“How many years have your and Jack’s mother been feuding?” asked Jules, applying a final layer of shimmer onto Maggie’s cheekbones.

“It’s basically a pastime.”

Fifteen years ago, when our mother, Hope Coventry-Gilford, learned that our father had made a handshake deal to sell the estate that had been with her family for over a century, she’d predictably exploded. Despite The Land’s impossible upkeep, she’d never expected it to be lost. She’d called Susie Utterback and relayed the story of the pending sale tragically, playing up my grandmother’s recent death, my brother’s diagnosis, and the Coventrys’ history on The Land. Though Susie was not about to renege on the deal, she offered to rent us the property’s carriage house, which my granny had converted into an apartment and artist’s studio in the `70s, for five thousand bucks a year.

I’m pretty sure Susie Utterback has regretted that decision ever since.

Jules withdrew, and the hairdresser, who told me to call her Miss Fawn, took over, standing behind Maggie’s chair and attending with quick fingers to all those clips. “Wasn’t there also a thing with an old tree on the property?” asked Miss Fawn. “I remember my parents talking about it years ago.”

“Hope fastened herself to a bulldozer, or something,” said Maggie. “Right, Cass?” Though Maggie fit into Newport like Cinderella’s foot in the glass slipper, even she could not deny that our family, Hope its de facto head, was—as Susie might say with delicacy—different.

“It was just a few saplings Susie wanted to take out.” I shook my head in amusement at the memory. “But Hope continually scared off the gardening crew with a shovel. Christ, I’d forgotten about that. And to think, you’re now going to be related to both of them.”

“Are you a kind of offering, Maggie?” Miss Fawn said as she put the finishing touches on my sister’s finger waves with the curling iron.

“Like in the olden days, when they would make the daughter marry into a family so they could join property, or whatever,” Jules chimed in, passing her brushes to her assistant for sorting and cleaning.

Maggie and I both found the idea of such a long con hilarious. “That’s exactly what you are, Buggie!” I declared. “You and Jack—a strategic alliance.”

“Well, maybe now there will be peace,” said Maggie. With permission from Miss Fawn—after she’d been sprayed just so—she rose from the director’s chair, her hair set, and appraised herself in the floor-length mirror leaning against the wall. She turned right, left, then right again. Hairline, neck, décolletage—it was all rigorously inspected. She flicked something invisible off her cheek. One wayward hair was tucked into place behind her ear. Finally, satisfied, she faced me with a wide smile. “Maybe now everyone will just get along.”