don’t have to take it,” he says.

Carol leans back against the counter. “Yes, you do,” she says. “You do and you will.” Her voice has some of its angry edge back, but its dominant note is resignation.

“It would be fun,” he says, sensing an opening and unable to resist aiming for it. “You’ve always wanted to live abroad.” He wants this. He’s surprised at the strength of his desire.

“It would have been fun,” she says. “It would have.” He can’t tell if she’s giving him something or taking something away. She turns away from him and starts fussing with a bowl of radishes, taking them out one at a time and examining them. Will sees that her thumb is bandaged.

“What’d you do to your thumb?” he asks.

Carol moves it slightly, pulling it toward herself as if embarrassed by it. “It’s just a little cut,” she says. He can hear the barrier dropping down in her voice, like a garage door closing on the day. Conversation over. He’s discharged, whether honorably or dishonorably, he can’t tell.

“I guess I’ll go help Kit with that cage,” he says. “Like you wanted.” He stands there for a moment, watching his wife’s back. It offers him nothing.