Father of the Rain

1

My father is singing.

High above Cayuga’s waters, there’s an awful smell.

Some say it’s Cayuga’s waters, some say it’s Cornell.

He always sings in the car. He has a low voice scraped out by cigarettes and all the yelling he does. His big pointy Adam’s apple bobs up and down, turning the tanned skin white wherever it moves.

He reaches over to the puppy in my lap. “You’s a good little rascal. Yes you is,” he says in his dog voice, a happy, hopeful voice he doesn’t use much on people.

The puppy was a surprise for my eleventh birthday, which was yesterday. I chose the ugliest one in the shop. My father and the owner tried to tempt me with the full-breed Newfoundlands, scooping up the silky black sacks of fur and pressing their big heavy heads against my cheek. But I held fast. A dog like that would make leaving even harder. I pushed them away and pointed to the twenty-five dollar wire-haired mutt that had been in the corner cage since winter.

My father dropped the last Newfoundland back in its bed of shavings. “Well, it’s her birthday,” he said slowly, with all the bitterness of a boy whose birthday it was not.

He didn’t speak to me again until we got into the car. Then, before he started the engine, he touched the dog for the first time, pressing its ungainly ears flat to its head. “I’m not saying you’s not ugly because you is ugly. But you’s a keeper.

“From the halls of Montezuma,” he sings out to the granite boulders that line the highway home, “to the shores of Tripoli!”

We have both forgotten about Project Genesis. The blue van is in our driveway, blocking my father’s path into the garage.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” he says in his fake crying voice, banging his forehead on the steering wheel. “Why me?” He turns slightly to make sure I’m laughing, then moans again. “Why me?”

We hear them before we see them, shrieks and thuds and slaps, a girl hollering “William! William!” over and over, nearly all of them screaming, “Watch me! Watch this!”

“I’s you new neighba,” my father says to me, but not in his happy dog voice.

I carry the puppy and my father follows with the bed, bowls, and food. My pool is unrecognizable. There are choppy waves, like way out on the ocean, with whitecaps. The cement squares along its edge, which are usually hot and dry and sizzle when you lay your wet stomach on them, are soaked from all the water washing over the sides.

It’s my pool because my father had it built for me. On the morning of my fifth birthday he took me to our club to go swimming. Just as I put my feet on the first wide step of the shallow end and looked out toward the dark deep end and the thick blue and red lines painted on the bottom, the lifeguard hollered from his perch that there were still fifteen minutes left of adult swim. My father, who’d belonged to the club for twenty years, who ran and won all the tennis tournaments, explained that it was his daughter’s birthday.

The boy, Thomas Novak, shook his head. “I’m sorry, Mr. Amory,” he called down. “She’ll have to wait fifteen minutes like everyone else.”

My father laughed his you’re a moron laugh. “But there’s no one in the pool!”

“I’m sorry. It’s the rules.”

“You know what?” my father said, his neck blotching purple, “I’m going home and building my own pool.”

He spent that afternoon on the telephone, yellow pages and a pad of paper on his lap, talking to contractors and writing down numbers. As I lay in bed that night, I could hear him in the den with my mother. “It’s the rules,” he mimicked in a baby voice, saying over and over that a kid like that would never be allowed through the club’s gates if he didn’t work there, imitating his mother’s “Hiya” down at the drugstore where she worked. In the next few weeks, trees were sawed down and a huge hole dug, cemented, painted, and filled with water. A little house went up beside it with changing rooms, a machine room, and a bathroom with a sign my father hung on the door that read WE DON’T SWIM IN YOUR TOILET — PLEASE DON’T PEE IN OUR POOL.

My mother, in a pink shift and big sunglasses, waves me over to where she’s sitting on the grass with her friend Bob Wuzzy, who runs Project Genesis. But I hold up the puppy and keep moving toward the house. I’m angry at her. Because of her I can’t have a Newfoundland.

“Fuzzy Wuzzy was a bear,” my father says as he sets down his load on the kitchen counter. “Fuzzy Wuzzy had no hair.” He looks out the window at the pool. “Fuzzy Wuzzy wasn’t fuzzy, was he?”

My father hates all my mother’s friends.

Charlie, Ajax, and Elsie smell the new dog immediately. They circle around us, tails thwapping, and my father shoos them out into the dining room and shuts the door. Then he hurries across the kitchen in a playful goose step to the living room door and shuts that just before the dogs have made the loop around. They scratch and whine, then settle against the other side of the door. I put the puppy down on the linoleum. He scrabbles then bolts to a small place between the refrigerator and the wall. It’s a warm spot. I used to hide there and play Harriet the Spy when I could fit. His fur sticks out like quills and his skin is rippling in fear.

“Poor little fellow.” My father squats beside the fridge, his long legs rising up on either side of him like a frog’s, his knees sharp and bony through his khakis. “It’s okay, little guy. It’s okay.” He turns to me. “What should we call him?”

The shaking dog in the corner makes what I agreed to with my mother real in a way nothing else has. Gone, I think. Call him Gone.

Three days ago my mother told me she was going to go live with my grandparents in New Hampshire for the summer. We were standing in our nightgowns in her bathroom. My father had just left for work. Her face was shiny from Moondrops, the lotion she put on every morning and night. “I’d like you to come with me,” she said.

“But what about sailing classes and art camp?” I was signed up for all sorts of things that began next week.

“You can take sailing lessons there. They live on a lake.”

“But not with Mallory and Patrick.”

She pressed her lips together, and her eyes, which were brown and round and nothing like my father’s yellow-green slits, brimmed with tears, and I said yes, I’d go with her.

My father reaches in and pulls the puppy out. “We’ll wait and see what you’s like before we gives you a name. How’s that?” The puppy burrows between his neck and shoulder, licking and sniffing, and my father laughs his high-pitched being-tickled laugh and I wish he knew everything that was going to happen.

I set up the bed by the door and the two bowls beside it. I fill one bowl with water and leave the other empty because my father feeds all the dogs at the same time, five o’clock, just before his first drink.

I go upstairs and get on a bathing suit. From my brother’s window I see my mother and Bob Wuzzy, in chairs now, sipping iced tea with fat lemon rounds and stalks of mint shoved in the glasses, and the kids splashing, pushing, dunking — the kind of play my mother doesn’t normally allow in the pool. Some are doing crazy jumps off the diving board, not cannonballs or jackknives but wild spazzy poses and then freezing midair just before they fall, like in the cartoons when someone runs off a cliff and keeps moving until he looks down. The older kids do this over and over, tell these jokes with their bodies to the others down below, who are laughing so hard it looks like they’re drowning. When they get out of the pool and run back to the diving board, the water shimmers on their skin, which looks so smooth, like it’s been polished with lemon Pledge. None of them are close to being “black.” They are all different shades of brown. I wonder if they hate being called the wrong color. I noticed this last year, too. “They like being called black,” my father told me in a Fat Albert accent. “Don’t you start callin’ ‘em brown. Brown’s down. Black’s where it’s at.”

The grass feels good on my feet, thick and scratchy. I put my towel on the chair beside my mother.

“You heard Sonia’s group lost its funding,” Bob was saying. I don’t know if Bob Wuzzy is white or black. He has no hair, not a single strand, and caramel-colored skin. When I asked my mother she asked me why it mattered, and when I asked my father he said if he wasn’t black he should be.

“No,” my mother says gravely, “I didn’t.”

“Kevin must have pulled the plug.”

“Jackass,” my mother says; then, brightening up, “How’s Maria Tendillo?” She pronounces the name with a good accent that my father makes fun of sometimes.

“Released last Friday. No charges.”

“Gary’s the best.” My mother smiles. Then she lifts her face to mine.

“Hello, Mr. Wuzzy,” I say, and put out my hand.

He stands and shakes it. His hand is cold and damp from the iced tea. “How are you, Daley?”

“Fine, thank you.”

They exchange a look about my manners and my mother is pleased. “Hop in, honey,” she says.

This morning she told me I was old enough now to host Project Genesis with her, that all the kids would be roughly my age and I could be an envoy to new lands and begin to heal the wounds. I had no idea what she was talking about. Finally she said I should just be nice and make them feel welcome and included.

“How can I make them feel included when there is only one of me and so many of them?”

I knew she didn’t like that answer, but because she was worried I’d tell my father we were leaving, she asked me softly if I could just promise to swim with them.

I stand on the first step, my feet pale and magnified by the water. I feel my mother willing me to behave differently, but I can’t. I can’t leap into the fray like that. It isn’t in my nature to assume people want me around. All I can do is watch with a pleasant expression on my face. The older kids are still twisting off the diving board. The younger ones are here in the shallow end, treading water more than swimming, their faces flush to the surface like lily pads. In the corner two girls are having underwater conversations. A boy in a maroon bathing suit slithers through them and they both come up screaming at him, even though he is underwater again and can’t hear. There are four boys and three girls, all different sizes, and I wonder if some of them are siblings. They seem like it, the way they yell at each other. But no one gets mad or ends up crying like I always do.

I move slowly from one step to the next, then walk out on tippy toes. They aren’t looking at me, but they all pull away as I approach. At the slope to the deep end, my feet slip and I go under. It’s cool and quiet below until a body drops in, a sack of bubbles. Normally when I look up from the bottom of the pool, the surface is only slightly buckled, like the windowpanes in the attic, but now it’s a white froth. The boy in the maroon bathing suit passes right above me. His toes brush through my hair and he screams.

When I surface, the littlest boy pushes himself toward me. The others watch him.

“This your pool?” he asks. The water lies in crystals in his hair.

“Yes.”

“You swim in it every day?”

“When it’s warm out.”

“But it’s heated, right?” He swings his arms around fast, making his fingers hop along the surface.

“Right.”

“I’d swim in it every day,” he says. “Even if it was twenty below. I’d get in in the morning and not get out till night.”

“You’d have to eat or you’d die.”

“Then I’d die in this pool. It’s the perfect place to die.”

I decide not to tell him about Mrs. Walsh, who did. She had a heart attack. “Is that Mrs. Walsh floating in the pool?” my father likes to say sometimes when I’ve left a raft in the water. My mother doesn’t think it’s funny.

This leaves a pause in the conversation and the boy paddles away. I feel bad and relieved at the same time.

My mother’s smile fades as she realizes I’m getting out. Bob is telling her about some fundraiser and she can’t interrupt to prod me back in. After I dry off a little, I cross the lawn and run up the steps.

My father is in the den, watching the Red Sox and smoking a cigarette. I sit next to him in my wet bathing suit. He doesn’t care about the possibility of the slipcover colors bleeding. At the commercial he says, “You didn’t enjoy your swim?”

“I got cold.”

He snorts. “The pool’s probably over ninety with all the pee they’re putting into it.”

“They’re not peeing in it.”

I wait for him to say I sound just like my mother, but instead he puts his warm hand on my leg. “I promise this will never happen again, little elf. I’m going to put a stop to it.”

It will stop without you having to do a thing, I think.

They only come a few times a summer. On other weekends they go to other people’s pools or private beaches in other towns. “Project Genesis,” my brother said at the beginning of the summer, on one of the few days he was home between boarding school and his summer plans, whatever they are, making his voice deep and serious like a TV announcer. “In the beginning there was blue chlorinated water in backyards. There were trampolines and Mercedes and generous housewives in Lilly Pulitzer dresses willing to share a little, just a little.” My mother giggled. My father scowled. He can’t amuse her with his teasing the way my brother can.

They swim for hours, until Bob calls them all out and makes them dry off and change in the poolhouse. He and my mother get the charcoal lit in the bottom of the grill and, once the coals are hot enough, put fifteen patties on the rack. The kids explore the yard, back and front, running from the space trolley to the swing set to the low-limbed apple tree. They dare to do things I don’t, like hang upside down on the trolley as it whizzes from one tree to the other, crawl on hands and knees across the single narrow tube on the top of the swing set, and flip off the stone wall around my mother’s rose garden.

I watch them from the kitchen window.

