Page 39 of The Light Year

“Yes, this is she,” Barbie says, setting down a small box with ornaments that she’d loved from her childhood. The kitchen is flooded with warm January light, and the older boys are at school as Huck takes his morning nap.

“I’m afraid I have some bad news,” he says. “Your father has retained an attorney who is prepared to drag this out. And I still have had no luck getting a copy of the paperwork to verify what your mother’s true intentions were.”

Barbie sinks onto a chair as she holds the phone with one hand. “Her intentions were notthis,” Barbie says, almost to herself, as her eyes focus on a red, yellow, and blue beach ball floating aimlessly over the surface of her turquoise pool in the backyard. “My mother would not have wanted him to fight me over money—he already has enough of it.” She pauses, laughing softly to herself. “My grandfather, Victor Mackey, was an inventor. He held the patent for a piece that is necessaryin every vacuum cleaner. He also created the blades that most companies use in their disposable razors, and he invested in the right stocks. My father has never wanted for anything. Why can’t he just give me this one thing?”

Jasper Wilkins is so quiet that Barbie can hear the water lapping against the cement walls of the pool through her open patio door. When he finally speaks, it’s with regret.

“I think you should talk to him, Mrs. Roman. I’m happy to pursue this further because that’s what I do, and it’s your dime, but until I have the paperwork, I don’t know what I’m working with. But before you go that route, maybe have a heart-to-heart with him. You would be amazed how far family will go to fight over money, but you’d also be surprised to know how frequently it’s held over someone’s head just as a way to get them to sit down and talk.”

Barbie’s shoulders are slumped as she sits there, holding the phone and nodding. “Okay,” she says, resigned. “Thank you.” She stands up and puts the phone back on the receiver and then sits again, facing the pool and the thick blades of green St. Augustine grass outside.

The day is warming up nicely for January, and there isn’t a single cloud in the sky. Barbie stays at the kitchen table, too stunned to do anything else. In a world where money was always plentiful, and no one ever had to question whether their needs or wants were met, Barbie had assumed that whatever sum of money her mother had left her would be hers without question. After all, her father doesn’tneedthis money—neither does Ted, for that matter. If he wants to start a foundation of his own, he can. Something nags at Barbie as she taps her pearly pink-polished fingernails against the table.

There’s a catch here, and she isn’t sure what it is. It would be so easy for her father and brother to do this on their own and to let her have her own passion project, and nothing that she’sdoing would affect them negatively. After all, an organization to help those less fortunate has positive implications, and could only shine a flattering light on the Mackey family. There has to be some reason why Ted and her father don’t want this.

Barbie is lost in thought as she looks out at her backyard, and, almost like a mirage, her mother appears there in a yellow and white bathing suit, walking across the pool deck with a book in hand. Marion Mackey sits on a chair and stretches her legs out, leaning back so that her face turns up towards the sun. Her eyes are hidden behind sunglasses.

Barbie watches this as if she’s seeing something real—itlooksreal, and in fact, the bathing suit is one she remembers her mother wearing on a vacation they’d taken to Palm Springs when she was a teenager.

Outside, Marion Mackey opens her book to a page in the middle and appears to start reading. This is what she’d done the entire trip to Palm Springs, but Barbie had spent most of their time there looking at a cute, tanned lifeguard, who had winked at her their first day at the pool.

“Barbara,” Marion had said to her with a warning in her voice. “That’s never going to happen.”

Barbie, pure and innocent as the driven snow, had looked up at her mother from where she’d spread a white towel along the side of the pool, stretching her young, lithe body out on the cement as if that were a comfortable position. She’d somehow envisioned that the lifeguard would find her alluring, lying there in a red one-piece and sunglasses, looking aloof as her body soaked up the warmth of the sun from above and the cement from below.

Barbie had sat back up, pushing her sunglasses up to look at her mother. “What’s not going to happen?”

Marion put her book in her lap and looked at Barbie through her tinted lenses. “You and the hired help.”

“Mom!” Barbie said, surprised. She was still two years from meeting Todd Roman in the halls of her high school, and two years from incurring the wrath of her father, who would not agree that Todd or his family were a good match for Barbie and, ultimately, for the Mackeys. As yet, she had no concept of who was “good enough” for her, and of who was off-limits based on class and economics.

