Free Bittersweet by Miranda Beverly-Whittemore

charisma.
    Athol picked his little boy up and tossed him in the air; the four-year-old shrieked in laughter. To the chubby toddler at his feet, he cajoled, “Do your parents know you’re out here?” and she huffed with resignation toward the other cottage. Soon they had all come out to greet us, Athol’s equally tall and tanned wife, Emily, who explained that the baby was napping; the little boy, Ricky, being gathered byhis auburn-haired, foreign au pair for an afternoon swim, water temperature be damned; Ev’s other brother, Banning, balding, rotund, pulling Ev into a sloppy hug; his wife, Annie, an air of messiness in her curly hair and round face, bearing the chubby little girl, Madison, out on her hip and asking the au pair if it wouldn’t be too much trouble to take Maddy along too. There were dogs too—I had begun to realize there would always be dogs: Banning and Annie’s two simple-looking golden retrievers (named Dum and Dee, although, like their namesakes, they were only ever mentioned in the same breath, giving them a collective identity) and Quicksilver, an old greyhound who stuck close to Emily’s side until he spotted an unfortunate squirrel and took off up the road, toward Galway’s.
    “Be careful,” Ev said, watching the dog’s pursuit. “Mum’s on about leashes again.”
    “All well and good for her,” Athol snapped. “She doesn’t have a greyhound.”
    “Don’t shoot the messenger,” Ev bit back, matching her eldest brother’s tone.
    I could already see a few fault lines in their siblinghood, but I couldn’t help but feel a pang of jealousy. It was impossible to imagine being known this way, teased, taken for granted. And Ev would never ask me what it was like with my brother, because, as far as she knew, I was an only child.
    Athol and Emily’s summer cottage was far nicer than the year-round home I’d been raised in, and Emily proudly took me on the grand tour, explaining how over the winter the whole foundation had been lifted onto steel beams, and then, naturally, they’d decided to repaint, and redo the kitchen with Sub-Zero and Wolf appliances. The home was modernized, with every possible extravagance, although that was not the word Athol and Emily would have used to describe the chrome garbage can that opened with the wave of a hand, or theflat-screen television hung on the wall in the “library.” Every surface in that cottage was dust-free, and, when the baby awoke, I noticed that she, too, was a perfect, tidy creature, smiling down from her mother’s arms like a dewy baby bird. I liked Emily in an abstract way, but she was the kind of tall, athletic person who lived in a different stratosphere, hardly looking below her shoulders. I wondered if she’d even recognize me the next time we met.
    We stepped onto Chicory’s whitewashed, screened-in back porch for a bottle of Prosecco and a view of the water and the other cottage. Banning lived a jovial, disheveled life in comparison to his toned and crisp older brother, and Goldenrod seemed a messy second to the elder brother’s summer home. The paint on Banning’s house and porch was peeling, the screens sagging, loose with age. Plastic ride-on toys were already scattered over the back lawn, and Annie huffed around them, trying, in vain, to minimize their tacky effect upon the landscape, her hair flying up and out like some kind of alive thing. I imagined Athol and Emily had strong opinions about spending their summer so close to his brother’s life and wife, and I wondered how on earth Banning had passed his mother’s inspection.
    Below us, at the water’s edge, the poor au pair tried to keep Ricky’s and Maddy’s little bodies from drowning. Every few moments there was a splash of exuberance or a sharp yelp, but none of the other adults paid the sounds any mind. Nor did they help the girl when, arms laden with wriggling children and sodden towels, she trudged up toward us through the woods. Only when Quicksilver,