"I don't, Mom. I've never wanted to. I hate skiing. I fell down the bunny hill last year in front of everyone and Brooke laughed so hard she cried, and you told me to smile for the picture."
There was a short silence.
"Okay," Greg said gently. "Then we'll cancel it. We'll lose the deposit. That's fine." He took a breath. "And the other thing. The college thing. Claire, if you get into UVM, you're going. I'll figure out the money. I'll take out the loans in my name if I have to. You've been working at a bakery at five in the morning so you can go to school forty minutes from your grandmother, and I didn't even know you'd applied, and I'm not going to be the reason you don't go."
"Greg," Diane said. "We talked about this."
"No, Di. You talked about it. I nodded. That's what I've been doing for seventeen years, and I'm done with it."
Diane's composure cracked, just slightly, at the edges. She looked down at the table. For a long moment the only sound in the kitchen was the hum of the refrigerator and the soft tick of the clock above the stove.
Then Grandma Ruth set down her cup.
"Diane," she said. "May I ask you something? And I'd like you to answer it honestly, because I think it matters."
Diane didn't look up. "What."
"Do you remember the first Thanksgiving Greg brought you home to meet us? You were twenty-two. You told me something that night, out on the back porch, while the men were watching football. Do you remember what it was?"
Diane's jaw tightened. Claire watched her mother's hands, which were clenched on the table, slowly loosen.
"I told you about my sister," Diane said finally, in a low voice.
"You told me about your sister."
Claire looked from her grandmother to her mother. She knew, vaguely, that her mother had a sister. Aunt Carol, who lived in Arizona and sent a card every Christmas that went straight into the recycling. They had never met her. It had never occurred to Claire to ask why.
"Carol was the pretty one," Diane said. She was speaking to the table, not to anyone in particular. "Everyone said so. My mother said so. She was the pretty one and I was the smart one, and that sounds like a fair trade, but it isn't. It isn't, because nobody ever comes to watch the smart one. Nobody throws parties for a report card. My mother took Carol to pageants every weekend for ten years. She made her dresses. She drove her all over the state. And I stayed home and did the laundry and made dinner for my father, and when I got into college, my mother said, well, that's nice, but Carol has regionals."
She stopped. Her mouth worked.
"I swore," she said. "I swore I would never do that to my child. I swore my children would be seen. That they'd have everything. That they'd never feel like I felt." She laughed, and it was an ugly, broken sound. "And then Madison was born, and she was so beautiful, and people stopped me on the street, and I thought, this is it. This is my chance to do it right. To give her everything I never got."