Marion set the book on her lap facedown and slipped off her sunglasses. The hotel they were staying at in Palm Springs was glamorous and populated by other rich families on vacation, and the entire resort was ringed by the San Jacinto mountains and the tall, still palm trees.

“You should hear this sooner rather than later,” Marion said to her daughter, pulling her knees up to her chest as she sat there, looking down at Barbie on the ground. “The way you feel on the inside doesn’t always match up to your station in life, but there are ways you’re expected to behave.”

“What does that mean?”

Marion squinted out at the mountain range. “It means that I was born into a family with not enough money or ambition for my taste. My family thought that I was putting on airs, but I knew I wanted to go to school and to be someone. I made that happen for myself. And when I ran out of resources, I found myself a man whose ambitions matched my own.” Marion stopped and pressed her lips together before going on. “But, on the inside, I’m still a girl from a family with modest means. I still root for the underdog. I’m just not allowed to do it publicly. There are expectations for how I’ll behave, even if I feel like someone different on the inside. There arealwaysexpectations, Barbara.”

Barbie was still sitting on the ground, her bony behind hurting as it pressed into the hard cement. The handsome lifeguard was nowhere to be found. She shook her head. “Soyou and Daddy expect me to only like boys who come from rich families?”

Marion chuckled softly, looking at her daughter with fondness. “Well.” She stopped and looked out at the mountains again. “We expect you to onlymarrya man from a solid and appropriate family, but sometimes the heart wants what it wants, you know?” Marion laid back against her chair, stretching her legs out in front of her again and picking up her book. “You can have all the crushes you want inside your head, but don’t ever let your father catch you kissing a pool boy or the son of one of our staff members, or there’ll be hell to pay.”

Barbie remembers sitting there for a long time after her mother had gone back to her book, thinking about her warning. In truth, she’d barely liked any boys, and had been busy trying to do well in school and to meet her parents’ expectations, but at some point the hormones kicked in, and she started to find them all cute. The lifeguard, a boy in her eighth-grade science class, several of the boys who Ted played tennis with, and—God forbid—the son of one of the kitchen workers at their house, who was tall and Black with warm eyes and a smile that kick-started Barbie’s heart every time she saw him. But how had her mother known aboutthat?

Huck makes noises in the back bedroom and Barbie stands up now, pushing herself up from the kitchen table with both hands. The vision of her mother at the pool is gone, but her words ring in Barbie’s head as she walks down the hall to get her fussy three-year-old out of bed after his midday nap:“There are expectations for how I’ll behave, even if I feel like someone different on the inside. There are always expectations, Barbara.”

Barbie picks up the warm body of her toddler, burying her face in the sweet smell of his neck and hair as he wraps his arms around her, eyes still at half-mast.

Of course there are expectations, she thinks. And that’s what’s troubling her father and brother: that things need to look a certain way. Politically, they don’t need her to help the less fortunate people in her own community, they need to show the world that they’re thinking bigger, that they’re helping to breed more progress-minded politicians for the future.

Barbie sets a fussy Huck on a chair at the table and pours him a glass of milk to drink while she makes him a peanut butter sandwich with thin slices of banana squished into the middle just how he likes it.

She’s going to take Jasper Wilkins’ advice and talk to her father and her brother, even though what she wants to do is slap them silly, with their expectations and their public faces. Barbie might have grown up in that world, but she’d mostly left it behind. First, when she’d married Todd against her father’s wishes, and finally, when her mother—her closest ally—had died.

And now it’s time for her to take another step towards leaving the family fold. This time, maybe for good.

"This is one hell of an expensive meeting, Barbara," George Mackey grumbles, settling into the large leather chair at one end of the table in his attorney's office in Hartford, Connecticut. Barbie had assured Todd that she needed to have a face-to-face with her father, and had corralled Carrie into pitching in with the boys for forty-eight hours so that she could fly home for this family meeting. At her request, Jasper Wilkins had referred her to an attorney he knows from New Haven, and the man—a tall, foreboding attorney who bears more than a passing resemblance to Clark Gable—has driven the hour to be there in Hartford.

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