“Bunch of monkeys,” my father says, mixing a drink at the bar.

They have so much energy. They make me feel like I’ve been living on one lung. The littlest girl skins her knee on one of the huge rocks that heaves up through the grass in our yard and the two oldest take turns jogging her in their arms, planting kisses in her hair and stroking away her tears. She clings to them for a long time and they let her.

“Daley.” My mother stands at the screen door. “Please come out and eat with the rest of us.”

“Oh, yes,” my father says. “Do go eat with the fairy and his little friends.”

My mother acts like no one has spoken. On the steps, away from him, she puts her arm around me. She always smells like flowers. “I know it’s hard, but try not to be so remote. This is important, honey,” she whispers.

Normally I eat dinner with Nora, but she’s in Ireland for two weeks visiting cousins. She goes every summer and I never like it. The rest of the year she lives with us except on Sundays when, after church, she drives over to Lynn, where her sister lives, and spends the night with her. “Lynn, Lynn, the city of sin. You never come out the way you went in,” my father often says when she drives away, but never to her face. She is a serious Catholic and she wouldn’t like it. I’ve gone with her many times to see her sister in Lynn on Sunday nights. They eat cutlets and play hearts and go to bed early. There’s no sinning for them in Lynn. There’s a picture on Nora’s bureau in our house of her and my father on some rocks near the ocean. She’s eighteen and my father is one. He’s holding onto her hand with both of his. His mother hired Nora for a summer in Maine, but she ended up going to Boston with them and staying for nine years, until my father went to boarding school. When my brother, Garvey, was born, she was working for another family somewhere in Pennsylvania, but she was free when I came along. After dinner Nora and I watch TV on her bed, Mannix and Hawaii Five-0, both of us in our bathrobes. She puts me to bed and we always say “Now I Lay Me” and the Lord’s Prayer, though at her church it has a different ending. My mother says that after we leave, Nora will stay on to take care of my father, who can’t boil an egg.

My parents didn’t name my brother Garvey. They named him Gardiner, after my father, and he was Gardiner all my life until he went to boarding school and came back Garvey. My mother tried to stop it, but he is Garvey now. At his graduation a few weeks ago even the headmaster called him Garvey.

We sit in a jagged circle in the grass. My mother’s dress is too short for her to sit Indian-style so she folds her legs off to one side, which tilts her toward Bob Wuzzy. I’m aware of how it will look to my father in the kitchen window, sipping his drink.

Bob makes us all go around and say our names, but after that we’re silent. Even the two grown-ups seem unable to keep up a conversation. We eat our burgers, then Bob says, “Who wants to play sardines?” and all of them cry out, “Me!” I know my father would rather I come in and sit with him, but my mother’s eyes are locked on mine.

Bob tells us we can only hide in the yard as defined by the back and front driveways, and not inside any of the buildings on the property. He makes it sound like a small college campus. Then he chooses a girl named Devon to hide first. The rest of us count aloud as fast as we can to fifty, omitting vowels and syllables, like racing down stairs three at a time. Then we scatter, to find Devon without anyone else seeing. I’m sure I’ll get to her first, since I know the terrain and all the good hiding places. I go first to the rhododendrons in front, then to the small empty fountain in the rose garden. After that I check behind the granite outcropping near the street. Soon everyone else is missing, too, except the little boy named Joe, my friend from the pool.

“Let’s check over there,” I call to him, pointing toward the small pines beyond the pool, but Joe runs off in the opposite direction.

As I pass the back porch, I hear a crinkling sound. They’re all in a tight cluster beneath the back steps, in a small, dark, spidery space that has always scared me. As I draw closer, the buzz of their chatter is so loud I wonder how I could have passed by twice without having heard them. I bend over and squeeze in. To fit all the way, I have to press up against several bodies. We’re all hot and our skin sticks. All their buzzing stops. No one says a thing. It seems to me that they’ve all stopped breathing. I try to think of something to say, something goofy the way Patrick can, that will make us all giggle. Out in the twilight of the yard little Joe begins to cry, and Bob Wuzzy tells us to come out.

The boy who found Devon first goes off to hide, and the rest run off to count. I slip back up the porch steps.

My father is eating a minute steak with A-1 sauce slathered all over it. His forehead and his nose are covered in sweat, the way they always are when he eats dinner. He’s staring straight ahead and I can’t tell if he knows I’m there.

“You’s a good kid, you know that, elf?” His words are skating slightly sideways.

When he’s done with dinner, he makes another drink. He gives me two tiny, vinegary onions from the bottle. In four days I won’t live here with him. When we come back to Ashing in the fall, my mother says, she and I will live in an apartment and I’ll only come up here on weekends.

The game outside has ended and no sounds come through the screen door. Then the pool lights go on, the little mushroom-shaped lamps in the grass and the big underwater bulb beneath the diving board. Bodies stream out of the poolhouse and crash into the water. My father’s body goes rigid at the sound.

He finishes his martini, jiggles the ice as he drinks to drain it of every drop. Then he sets the glass down on the counter. “I’ve got an idea,” he says.

I don’t say no to my father’s ideas, just as I don’t say no to my mother’s. If my father had asked me to go away with him, I would have. My brother says no all the time when he’s home, and that just gets everyone all riled up.

We take off our clothes on the back porch. The puppy is with us, jumping around our ankles, sensing something different.

“Un, deux, trois,” my father says. He knows French from fishing in Quebec. “Go!”

He heads straight for the pool, his long tennis legs springing across the grass he keeps shorn and stiff, a bulb of muscle at the back of each calf, his thighs thin and taut, his bum high and flat and stark white in the dark, and his long arms flashing fast as he moves, the right stronger than the left, with an Ace bandage at the wrist. He moves in a way no one else in my family does, graceful as water. When he reaches the pool, he begins to grunt. He veers right, away from the corner where my mother and Bob Wuzzy sit with their sodas, and runs along the patch of grass between the length of the pool and the garden’s stone wall.

A boy floating on my red raft sees us first.

“Streakers!” he yells.

My father leaps over the short toadstool lights, one at a time, his grunts getting louder, his arms beginning to buckle toward his body, his spine bending forward. He takes the turn around the deep end, his body all sinew and strength, flecked with silver veins and tendons, glowing in the pale green pool reflection.

All the kids are yelling now, hooting and slapping the water, laughing so hard they have to swim over to the edge and hang on.

He saves my mother’s spot in the corner for last. He comes at her now head-on, past the poolhouse, right toward her seat in the chaise longue, his balls whipping from side to side, the penis boylike, small as a mouse. He curls his arms up all the way now, scratches at his armpits, and says, “Ooooo-ooooo-ooooo” right in her face, and then is gone.

My mother, for a moment, looks like she’s been tossed out of a plane. Then she reassembles a smile for Bob, who, for the children’s sake, is pretending it’s an odd but innocent prank. But when she sees me, something snaps. She lunges out of her chair to grab me, but I’m fast and slippery without clothes. I feel the thick, tough grass between my toes and the wet summer night air moving through the hair on my arms and through my hairless crotch. I’m boylike, too, with tight buds on my chest, and this night I’m nearly as lithe and quick and nimble as my father. Both my lungs are pumping hard. I don’t want to stop running, stop the burning of my stomach muscles and the ache in my throat, stop the stars from seeing my bare, newly eleven-year-old body in the grass, fast and graceful as a deer through the woods.

On the porch we stand laughing and panting together with our clothes at our feet and our puppy spinning in joyful circles and my father grinning his biggest grin and looking at me like he loves me, truly loves me, more than anyone else he’s ever loved in his life.

2

The day before my mother and I leave Ashing, I ride my bike down to Baker’s Cove. There isn’t much of a beach, and it’s smelly at low tide, so we usually have the place to ourselves. If you climb way out around on the rocks, no one can see you from the road.

Mallory’s got her mother’s Larks and I’ve got my father’s L&Ms and Gina’s got her father’s Marlboros. Patrick says his mother ran out, and Neal says neither of his parents smoke. No one believes him. This is the first time Neal Caffrey’s come to the cove with us. I’m not sure who called him.

“You’re just scared to steal,” Teddy says, pulling out a silver box full of menthols.

“My father has asthma,” Neal says. He takes one of the Salems and shuts the box. “Who’s G.E.R.?”

We all look at the swirled initials cut into the silver. Teddy’s last name is Shipley.

He shrugs. “Who cares?” He takes off his shoe. “Are we going to play or what?”

“I want to finish my cig,” Mallory says. She looks exactly like her mother when she smokes, her free hand tucked under the other arm which is bent up in a V, the cigarette never more than a few inches from her mouth.

The boys only ever want to kiss her, so they wait.

The air is thick and hot, but every now and then a cool gust comes off the water. You can see it coming, wrinkling the surface from far away as if it were a huge dark wing. Afterwards everything goes light and flat again. Neal’s curls have been blown around. He’s the closest thing I’ve ever had to a crush and my heart is thrumming a little faster than normal. I can’t look at Patrick because I know he knows. He’s like that.

“Who wants to go first?” Teddy asks.

“Me.” Mallory scrapes her cigarette out against the rock and pulls her hair into a ponytail, all business.

She spins Teddy’s topsider. When it stops, the toe points at me and everyone laughs. She spins again. It points to the space between Patrick and Gina.

“If it’s between people then you can choose anyone,” Teddy says.

“Patrick,” she says, and Patrick rolls his eyes. He always pretends he hates to be kissed.

They lean in toward each other and their lips meet for a quick peck. Mallory says she likes to pick Patrick because his lips are nice and dry.

It goes clockwise from Mallory. Neal is next. He spins the old crusted topsider with two hands. It wobbles to a stop, the toe pointing undeniably at me.

He stands all the way up, walks around the outside of the circle to me, takes my hand, pulls me up, and kisses me. It’s a warm kiss, not quite as quick as Mallory and Patrick’s. He lets go of my hand last. I know my face has flamed up and I keep my head down until the burning stops.

Gina kisses Teddy. Teddy kisses Mallory. Then it’s my turn. Neal, Neal, Neal, I beg but the shoe points at Teddy.

“Hat trick,” he says, meaning he’s gotten to kiss all three of us.

I get it over with fast. His lips are wet and flaky, like soggy bread.

When it’s Neal’s turn again, it lands between Gina and Teddy.

“Your choice,” Gina says, hopeful.

“Daley.”

And this time he leads me even farther away from them, nearly to the trees.

“You got a bed in the bushes?” Teddy says.

“I don’t like an audience,” Neal says. And to me, quietly, “You mind that I chose you again?”

I shake my head. I want to say I was hoping for it, but I can’t get the words out before he kisses me, longer, opening his mouth the slightest bit.

“That was nice,” he says.

“It was.” Everything feels so strange, like I’m walking into someone else’s life.

“Teddy says you meet here every week.”

“This is only our third time.”

“You coming next week?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Hey, stop yacking. It’s my turn,” Gina says. “And Patrick has to meet his grandmother at the beach club for lunch.”

They’re all turned toward us now. “Try,” Neal says quietly.

The game breaks up soon after that. We smoke a few more cigarettes and watch the seagulls drop mussels against the rocks and then fight over the smashed pieces.

“Can you imagine that being your life?” Patrick says.

“I’d throw myself off a cliff,” Teddy says.

“But you’re a seagull so it wouldn’t work,” Gina says. “Your wings would just start flapping. Are you taking sailing this year?”

“Yeah,” Teddy says. “You?”

“All three of us.” She points her thumbs to me and Mallory.

“Do you think any animal in the history of animals has ever committed suicide?” Neal asks.

“No. Their brains aren’t big enough to realize how stupid their lives are,” Teddy says.

I don’t know if it’s the cigarettes making me feel funny, but they all seem far away. If I spoke I would have to scream for them to hear me.

When we go, I let the others ride ahead, the five of them weaving around each other, taking up the whole road. I look back at the cove. I thought I had the whole summer for cigarettes and spin the shoe. A seagull lands where Teddy left a plum pit, pecks at it twice, then lifts back up into the air. The water is higher now, creeping up the barnacled sides of the rocks. Neal looks back for me through the opening between his right arm and the handlebar of his ten-speed, casually, as if he’s just looking down at his leg.

