Page 35 of For The Record

After I sit on the navy blue couch, leaning against its tufted, velvet-covered arm, I take a fancy cheese and cracker combo (brie and artisanal bread) from the charcuterie board on the cocktail table. Heidi mingles with various family members. Across the room from me, Aaron is engaged in conversation with our forty-year-old cousin Bradley, a venture capitalist, both of them gesticulating so wildly I’m worried they might knock a tray out of one of the caterers’ hands.

As I amuse myself with various cracker and cheese combinations, my brother chooses to take that time to knock over my stack of five crackers and four slices of cheese, the miniature, delicious tower toppling onto my plate. I flinch, childhood memories resurfacing, and lose my appetite.

“Aaron,” I say tightly.

I see you’re still a jerk.When we would go to the beach as children, he never failed to stomp on my sandcastles just as the tide was coming in, destroying my creations and splashing salt water in my eyes all at once. All my poorly drawn scribbles of buildings or parks or houses would be torn to shreds by him, either literally or figuratively when he showed them to his friends and vandalized them. Isabelle never stopped him, but she always looked at it like nothing more than brothers being brothers. Maybe that was the case. Who knows?

“How’ve you been, Skye?” He plops down on the couch next to me and puts his feet on the table next to the charcuterie board. I’m five seconds away from socking him in the face or taking my plate of food to the bathroom.

“Fine.” Maybe if I bring up work, he will leave me alone. “Work has been… a lot.”

“Well, if you ever get bored with managing people’s crises, maybe you could go draw crap for a living or something,” he says, snorting a laugh.

Okay, different plan. I will make small talk about our family. “Has Aunt Becky cornered you yet?”

“And asked about my love life? She’s all but tried to set me up with her manicurist. Three times.”

“What’s wrong with that?” I try to joke.

He gives me a dark look. “She’s a manicurist.”

Ah, yes, classic Aaron Holland snobbery. “Do you know when Izzy will get here?”

“She’s stuck at work. You know how movie sets are—oh wait, you wouldn’t.”

My blood boils. Fine, last resort: time to coddle his ego and bring up his work. “How’s movie directing? I saw that you just worked with Kate Winslet.”

I settle somewhat more comfortably into my seat when he starts name-dropping like crazy, but I don’t dare to try to reassemble my cracker-and-cheese stack. It would be a lost cause anyway, the crackers turned to crumbs now by his rude gesture. I pick at the few cheese slices, now coated in breadcrumbs and sesame seeds, and pretend to nod along to his words.

“… and then, Brad Pitt said,give me a call sometime! I’ll hook you up.”

“Mm-hmm.” I’m sure that happened.Not. Though I’ve completely tuned out, so he could be talking about drugs or yachts or private jets, and I would have absolutely no idea.

Finally, after twenty minutes of conversation—if you consider conversation to be thinly veiled insults, a brash bragging session about how cool, famous, and rich he and his golf buddies are, and other mind-numbing chatter—the butler calls us to dinner. Yes, we have an actual butler because Heidi is actually a shameless Anglophile, who passed on her love of Downton Abbey to her daughter, Harper, and probably to Isabelle, too, since she’s been acting almost exclusively in period dramas.

Shortly after dinner is ready, Dad makes an appearance and is talking to Heidi. Genuine affection shows on his face for her, a smile creasing the corners of his eyes as he touches her shoulder. I swallow the strange sensation rising in my throat and head toward the dining room.

At that moment, Isabelle chooses to make her appearance. Maybe it’s the actress in her—and maybe she just left set five minutes ago and came here in her costume, who knows?—but she’s definitely got a flair for the dramatic, in her outfit. Clad in elbow-length black lace gloves that I know are Gucci, with a floor-length black dress that plunges nearly to her navel but is somewhat covered by sheer panels of fabric, my older sister, Isabelle Holland, appears in the doorway. Her black Louboutins clack on the hardwood, and the black veil on her head makes her look like she just came from an extremely risque funeral and tried to seduce a pallbearer.

“Did I miss the turkey carving?” she says, not missing a beat.

“You came just in time, honey,” Dad says, giving her a one-armed side-hug while holding Heidi’s hand. “Didn’t miss a thing.”

Aaron gives her a plate of food and an enthusiastic “Happy Thanksgiving.”

He didn’t greet me like that, but I think we both know why. A childhood of fraught tensions, snide remarks, and cold shoulders has taught me that much.

Isabelle, to my surprise, after saying her usual pleasantries, sits next to me at the table, swapping the place cards around in a deft sleight of hand so that she, not Aaron is assigned to my right. “How’s my favourite sister?”

I almost sayI’m your only sisterbefore remembering, of course, that it’s not true. We have Harper. “Fine.”

“Fine?” Though the veil is off, Isabelle doesn’t even remove her gloves to eat and she looks thinner than I remember from the last time we saw each other. I file away the details in my mind, wondering if this is part of method acting or if something’s going on with her. “Just fine? We haven’t talked in forever.”

“I’m seeing someone,” I say, offering up the smallest morsel of girl talk that I know how to have with my older sister: talking about relationships. Though the last time I heard about her relationships, it was in a copy of People magazine I picked up at the dentist. So I doubt this conversation will go anywhere.

Isabelle perks up. “Leo Perez, right?”

How do everyone and their grandmother know about him? “Aunt Becky told you?”

---