“The state would pay, is all I’m saying,” says Henry. “It might be below market, but there are things to consider beyond your fucking bottom line.”

“Exactly,” Kate says. “Like our family, our mother—like keeping the house in our family.”

“Most of us,” Tess says, “live in New York.”

“But it could stay the place we go,” Kate says. “It could stay the place we go when we all come together. I don’t know how to ask you to understand that there is value to that for us.”

Tess crosses her arms, leans forward, then back. “Don’t do that, Kate. Don’t be like that.”

“Do what? I’m asking you to think about what mattered to our mother.”

“I think what mattered to your mother was all of us.”

“She loved that house, Tess.”

“She loved us.”

Henry has hold of Alice, who’s come back with a beer and sits against him, her beer held tight with all ten fingers. “I think maybe this is enough grown-up bonding for our first night,” Henry says.

“We have to settle this,” says Josh.

“We will,” says Martin. “But we also need to sleep. We don’t need to wake the kids.”

Kate doesn’t look at any of them. She listens, eyes out the window, head angled toward the floor, as Tess and Martin go upstairs, as Alice and Henry get up together and walk out the back door.

“We don’t get as much say because we don’t have children,” says Alice, lighting a cigarette and walking past the barn toward the woods. She doesn’t really care what happens, but still, fuck them.

“No one said that,” says her husband.

“Your fucking snail kites,” she says.

When Henry was little, he has told her, from his upstairs window, looking out over the federal preserve, he’d watched them, only found in Florida in the U.S.: taloned raptors, beaks made to eat the snails found only in the wetlands; the only species of raptor that lived communally. He wants to make more space for all of them: the great blue herons, the ospreys, the bald eagles that he glimpsed sometimes when he was a kid.

“There aren’t that many left,” he says. She only started to smoke again last year, and she knows he hates to watch her do it, like she no longer cares what might or might not kill her. He looks back toward the barn instead. “I’m not sure why you think what I want matters less.”

“Because they’re trying to survive, Henry. My mom helped us. Your mom helped us. We have this house.”

“Oh, fuck that,” he says. “They’re all rich. Their kids’ futures aren’t going to be determined by where they fucking go to college.”

Alice smokes and waits for him to settle.

“When did my siblings become such gross people?”