We got married 18 months later in the backyard of my mother’s house in Asheford, which is about 40 minutes outside Charlotte. Small town, old money that had mostly dried up, old names that still meant something to people who cared about such things. My mother was Barbara Caldwell Nay Richardson, and the Richardsons had owned the mill that employed half the county before it closed in the 80s. By the time I was born, there wasn’t much left but the house and the reputation and my mother’s conviction that we were still somebody.
Karine was always better at playing somebody than I was. My sister was 2 years younger and had gotten all the things I hadn’t: the height, the cheekbones, the ability to walk into a room and make people want to impress her. She married young at 22 to a man named Bradley Fisk who came from actual money. New money, but still money. And for about 6 years, she lived the life my mother had always wanted for us. Big house in Meyers Park, charity gayas, a photo in the observer’s social pages at least once a year. Then Bradley left her for his dental hygieneist and moved to Scottsdale.
Karine came back to Ashford like a wounded bird returning to the nest, and my mother welcomed her with the kind of attention she’d never given me. It made sense in a way. Karine was the one who needed saving. I was just the one who was fine. I was always fine. When Karine moved back, Nathan and I had been married for 4 years and were living in a small house in Huntersville, which was close enough to Charlotte for his work and close enough to Ashford for the family obligations that my mother never let me forget.
Karine needed help getting back on her feet, so she came to stay with us for 8 months. I should have minded more than I did, but the truth was I liked having her there at first. We’d never been close as children. She was my mother’s daughter and I was my father’s. And after he left when I was 12, that division only deepened. But in those early weeks, with Karine sleeping in our guest room and crying on our couch and drinking wine with me while Nathan was on the road, I thought maybe we were finally becoming sisters. She got a job at a real estate agency. She started dating again. She found an apartment in Charlotte close to the South End and moved out just before Christmas. I helped her hang curtains and organize her closet, and she hugged me at the door and said, “I don’t know what I would have done without you.” I believed her.
