Fun for the Whole Family

Jennifer E. Smith

First published in Great Britain in 2025 by

Quercus Editions Limited

Carmelite House

50 Victoria Embankment

London EC4Y 0DZ

An Hachette UK company

The authorised representative in the EEA is Hachette Ireland,

8 Castlecourt Centre, Dublin 15, D15 XTP3, Ireland (email: info@hbgi.ie)

Copyright © 2025 Jennifer E. Smith, Inc

The moral right of Jennifer E. Smith to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

EBOOK ISBN 978 1 52944 488 9

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

www.quercusbooks.co.uk

Also by Jennifer E. Smith

ADULT

The Unsinkable Greta James

YOUNG ADULT

Field Notes on Love

Windfall

Hello, Goodbye, and Everything in Between

The Geography of You and Me

This Is What Happy Looks Like

The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight

You Are Here

The Comeback Season

MIDDLE GRADE

The Storm Makers

PICTURE BOOK

The Creature of Habit

The Creature of Habit Tries His Best

For Declan

There’s no such thing as fun for the whole family.

—JERRY SEINFELD

Michigan

1997

BY THE TIME THEY ACQUIRED A MAP, THEY WERE ALREADY seventeen states in. They’d never bothered to count before—not really, not officially—though they each had their own way of keeping track. Gemma had a leather pouch full of rocks, one from every place they’d been. Connor kept a journal, scribbling his observations as the country scrolled by unseen out the window. The twins, Roddy and Jude, collected snow globes. But there had never been any formal way of marking their progress, of ticking off states as they saw them.

That all changed when Jude discovered the map at a yard sale, propped up against a grim-faced old rocking horse. It was enormous, almost bigger than she was, with the world’s ugliest red frame and a tear that went from the Florida Panhandle all the way to Oklahoma. She didn’t care. She enlisted Roddy to carry it back with her, the two of them stopping every few feet along the gravel edge of the road to adjust their grip on the heavy frame.

At home, they burst into the kitchen, two proud fishermen hauling in their catch. Their dad was at work—was always at work—but Gemma and Connor were there, and they looked up from their homework to stare first at the threadbare map, then at the twins. For a moment, Jude worried she’d miscalculated. That it was a terrible idea. That nobody else would understand.

But of course they did. Connor hurried over to help them set it on the table; Gemma disappeared upstairs and returned a few minutes later with a box of colorful thumbtacks. They set to work, recalling stories, arguing over memories—that diner where Roddy spilled a milkshake, was that in Vermont or New Hampshire? was it last August or the one before that they saw that black bear in upstate New York?—and when they were done, they stood back to admire their handiwork. There was a smattering of pins along the East Coast, the rest arranged like a fist around Lake Michigan. Seventeen in all.

Proof of what they’d seen.

Proof that she’d been there too.

They stared at the map, each examining it for their own kind of evidence. Gemma’s eyes ran over the blocky states in the western half of the country as she tried to guess where she might be now. Connor was remembering the time he’d gotten carsick on a highway in Kentucky and she pulled over to rub his back, whispering stories about her adventures as his brother and sisters slept. Roddy wondered if she’d show up again this August; it always felt like a magic trick when it happened, but magic wasn’t all that reliable, so it seemed best to keep his expectations low.

Only Jude was looking at the box of thumbtacks.

To her, it felt like a promise.

More.

There would be more.

Gemma

Illinois

2025

It’s been three years since Gemma has seen any of her siblings, three years since they’ve exchanged anything more than the occasional polite text, but somehow, she’d always known that when one of them finally got in touch for real, it would be to ask for something. She’d also known that—no matter how many times she’d told herself otherwise—she wouldn’t be able to refuse.

The text arrives just after five A.M. in Chicago, which means it’s three A.M. in Los Angeles, though Jude could be anywhere right now. Gemma is already awake; she sits up in bed, her heart beating fast. Beside her, Mateo shifts in his sleep, upsetting the dog, who gives him an indignant look. She stares at the phone, her sleep-deprived brain trying to make sense of the words: Meet me in North Dakota this weekend?

Behind the curtains, the night is punctuated by streetlamps, and Gemma blinks into the semidarkness, thinking: North Dakota? and then: Jude.

Jude.

She gets out of bed and walks quietly into the kitchen, phone in hand. The dog, Waffles, follows her, a mop of an animal, shaggy and smelly and not terribly smart. Gemma reaches for the coffeepot automatically, then remembers she’s not allowed to have any caffeine right now. She glances over at the counter, which is crowded with vials of saline and packets of syringes, prenatal vitamins and pages of instructions from the fertility clinic. In the fridge there’s more, the bottles of medication stacked neatly alongside the ketchup and the mayo and the expired jar of applesauce.