In the driveway my mother takes a wrench to my bike. I’ve never seen her use a tool from the garage before. She removes the two wheels easily and loads them along with the frame on top of our suitcases in the back of her convertible. She’s wearing a kerchief around her hair, the way she does when she gardens. Her movements are sure and studied, like a performance. She presses down on the trunk several times, and when it finally clicks a laugh bursts out of her, though nothing is funny.

Sometimes, when no one else can come get me, a teacher drives me home from school. It feels like that now, like a teacher, a stranger, is taking me somewhere.

“Hop in, sugar,” she says.

The ugly puppy is scratching at the screen door. My father will come home to his bright yellow urine and soft shit all over the newspaper I just spread across the whole kitchen. An hour ago I promised him I’d keep the puppy outside most of the day.

“You have to give him a lot of attention every time he goes to the bathroom outside,” he said. He was dressed in his summer work clothes — a tan suit and a light blue tie — his hair still wet from his shower, cleanly parted on the right. “You’ve got to go like this: good boy, good boy, good boy”—and he rubbed my belly and back at the same time, hard and fast, practically lifting me off the ground.

I laughed and said, “Okay, okay.” I held onto his arms after he stopped, dangling from him.

“You sure you can do that?”

“Yes.”

His hands were wide, tanned and bony, the nails bitten down, the veins sticking out blue-green and lumpy. He said goodbye, and I kissed his hands and let go.

In my mother’s car, the radio is always tuned to the news, WEEI. “Only five days after completing a tour of the Middle East,” a reporter is saying, “President Nixon arrived in Brussels, Belgium, today to confer with Western European leaders before going on to Moscow on Thursday.”

My mother speaks directly to the radio. “Oh, you can run, Dick. You can run, but you cannot hide.”

At the four-way stop, I look down Bay Street. Mallory’s house is the big white one on the corner, and Patrick’s is the last driveway on the left, across from the beach club. They will both call my house today, and no one will answer.

“As the president flew across the Atlantic today, his physician told reporters that he was still suffering from an inflammation of veins in his left leg. The president has known about this ailment, known as phlebitis, for some weeks now, but ordered that the condition be kept secret, his physician said.”

My mother snorts at the dashboard.

We drive through town. In the park, trailers have arrived with rides for the carnival that comes for a week every summer. Men are taking off enormous painted pieces of metal and setting them in the grass. The big round cars for the Tilt-a-Whirl, with their high backs and red leather seats, lie splayed out near what is normally first base. But once the rides, the stalls, and the vans with pizza and fried dough are set up, you can’t find the old park anymore. A few little kids look on, from the bleachers, like we used to.

Downtown is small, just one street with shops on it. Neal’s mother sometimes works at the yarn shop. Her car is outside it now, an orange Pinto with a small dent on the driver’s door. Traffic is slow coming from the opposite direction, tourists heading toward Ruby Beach. People wave to us — Mrs. Callahan and Mrs. Buck — but my mother is gnawing on her lip and listening to the news and doesn’t pay attention to them. When we reach the highway she takes my hand and guns it to seventy-five.

We stop at the Howard Johnson’s for lunch. I like their fried clams because they’re just the necks, no bellies. The bellies make me throw up. But there is a mountain of them. They look like fat fried worms. I eat three. My mother can’t eat much of her club sandwich either. The waitress asks if we’d like to take the food home with us, and we both shake our heads no.

“We are going to be okay, you and I,” my mother says, rubbing my arm.

“I know,” I say, and my mother looks relieved.

Back in the car, she lets me put in an eight-track for a little while. I play John Denver singing about his grandma’s feather bed. I play it over and over until she asks me to stop. It makes me happy, that song, all the kids and the dogs and the piggy in the bed together.

We cross into New Hampshire. Until she got married when she was nineteen, my mother spent every summer of her life on Lake Chigham. She says I’ve been there before, but I can’t remember it. I can only remember my grandparents in our house for Thanksgiving or Christmas, sitting in chairs. I have no memory of them standing up.

After a while we get off the highway onto narrow then narrower roads. The trees seem to get taller. We turn onto a dirt road with a small white sign with blue paint: CHIGHAM POINT ROAD. Below it, in much smaller letters: Private Way.

My mother sucks in a deep breath and says, letting it out, “Here we go.”

I look down the road. There are no houses, just trees — pines and maples — blocking out every drop of sun.

“Remember it now?” my mother asks.

“No.”

We drive in. It’s a very long road with other roads leading off it, long driveways with last names painted on wooden boards nailed to trees. Occasionally, through all the trees and bushes and undergrowth, you can see the dark shape of a house or the glint of water. We turn down one of the last driveways and park beside a brown sedan. The house, made of dark brown wood, is only a few feet from the lake, which is still and too bright to look at after the dark road.

“Home again, home again,” she says in a sigh.

My grandfather comes out. His mouth is all bunched up like he’s angry and he moves quickly down the porch steps and my mother practically runs to meet him and they hug hard. My mother lets out a noise and Grindy says, “Shhhh, shhhhh now,” and strokes her hair until the kerchief falls on the grass. She says something quietly and he says, “I know. I know you did. Twenty-three years is enough trying.”

He motions to me with an arm and when I get close enough he pulls me into their hug and kisses me on the forehead.

Nonnie is in the doorway when we come in with all our bags. She kisses us both on the cheek. Her skin is fuzzy and she smells like one of those tiny pillows you put in your drawer to scent your clothes. She isn’t really my grandmother, my mother tells me that night, when we are lying in our twin beds in the room we share. I have never known this. It turns out I’ve never met my real grandmother. She lives in Arizona, and my mother hasn’t seen her since Garvey was a baby.

Nonnie still has a young face but old hair, completely white. She keeps it pinned up, but if you go down into the kitchen early enough you can catch her in a blue plaid robe and her hair, brushed to a shine, spilling down past her waist. The rest of the day it’s gone, braided and coiled behind her head.

At dinner that night, Grindy argues with my mother about Nixon. “All these testimonies and hearings are just putting a stopper on everything else. These ridiculous tapes! The country doesn’t need to listen to all that nonsense. We are in a serious recession. Let the man deal with things that matter.”

“Nothing matters more than this, Da. People need to be held accountable. Otherwise we’re paving the way for another Hitler.”

Grindy shakes his head. “Little girl,” he says, and then his voice grows very sharp. “You mustn’t ever speak of Richard Nixon and Adolf Hitler in the same breath. Ever. Richard Nixon did not know about Watergate.” My mother tries to interrupt but he holds up his hand. “He did not know about it, and all he is guilty of is trying to protect his own men from going to prison. You are naive, little girl. There is always internal spying. Always. These people got caught. But the president needs to be able to get back to the business of running the country.”

My mother looks like she’s looking at my father. Nonnie asks if anyone would like more beans.

After dinner my grandfather watches the Red Sox. I stand behind his chair and polish his bald head with my sleeve. I’m fascinated by the sheen of his scalp, the white age spots, the brown age spots. My mother tells me to leave him alone but he tells her it feels nice. The thin layer of brown shiny skin smells like mushrooms before they’re cooked. When I go to bed, he puts his hands over my ears and gives me a hard kiss of bristles on my forehead.

My mother insists that my father knows where we are, but I can’t understand why he hasn’t called or driven up. I pick up the phone every now and then, to see if it really does work, then hang it back up. He must be so mad at me.

On the map of the lakes region in my grandparents’ dining room, where we are is circled in red. Our point looks like a little tonsil hanging off the north side of the lake.

“It’s like being in a bunker,” my mother says to someone on the phone, probably her friend Sylvie. “No light comes in the windows. You have to go out into the middle of the lake to see the sun.”

In the upstairs hallway there is a photograph of my mother standing on the dock in a white two-piece bathing suit, scratching her leg. Her skin is brown against the white and she is smiling. In the background a few girlfriends are waiting for her in the water. Those friends still come back here, with their own families, and my mother wonders aloud to me in our slope-ceilinged room how they can do it, return each summer, year after year, to the same people, the same cocktail parties, the Fourth of July picnic, the August square dance, the endless memorial services for all the old people who died over the winter.

Eventually my mother drags over a girl named Gail to meet me. She’s going into sixth grade too, but looks much older. I take her up to my room to show her my albums.

“You’re tiny,” she says, wrapping her fingers around my wrist. She pulls out a pack of cigarettes and we smoke a few on the third floor next to an old seamstress’s mannequin. The taste reminds me of kissing Neal.

She comes over nearly every day after that. I’m the only other girl her age nearby. When it rains we play Spit and War in our living rooms and on sunny days we swim out to the float that is for all the families on the point or play tennis on the disheveled court in the woods. She introduces me to the other kids. Most of them are my second cousins, though they don’t really believe that. Or maybe they don’t care. Even though we aren’t in school I can tell Gail is the popular type. She has that thrust of personality that matters so much more than looks. I follow her around, the tail to her kite, grateful to be mysteriously attached.

After two weeks my father calls during dinner. Nonnie answers and returns quickly.

“It’s Gardiner.” She stands in the doorway, waiting to see if my mother will take the call.

“I’m not sure you should,” my grandfather says, but my mother gets up and goes to the phone, which is below the stairs in the living room. She speaks so low we can’t hear much, but I can see her straight stiff back and the way she holds the receiver several inches from her ear. When she calls me in and passes the heavy black receiver to me, my father asks me to come home.

“That’s what I want. I want you and your mother to come home.” His voice is high, like he’s making fun of something, but he isn’t. He’s almost crying. I smell him, smell the steak and the A-1 sauce and the little onions in his drink.

I’m not sure what to say. After a long silence, he tells me he’s named the puppy Scratch, that he’s a good boy, and that Mallory and Patrick came over to the pool to swim yesterday. His voice becomes regular and he says he took Scratch to the vet that afternoon. He got four shots and he was so brave.

“He’s right here,” he says, “right next to me, and he says hello to you and wants you to come home soon, little elf.”

“I’ll try, Dad.”

After I hang up I can see his hands and the sweat on his nose, and I miss him so much it feels like my skin is coming off.

In the dining room, my mother is complaining about him and the martinis and how he obviously talked to a lawyer who advised him to act like he wanted her back. “You watch,” my mother says, “he’ll write a letter. He’ll put it in writing.”

My grandmother sees me listening and asks if anyone wants more chicken.

I write to Mallory, Patrick, and Neal Caffrey. Mallory writes back first. She typed her letter in the shape of a giraffe.

Patrick writes next, on a turquoise card with his name embossed at the top.

Dear Daley,

I got this stationery for Christmas and this is the first time I’ve used it. It’s kind of dumb. We’ve been using your pool a lot. Hope you don’t mind. It’s hot here. Mr. Amory and me went to the supply place for more chlorine and a new DPD kit. We also went to Payson’s for an extension cord and thumbtacks. When are you coming back? The carnival is over. Elyse threw up on the Scrambler. It was gross. We capsized three times yesterday.

Love,

Patrick

I was the one who used to go with my father on all his weekend errands. The last time we were at Payson’s, he bought me a round key chain, one of the big silver ones like the kind the janitors at our school have that clip on a belt and have a little hard button in the middle you push to reel the keys back in. I forgot to bring it with me, and after I read Patrick’s letter I cry hard for that stupid key chain.

Then my father writes, like my mother said he would, a joint letter to both of us, asking us to come back. He used the white stationery from the desk in the living room that has our name and address on it in red letters. He wrote in blue ballpoint, pressing down hard against the blotter beneath so it feels like Braille on the other side. He says he misses us and loves us and wants us to come home and live with him. My mother lets me keep the letter in the pocket of my suitcase. She doesn’t write back. I do, but I don’t want to sound like I’m having a good time and I don’t want him to worry that I’m unhappy, so it’s a bad, boring letter. He never writes again.

