Nobody Asked Nick

Chapter 1: The Summons

The email arrived on a Tuesday in March, which should have been my first warning. Nothing good has ever come from the Larkin family on a Tuesday.

To be fair, nothing catastrophically bad had come on a Tuesday either—the Larkins prefer to concentrate their chaos on weekends, preferably holiday weekends, preferably in locations where escape requires crossing a body of water. But the Tuesday email had a special energy to it, the digital equivalent of a hand grenade rolling under a bathroom stall.

From: Diane Larkin <diane.larkin@larkinproperties.com>
To: [The Entire Known Larkin Universe]
Subject: DAD'S 70TH — MANDATORY FUN

The body of the email was four paragraphs long, single-spaced, written in the imperial tone my mother-in-law reserves for occasions she considers both joyous and non-negotiable. George Larkin was turning seventy. The family would gather at the usual rented house in Kettle Cove, Maine. Attendance was not optional. The weekend would run Thursday evening through Sunday morning, which was a full day longer than the standard Larkin reunion and therefore represented a twenty-five percent increase in my annual suffering.

I read the email twice at my desk during my planning period, then closed my laptop and stared at the poster of Abraham Lincoln on my classroom wall. Lincoln stared back with that expression he always has—melancholy, resolute, as if he too had once been trapped in a beach house with people who didn't think he belonged there.

"You survived a civil war," I told him. "I can survive this."

Lincoln did not look convinced.

My name is Nick Brenner. I am thirty-eight years old. I teach AP United States History at Coventry High School in Coventry, Connecticut, where I am known as a patient educator, a fair grader, and the guy who does a surprisingly good Teddy Roosevelt impression during the unit on Progressive Era reforms. I coach junior varsity cross-country in the fall. I drive a nine-year-old Honda Civic. I have a modest retirement account, a subscription to three history podcasts, and a deep, abiding love for my wife, Katie, who is a Larkin.

Being married to a Larkin is like being a minor character in someone else's novel. You're there. You have lines. Occasionally you get to hold a door open or carry a suitcase. But the story is never about you, and the other characters have a habit of forgetting you're in the scene.

Katie and I met at a museum fundraiser in Hartford eight years ago. She was working as an assistant curator at the Wadsworth Atheneum, and I was there because my friend Pete had an extra ticket and I had nothing better to do on a Saturday night. Katie was standing in front of a Thomas Cole painting, holding a glass of wine and explaining to a small crowd why the Hudson River School was actually radical for its time. She was smart, funny, passionate, and approximately six inches out of my league. I walked over, said something about Manifest Destiny that I thought was clever, and she laughed—not a polite laugh, a real one, the kind that makes you feel like you've just won a very small Nobel Prize.

We were married two years later, in a ceremony at the Larkin family's preferred country club, where George Larkin gave a toast that mentioned Katie fourteen times and me twice, both in the context of Katie's decision-making abilities.

"My daughter has always had excellent judgment," George said, raising his glass. "And I trust that she knows what she's doing."

The room laughed. I laughed too, because that's what you do when you're Nick Brenner at a Larkin event. You laugh. You help clear the table. You make yourself useful without making yourself noticed. It's a skill I've perfected over six years, and I'm not sure whether it's a survival strategy or a personality disorder.

Katie forwarded me the email that evening, adding a single line of commentary: "Brace yourself."

She was in the kitchen when I got home, chopping vegetables with the focused intensity she brings to tasks she's anxious about. Katie chops when she's nervous. After her last performance review, she reduced an entire butternut squash to confetti.

"So," I said, setting my bag down. "Mandatory fun."

"I know."

"Four days this time."

"I know."

"Your mother used the word 'mandatory' in the subject line. She's never done that before. That's an escalation."

Katie set down the knife and turned to face me. She has her father's blue eyes and her mother's bone structure and a way of looking at you that makes you feel simultaneously loved and slightly insufficient.

"It's Dad's seventieth, Nick. It's a big deal."

"I understand it's a big deal. I'm just noting that in the six years I've attended these reunions, the subject lines have progressed from 'Summer Get-Together!' to 'Family Weekend — Please Confirm' to 'MANDATORY FUN,' and I'm trying to calculate the trajectory. By the time your father turns eighty, the subject line will just be 'REPORT FOR DUTY' with a GPS coordinate."

