Page 41 of The Cul-de-Sac War

Well, well, wasn’t that just icing on the cake?

He closed his eyes.

And slept like a baby.

* * *

Chip’s brother Will set his glass on their parents’ dining room table. “So I told the investors, ‘Guys, we can get granular about this, but just from a thirty-second look here on the Google street view I can tell you this isn’t going to work. I can see overfilled garbage bins, dogs in the middle of a fight in the driveway next to what is clearly a gambling ring, asbestos siding, and a deer stand poking out from the second-story window. This isn’t going to be the deal of the century.’”

Will started laughing at his own story before it ended, and chuckles moved around the twenty-person table.

Chip’s mother’s eyes met his, and he gave a clandestine wink before raising his glass to his lips. This was Sunday-afternoon supper at its finest: carved ham, sautéed asparagus, and 120 minutes of construction jokes and tales of heroic journeys into the land of bidding wars and project management.

Brothers Pete, Will, and David sat with their wives and babies on the opposite side of the cognac-colored, custom-made table their mother and father ordered while on a trip to Sicily. Four of his nephews and nieces dined at the children’s table in the corner, well away from upholstered seating with their cranberry sauce–stained hands. With his mother and father sitting at the heads of the table, only Ashleigh and Chip were seated on the other side, flanked by empty chairs, like high school students facing the Brown admission committee.

Boy, had that been one intimidating interview.

“Pete, you didn’t happen to pick up that architectural drawing for Hotel Bristol on Friday, did you?” David said. “I know we were thinking that . . .”

Chip sliced into his ham with measured precision. Because no matter how engrossed they were in conversation, they were all watching him, anxious for any indication of his state of being. Everyone down to his sister-in-law Lisa, who was in the other room nursing her baby.

Drop his knife on the ground and let it clatter against the Moroccan hand-painted tile, and Lisa would be there in five seconds, baby wailing, wanting to know what was going on. Wanting to know if he was finally talking.

Two months ago at another Sunday supper, Chip had announced he was leaving McBride Construction and starting his own business. Since then, everyone seemed to be waiting on him to make some sort of emotional declaration.

Declaring what?

Well, he wasn’t totally certain. But he had heard rumors.

Some suspected he was unhappy because his salary had been lower than two of his three older brothers’. But then, after Chip’s apathetic response to a stilted lecture from Pete about how he had to earn his way up the ladder—even if it was the family ladder—that opinion lost popularity (although Alicia, Pete’s wife, apparently still favored it).

Others guessed he was jealous, that little Chip couldn’t tolerate sitting in his corner desk by the copier, across the room from Pete and Will and their walls of framed newspaper clippings and regional recognition plaques. They speculated that a lifetime of walking in his brothers’ shadows had slowly led to a Cain-like fury.

Which led naturally to the women’s (and Alicia’s life coach’s) favorite hypothesis: that poor Chip was expressing his psychological need for attention. That his reserve was low in a family as large as his. That coming along with his twin brother, Jake, as a “wonderful surprise” when his mother was forty-two had led to a cycle of self-doubt and overcompensation. This was why, in Alicia’s words, he wore “those lewd overalls.” (She had caught him in some Patagonia cycling bibs once, and you would’ve thought she’d caught him working as a male escort.) It was all just one big ruse to be told he was loved, to receive one compliment that would bring him back into the straight and narrow of McBride and Sons.

The only story none of them believed was the real one: that he simply wanted to try things his own way again. He had spent several years on his own up north after graduating from Brown and managed his own company just fine. He didn’t have the heart to mention Jake or the truth they all knew, which was that his twin brother had been the reason he’d come back four years ago. At Jake’s funeral, after one look at his mother and her shaking hands—even now, as she sliced her own asparagus, they never quite stilled—he had dropped his life in Providence and never looked back.

But now? Now it was time, at last, to try to make his own way again. He’d occupied Jake’s old desk for long enough.

He’d tried to explain that, yet none of them believed him.

Which explained why his mother took pains, every day, to reach out to him.

“And what fantastic renovations has my son been up to on his newest house?” Chip’s mother asked above the hum of conversation.

The word newest was not lost on him. He was well aware of her unspoken feelings about the house she considered too ramshackle for her baby boy to call home. So what did she do? Avoid reality by referring to it as if it were just another project.

She folded and stilled her hands, and the conversation around the table quieted.

Lisa peeked her head in, then disappeared.

Even Ashleigh set her fork down and politely turned to face him.

Good grief. Did they expect him to give a speech?

He cleared his throat. “Well,” he began, rubbing his lips with his napkin, “there’s not a whole lot to say yet. We have a new door. I finished painting the new cabinets. I’ve just started in on the windows.”

His mother clapped her hands together as if he’d said he was nominated for the Nobel Prize. “Oh, how terrific. Did you go with the Intrigue series?”