After my father’s letter, Nora begins to send me cards with flowers or bluebirds on them and little poems on the inside. One says,

Before this little bird flies away

He wants to wish you a happy day.

She signs them Love Always, Nora.

I wait for a letter from Neal. I go with my grandfather nearly every morning to the Chigham General Store, where he buys a Boston Globe and a pack of Hot Tamales for me. Then we cross the street to the little post office. A woman named Mavis sits behind the counter. She blushes no matter what my grandfather says to her. I stand in a different spot in the small room each time, thinking if I can just stand in the right place a letter from Neal will be in my grandfather’s box. It can be as long as five or ten minutes that my grandfather talks to Mavis, never seeming to notice the hot flush of her flabby, downy cheeks. And then he reaches into his pocket for the key and steps over to box No. 5 and I stare down at the wooden planks of the floor until I hear the box click shut, my heart leaping in my body until I see that there’s nothing from Neal, and then it slows slowly down.

At the end of July, my brother comes to Lake Chigham with his new girlfriend, Heidi.

“Hermey!” he says, and picks me up in a big squeeze. He’s a little smelly and unshaven. “Hermey’s gotten so tall and even more fluffy-haired.” He calls me Hermey because I remind him of the little toymaker who wants to be a dentist on Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer.

“It’s the humidity,” I say, trying to mush down my frizz.

He introduces Heidi. She has long smooth hair and clear green eyes. He met her at the end of June at a party in Somerville, where he’s living for the summer.

“What day in June?” I ask him later, after dinner.

“I don’t know. It was a Monday night.”

“The twenty-fourth.” She hits my brother softly.

“Ow,” he says, not meaning it.

“The night before we left Myrtle Street,” I say. Everything for me is divided there, the before and the after.

“I’m going to marry her, Daley,” he says on the couch after dinner, when she goes to the bathroom. He puts his hands on his head and presses down. “Fuck. I’m going to marry her.”

When she comes back he clutches her tight, paws her hair, whispers something, and laughs into her neck. I’ve never seen him with a girl. He always only came home with other boys. They’d stay in his room all weekend, playing their guitars and rolling what looked like dirt into little squares of tissue paper. They listened to records I’d never heard of, cleaned every scrap of food out of the fridge and pantry, and then disappeared in a car until next time. But with Heidi, Garvey is very different. He’s soft and mild and always asking her what she thinks or what she wants.

“He’s really fallen in love,” my mother says.

We lie in our twin beds and listen to them murmuring in Heidi’s room. My mother tells me about her first love. She met him here one summer. He was visiting her cousin Jeremy. I know Jeremy. He looks like an old man already with tough leathery skin. He always wants a few kids to go out sailing with him, but he barks at you if you pull the wrong line on his boat. Jeremy’s friend was named Spaulding. He spied my mother from Jeremy’s porch.

“‘You’re a pretty thang,’ he said to me, just like that, thang because he was from Georgia and that made me curious. I was fourteen. I climbed right up onto the porch. The first night we went out I told him I felt like I was in a novel. That’s the way he made me feel. It’s the way I always feel when I fall in love.”

Garvey and Heidi have stopped talking and are making other noises. I know what they’re doing but it sounds like they’re both jumping on the bed, which I’m never allowed to do.

“We’re all lucky my father is losing his hearing,” my mother says.

The next day we go to one of the islands in the middle of the lake with a bucket of fried chicken. On the picnic blanket my brother licks the grease off Heidi’s fingers until my grandmother reminds them of their napkins. Then they go for a walk around the island. My grandparents walk in the other direction, shoes on, arms linked, leaning into each other as they speak. My mother, in her yellow bikini and enormous sunglasses, reads the newspaper, talking to it like she always does. “A five-minute-and-eighteen-second gap in the latest tape. How shocking.”

For a split second I think it’s my father on the front of the paper — the stoop, the heavy eyebrows, the small eyes — but it’s Nixon, waving from the metal stairs of his airplane.

Late that night, Garvey, Heidi, and I go for a walk all the way to the main road where the sky opens up and there are so many stars it’s hard to find the dippers or Cassiopeia. They seem to all be receding even as I watch them, but everything feels far away this summer; everything feels like it’s backing away from me. Heidi explains to me that most of the stars we’re seeing don’t exist anymore. They’ve died. But because they’re so far away and their light takes so long to get to us, we can still see them, even though they’re not there anymore.

“Aren’t there any new ones?” I ask.

“Yes, but we can’t see them yet.”

I crane my head up and stare at the dead stars. I don’t like that we’re seeing light from things that don’t actually exist. I feel how flimsy a life is, how flimsy the universe is. I’m just going to die and not even leave a spit of light behind. I jerk my head down to the earth but it doesn’t help. There are no streetlights. I can’t seem to take a deep breath. My hands and then arms begin to tingle, like they have fallen asleep, like they can’t get enough blood. In a split second, for no good reason, my heart starts racing, faster than it ever does in the post office, so fast it seems like there’s nothing for it to do but explode. I’m dying. I feel suddenly sure of this. I keep walking but I feel like crouching, curling up in a small ball and begging someone to make the feeling pass. My brother and Heidi walk ahead and it seems like they are about to step off a huge cliff and I know that I’m dying but I can’t call to them. My voice is gone. I’m disappearing. They turn back down the point road. I urge my legs to follow them.

“No they’re not,” I hear my brother say.

“Yes they are.”

My brother laughs and for a second he sounds just like my father. He taps her head. “What do you have in there, marshmallow fluff?”

“It’s true. My dad and I used to take walks at night, and he taught me about the stars.”

“The french fry maker is a closet astronomer?”

She punches him. Hard. He laughs, then punches her back just as hard.

I can’t get enough air. I can’t get my heart to slow down. I can’t even feel any space between the beats.

“Screw you,” Heidi says, and takes off running.

“Garvey,” I begin, wanting to tell him that I need to go to the hospital.

“She’s not mad,” he says. “She likes to play a little rough sometimes.”

The sound of his talking to me is soothing. “She’s nice,” I say. My voice is strange, like from a tin can. But I hope he’ll keep talking and he does. He tells me that she has this birthmark on her hip that drives him wild and that she kisses like a catfish in heat.

When we get back to the house she isn’t there. Garvey calls for her and she answers from far away. We find her sitting on the grass outside Cousin Jeremy’s house.

“All the driveways look the same,” she says.

My brother leans down and she pulls him to her and I don’t stay for the rest. I decide I’m not going to die and go back to my grandparents’ house.

Every Friday morning, my mother drives down to Boston to see her lawyer. She stays in the city for dinner, and I fall asleep on the couch waiting up for her. She brings back a present each time: a jump rope, a deck of magic cards, a Watergate coloring book about people called the Plumbers and a hippie talking to a faceless man named Deep Throat in a parking garage. The rest of the days she stays on the point with me. She says I can take sailing lessons, but I don’t want to. I like being with her. We listen to the music I brought — Helen Reddy, Cat Stevens, The Carpenters — in our room. We ride bikes to the ice cream shop on the main road. I teach her how to play Spit but she never beats me. She never leaves to go to a luncheon or set up a fundraiser or attend a rally. When she has to fill a prescription, buy a present, or get her hair done, I go with her, like I used to go everywhere with my father. She tells me stories about her relatives, about her childhood, about books she’s read and plays she’s seen. She has all sorts of stories she’s never told me before.

One day in my grandfather’s rowboat she points to a red boathouse across the lake. “That’s where I met your father,” she says.

“Where?”

“That’s a tennis club in there. Your father was playing in a tournament. I saw him on the court and I walked slowly past the fence. He was warming up, practicing his serves. And when he went to pick up the balls, he asked me if I wanted to have an iced tea with him afterwards.”

Was it really like that then? Did you just get picked like a flower by some guy? “And you said yes?”

“No. I said I had a hair appointment. So he asked me to the movies, which was much better than an iced tea.”

“Did you like him?”

“I did. Of course I did.” She stops rowing. I think she’s looking right at me but it’s hard to tell with her sunglasses. Her bottom lip scrunches into her top one, like she’s only just realizing my full connection to the story. “He was very attractive, very funny. I can’t remember the movie we saw, but in the middle of it a couple got into twin beds and your father leaned over and said, ‘When we get married, we’re going to have a double bed.’ I was so charmed by that.” She shakes her head. “All it really takes is a few words here and there. You can hang on to a few words for a long time. Fill in the rest with the fluff of your imagination.”

She starts rowing again.

“But when did he ask you to marry him?”

“At the end of the summer. I don’t know why it happened so fast but it did back then. We were all in such a hurry. And your father was an only child. He’d just graduated from Harvard and I think he was scared of being alone.”

When Nixon resigns in August, we have to watch it up in our bedroom, on the little TV we brought from the kitchen on Myrtle Street, because my grandfather wants nothing to do with it.

“Good evening,” Nixon says. He’s wearing a black suit and black tie. “This is the thirty-seventh time I have spoken to you from this office where so many decisions have been made that shaped the history of this nation.”

My mother usually berates Nixon whenever he appears on TV, but tonight she’s silent. She listens intently on her bed, chewing her lip. Nixon holds his stack of papers, reading from the top one then setting it gently to the side and starting at the top of the next. His hands don’t seem to be shaking. His words wash over me: political base, national security, American interests. It sounds like any other speech. He glances up only briefly to the camera, except at one point when he lowers his papers and without reading says, “I have never been a quitter.”

After a long time his voice starts to slow down and I know he’s getting to the end.

“To have served in this office is to have felt a very personal sense of kinship with each and every American. In leaving it, I do so with this prayer. May God’s grace be with you in all the days ahead.” And then he gathers his pages and they shut the cameras off.

“Goodbye to your sweet ass!” my mother hollers, then falls back on her pillows, exhausted, satisfied.

3

At the end of August we leave Lake Chigham. It’s like our arrival played backwards, with Nonnie giving us kisses in the doorway and then Grindy pulling me and my mother into a hug in the grass beside our stuffed car. But we don’t drive directly to Ashing. We go to Boston, where we meet Garvey at Park Street and I get out of the car and my mother drives away. She’ll pick me up at Garvey’s in three days. We go down a grimy set of steps below the street and take the T to Somerville.

Garvey’s apartment is on the third floor of a house that has slipped off its foundation sideways. A corner of the porch is sunk into the ground. Everything is broken — the porch railing, the windows. Even the front door has a crack running up the middle.

“This is the best part, right here,” he says, stopping in the dark stairwell to breathe in. “Smell that?”

I smell a lot of things and they’re all disgusting. “Your BO?”

Garvey laughs. “No. It’s Indian food. She makes it every day at lunchtime. She’s gorgeous, too. She wears these”—he sweeps his arm along his leg to the floor—”wraps. And she has this smirk I can’t interpret.” He shakes his head and keeps climbing, saying nothing about the people through the door on the second floor and the music they’re blasting. It gets hotter the higher we go. At the top of the stairs it’s bright — the sun pours through two big windows — and broiling. He pushes open a door that doesn’t seem to have a knob.

“Here we are. Home sweet home.”

It smells like vinegar and wet dirty socks. There’s linoleum, not just in the kitchen but covering the whole apartment, and my sneakers stick to it as if I have gum on both soles.

“Here. Bring your stuff to my room.”

Off the short hallway are three rooms. “Deena,” he says, pointing into a tidy blue room with a lime green bedspread and hundreds of earrings, the dangly kind my mother won’t let me wear yet, hanging from ribbons on the wall. “Heidi”—her room is just a pile of clothes and no bed—”and me.” Garvey’s room is all bed— two queen-sized mattresses put together. “We like to sprawl,” he says. “I’ll put one back in Heidi’s room and you can have your privacy in here.”

“Do Mom and Dad know you live together?” I’ve heard my father rant about Garvey’s generation enough to know he wouldn’t like this at all.

Garvey’s eyes widen and he covers his mouth with both hands, mocking me. “Ooooh, don’t tell them. I’m so scared of what ‘Mom and Dad’ think.”