Gemma had never expected to find herself here, forty-three years old and still not totally sure she wants to be a mom, even as she waits to find out if their first round of IVF has worked. She’d always assumed she’d have figured it out by now, that she’d have enough distance from her childhood to know either way. Instead, she’s continued to inch through this process with alarming ambivalence, first the months of medication to boost her numbers, then the three unsuccessful rounds of IUI, and now this: a single embryo, which will either stick or it won’t, which will either turn her into a mom or not. She wishes she knew which she was hoping for.

When she looks up again, Mateo is standing in the doorway of their tiny kitchen with evident bewilderment. “What time is it?” he asks as he stoops to pet the dog, who promptly flips onto her back, gazing up at him adoringly. She might’ve belonged to Gemma first, but from the minute Mateo came into their lives, over a decade ago, she’s had eyes only for him.

“I got a text from Jude,” Gemma says, and Mateo straightens, looking surprised.

It’s not as if she hasn’t spoken to her siblings at all in the three years since their fight. But if anyone ever reached out, it was usually Gemma, whose job it had always been to keep them together. In spite of everything, she sent birthday cards and texts on holidays and congratulatory emails when she read something interesting about any of the other three in the news, which had been happening with increasing regularity. Sometimes she got something in return: a thanks! or a you too or simply a hollow-feeling xo. But usually she didn’t.

“Wow,” Mateo says, raising his eyebrows. “What did she say?”

“You wouldn’t believe it.”

“I’d believe just about anything when it comes to your sister,” he says, his accent like music, her all-time favorite song. He walks over to give her a kiss, lingering for a moment in case she needs more. But she feels too fragile right now. Behind her, the sun is beginning to stream through the window above the sink, and the old man in the townhouse next door is playing the same tuneless rendition of “Heart and Soul” he does every morning. For years, Gemma had thought about complaining, but then she ran into him in the courtyard one day and he told her how his late wife used to play the other half, the two of them side by side at their old piano, and she’s since grown to love it. Even if it’s badly off key.

Mateo grabs his favorite mug, the one with the Brazilian football logo on it, and starts to make coffee with an apologetic look. But Gemma’s mind is elsewhere.

“She wants me to meet her in North Dakota,” she tells him.

He laughs, then realizes she’s serious. “Oh.”

“This weekend.”

“Oh,” he says again, setting down the mug, clearly searching for the right thing to say. “Have you ever been?”

“To North Dakota?” Gemma says with a frown. “No.”

“I thought you went everywhere as kids.”

“Not everywhere,” she says, thinking about their childhood map, the thirty-two states they’d marked off with pushpins before everything had fallen apart so abruptly the night of the fire in Texas. It’s been a while since she’s bothered to tally up her official number, to count all the states she’s seen in the years since those breathless road trips with their mother, on travels with friends and adventures with Mateo, summer vacations and business trips to marketing conferences in random cities. If she had to guess, she’d say that maybe she’s been to forty or so by now. But mostly she’s lost track. They all have. Or at least that’s what she thought.

“Maybe she’s filming something,” Mateo says, and then—trying and failing to sound casual—he adds, “Do you think you’ll go?”

His eyes flick to her stomach, and the look on his face is so hopeful it could break her heart if she let it. She shakes her head.

“No,” she says. “Don’t worry.”

“I’m not worried,” he says with a too-quick smile, but she knows that’s not true, and she feels a stab of guilt because it’s her fault they’re here. From the moment they met, Mateo was ready to be a dad. Everything about him fits the part, from his periodic table sweatshirt to his corny jokes to the way his sixth-grade science students adore him. This had always been their plan eventually, to have kids, but it was Gemma who insisted on waiting, hoping something would tip her into feeling ready too; at first it was just a couple years, and then more, until nearly a decade had slipped by, and the question mark she’d been carrying around inside her all that time stopped mattering as much as the unforgiving fact of her biology.

Sometimes she can’t help feeling jealous of Mateo’s certainty. But it’s easier for him. He grew up in a wealthy suburb of São Paulo, in a house with two loving parents and a protective older brother, an abundance of riches as far as Gemma is concerned. Her childhood was something different altogether. Until she was twelve, she and her younger siblings had a mom like any other. Frankie Endicott was maybe a little more scattered than most, a little less reliable, but she still managed to brush their hair and pack their lunches and give them baths before bed most nights. Then one day, she sent the four of them off to school with hugs and kisses, and when they came home that afternoon, they found a tuna casserole in the fridge with a note explaining that she would be gone for a while.

That was May. She didn’t return again until August—and then, only long enough to whisk them off on the first of those summer road trips. But already, she didn’t seem like their mom anymore. Already, she seemed more like a stranger.

