Free Reunion: A Novel by Hannah Pittard

pauses. “Not that this isn’t also a big deal.”
    I look around. Overhead is the same chandelier that’s been following us from house to house to house. It seems obscene in this condo. Completely out of place. It needs a staircase. It needs a balcony and a foyer and a grand piano. It needs a nuclear family. Mom would have blushed. Or shaken her head. Or merely looked away until she’d found a better talking point. My imagination’s version of my mother.
    Nell picks up a pair of fingernail clippers and stares at them like they’re a foreign object. I put my hand on her knee. “Are you okay?” I say.
    She nods, then puts the clippers down and wipes the tips of her fingers on her pant leg. “I’m in shock, probably. I feel sad for him. Not sad for me, but sad for him. Does that make sense?”
    “It does,” I say. “Yes.” I say this not because I necessarily agree, but because I know she needs to hear it.
    “But then,” she says. “Feeling sad for him sort of makes me feel sad for me also, after all. God.”
    A mosquito buzzes at my ear.
    “This was his life,” she says.
    I nod.
    “This.” She gestures to the room around us.
    I nod again. I feel faint. Or maybe it’s the booze wearing off.
    It’s not normally so awkward with Nell, but sitting knee to knee with her in this room doesn’t feel carefree and easygoing. Instead it feels like a first date. A first date that’s going badly.
    “Are you okay?” she says.
    Of course, I could tell her the truth. I could tell her right now while it’s just the two of us surrounded by the physical manifestations of our father’s mental failings. I could cut the tension with one admission or with every admission. I could tell her about the affair. I could tell her Peter wants a divorce. I could tell her that for the past many years I’ve been slowly whittling away at nearly fifty thousand dollars’ worth of early twenties credit card debt on top of mammoth school loans. But all this would be tantamount to saying, “P.S.: you think you know me, but you don’t.”
    I can’t tell her the truth because the truth is that I lie to my sister. I’ve been lying to her this whole time. Every day. Every phone call. As much as and more than I lie to Peter, I lie to Nell. I feel like I might pass out.
    “Don’t you think it’s strange that Sasha didn’t tell anyone?” I say.
    “Tell anyone what?”
    “About Stan,” I say. “About moving out.”
    She looks down at her lap and picks at an imaginary fiber. “She told me.”
    “You didn’t say anything,” I say.
    Nell looks older than the last time I saw her, which was over Christmas. Six months and she’s already aged. Which is better? To see yourself so often you don’t notice the wrinkles? Or to go a year not looking in mirrors, only to be shocked that everything’s changed?
    She shrugs. “I couldn’t have stopped what happened.”
    I’m about to say something insincere, something like, It would have been nice to be looped in , but Nell’s right. Being looped in wouldn’t have altered anything.
    Nell says, “Did Dad have a cat?”
    “Why?”
    “It smells,” she says.
    I sit up straighter and sniff the air.
    Big Daddy: Didn’t you notice it, Brick? Didn’t you notice a powerful and obnoxious odor of mendacity in this room?
    Tennessee Williams is not on my side tonight.
    “Maybe we’re on an episode of some awful show,” says Nell. “Maybe we’re being filmed. Maybe there’s a dead cat under these boxes.”
    “Maybe,” I say. I can ignore the smell for now. “Maybe there’s even alcohol in the kitchen.”
    She looks around at the stacks and mounds and piles of every tiny thing you could possibly think of. “We should probably find out,” she says.

11
the back porch
    I t’s a screened-in back porch, which I hadn’t been imagining. I’d been imagining an open porch, covered, but with a railing, maybe with some plants hung here and there. But this, screened in and closed off from the