“They’re not dead. They’re just getting a divorce.”

“Oh, thanks for the clarification.”

“They’re still your parents.”

“They’re my progenitors, not my parents. The word parent suggests something a little more hands-on.” He starts to drag one of the beds toward the door. “Besides, they’re both getting more than I am now.”

“Getting what?”

He drops the mattress and pats me on the head. “Little babe in the woods. So much to learn.”

There’s a fan in the corner of the room. I squat down to feel it on my face. My sweat turns cool, then disappears.

Garvey lies down on the bed by the door. “I’m surprised you let Mom escape for an assignation with her paramour.”

I have a bad feeling about what he’s just said. “Do you mind speaking English?”

“You let Mom go off with her boyfriend.”

“She just went to Sylvie’s. I’ve been there before.”

“She went to Sylvie’s. But Sylvie’s in France. And so a guy named Martin is going to be there with Mom. You are definitely not the sharpest tack in the box.”

Tears rise and the fan blows them toward my ears. Say hi to Sylvie for me, I just said to her in the car before she dropped me off. I will, she said.

“You really didn’t know?”

I shake my head. When I find my voice, I say, “Is he from Ashing?”

My brother laughs, loud because he’s on his back and because he loves it when I’m stupid. “Shit, no. God, Daley, do you think she’d ever have anything to do with the warmed-over corpses in that town?”

“But that’s where we live. We’re moving back there on Monday. I’m starting sixth grade. Mom found an apartment downtown on Water Street.” I say all this to make sure it’s still true.

“I know. And that’s all for you. For your benefit. Mom outgrew that town a long time ago.”

“So who is Martin?” I can barely move my lips. I forgot how bad my brother could make me feel when he wants to.

“I don’t know. That’s what I was trying to ask you.”

If my mother lied about who she was with, she could have lied about where she was going, too. It makes me woozy to think of a whole weekend of not knowing.

At least I know where my father is. On a Friday night at five-thirty he’ll be sitting in the den with his second martini. He’ll be looking at the local news, thinking about the pool and how he’ll clean it in the morning, test the chlorine balance. The dogs, just fed, will be moving swiftly around the yard, looking for the right place to pee and poop. Scratch will be trained by now, but if he lifts his leg in my mother’s rosebushes, my father will leap up and holler at him.

“Have you seen Dad?”

“Yeah. I went up there last weekend. Stupid.”

“What happened?”

My brother covered his eyes and groaned. “I don’t think I should tell you.”

“What’s wrong with him? What’s the matter with Daddy?” I picture him on the kitchen floor, for some reason, unable to stand. I can see it so vividly. I stand up myself, as if I can go to him.

“Nothing’s the matter with him, Daley. Have a seat.” He says this like a homeroom teacher. “He’s hooked up with—” He looks at me, deciding whether I can handle it. But it turns out I already know.

“Patrick’s mother.”

“I knew you weren’t as dumb as you look.”

Mr. Amory and me went to Payson’s. Mr. Amory and me cleaned out the shed. I’ve been reading about it all summer.

At six, we walk to the Brigham’s where Heidi works. After my brother’s roasting pan of an apartment, the street is cool; Brigham’s is like walking into a fridge. Heidi is waiting on a boy and his grandmother. She gives us a small smile, then turns her back to us to make their frappes. A blue apron is tied loosely at her waist and her hair hangs in a frayed braid. She slides the tall drinks and two straws to her customers and takes their money without speaking to them. Her face is moist, despite the air conditioning. She looks different than I remember, faded somehow.

“Hi there,” she says to me, but she is not glad to see me or Garvey. Her eyes are dull and olive, not the clear green I remember. “You made it.”

Garvey and I share a raspberry rickey at a corner table until her shift is over. Outside it is hot again, and the sidewalk is crowded with people coming up from the subway stairs or racing to them. After a summer in the woods, the chaos makes me uneasy. I stick close to my brother, who leads us to a Greek sandwich shop.

“Haven’t been here since yesterday,” Heidi mutters.

“I can’t really afford La Dolce Vita,” Garvey says, pointing to a fancy place down the street.

“You wouldn’t know la dolce vita if it hit you on the head.” She smiles but my brother does not.

The restaurant is hot and smelly and it’s no wonder Heidi doesn’t like it. We sit crammed in a corner. My brother orders me a falafel sandwich that tastes like sawdust mixed with onions. He has a big plate of diced meat and Heidi tells me to watch how he chews like a cow chewing cud. My brother tells her she should have stuck it out with Graham, and Heidi’s eyes get pink. She catches her tears with her thumb. They are drinking something called grappa and it seems to make them hate each other.

That night my brother’s apartment is a cauldron, as if all the city’s heat has risen and gathered here. I lie on the remaining bed in the dark, my feet and hands swelling, my skin stretching like a sausage being boiled. They took the fan into Heidi’s room. No air is coming through the three open windows. I miss the water and its cool breezes. Neither Ashing nor Lake Chigham ever got this hot. Headlights and brakelights swim across the ceiling. The cars and people below begin to seem responsible for the heat. A siren blares, spewing hotter air. I dream that I am rebraiding Heidi’s hair over and over. I can’t get it tight enough. I wake up to the sound of a door shutting.

Out the window my brother and Heidi are walking away, down the sidewalk, not touching. Garvey told me last night that they had to run an errand in the early morning and they’d be back by ten. I stay in the room as long as I can, but my hunger and need to pee drive me out. The bathroom is filthier in broad daylight. I don’t let my skin touch the toilet seat, the way my mother has taught me. I find cornflakes and milk in the kitchen, and just as I sit down with my big bowl on the couch, Deena’s door opens and a man comes out, naked. He’s very hairy.

“Hey,” he says, reaching for his jeans and T-shirt, which are beside me on the couch. He leaves, still naked, out the swinging, knobless front door. I hear him dressing in the hallway, then his bare feet sticking on the stairs on the way down.

The heat has retreated slightly; a breeze, an actual breeze, comes through the windows.

Deena’s door opens again. “Shit. Is he gone?”

“Yeah,” I say.

“Shit.” She looks down at a pair of glasses in her hand. “Shit.”

She throws them out the window. Then she stretches her long arms up to the ceiling and side to side. She is naked too, and her breasts are enormous, three times the size of my mother’s. She’s thin so they don’t even seem to fit properly on her chest, the nipples nearly facing each other. Her waist tapers in and then her hips flair out and her thighs are thick and strong. Her body is fascinating to me, womanly in a way my mother and my aunts in Chigham are not.

“I’ll get something on and join you,” she says, noticing my stare. She comes back in a short shiny robe that barely covers her bum.

“So your parents are splitting up,” she says, sitting beside me where the man’s clothes had been.

“Yeah.”

“How does that feel?”

How does that feel? The question echoes. I shrug.

“Was it hard with them fighting all the time?”

“They never fought. They didn’t really talk to each other all that much.”

She laughs. “I guess you and Garvey had different parents.”

“No,” I say quickly, before I get what she means.

“He tell you where he was going this morning?”

“No,” I say again.

She pushes her thick lips in and out, thinking. If I ask I know she’ll tell me but she strikes me as dangerous, full of things I don’t want to know.

“He is really fucked up. You know that, don’t you?”

My heart starts beating really fast, the beginnings of the dead star feeling. I put my bowl in the sink and go back to Garvey’s room. I lock the door. When I glance out the window, there they are in front of the house, not moving. The top of Heidi’s head is pressed into my brother’s chest and his arms are wrapped awkwardly around her. It looks like he’s the only thing keeping her from collapsing to the ground.

A half hour later they come inside. I wait for Garvey to come back to his room to check on me but he doesn’t. I hear them moving things around in Heidi’s room, then a kettle whistles and my brother calls, “Milk and honey?” down the hallway and she says, “Yes, please,” her voice low and ragged like she hasn’t used it yet this morning, or maybe has used it too much.

They settle in there, on the other side of the wall from me. Their talk is quiet and intermittent, calm, like little waves lapping against a hull. Then I hear something awful, a sort of yelp, like the wail of an animal in the woods, impossible to tell if it is male or female, only that it is coming from the room next to mine. Then it’s quiet.

I find a thin paperback on the floor called The Breast. “It began oddly,” it begins. “But could it have begun otherwise, however it began?” I read a few chapters. A regular guy has turned into a big hundred-and-fifty-five-pound boob. His penis changes first, into a nipple. Only Garvey would own a book like this. When I get tired of reading, I try to snoop but there is nothing, no secret notebook or hidden scraps of paper in his drawers. I’m angry at him for forgetting about me and I want to find something terrible about him that I can shove in his face.

When he finally does come in, he drops down face first on the bed and doesn’t move or speak for a long time. His threadbare flannel shirt has risen up with his arms and I can see the pale skin on his skinny lower back and a patch of dark hair at the bottom of his spine. His bum is flat like my father’s, the jeans covering it nearly black with dirt. I can tell he isn’t sleeping; his breathing is loud but uneven, as if there are words attached that I can’t hear. He looked at me when he came in, but now I’m not sure if he saw me. Then he flips over and fixes his restless eyes directly on mine, breathes another lungy loud breath, and says, “Please, Daley, whatever you do, don’t let any guy touch you. Ever. Not until you’re thirty. Or forty.”

I think of Neal, how I will see him in less than two weeks, how he never wrote.

“Please. Please listen to me. They will only fuck you up. Don’t fall in love. Don’t let ‘em close until you know exactly who you are and where you are going.”

“All right,” I say quietly so he’ll take his eyes off me.

He does, and then he looks up at the ceiling and starts to cry. I’ve never seen my brother cry before and he’s bad at it, spastic, his mouth contorted and his hands flailing around his face like they don’t know where to go. I don’t really recognize him as my brother anymore and I put my fingers on the inside of his arm to reassure myself it’s still him. He seizes me, pulls me into a hard, tight hug. My head bobs on his chest as he sobs. Just as suddenly it’s over and he says fuck and shoves me off him and leaves the room.

In Heidi’s room their voices start off quiet again but soon my brother is screaming at her. And she’s screaming back but then she’s doing something that’s not screaming. There are no words anymore; it’s like the horrible yelp I heard earlier but it doesn’t stop; it’s a long deep pitted howl that goes on and on and I feel in my own stomach that need to howl, and for a few seconds I get scared that I am actually the one howling, so hollow and jangly is my stomach.

After that it is silent and I lie all the way down on the bed and fall asleep. When I open my eyes again, the sun is gone and the night outside is a pale green haze. I hear voices in the living room and follow them. My brother and Heidi are facing each other on the couch, eating noodles from blue bowls.

He says something and she giggles and then they both look at me.

“Grab some chow on the stove,” Garvey says.

“Let me see if we have any milk left.”

“Milk? She doesn’t drink milk with dinner. She’s not four.”

“Kids need milk, for their bones.”

“Yes, little mama.”

“We don’t have any,” Heidi says, shutting the fridge hard, her voice suddenly flat. When she comes back to the couch with her bowl, she doesn’t sit as close to my brother.

“Sorry,” I hear him whisper behind me as I get my food. “I’m such an idiot.”

I sit on a foam chair.

“So Heidi went with me last weekend.”

“To Dad’s?”

“She got the full monty. ‘Patrick, where’s that puppy?’” My brother can do the most amazing impressions of my father, making his voice just as rough and cracked and pissed off. “‘Goddammit, did he run off again? You kids have got to keep an eye on him!’”

“‘Did he pee in the pool?’” Heidi says, but her imitation is rotten.

“‘No, I think he shat on my tennis whites! Goddammit, that’s a golf ball coming out of his ass!’”

Heidi breaks into peals of high-pitched laughing. I can tell they’ve been doing this all week.

“Mom has a new name,” Garvey says.

“What do you mean?”

“She’s not Mom or Meredith. She’s Your Fucking Mother. You better get used to it. ‘Do you know what Your Fucking Mother did?’” It’s amazing how he can just switch into my father’s body. “‘She literally stole the family jewels!’ Did you know that, by the way?”

