a sinking feeling that this time Manda wasn’t going to forgive him.
“Maybe Dakota and Manda will work things out by then, anyway—they usually do,” she said. She stared at her screen saver: a photo of her and Nigel and Samuel standing on a beach during their vacation to the Dominican Republic last year.
“It’s never been this bad before. Manda might not be so willing to take him back this time. He’s been a college kid on a bender for the last ten years, Winnie.”
She sighed deeply. Dakota’s emotional outbursts as a child were frequent; Winnie remembered him as being sulky and demanding. Their father’s death seemed to tip him over the edge; he navigated through his grief with fists and one suicide attempt when he was seventeen. But he’d always been angry; at what Winnie didn’t know. He seemed to pick and choose his triggers. At their joint tenth birthday party, Dakota was so furious that he had to share a party with her that he’d picked up the sheet cake that their mother had paid three hundred dollars for and dumped it into the pool. Winnie could still picture him standing in his camo swim trunks with the neon orange trim, the cake a large sheet with a photo of their faces airbrushed across the top. He made eye contact with her the second before he launched their smiling faces into the deep end. He hadn’t been punished, of course; their parents had laughed it off to their friends.
For their thirteenth birthday, they’d both been given little glass bowls with betta fish from their aunt Shea. A week later Dakota found that his betta had gone to the ocean in the sky. He’d stormed into the bedroom she shared with Chelsea and snatched the bowl from her desk. Winnie had tried to stop him, but he was already a foot taller than her and he held the bowl above his head, sloshing water on her face as she reached for it. He’d darted to the bathroom, then flushed Winnie’s very alive fish down the toilet along with his dead one as she wailed in protest. “Fair’s fair,” he’d said, pulling the lever. He’d felt bad as soon as he’d done it and had burst into tears. Winnie had forgiven him, of course, but sometimes all these memories came together in a very uncomfortable way. If he’d been like that with his twin sister, what was he like now with his wife, Manda?
Nigel was waiting for her to say something. She pushed her thoughts away. “I know—jeez—I know. He never recovered from Dad’s death. But he’s family, so we’ll just have to work this out. Be patient with him. Everyone can chip in.” Her voice was falsely positive. She sounded like a drunk cheerleader. And he wasn’t just family, he was her twin. There was extra responsibility that came with that.
After fifteen years of marriage, Winnie knew his stance without him having to say it—Nigel disagreed. He did not think Dakota and Manda were going to work it out. This was not his problem, nor was this his brother, nor did he believe in the twin bond. He didn’t want to chip in. There were perks to being an only child, Winnie assumed bitterly, and while Dakota moving in with them may have been a completely normal thing to Winnie, she knew that to Nigel, it felt like an extreme breach of privacy. Dakota lacked the respect of a good houseguest: he was a slob. He left dirty dishes all over the house, the remnants of frozen burritos congealing in red lumps, empty beer cans stacked on counters—and the tissues. Oh, God, every time he stayed with them there was so much crying. Nigel called them snotflakes—little hardened wads of white that made their house look like it was decorated for Christmas. Then there was the drinking problem, which had led to the horrifying moment for Samuel.
“Well, he’ll be there when you get home,” Winnie said. “He stopped by for the key. He can stay in the blue bedroom.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Are you mad? You sound mad.”
“I’m mad,” he said. “But it doesn’t make a difference because you already moved him in without talking to me about it.”
Winnie said nothing.
“If he so much as looks at me the wrong way, Winnie...”
“I know, I know,” she said. Her breath exhaled in a whoosh. She could picture his chin dipped, eyes narrowed, pressing his tongue up against his front teeth. “I warned him,” she said.