Page 48 of Butterfly Sisters
Colton took it off the hook and held it up. “Almost, Meredith. This alone could feed about three or four of us,” he said, dropping it into the live well on the boat. “Nice job.” He loaded her hook with another minnow and she cast it in.
The bright-blue sky overhead and the swish-swashing of the boat in the water were so relaxing that she actually noticed the fall in her shoulders and the release of the tension that usually banded across her brows. Miles away from the hustle and bustle of the city, the honking of the traffic, and the smell of diesel fumes, she understood what Colton had been saying all those years ago when he’d told her that he’d rather just fish than put up with all that.
The sound of a cell phone ringing caught them all off guard.
“It’s mine,” Colton said, heading over to the wheel and picking up his phone. “Oh, I need to take this. Give me just a second. If you catch another big one, yell.” Then he put the phone to his ear and walked to the bow of the boat.
“Tell him that I’ll be there first thing the minute he gets back. There’s no way I’m letting him do this…” Colton paced the front of the boat. “I don’t care what he says. I want to be there… All right. Talk to you later.”
He hung up the phone and put it back on the dash by the wheel. “Sorry about that.”
“Everything good?” Meredith called.
“Yep, all good.” But he took in a breath that made Leigh wonder if he was being truthful or not. Whatever it was, he didn’t want to elaborate.
They’d caught five fish—two striped bass and three bluegills—and Colton had taken them back home to clean them for dinner, so Leigh had retreated to the screened-in porch of the cabin with Mama, soaking in the beautiful spring breeze. Cicadas chirped in the trees, their sound like a distant hymn of impending summer as the water rippled onto the sandy shore.
Meredith came out with three lemonades, handing one each to Mama and Leigh before she dropped onto the outside sofa. “I’ve been thinking about what I want to do with the cabin.”
“Oh?” Mama said, leaning forward in her chair, holding her lemonade in both hands.
“I think I might renovate it and turn it into an Airbnb.”
Leigh waited for the laugh, the indication that her sister was only kidding. Meredith knew better than to even mention such a thing. But when she stared at them, her face serious, an icy chill snaked through Leigh’s veins.
“You want to rent it out to people?”
Meredith crisscrossed her legs on the sofa like a child and took a sip of her lemonade. “Yeah. I was thinking about reasons Nan would’ve given me the cabin, and it occurred to me that I need to travel to be creative, so I could make this an artist’s retreat, put it on the Airbnb site, and rent it to others who needed a new space to create.” She waved her hand at the yard. “I’d flatten all this, take out the fire pit, and maybe pour cement there so we can set up our easels outside more easily. Maybe even have some cool quote about art in the cement. And inside,” she continued, “I’d like to completely renovate the place: high ceilings, bigger windows, sheetrock over those wooden walls so it’s bright in there. I’d gut the place and give it an open floorplan.”
With every word Meredith uttered, Leigh felt sicker. “You want to get rid of all that Nan did,” she said. “The flower beds and the little vegetable garden outside by the fire pit—she planted those herself; the cabin was completely designed by her…” She stopped talking, fighting the lump in her throat. This wastheirplace. No one else’s.
“But she’s not here anymore,” Meredith said, bristling as if conditioned for confrontation when it came to expressing herself. “She’s given it tome. Shouldn’t I use it for my own purposes now? Wouldn’t that be what she’d want?”
“Why don’t you make it yourownartist’s retreat?” Mama suggested, not hiding the fear in her eyes very well as she tiptoed around the idea.
“I know you two don’t understand this, but staying here for any length of time would drive me crazy. It would suck the life right out of me. I need fresh perspectives, movement, the energy of new places and people.”
“Then leave the cabin to us,” Leigh said. While it wasn’t what Nan had wished, it was far better than the alternative.
“If Nan had wanted that, she’d have left it toyou,” Meredith rebutted. “But she didn’t.”
Meredith’s words stung, driving home the one thing that tortured Leigh most.
“We can stay in the Airbnb for free, whenever we want,” Meredith offered, but it wasn’t enough.
Why would Leigh want to stay in a place that Meredith was going to make completely unrecognizable? “You’re missing the point.”
Meredith set her lemonade on the table and twisted around to face her sister. “Which is?”
“We were a terrible excuse for a family—let’s just admit it,” Leigh said. “We never learned how to get along or understand each other. But this place was the one spot where our troubles melted away for a little while. You could go off and do your thing while I stayed back and reset. We all actually ate dinner at the same table at night without arguing. This was the only place that could do that for us. We’ve just now found it again. Changing it would remove that, and we’ll scatter like before, but with nowhere to return to as a family. As bad as we were at being one, this is it, Meredith. Me and Mama are all you’ve got and you’re all we’ve got.”
“We could meet up at Mom’s,” Meredith said.
“It’s a one-bedroom apartment, Meredith,” Leigh countered.
Mama looked down at her lap as if she’d failed them, but there was nothing she could’ve done to save them from this.
Meredith stared at the sweating glass of lemonade that had now made a tiny ring on the outdoor coffee table, not saying anything.