I don’t know what he’s talking about.

“I think I’m going to lie down,” Heidi says.

“I’ll come,” my brother says, taking her bowl and putting it by the sink, then coming back to help her up.

“I’m fine,” she says, but she lets him. Then she bends back down to me and gives me a kiss on my forehead like my grandfather did at bedtime. She smells nice and I hope my brother will marry her like he said. They call good night to me over their shoulders and disappear, arm in arm, into her room.

I do our dishes. There’s a TV in the corner and I would turn it on but I’m scared Deena will reappear and want to talk to me again, so I go back to Garvey’s room, read more about the man who is a breast, and go to sleep.

I forget to go to the bathroom, so I wake up in the middle of the night. As I quietly open the door and cross the sticky hallway, I keep hearing my brother imitating my father. You kids have got to keep an eye on him! I can see that twenty-five-dollar mutt and his prickly hair and long ugly face. You kids. You kids. And he isn’t talking to me or my brother anymore.

I don’t flush or wash my hands for fear of waking someone, but as I cross back I look down the hallway and see that someone else is up. Garvey. I can see the narrow outline of his back. He’s moving, stretching or scratching, tilting his head to one side. I want to go back to bed, but I have a feeling he needs me, wants some company.

“Hey,” I whisper as I move closer, but he doesn’t hear.

A few more steps and the whole scene changes, from Garvey alone itching his back to something else altogether. The hand on his back is not his own and it’s not a hand but a foot and a shin. There are two of them, locked together, moving together, kissing, twisting, all in complete silence. And then they turn, Garvey carrying her in a frontwards piggyback, his legs buckling slightly as he moves toward the couch, her legs wrapped around him, both of them naked, scraping against each other, and then falling into the cushions, her enormous breasts flopping to the sides and Garvey scooping them and shoving them into his mouth, all the while his bum moving up and down and her hands down between their legs, and her face, Deena’s face, in a silent scream.

4

On Monday my mother picks me up and we drive straight to Ashing. It feels like I have been gone many years. We pass the Christmas tree farm, the inn at the corner of Baker Street, the Citgo station, and then my mother, instead of driving through the middle of town and up the hill to Myrtle Street, turns right onto Water Street and then left into a parking lot. It looks like a miniature motel, beige with white trim, with six apartments, three up and three down. My mother pats my leg. “We’re home.”

Our apartment is on the bottom in the middle. There’s a large 2 on the door, which she opens with a key she’s already hidden in the little lantern above the doorbell.

“I don’t think either of us want to bother with carrying a key,” she says. We never, as far as I know, had a key to our old house. I don’t even remember there being locks on the doors.

All the furniture has been moved in, chairs and couches and beds that used to be on Myrtle Street. I sit on the sofa with yellow flowers that used to be in the den. Is my father sitting on the floor now?

“Come see your room.”

I follow her down a long hallway. My room is small and dark. The one window looks out at our car in its spot. But my old beds are in there, with the same white bedspreads, and all my stuffed animals are on top. I forgot to pack any of my stuffed animals in June, and now they seem strange to me, stupid, with their puffed-up bellies and sewn-on smiles.

“Well?”

“I like it.” I hate it. “Can I see yours?”

Hers is at the end of the hallway, as large as the living room, with French doors that go out to a deck, and the canopy bed she took from the guest room. All my life I’ve been asking to have that bed in my room.

“We need to hang things on the walls, buy some plants, but it has potential,” she says. “And it’s convenient, being downtown. You can meet your friends whenever you want.”

I nod.

“Does Dad know we’re back?”

“I have no idea,” she says.

“Can I go up there?”

“Now?” She looks at her watch. It’s only two-thirty.

I get my bike out of the car and put the wheels back on it.

It’s Labor Day, and Ashing is clogged with cars and pedestrians streaming off the train from Boston, making the trek to the beach. Some kids my age are hanging out on the steps of Bruce’s Variety. I recognize a couple of them, but I don’t know anyone’s name. I’ve gone to the same private school all my life and only know the kids from Ashing who go there too.

“Reggie,” one of them says as I pedal by. I’ve heard this word before. I think it’s a blend of rich and preppie. I don’t know, when they say things like that, if they know me specifically, or just that I don’t go to school with them.

I live in Water Street Apartments now, I want to call out. My mother doesn’t have a job and she’s worried my father won’t pay the child support.

I pass the yarn shop. No orange Pinto. I look for Neal in every face I pass. When I get to Dad’s I’ll call Patrick and find out everything about the summer. Mallory’s at her aunt’s on the Cape until Wednesday.

I ride straight up the hill and then take a right at the blinking light to the stucco house on Myrtle Street with the halfmoon driveway. I stop there, like a tourist. The front of the house is a facade no one but the mailman uses, with pretty white stones instead of regular gravel, and slate steps that wind up through the rhododendrons to a wide terrace. Through the windows is my father’s den but he wouldn’t be in there during the day unless it was raining. Once, when I was in second grade, I was dropped off here after a birthday party by a parent who didn’t know any better. I climbed up all the steps and was greeted at the top by a stray dog who was lapping up rainwater that had collected in the wide saucer of a planter. He attacked immediately, knocking me over, ripping open the skin on my arms and left ear. I screamed and screamed but no one heard. I remembered the goody bag full of jelly beans in my coat pocket and tossed it down the steps. The dog leaped after it and I got myself inside. I still have faint lines on my arms from that attack. The front of this house is fake; all the activity is in the back. I can hear shouting coming from the pool.

I keep going down Myrtle Street and ride up the back driveway, through the small patch of woods where sometimes in winter rain will gather and freeze and you can skate all around the trees, to the poolhouse and the hum of its machines. Home. Finally I am home.

Mrs. Tabor, water sluicing off the bottom of her bikini, is just stepping out of the shallow end of the pool.

Patrick’s clipping the grass around the little toadstool lights. He’s the first to see me. He drops the shears.

“Daley,” he says.

“Daley?” His mother laughs, as if he’s making an old joke. And then she sees me and says, “Oh my God.”

It’s a little bit like coming back from the dead, a little bit like Huck and Tom when they show up at their own funeral. Only Frank, Patrick’s older brother, ignores me, launching himself off in a swan dive and gliding along the bottom of the pool like a stingray.

“Sweetie pie, when did you get back?” Mrs. Tabor says, quickly putting her head through a terry-cloth dress before coming over to me.

“Today.”

She hugs me. She’s cold from the pool and water from her hair drips down my neck. Her black hair is no straighter wet than dry and hits the small of her back in a straight line. She is normally pale but now her skin is like copper. She must have spent a lot of time beside my pool this summer.

“Well,” she says, looking down the driveway, then at the house. I wait for her to start asking me questions — she was always so full of questions for me when I went over to Patrick’s house. “Your dad will be sorry he missed you.”

“Where is he?”

“Radio Shack. Isn’t that where he went?” she asks Patrick, who nods. “Can you come back later?”

There’s something strange about the way she’s standing, I feel like if I try to take a step closer to the house, she will tackle me. I glance at the garage to see if my father’s car is gone; it is.

“Hey.” Patrick hits me on the arm. “I gotta show you what we got for the pool.”

His mother starts to say something and stops herself. I follow Patrick into the poolhouse. It’s mostly the same, except for some of the towels hanging on the hooks. Patrick leads me to a new little cabinet next to the bar and tells me to open it. Inside is a stereo with a turntable, an eight-track, and a radio. He pushes ON and music blasts inside and out. He points to some yellow speakers in the trees beside the pool. “They’re waterproof,” he says. “For rain. Oh, and I gotta show you something else, too. It’s so cool.”

“Stay out in the sunshine. Don’t go indoors,” Mrs. Tabor calls as we pass her chaise on the way to the house. “Patrick, are you listening to me?” But Patrick keeps on moving, and by the time we reach the back steps she’s lain back down again.

The kitchen table is gone. The only furniture in the kitchen now is a red leather armchair I’ve never seen before. They’ve moved the table into the pantry and covered it with an orange and brown tablecloth that’s not ours. In the living room there are two new lamps (my mother took the blue and white Chinese ones) that have shiny black bases and silver shades with a kind of veiny green mold design. In the den, where the yellow flowered couch and chairs used to be, are two baby blue recliners. On the mantelpiece is a photograph in Lucite of two old people I don’t know.

Patrick heads up the stairs possessively and into my parents’ room. Same bed, missing dresser, new chair with ottoman. Weird geometric sheets on the unmade bed. He sits on my father’s side of the bed and opens the thin drawer of the bedside table. He lifts up a black plastic thing shaped like a small egg with the top cut off and a bright red button there instead. A cord runs out of the other end.

“If you push this, the police will come.”

“What?”

“It’s called a panic button. Gardiner — I mean, your dad — wired the whole house. Downstairs there’s a box and when you go out you turn it on and if anyone crosses any threshhold anywhere in the house a signal goes off downtown at the police station and they have to come in two minutes or they get fired. Isn’t that so cool?” He’s sitting on a gold velour robe.

In the drawer with the panic button are several old watches, receipts, white golf tees, one cuff link, and a silver fountain pen my mother gave him for his fortieth birthday. I used to play in this drawer on weekend afternoons while my father napped and a ballgame flashed on the TV at the foot of the bed. He slept so deeply I could thread the golf tees through the circles of hair on his chest and he wouldn’t wake up. Sometimes I fell asleep beside him. The drawer, this whole side of the room, holds the smell of him, which is humid and spicy.

In the drawer are two new things: a tube of something called KY Jelly and the note my mother left on the kitchen table on the morning of June 25th. It’s crumpled and in the back but I know what it is. If I were alone I’d pull it out and read it, but I don’t want Patrick to know it’s there, though he probably already does.

I get up and go down the hallway to my room. The door is shut. Patrick whispers something to me, but he’s too far away to hear and I really don’t want to listen to him anymore. I open the door. My beds have been replaced by a double bed I don’t recognize, and in the bed is a little girl. I’m not sure how I forgot that Patrick had a little sister, but I did. She lies on her side in a deep sleep, a short pigtail sticking up above her ear, two hands curled under her chin.

“Mom will kill me if she wakes up,” Patrick says behind me, so I shut the door.

It is afternoon in somebody else’s house. I don’t know what to do now.

“We’re not living here,” he says. “I mean, not really.”

We just stand there in the dark hallway.

“We thought you were coming back next week. School doesn’t start until a week from Wednesday, you know. Why are you shaking?”

I hold my hand out flat. I’m shaking like I have a disease. “I don’t know.”

“Let’s get out in the sun.”

We go down the back stairs and out onto the porch.

“He’s back,” Patrick says, pointing.

My father is in his chair at the pool in his bathing trunks. He’s sitting sideways to us, talking to Mrs. Tabor. She glances over but he doesn’t. I walk all the way across the grass to the concrete squares around the pool before he looks up. He fakes surprise. “Well, hello there!” He fakes friendliness. I know it’s fake because I’ve heard that voice when he talks to the neighbors he hates. He hates Mr. Seeley for building his garage so close to our property line, and he hates the Fitzpatricks for having so many children. He hates the old Vance sisters down the hill for feeding our dogs and Mr. Pratt across the street for playing taps at sunset. He grumbles about them, swears about them, and makes fun of the way they walk or talk or laugh. But whenever he sees one of them, at the post office or the gas station, he always says, “Well, hello there!” in that same fake friendly voice.

I hug him tight but his arms are loose around me.

“You come up for a swim? The pool’s nice today.” He reaches for his drink and I notice his hand is shaking like mine.

“No, I didn’t bring a suit. I just—”

“Why not? The pool’s nice today,” he says again, just before sipping.

“I don’t know. I haven’t unpacked yet,” I say, then regret mentioning anything about being away. At the same time I want him to know that I came up here first thing. “We just got back an hour ago.” I realize this isn’t true. It’s been more like three hours by now.

“Oh, really? I thought I saw the convertible downtown this morning.”

Now he’s lying. We drove in well past noon. I shake my head, but I don’t have it in me to fight.