Their dad, Paul, worked long and unusual hours as a feeder driver for UPS, and so it was Gemma who became responsible for making grilled cheese and forging permission slips and walking the twins to school, for making sure Connor didn’t stay up too late reading and finding Roddy’s inhaler before soccer practice and keeping tabs on Jude. It wasn’t until years later, when their dad met Liz—a pediatric nurse whose best and worst quality was that she was not their mother—that their home finally regained a semblance of order. But by then, Gemma was nearly out of the house herself. Which meant she’d never really been a kid. Not when her mom was around. Not when she wasn’t. Not even when she came back at the end of each summer to take them on those freewheeling adventures, crisscrossing the country in great lurching strides before depositing them back at their dad’s.

Especially not then.

Across the kitchen counter, Mateo is still watching her with an anxious expression. “I know we’re talking about Jude here,” he says very gently. “So if you feel like you need to—”

“I’m not going,” Gemma tells him, because today is Tuesday, the fourth day of February, which means that in exactly five days she’s meant to take a pregnancy test—and while she has no idea which way it will go, no idea what she’s even hoping for at this point, she does know that she’d rather not be in North Dakota when she finds out. She shakes her head. “This is so typical. You can’t disappear for three years and then out of nowhere just . . .” She trails off, her throat suddenly thick, and blinks a few times. “I’m not going. I can’t.”

Mateo frowns. “Are you sure?”

“I’m sure,” she says firmly.

“Okay,” he says, and then he brightens. “You’ve got plans this weekend anyway.”

“I do?”

“Yeah, it’s only the biggest event of the sixth-grade academic calendar.”

“Right,” she says with a faint smile. “The science fair.”

He runs a hand along his rapidly balding head. “We’ve got to see whether Beatrice W’s potato ends up with more hair than I have at this point.”

Gemma walks over and kisses him lightly on the cheek. “It might, but you’ll still be cuter,” she says, and he grins. “I’m gonna run out for some milk.”

Mateo opens the fridge and points inside. “We have plenty.”

“Then I’m going for a walk,” she says, already disappearing into their bedroom to get dressed.

Outside, it’s unseasonably warm for February in Chicago, even at this early hour. The air still smells of rain from last night’s storm, and in the distance, the sunrise is reflected in the flashing silver of the skyline. Gemma feels a deep fondness for all of it: the elevated train rumbling by, the old woman watering her plants on the steps of a neighboring brownstone, the line out the door of the fancy coffee place on the corner. All those years growing up in the little A-frame house in Michigan, staring across the lake from the opposite shore, this is what she’d wished for: a city. A sense of freedom. A place where she, too, could disappear.

In the convenience store, Gemma weaves aimlessly through the aisles and arrives at the checkout with an armful of items she barely remembers grabbing. She spills them onto the counter and then hands over her credit card, which the blue-haired girl glances at before swiping.

“Endicott,” she says, and Gemma follows her gaze to the magazine rack beside the cash register, unsurprised to find Jude looking back at her from the cover of People. She’s wearing a gold sequined dress, her strawberry-blond hair—the same color as Gemma’s, the same as all of theirs—sleek in a long bob and the fair skin across her nose sprinkled with freckles. It’s a special Oscars preview, and the headline across the front reads: GOLDEN GIRL.

“That’s not you, is it?” the girl asks with a sardonic smile as she swipes Gemma’s card. “Is this one of those stars-are-just-like-us moments?” Gemma is about to assure her it’s not when the machine lets out a shrill beep, and the girl looks up again. “Oh. Um . . . it’s been declined.”

Behind her, a mom trying to pry a candy bar out of her toddler’s hands averts her eyes, clearly embarrassed by this turn of events. Gemma had forgotten they’d put the entire cost of the IVF on this card, which amounted to thousands and thousands of dollars and had raised a fraud alert they were still trying to untangle. See, she’d almost said to Mateo, even the bank thinks it’s unlikely that I’d be trying to become a parent.

“Now you know for sure I’m not a movie star,” Gemma says as she fumbles through her wallet for cash, but then she realizes she doesn’t really need any of this stuff. “You know what? I think I’m okay actually.” She waves awkwardly as she backpedals out of the line, but even once she’s outside, her words continue to ring in her ears: I think I’m okay, I think I’m okay.

She tips her head back to look at the sky, taking long, ragged breaths. She has a powerful urge to text Connor and Roddy and ask if they’ve heard from Jude as well, to see if there’s some universe in which they’re actually planning to go to North Dakota this weekend. But she doesn’t. She’s not sure if she’s more afraid that they’ll write back or that they won’t.

