Page 26 of The Favorite Sister

“I’ll come out Sunday.” Yvette’s voice is barbed. “So I’m not in your way.” She reaches for the grocery bags with an impish smile. “Would you like me to unpack these for you as well, dear?”

Jen slaps a hand around her mother’s wrist, stopping her. “How much do I owe you?”

“One thirty. It would have been ninety if you’d let me go to Gristedes but...” Yvette lets that hang, stepping over the dog gate and joining us in the sitting area. “Did I interrupt the powwow?” she asks, reaching for a vegan cracker. She takes a small, tentative bite and criesOh!as the whole thing crumbles in her hand.

“We were just talking about this year’s trip, Miss Greenberg,” Lauren says, politely, hoping that this time she will be invited to call her Yvette,dear, please.

“I’m sorry to hear Morocco isn’t going to work out,” Yvette says, and Lauren dims, ever so slightly.

“It’s not like Brett can’t go just because we can’t go,” Jen says, reappearing to shove a fist of cash into her mother’s pocket. “She wouldn’t even have to go alone,” she adds, her voice pitching with the risibility of it all. “She’s got her sister and her niece to ride her coattails.”

Yvette shakes her head, clearly disapproving of Jen’s tone. “I think you should give Brett a chance. She’s got a lot to celebrate this season and I know it hurts her not to be able to share that with her friends.”

“No more than any of us!” Jen spits.

“Well...” Yvette presses her lips together, pained. “Maybe. I don’t know.” She fans her hand in front of her face, still sweating. “It’s not my place to say.”

We all look at each other, thrumming with curiosity. What is not Yvette’s place to say? But we can’t bring ourselves to ask. Asking implies that we care. Instinctively, I check my nails.

Yvette rests an elbow on the back of the couch. “Did you girls meet Brett’s sister yet?”

“Kelly was at the prod meeting,” Lauren says. She notices with a delighted little start that my wineglass is empty. Before she can get up to grab the wine bottle in the kitchen, Jen is behind me, topping me off.

“Do you think she will make a nice addition to the group?” Yvette asks.

“She’s a mom,” Lauren says, in lieu ofno.

“I’m a mom,” Yvette says. “So don’t let Jesse tell you it’s unfeminist to have children. You’re all about that age where you need to start thinking about what you want to do.”

There is a chorus of soft lies about our ages: thirty, twenty-nine, thirty-two and a half.

Yvette sighs, pinching the fabric beneath her arms and shaking it, trying to air it dry. “In any case. I hope you will be welcoming to this new woman. I know you think it’s more interesting when you give each other a hard time, but I promise you are all interesting enough on your own.”

Jen throws her head back and squeezes her eyes shut in blinding exasperation, and I can’t say I blame her. Yvette likes to act like she left the show on principle, when what really happened is that she threatened to walk if they didn’t give her more money, and Jesse called her bluff. I don’t know why Yvette pretends like this didn’t happen. Here she is, the ne plus ultra figure of gender equality, and she would rather the world knows she values her integrity over her wallet. Integrity is just the rock you hit your head on when you lose your fingerhold on power. The last thing the world needs is one more woman with principles. What we need is women with money. Women with money have flexibility, and nothing is more dangerous than a woman who can bend any way she wants.

Jen groans. “We welcomed her, Yvette.”

Yvette turns to face Jen. “So you wrote her back?”

The question gives me whiplash. “Wrote who back?”

Yvette replies, over Jen’s protestations that she not, “Brett’s sisterreached out to Jen and asked her to tea. She told her that she admires the way she’sscaled her product”—Yvette throws a look to her daughter—“did I say that right, dear?”

Jen rolls her eyes, but she nods.

“You’re not going, are you?” I set my wine on the table. I had been enjoying the taste up until now.

“Why wouldn’t she go?” Yvette asks me, in the gentle, infuriating tone of a therapist prodding you to reexamine a preconceived notion that is patently false.

I squeeze my shoulder blades tighter together. Thehypocrisyof this woman. “Because,” I say, very slowly, as though Yvetteisan invalid who may have trouble following, “Jen and Brett don’t get along, and it would probably be very hurtful to Brett if Jen went out of her way to befriend her sister.”

Yvette’s posture improves as well. Appallingly, she says, “I very much doubt it. With the contributions Brett strives to make in this world, she doesn’t have the bandwidth for such petty grievances.”

Lauren pops a cracker in her mouth, watching the two of us anime-eyed.

“I told her I couldn’t go,” Jen says, slamming a cabinet door shut in the kitchen, startling us out of our standoff.

Yvette gives me a smile that says she hopes I’m happy (oh, I am), before rolling back the sleeve of her linen button-down. Jen has inherited her mother’s love of linen. “Ah!” she exclaims. “I’ve got to get going if I want to make the twelve-thirty class.” She heads to the door and plops down on the cane-backed settee while she stuffs her feet into her shoes.

“Be nice, girls.” She stands, pressing her palms together, like it will require divine intervention for such a miracle to happen. “The whole world is watching.”

Yvette really took the air out of our sails, and so we disband not long after she leaves. It’s three quarters of a mile to the Canal Streetstation, the city a humid, gloomy fishbowl, but I decide to walk it anyway rather than get an UberBLACK, my usual move. My mood is not usual. I have the feeling of being both drowsy and frenetic, of yearning for and dreading the next season, all compounded by the email that arrived in my inbox while I was at Jen’s. I read and reread the message from the private investigator on my walk. I don’t realize that I’m covered in a film of sweat until I descend the stairs to the subway, swipe my MetroCard, and walk past three silent Christian missionaries who do nothing to try to convert me.

John Gowan from Spy Eye Inq. has responded to my latest panicked missive, assuring me that my mother’s funeral was at St. Matthews, as I reported it in the book, and not at St. Mark’s, as the friend of my grandmother’s claimed at my event in Chicago. I look up from my phone sharply—the tunnel is coughing hot air in my face. I step over the yellow line and strain to see if that’s the downwind from the express or the local. You always feel it coming before you see it.

The ground burbles beneath my feet, and a cast of headlights sends tourists scattering back, unlike the inured city roaches that hold their ground. I stay where I am too, like I always do when I rarely ride the subway, feeling one millionth of the train’s impact as it cannons into the station. It’s a blow at first, your hair sucked straight off your head, your dress, if you’re wearing one, flying up to reveal your underwear, but once you get past the initial confrontation you find it’s more of a pull, an invitation. Something you could almost imagine accepting.

Huh. For the first time in a long time, I might be a little bit drunk.