He’s glaring at Mrs. Tabor. I know that look, too. It means, Can you believe this little shit? Sweat has popped out on his nose.

“I missed you,” I say.

“Oh yeah?”

“Gardiner,” Mrs. Tabor says.

“I missed you, too.”

Our eyes catch briefly. His are a yellowy green. My throat aches from not crying.

“Why don’t you go help your dad finish unloading the car?” Mrs. Tabor says.

We walk across the stiff healthy grass together. He lights a cigarette with his lighter, a heavy silver rectangle that makes a wonderful shlink when he flips it closed. The familiarity of that sound, of everything about him, hurts. The driveway is hot, the way-back of the station wagon hotter. I have to get on my knees inside to reach the last two bags. The smell of the dogs reminds me that I haven’t seen the puppy.

“Where’s the puppy?”

“What?” my father says over his shoulder. I hurry to catch up.

“Scratch. Where is he?”

“Ran away.”

“Ran away?”

“Summer for running away.”

“Have you looked for him?”

“I know where he is.”

“Where?”

“He’s with the old biddies. They’ve been trying to steal my dogs for years. I decided to let them have this one. You didn’t want it.”

“I couldn’t take him. I asked, but I couldn’t.”

He flicks a look of raw disgust at me. He’s putting it together, my refusal of the Newfoundland, my secret with my mother. “Ugliest goddamned dog I ever saw.”

I help him put away the batteries and the rest of his purchases. He leaves a pack of lightbulbs out, saying there are some that need replacing, and when he leaves the room to do that I follow him. I have the idea that if I stay with him long enough he’ll remember me, like an amnesiac who needs time for the memories to filter back in. We change a bulb in the den, then one in the upstairs hallway. He doesn’t comment on any of the missing furniture or the strange new items or the fact that Elyse Tabor is sleeping behind the closed door of my room. We move around the house in silence, with only the sound of his breath squeaking loudly through his hairy nostrils.

When we’re done, he says, “Lemme show you something.”

I figure he means the panic button or some other new gadget, but he takes me into the laundry room. He opens the cabinet that holds the safe, a heavy lead-colored box with a combination lock.

“Open it.”

We all know the combination: 8-29-31, my father’s birthday. As a special treat my mother will sometimes let me bring the silk bags of jewels to her room and lay out every piece on the bedspread. It feels strange to be opening the safe without her in the bedroom.

It is empty.

“Did you know?”

I shake my head

“She took it all. She just took it and ran.” He slams the heavy safe door, but it bounces back and swings hard against the cabinet, making a dent in the wood. He points to the dark empty inside of the box. “She took it all, all of my mother’s and grandmother’s jewelry.” His voice cracks and his face is purple. He pounds his fist on the top of the washing machine and shouts, “Bitch bitch bitch!” His voice is high, like a small boy’s. Then he stoops over and little wordless gasps came out of his mouth.

He straightens up and looks at me. “Come here.”

I do and he hugs me, hard this time, my ear pressed into the coarse hair on his chest, and says, “But you’re mine. You’re mine. Aren’t you?”

“Yes,” I whisper to his chest hair.

When we come downstairs, Mrs. Tabor is making dinner, and Patrick and Elyse are playing cards on the floor where the kitchen table used to be.

“Can Daley stay for dinner?” Patrick asks.

Mrs. Tabor looks at my father, who nods.

“I’ll have to call.”

“Stay the night,” my father says.

“All right. I’ll just go to the bathroom, then call.” I don’t want to use the kitchen phone — I don’t want to be in the same room with both my parents’ voices.

There is a little telephone room off the den, next to the bathroom. I sit down on the swivel stool. One of my mother’s pads with the thick white paper and the words DON’T FORGET in red at the top is on the phone table. It makes me miss her and I’m glad to hear her voice when she picks up.

“I’m at Dad’s still.”

“Oh, good. It’s going well then.”

“Mostly. They want me to stay for dinner and the night.”

“All right,” my mother says, and as she is speaking I hear a little click. “I have to go into town in the morning. Bob’s lined me up a few interviews, bless him.”

The click is probably my father listening in on the extension in the sunroom. I wish she hadn’t mentioned Bob Wuzzy.

“Okay. I’ll see you in the afternoon then.”

“We’ll have to get you some back-to-school clothes. When do you want to do that, Thursday?”

I just want to get us all off the phone. “Sure. Sleep tight.”

“Sleep tight, baby.”

I wait. Mom hangs up loudly. Dad’s is the tiniest tic.

We come into the kitchen at the same time. He goes to the bar to make a drink and drops the jar of onions. It doesn’t shatter but he shouts, “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” in a kind of wild strangled voice as if the bottle had sliced him open. Elyse, holding out a fan of cards, scoots closer to her brother.

“Oh, knock it off, Gardiner,” Mrs. Tabor says, spooning tuna noodle casserole onto three plates.

Frank comes in then, tossing a tennis racquet toward but not in the coat closet.

“Pick that goddamn thing up and put it where it belongs,” his mother says, much more sharply than she’d spoken to my father.

“Hello, Frank. How are you, Frank?” Frank mutters from the closet. It’s my brother’s Davis Classic he’s been playing with.

“Why hello, Master Frank,” my father says, bowing. “How kind of you to grace us with your presence this fine evening.”

Frank smirks, about the nicest response you can get from him.

“And what, pray tell, has become of your opponent?”

Surprising me, Frank plays along. “He has entered an insane asylum, so profound was the psychological blow of losing to me.”

“You beat him?” my father says, no longer in character.

“Six — three, six — O.” Frank looks like a little boy then, waiting for my father’s reaction. Their father, Mr. Tabor, hasn’t been around in a long time. He moved to Nevada even before Elyse was born.

My father’s face lights up. I remember that face. I remember what it feels like to receive the full glow of that face. “Six — three, six — O. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. You clocked him. You really got his number. He couldn’t get a game off of you, could he, once you figured him out.”

Frank shakes his head and then takes his enormous smile out of the room before too many people see it.

We are all handed our portions of the casserole and some sliced cucumbers on pink plastic plates. We eat in the pantry; the plates clash with the tablecloth. My father and Mrs. Tabor take their drinks into the sunroom. You can see the backs of their heads through a window in the kitchen. They’re watching the news. It’s weird to see my father and all the dogs in there. It was always my mother’s room because there was no TV in it.

“So, Daley,” Frank says. “Here you are, after — what — three months?”

“Two.”

Frank and Patrick are over three years apart in age but, because they’re nearly the same height and have the same straight brown hair, people always get them confused. I never do; Frank is mean, and his meanness is the only thing I ever see.

“And now you’re here, back in your old house. Looks pretty different, doesn’t it?”

“Never ate in this room before.” I scrape another forkful of noodles together and hope he’s done with me.

“You like my mother’s taste?”

My heart begins to thud. “It’s different.”

“You think your mother is classier, don’t you?”

“Leave her alone, Frank,” Patrick says.

“Protecting your girlfriend, Weasel?”

“Shut up.”

“Well, she can’t be your girlfriend now, can she? Pretty soon she’ll be your—”

“Shut the fuck fuck up!”

Frank laughs at the two fucks.

I’ve never heard Patrick swear before.

Elyse eats. She finishes her casserole and moves on to the cucumbers. Her mouth does not reach the table so all her food has to be brought down to it unsteadily. She’s spilled all over the place. I ask her if she wants a cushion but she shakes her head without looking at me.

After dinner Frank goes outside to shoot things with a BB gun, and Patrick and I play the game Life in the living room. Elyse comes through every now and then, dragging a little beagle on wheels by a string. Sometimes she drags it right through our money piles to get our attention, but we don’t give it to her. Through the swinging door I can hear Mrs. Tabor making her and my father’s dinner, and Dad mixing more drinks at the bar on the other side of the door. Their voices rise, as if drinking made them deaf.

“Oh, that ass. I can’t believe she said that to you!”

“I was just minding my own business. Standing in line at the drugstore, for chrissake.” My father is enjoying himself. “But I set her straight.”

“I bet you did, pet.”

A while later his voice drops to a scratching sound, his attempt at a whisper. All I can hear is something like alcar over and over again.

“What’s alcar?” I ask Patrick.

“You don’t know who Al Carr is?”

“No, obviously.”

“He’s your mother’s lawyer, and he’s trying to take Gardiner to the cleaners.” Patrick says this wearily, without accusation, as if he’s tired of the sentence.

My father’s voice scrapes on. It sounds like he’s choking on his sirloin.

Mrs. Tabor doesn’t bother to lower her voice. She just says mm-hmm and of course and you’re right about that.

Outside you can hear BBs slicing through the leaves in the trees.

If you play all the way to retirement, Life is a long game. My car is full of babies. I’ve had two sets of twin girls and a boy I have to lay down the middle.

Mrs. Tabor comes into the living room and asks us where Elyse is. We don’t know.

“What do you mean, you don’t know? I thought she was in here playing with the two of you.” She is speaking with her eyes shut, but when she starts to tip forward she opens them and catches hold of the back of a sofa.

“Nope,” Patrick says.

“Nope,” she mocks, badly. “Get off your ass and find her!”

Her words are so slurred I can’t take her anger seriously. I want her to leave so Patrick and I can laugh about it, but he gets up and leaves the room.

“There are responsibilities, Daley, if you want to stay here.” Her eyes are shut again. She pronounces my name Day-lee.

I almost say Fuck you. It almost flies out of my mouth.

“Catherine,” my father calls. “He’s got her.”

I get up and follow her in. Patrick is holding Elyse, who is sound asleep.

“She was under the dining room table.”

“Let me have her, pet,” Mrs. Tabor says.

“No, I’ll take her up.”

“I’ll take her.”

“You’ll just wake her up.” Patrick moves quickly to the back stairs. “Or drop her,” he mutters.

“C’mere,” I hear my father say. I turn — I thought he was talking to me — just as he is wrapping his arms around Mrs. Tabor. He puts his face close to hers and waits for her to kiss him. Her lips separate and I watch her tongue go into my father’s mouth. He grabs her by the butt with two hands and shoves her into him. “I love this ass,” he says, not even trying to be quiet. “I love this fucking ass.”

I go out the back door. I have the idea that I will walk home to Mom’s, but then I hear a BB hit the side of the house and don’t want to risk it. It’s too dark to see where Frank is. I push out the little chest of drawers that has some gardening stuff in it from against the wall and sit behind it for protection.

My father is always in a good mood in the morning. He is up before anyone else, showered, shaved, and dressed in bright colors. He sings in the kitchen as he makes coffee and feeds the animals.

I can hear him humming below my window in the guest room, on his way to clean the pool. I slept in my clothes, so I catch up with him before he reaches the poolhouse.

He stops humming; then he says, “Does it look a little cloudy to you?”

The water is its usual rich clear turquoise, but I want to do the chlorine test with him afterward so I say, “A little.”

He connects the pieces of the vacuum cleaner, the long silver shafts and the rectangular head, then sidesteps slowly along the edge of the pool, the long pole sinking as the vacuum travels toward the drain in the middle, then rising up over his head as he brings the vacuum closer, directly beneath his feet at the bottom of the pool. He gives me turns, helping me when I let it out too far and don’t have the strength to pull it back, and for brief flashes I feel just like I used to feel when this was my only home and my mother was still asleep upstairs and nothing had changed. Even though it’s going to be a hot day, it still feels like the beginning of fall. The leaves are brittle and loud when they shake in the breeze.

