Margaret shifted nervously. Her lips began to tremble.
“You’re her brother!”
“Third,” Daniel continued in the same steady voice, “when Rachel got married, I gave her two hundred thousand dollars. It wasn’t an enormous fortune, but at the time it was almost everything I had available. In the six years since then, she has never helped me in any way. I never demanded that she do so. I’m simply listing facts, since we’ve apparently decided to discuss fairness.”
“She put all of this in your head!” Margaret cried. “Before Claire, you were a completely different person!”
“Fourth. After Claire’s grandfather died, her father inherited the property, sold the old house, and gave every penny to his daughter. That allowed us to pay off our mortgage. Later, we sold our two-bedroom apartment and bought this one. So the serious financial help that allowed our family to move forward came from Claire’s relatives. From your side, we have mostly received demands. Unfortunately, banks don’t accept demands as a form of payment.”
“And fifth,” Claire added softly, “we’re thinking about having a second child. But first we want to take our daughter to the ocean, which she has seen only in photographs and in her own drawings. This vacation wasn’t some sudden whim we had yesterday. We’ve been waiting six years.”
Margaret drew breath, preparing to answer, but Daniel raised one hand and stopped her.
“And one last thing. I am not abandoning my sister. If she needs help, I can buy groceries, bring the children things they need, and sometimes have my nieces and nephews stay with us for a weekend. But I will not destroy my own family’s plans to make someone else’s life more convenient. Not for Rachel’s children, and not to make you feel calmer.”
“So now they’re strangers to you,” Margaret whispered. “This is what it has come to.”
“My family is here,” Daniel said, nodding toward the next room, where Sophie’s quick footsteps could be heard. “The others are still my relatives. Those are not the same thing, Mom. There’s a reason different words exist for them.”
At that exact moment, Sophie entered the room. She held her drawing in both hands as if she were about to present her grandmother with an important ceremonial gift.
“Grandma, look! This is the ocean! Here I am, and Dad is next to me, and Mom is over there. And this is a dolphin. Although for some reason mine looks a little like a cucumber.”
Margaret looked down at the picture but did not take it from the child. She merely guided the little hand aside, as if moving an inconvenient curtain out of her way, and walked toward the front door.
“Grandma, you haven’t really looked at the dolphin yet.”
The door closed.
As soon as she reached the landing, Margaret pulled out her phone and called her daughter. She began speaking before she had taken even one step down the stairs.
“He refused. Completely.”
“What do you mean, he refused?” Rachel’s voice came sharply through the phone. “Did you tell him about the children? Did you explain that I’m alone with them?”
“I told him everything. He stood in front of me and started listing facts point by point. First, second, third…”
“She poisoned him against us! I knew it from the beginning! He used to be a normal person! Claire controls him completely. She deliberately turned him against his own family!”
“Claire was standing right beside him. Perfectly calm, smiling even. Whatever I said, she had an answer ready.”
“I want to go to the ocean too!” Rachel nearly shouted. “Why are they allowed to have a vacation and I’m not? They have money, and I know they do! They’re just selfish! They always have been!”
Margaret fell silent for several seconds, staring at the number painted on the stairwell wall.
“She said it right to my face: ‘Why should we give up our plans for your daughter’s children?’”
“And you just let her say that?”
“I left.”
“Mom!”
Margaret ended the call. She went down the stairs slowly, carrying two completely opposite feelings inside her. One of them was almost impressed by the daughter-in-law who defended what was hers so firmly, as though she had built a high, solid wall around her family. The other was furious because the money was so close, almost within reach—and yet it was still going somewhere Margaret did not want it to go.
Meanwhile, Claire placed the suitcase in the center of the room and opened it wide.
“Sophie, bring your swimsuit. And take the swim ring too.”
“It won’t fit in there!”
“Then it can travel separately. It will be treated like a very important passenger.”
Daniel paused in the doorway and watched his wife arrange the clothes in neat, even stacks.
“Are you sure you’re all right?” he asked.
“Me? I’m wonderful. I actually like it when difficult conversations end with me being able to go right back to packing.”
“Mom probably won’t speak to me for a month now.”
“So we get an ordinary vacation, plus perhaps three weeks of complete silence. That’s an extremely generous gift from this summer.”
Daniel walked over, took the neatly folded towel from Claire’s hands, and placed it in the suitcase himself.
“If you think I’m going to spend the next few weeks torturing myself over Rachel, I’m not. My sister has her own life and her own family. I’ll help her when I can and when I believe it’s the right thing to do. But right now we have a different task in front of us.”
“What task is that?”
“Our vacation,” Daniel said. “In eight days. Or nine, apparently. There are some serious disagreements in this family about the subject.”
“Eight!” Sophie’s voice rang out from the hallway.
The little girl ran into the room carrying the enormous pink swim ring.
“The ocean! The ocean! We’re going to the ocean very soon!”
Claire closed the zipper on the first compartment and gave her husband a cheerful wink.
“There you are. You heard her yourself. Fingers never make mistakes.”