another Sunday supper, Chip had announced he was leaving McBride Construction and starting his own business. Since then, everyone seemed to be waiting on him to make some sort of emotional declaration.
Declaring what?
Well, he wasn’t totally certain. But he had heard rumors.
Some suspected he was unhappy because his salary had been lower than two of his three older brothers’. But then, after Chip’s apathetic response to a stilted lecture from Pete about how he had to earn his way up the ladder—even if it was the family ladder—that opinion lost popularity (although Alicia, Pete’s wife, apparently still favored it).
Others guessed he was jealous, that little Chip couldn’t tolerate sitting in his corner desk by the copier, across the room from Pete and Will and their walls of framed newspaper clippings and regional recognition plaques. They speculated that a lifetime of walking in his brothers’ shadows had slowly led to a Cain-like fury.
Which led naturally to the women’s (and Alicia’s life coach’s) favorite hypothesis: that poor Chip was expressing his psychological need for attention. That his reserve was low in a family as large as his. That coming along with his twin brother, Jake, as a “wonderful surprise” when his mother was forty-two had led to a cycle of self-doubt and overcompensation. This was why, in Alicia’s words, he wore “those lewd overalls.” (She had caught him in some Patagonia cycling bibs once, and you would’ve thought she’d caught him working as a male escort.) It was all just one big ruse to be told he was loved, to receive one compliment that would bring him back into the straight and narrow of McBride and Sons.
The only story none of them believed was the real one: that he simply wanted to try things his own way again. He had spent several years on his own up north after graduating from Brown and managed his own company just fine. He didn’t have the heart to mention Jake or the truth they all knew, which was that his twin brother had been the reason he’d come back four years ago. At Jake’s funeral, after one look at his mother and her shaking hands—even now, as she sliced her own asparagus, they never quite stilled—he had dropped his life in Providence and never looked back.
But now? Now it was time, at last, to try to make his own way again. He’d occupied Jake’s old desk for long enough.
He’d tried to explain that, yet none of them believed him.
Which explained why his mother took pains, every day, to reach out to him.
“And what fantastic renovations has my son been up to on his newest house?” Chip’s mother asked above the hum of conversation.
The word newest was not lost on him. He was well aware of her unspoken feelings about the house she considered too ramshackle for her baby boy to call home. So what did she do? Avoid reality by referring to it as if it were just another project.
She folded and stilled her hands, and the conversation around the table quieted.
Lisa peeked her head in, then disappeared.
Even Ashleigh set her fork down and politely turned to face him.
Good grief. Did they expect him to give a speech?
He cleared his throat. “Well,” he began, rubbing his lips with his napkin, “there’s not a whole lot to say yet. We have a new door. I finished painting the new cabinets. I’ve just started in on the windows.”
His mother clapped her hands together as if he’d said he was nominated for the Nobel Prize. “Oh, how terrific. Did you go with the Intrigue series?”
He fought the childish urge to roll his eyes. “Yes, Mom. I went with Intrigue.”
She’d been married into construction for forty-one years but had learned more about the industry in the last month for his sake than all previous years combined.
“North Star? Or Interesting Aqua?”
She beamed at him, proud as ever at the fact he was willing to “experiment with color.”
He hesitated, aware of the darting looks between his brothers. “The North Star.”
Ashleigh jumped in, clasping his hand. “You need to come by and see what he’s done just this past week, Mrs. McBride. You’d think you walked into the wrong house.”
Right. The house was empty of furniture, the floors were scratched with one hundred years of wear and tear, and the upstairs bathroom was one giant, gaping hole waiting for an accident. But whoa now, people, we have cabinets.
“I’ll do that,” his mother replied, reaching out of habit for her calendar on her