Joy takes over the sorting, but she doesn’t back down—she rarely does, which is both her greatest strength and her worst curse, in part because she is logical enough to be annoying as hell. I should leave her to the job and walk away. But the truth is, I want her opinion.

Actually, I need it. She’s all I have.

“He’s your father,” she says now. “And Anne’s your sister. And that house is where you grew up. Not all the memories are bad, some are good—like hide-and-seek in your mother’s potting shed—so why can’t you focus on the good stuff?” She’s sounding younger as she drops the last of the items in the basket and turns wounded eyes on me. “I’ve never been there, Mom. It’s less than three hours away, and I’ve never been there? That’s embarrassing. And even if all of the above wasn’t true, it’s the beach? We love the beach.”

Basket on hip, I head for her room. “We were in Jamaica in February and spent last Thanksgiving in Anguilla.” Our travel expenses were paid by the owners of the houses I photographed. “Those beaches are soft and warm. Beaches on the New England coast are neither.”

“Those beaches were for work,” Joy argues as I dump her things on her pillow, where she’ll have to address them before she sleeps. “This would be a vacation.”

“Going home will not be a vacation, Joy. Trust me on that.”

“Okay, so let’s go for a weekend, just a weekend?”

We could, I concede on the way to my room. I’ve considered that before, but always veto it when I start to hyperventilate. Okay. That’s an exaggeration. I’m not hyperventilating now. But the knots in my stomach are real. It’s an ingrained thing, a legacy of my childhood when I was always afraid I’d do something wrong, provoke Dad, piss someone off.

And then there’s my mother. She’s been dead a while, but I imagine her up there looking down, watching, waiting, wondering what I’ll do, whether I’ll flip sides now that she’s gone. Maybe my father is doing the same thing in his judgmental way. Or not. I’ve often thought it would be nice if, in his diminished state of whatever, he mellowed. When I was growing up, it was his way or the highway.

Margo chose the highway, me the median strip in an attempt to be neutral, because I want my family to love me. I want to have a relationship with my sisters once my father is gone, and that means finding common ground. Common ground is right here in New York. When they visit, I knock myself out planning fun things to do. That’s the thing about fun. Each round is a deposit in a memory bank that earns interest over time.