She didn't laugh. That was unusual. Katie almost always laughs at my jokes, even the bad ones, which is one of the things I love most about her and also one of the things that makes me wonder if she's been humoring me for eight years.

"Nick, I need you to be good this year."

"I'm always good."

"I need you to be extra good."

"Define 'extra good.'"

"Don't hide in the bedroom reading. Don't spend three hours on the beach by yourself. Don't get into a debate with Chad about zoning laws."

"That was one time, and he was wrong about setback requirements."

"Nobody cares about setback requirements, Nick."

"The Connecticut General Statutes would disagree."

She gave me the look. The look is a Larkin family heirloom, passed down through the maternal line, and it communicates a very specific message: I love you, but you are testing me, and I have inherited a capacity for emotional warfare that you cannot begin to comprehend.

"Fine," I said. "Extra good. I'll be the best Nick I can be."

"Thank you."

She went back to the vegetables. I went to the living room, sat on the couch, and began the mental preparation that every Larkin reunion requires. It's not unlike the way I imagine astronauts prepare for reentry—you know you're going to survive, probably, but the heat is going to be intense, and there's always a small chance of catastrophic failure.

The thing about the Larkin family is that they're not bad people. I want to be clear about that from the start. They are not villains. They are not cruel, at least not intentionally. They are simply a family that has built an elaborate mythology about itself and then committed to that mythology with the fervor of a religious order. The Larkins believe they are special. Not in the way that all families believe they're special—the way your aunt says "We're just a crazy bunch!" at Thanksgiving while everyone eats casserole. The Larkins believe they are special in a structural, almost constitutional sense, as if George Larkin didn't just build a real estate company but founded a dynasty.

George Larkin started Larkin Properties in 1982 with a small office in Glastonbury, Connecticut, and a philosophy he summarized as "buy the ugly ones." He specialized in distressed commercial properties—strip malls, office parks, the kind of buildings that look like they were designed by someone who had never seen a building and was working from a vague description. He'd buy them cheap, renovate them competently, and lease them to businesses that needed affordable space. It wasn't glamorous, but it was profitable, and by the mid-nineties George had expanded into residential development and was wealthy enough to start acting like it.

The wealth changed the family the way wealth usually does: gradually, then completely. The Larkins went from comfortable to affluent to whatever you call the stage where you start referring to your vacation home as "the property" and your children start using "summer" as a verb. George bought a bigger house, then a bigger one. The kids went to private schools. The family developed traditions—the annual reunion, the Christmas party, the Fourth of July clambake—that were less about togetherness than about reinforcing the brand.

By the time I married into this family, the Larkin mythology was fully formed. George was the patriarch, the self-made man, the benevolent king of a small but prosperous kingdom. His wife, Diane—née Morrison, from a perfectly respectable family that the Larkins somehow managed to treat as if she'd been rescued from obscurity—was the queen, the organizer, the one who held everything together with a combination of charm, discipline, and strategic deployment of passive aggression.

And then there were the children.

Katie was the second oldest and, by general consensus, the most reasonable Larkin, which is like being the most moderate member of a revolutionary council. She had her father's ambition and her mother's composure, and she'd carved out a career in museum curation that the family regarded as charming but inessential, the way you might regard a hobby that your child refuses to outgrow.

Chad was the eldest, the heir apparent, the one who'd gone to law school and then joined the family firm, where he held the title of Junior Partner and the actual role of George's loudest supporter. Chad was thirty-nine, built like a former lacrosse player who'd transitioned seamlessly into a current beer enthusiast, and he had the unshakable confidence of a man who had never been told he was wrong about anything that mattered. His wife, Becca, was a quiet woman who seemed to exist primarily in Chad's peripheral vision.

Holly was the third child, twenty-nine, and had built a modest social media following around the concept of "coastal New England lifestyle," which as far as I could tell meant photographing lobster rolls and wearing cable-knit sweaters in rooms with exposed beams. Her husband, Jared Tully, was a videographer she'd met at a content creation workshop, and their marriage appeared to function as a joint business venture with occasional romantic overtones.

And then there was Jeff, the youngest at twenty-six, the family's designated disappointment. Jeff had started law school, dropped out after one semester, tried a startup that made an app for rating hiking trails (it was called TrailMix, and it was exactly as successful as you'd expect), and was currently working at a nonprofit in Burlington, Vermont, doing something with community land trusts that nobody in the family understood or respected. Jeff was bringing a new girlfriend to the reunion, which in Larkin terms was roughly equivalent to introducing a foreign dignitary—the family would be polite, but there would be an assessment.