Three years, she thinks. How could they have let so much time go by?

This isn’t the first time their family has fractured. That happened when Frankie up and left them out of the blue, and then again years later on the night when Gemma and Connor and Roddy woke up in a Texas motel to the smell of smoke and stumbled outside to find Jude and Frankie huddled together on the grass, their faces pale behind streaks of ash, watching the old red Honda burn in the blue-black night. They’d apparently been sitting in the parked car when Frankie decided to light a joint. “It must’ve been a spark,” she kept repeating afterward, her voice strangely robotic, her eyes a little haunted. It didn’t occur to Gemma to ask why their mother thought it would be a good idea to smoke pot in an enclosed space during a heart-to-heart with her fourteen-year-old daughter; Frankie had been largely absent from their lives for years at that point, and Gemma had long since stopped asking those types of questions.

Afterward, their dad had forbidden her from seeing them, which meant it was the last summer of the road trips, the last summer the country revealed itself through the window of the ramshackle Honda, the four of them fighting over who got shotgun, the other three jammed in the backseat, their mother’s hair whipping in the breeze from the open window and the Rolling Stones on repeat in the cassette player.

It was the last summer of a lot of things.

And now, all these years later, the Endicotts have managed to split themselves apart for a third time—only this is somehow even worse. Because both their parents are gone now, and they have no one to blame but themselves.

Gemma begins the walk home empty-handed. When she reaches their brownstone, she sits down on the cool of the front stoop, wrapping her jacket tightly around herself, watching an endless stream of kids hurry by on their way to school. She sees an older sister pause at the crosswalk to wait for her younger brother, a hand outstretched, and she remembers her own days shepherding the other three to school, walking along the edge of the road in a wobbly line, Gemma and then Connor and then Roddy and Jude, side by side as always.

Her phone buzzes with another text, and she looks down, expecting it to be Mateo asking if she’s okay. But it’s Jude again.

Please, Gem. It’s important.

She was thirteen when Jude was eight and started having nightmares. Gemma knows she could’ve gone to Roddy, who was in the bunk right below her, or their dad, who was just down the hall, but it was her bed that Jude would climb into every night, burrowing in beside her to fall into a feverish sleep, her body blazing with heat. All night, she’d toss and turn and kick, but Gemma never minded; she just held her tighter, waiting until her little sister had drifted off before she closed her own eyes.

When she walks back into the condo, Mateo is sitting on the couch with a copy of the Tribune. Her suitcase, which they usually keep in the basement storage locker, is on the floor beside him. He looks at her with a tentative smile.

Gemma walks over and runs a hand lightly over the handle. “How did you know?”

“Because,” he says, “I know you. And I know this is important.”

She sinks down onto the couch beside him, leaning her head against his broad chest as she works her way up to her next question. “You don’t mind?” she asks, motioning toward her stomach. “That I won’t be here when we find out?”

He kisses the side of her head. “You’ll be right where you’re supposed to be.”

She laughs. “In North Dakota?”

“With your family,” he says, and Gemma thinks back to the last time she saw her siblings before their big fight: they’d all flown to L.A. for a premiere of Jude’s, and had watched with a mixture of awe and amusement as she worked her magic on the red carpet. Afterward, they settled into the darkened theater to watch, but only ten minutes into the film, Gemma felt a tap on her shoulder and turned to see Jude motioning for them to follow her. Instead of the movie, they went out for dumplings, and instead of the after-party, they headed back to her suite at the Four Seasons to drink champagne and eat the chocolate strawberries the studio had sent her. They stayed up most of the night, laughing and talking and catching up, reminiscing about their strange childhood and the even stranger turns their lives had taken, and then the sun began to rise over downtown Los Angeles, and they stepped out onto the balcony to watch, the four of them lined up in a row, the sky a riot of pink and orange, the palm trees turning to silhouettes.

“If anyone asks,” Jude told them, “you loved the film.”

“It was brilliant,” Gemma said with a nod.

“Best thing I’ve seen in ages,” Roddy agreed.

“I have some notes,” Connor added, and Jude swatted at him, laughing.

Gemma twists to look at Mateo now, her throat tight. “Thank you,” she says, grateful that he understands. “Though I’m sorry to miss the science fair.”

“That’s okay,” he says, and his eyes shift to her stomach again, his expression so tender it makes her a little panicky. “There’s only one experiment I care about right now anyway.”

She manages a smile. “Don’t tell the hairy potato.”

“Wouldn’t matter anyway,” he says. “Potatoes only have eyes. No ears.”

In spite of herself, Gemma laughs. “You’re such a nerd.”

“Which is why you love me.”

“I really do,” she says, and she leans over to kiss him.