I knew all of this. I had been studying the Larkins for six years with the analytical rigor I bring to primary source documents, and I had developed a comprehensive understanding of the family's power dynamics, unspoken rules, and pressure points. I knew that George drank scotch but pretended it was bourbon because he thought bourbon was more American. I knew that Diane rearranged other people's kitchens when she was anxious. I knew that Chad couldn't go more than twenty minutes without mentioning his golf handicap, that Holly photographed her food before anyone was allowed to eat it, and that Jeff was the only Larkin who had ever asked me a genuine question about my job.

What I didn't know—what I couldn't have known, sitting on my couch in Coventry, Connecticut, mentally packing my suitcase for four days in Maine—was that this particular reunion was going to be different. That the mythology was already cracking. That the weekend would force me to stop being the quiet observer in the corner and become something I hadn't been in years: a person with opinions.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. That's the problem with knowing how a story ends—you want to skip to the good part. And the good part, for me, started on a Thursday afternoon in July, when Katie and I loaded the Honda Civic and pointed it northeast toward the coast of Maine, toward the rented house on the bluff, toward the family that had never quite figured out what to do with me.

Katie drove. She always drives to Maine. It's a control thing, and I respect it.

We were forty minutes into the trip when she said, casually, the way you say something you've been rehearsing for hours: "Mom says she's hired a caterer for the birthday dinner."

"Good."

"A real caterer. Not Aunt Linda with a crockpot."

"Even better."

"And she's rented a tent. For the backyard. With lights."

"A tent with lights. Your father's going to love that."

"She's also invited the Prescott-Cunninghams."

I turned to look at her. "Who are the Prescott-Cunninghams?"

"Family friends. From the club."

"I've never heard of them."

"You've met them. At the Christmas party two years ago. He's tall, she wears a lot of turquoise."

"I have absolutely no memory of these people."

"Well, they're coming. And some of Dad's business associates. And possibly the mayor of Glastonbury."

"The mayor of Glastonbury is coming to your father's birthday party in Maine?"

"She's a friend of Mom's."

I let this settle. The reunion was expanding. What had been pitched as a family weekend was metastasizing into an event, and events in the Larkin universe had a way of becoming productions, and productions had a way of becoming disasters.

"Katie," I said carefully. "How many people are coming to this thing?"

"Just family for most of the weekend. The party is Saturday night. Maybe forty, fifty people."

"Fifty people."

"Give or take."

"At a rented beach house."

"It's a big house, Nick."

It was a big house. The Kettle Cove house was a sprawling, shingle-style monster that perched on a bluff overlooking the Atlantic like it was daring the ocean to try something. Six bedrooms, four bathrooms, a wraparound porch, and a kitchen that could feed a platoon. The Larkins had been renting it every July for the past decade from a retired surgeon who lived in Palm Beach and probably had no idea what happened to his property each summer.

What happened to his property each summer was the Larkins.

"Okay," I said. "Fifty people. A tent. Lights. A caterer. The mayor of Glastonbury. Anything else I should know?"

Katie was quiet for a moment. Just a beat too long.

"No," she said. "That's everything."

She was lying. I knew she was lying because after eight years together I can read Katie's tells the way a poker player reads a table. When Katie lies, she doesn't look away—that would be too obvious. Instead, she over-commits to eye contact, or in this case, over-commits to watching the road, gripping the steering wheel at a perfect ten-and-two that she never maintains under normal circumstances.

But I didn't push it. I never push it. That's the Nick Brenner way—observe, catalog, file away for later, and assume that whatever's being hidden will eventually reveal itself, probably at the worst possible moment, probably in front of the entire Larkin family.

I leaned back in my seat and watched Connecticut give way to Massachusetts give way to the southern tip of New Hampshire, and I thought about what I always think about on the drive to Maine: how strange it is to love someone whose family treats you like an optional accessory.

Not unloved. Not mistreated. Just... optional. Like the garnish on a plate. You wouldn't miss it if it weren't there, but since it is there, you might as well let it sit quietly and not draw attention to itself.

That was me. The garnish.

The garnish was going to Maine.