My father used to sing a back-to-school song he got from an old ad on TV. He changed the words and put our names in it. He always sang it when my mother and I came home with shopping bags in early September. The tune would linger in the house for weeks, someone breaking out singing it just when the others had nearly forgotten. The tune is in my head now, but I know if I sing it, it will be a betrayal. I know — I sense all the new rules, though I could never explain how— that I’m not allowed to refer in any way to the small particular details of our past life together, the details that made it uniquely ours. We had an array of refrains among us, my father, my mother, Garvey, and I, clusters of words repeated so many times I thought they were universal clichés until I slowly learned, one by one, that they belonged solely to us. I don’t like you, I don’t like Pinky, and I’m not having a good time, is one. It came from my parents’ honeymoon in Italy. On their third day in Rome, my father returned to the hotel room with a puppy. My mother was not happy about this and the puppy sensed it. He bit her little finger, which is why my father named him Pinky. I was born twelve years after their honeymoon, but the expression was still very much alive, used by all of us in our sulky but self-mocking moments. But I know this expression and all the others have to be buried now. They are a dead language. If I ever said, I don’t like you, I don’t like Pinky, and I’m not having a good time to my father, something would perish between us, as if I had broken a blood oath.

And so I do not sing the back-to-school song as I push the vacuum toward the middle of the pool and pull it back to where I stand at the edge. And I do not ask about Nora, whose bureau has been cleared off, her Jean Naté, silver pillbox, and photograph of her and my father in Maine gone, her drawers empty, and even her soft blue bathrobe no longer hanging in her bathroom.

“You missed a spot,” my father says of a thin line of dirt I was just going back to get.

“Okay.”

“How’s Mr. Morgan doing?”

This surprises me, for I would have thought that speaking of my mother’s father would be completely against the rules. “He’s good,” I say, then wish I’d just said okay, in case my father was hoping my grandfather missed him.

“Still playing a lot of golf?”

“Every morning. He won the tournament this year.”

My father laughs. “You know, all his life he was a terrible golfer. Never got better. Year after year.” I know this story well, but my chest swells at my father’s telling of it, my father talking about my mother’s father, those two smashed sides of me fusing briefly. “And then”—my father lets out a shrill wheeze of delight—”he had that stroke, remember, in ‘sixty-seven, and suddenly he could hit that ball like nobody’s business. He was hitting in the seventies.”

I laugh as if I’ve never heard it before. I feel like I’m glowing. I don’t want him to stop talking about Grindy. “He still has that smelly old spaniel.”

“Oh yeah?” he says, but he hasn’t heard me. His attention has moved on. “You missed another spot right there.” He takes the vacuum from me and finishes the rest of the pool. We do the chemical tests but he won’t let me hold the little vials or squeeze in the drops. Then Patrick comes out and he and my father start talking about grub control and some sort of seeder or feeder. My father wants to show Patrick something in the machine room. It’s hot and electric-feeling in that room and they stay in there for a long time, my father wanting to know if Patrick thinks the pressure on the something-or-other is too low. I go to the minifridge and pull out a tiny can of V8 juice. Then I go into my mother’s rose garden.

The regular flower beds — daffodils in early spring, then tulips and peonies, daisies and lilies — begin outside the living room’s French doors, where they curl around a stone terrace, drop alongside a set of stone steps, spread along the edges of another, smaller terrace, then drop again to fan out along the stone walls that are the border of the main body of the garden, an English garden with a floor of grass and two long, squat hedges whose ends are scrolled toward each other. On either side of these sculpted center hedges, in long dense prickly rows, are the beds of roses. At the far end of the garden is a small fountain painted robin’s-egg blue with a centerpiece of two pudgy children holding a large fish that spurts out water. Behind the fountain are two sets of moss-covered steps that lead to a black wrought-iron door, which opens onto that patch of woods on the inside of the curve of the back driveway. The garden and the door seem to belong to something much more ancient than the house and the driveway.

On a summer day, in full sun beneath a dark blue sky, this garden is magical. My mother is normally in it somewhere, crouched down beside a rosebush with her gardening basket, a kerchief holding back her hair, her gloved hands digging deep into the dirt. She has many varieties of roses and knows all their names: Southern Belle, Black Magic, April in Paris, Mister Lincoln. If I don’t understand the name, she’ll explain it to me. A full pale pink rose with a tiny yellow center is called Christopher Marlowe, and she tells me all about his plays, the one about the doctor who exchanged his soul to the devil for twenty-four years of magical powers, and the one about the queen and the sailor who fall in love in a cave during a storm. Her roses are different colors and shapes, some thin and delicate like a teardrop, others thick and fluffy with a million petals. They are pale yellow, dark pink, deep red, salmon, lavender, and white. The white ones are the puffiest. They look like they’re made of meringue. I used to play around the fountain, trying to catch the eyes of the smiling children wrestling their fish, running up one set of steps to the black door and down the other, around and around, until I got so hot I’d fling off my clothes and slip into the cold, ice cold, fountain water.

But now everything in the garden is dead or dying. The heads of the roses, if they have not already fallen off, are dry and drained of color, their leaves hole-punched by insects. Every plant is encircled by a wreath of its own debris. The grass is burnt, the shrubs white with aphids. The fountain water is olive green. A black sludge covers the bottom. Nothing trickles out of the fish’s mouth. This whole spectacular place, the most spectacular thing about the property, is being punished for having been my mother’s.

While my father and Patrick move from poolhouse to shed, drive off someplace and come back, and operate many machines all at once, I try to resuscitate the garden. I drain the fountain, scrape out the slimy leaves and dirt, and refill it. I spray the shrubs and rake up all the death. And then I water. I press my thumb down on the lip of the hose to create a spray like my mother always did. I can feel the leaves and roots of the plants thanking me as they gulp the water down.

“Well, you’ve been a busy little bee this morning,” Mrs. Tabor says when she brings lunch out to the pool.

“It will perish if no one tends it.” I’ve been reenacting scenes from The Secret Garden as I work and haven’t completely stepped out of character.

My father puts the back of his hand to his forehead and tips his head to one side. He’s taken my accent for southern and become Scarlett O’Hara instead. “Oh, my. It will simply perish. Whatever shall we do?”

“I could think of a thing or two,” Mrs. Tabor says in her regular voice, smiling at my father as she sips her drink.

She drinks vodka like my father but mixes it with orange juice during the day. My father used to have a rule about waiting until five o’clock on the dot before having a drink (sometimes we’d watch the clock on the stove and count down the last minute together), but now I wonder if that had been my mother’s rule. Today he drinks two martinis with lunch.

After he’s finished his sandwich, he pushes his plate away, sits back, and sighs. “I wonder what the poor people are doing today.”

Mrs. Tabor chortles.

Then he stands up. “Well, I think it’s time for a swim.” He pulls down his swimming trunks in one fast motion.

Patrick and Elyse erupt in laughter at the sight of his bare bum and floppy brown penis.

“Well,” Mrs. Tabor says, and stands up unsteadily, “I guess I will too.” Off comes the top and then the bottom to her bikini. Her breasts hang square and low, and her pubic hair is not black but salt and pepper, like Mallory’s grandmother’s old schnauzer.

Patrick and Elyse, howling, struggle to inch off their own wet bathing suits, the struggle only increasing their laughter.

The four of them splash around together at first, then Patrick and Elyse go to the diving board to do naked jumping and screaming, and my father and Mrs. Tabor hang onto each other in the shallow end.

“Look at the old prude in her chair,” Mrs. Tabor cackles.

My father doesn’t look. He’s touching Mrs. Tabor’s breasts.

“Watch out, Gardiner,” Elyse says, looking down from the diving board, wearing only a life jacket because she can’t swim yet. “You’re gonna get a boner.”

Everyone but me bursts out laughing.

“What’s a boner?” I ask, and that puts them over the edge. Even if it’s at my own expense, I like making my father laugh. He has a lot of pretend and halfhearted laughs, but his real one makes a clicking sound in the back of his throat that I love to hear.

I cannot seem to get on my bike and return to Water Street, even though it feels like I have come onstage too late to be anything but the straight man to their summer antics.

In the early evening, without my father knowing, I call my mother.

“Can I stay another night?”

“Of course. I’m glad it’s going so well. All summer I worried.”

“Worried about what?”

“I just worried, that’s all.”

“What do you mean?”

“You two were so close.”

After a while she says, “Daley?”

“Yeah.”

“Are you sure you want to stay?”

“Yeah,” I say, but my throat is tight.

“Oh, honey. Maybe you should come back here. You’ll see him on the weekend. You’ll see him every weekend. And things will fall back into place with him.”

“Mrs. Tabor is here a lot.”

“Mmm,” she says, which means she already knew that. “Patrick’s one of your best friends.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Isn’t he?” She’s doing something, painting her nails maybe. The phone keeps slipping away from her mouth.

Patrick follows my father around like one of his dogs. It isn’t the same. Nothing is the same. “How’d your interviews go?”

“Pretty well. One in particular.”

“What?”

“This child advocacy lawyer needs an assistant. He’s a good guy. He helps children.”

“When will you know if you got the job?’

“Within a week, he said. But I’ve got two more interviews tomorrow. I’ll be home by four. Come home for dinner, okay? I miss you.”

“I miss you, too.”

I hang up and nearly pick it up again to ask her to come get me. Then Patrick calls for me, saying we’re going to Peking Garden for dinner.

I’ve come here a lot with my parents. We always got a booth along the wall and had a waiter named Roy, the owner’s son. My father would order the moo goo gai pan just because he loved to say it to Roy in a funny voice. My mother would get a drink with a bright paper parasol so I could play with it. I liked to pretend it belonged to my spoon and that the fork was in love with her, though he could never see her face behind the parasol. I never suspected we all weren’t having a good time.

There are six of us now — Frank showed up again right at dinnertime — so they put us at a round table in the middle. Mrs. Tabor is wearing a shimmery green dress that falls to her ankles and has wide sleeves that droop onto her plate and into the small bowls of sauces without her noticing. She and my father order a new drink every time Roy comes to the table. Roy winks at me but he acts like he doesn’t know my father, who is quiet tonight, his head hung low over his plate, his eyes casting around, seeing little. I wonder if he misses sitting in our booth, the three of us on a Sunday night.

Patrick and I order spareribs. We slather on the sweet-and-sour sauce and compete to see who can gnaw down to a clear bone quicker.

“You two are revolting,” Frank says.

My father looks at me hard. “You ever see your mother eat a piece of chicken?”

“No,” I lie.

He breaks into a fake smile and chuckles. I can tell there is nothing funny about how my mother eats chicken. “She’d eat everything — tendons, cartilage, the works. Then she’d crack open the bone and suck it dry. I’m not kidding.” He shakes his head. “She was a beauty.”

“Now you’re the chicken bone,” Mrs. Tabor says, pleased with her analogy.

My father isn’t pleased. He mutters something I can’t hear and tries to gesture to Roy, who turns and goes into the kitchen without acknowledging him.

Elyse, reaching for a different crayon, knocks her water straight into my father’s lap.

He leaps up and screams “Goddammit!” as loud as he’s able, as if he’s forgotten we’re in a restaurant. “Goddammit! Goddammit!” His yellow eyes in his purple face flash from Elyse to Mrs. Tabor. The restaurant is silent. Roy stands stunned by the fish tank.

Mrs. Tabor starts laughing.

“Fuck you, you little bitch. Fuck you!” He picks up a chair like he’s going to throw it at her, but it just shakes in his hands until Roy’s father comes and puts it back down and wipes up the spill. Mrs. Tabor never quite wipes the smirk off her face.

My father sometimes irritated my mother by complaining too much about Hugh Stewart, his boss at the brokerage firm. She’d tell him to hush and sometimes he might say Hush yourself, but that’s about as heated as they ever got in front of me. He yelled, but it was never at her; it was always about someone else. And when she was mad at him, she squeezed her lips together and looked away. I wonder what Roy and his father think has happened to my father, who used to chat easily with them up at the counter while he was paying the bill.

Elyse continues to color in her place mat and Frank looks blankly at the wall ahead of him, but Patrick is crying. I take slow breaths and count backward from a thousand in my head. Roy slips a blue parasol beside my spoon. It has a thin band of paper around it, keeping it shut.

On the way home, Elyse asks my father to sing her favorite song. He seems to know what she means because he starts singing: “Mr. Rabbit, Mr. Rabbit, your ears are mighty…” He pauses and she fills in—blue—and he continues: “Yes, my Lord, I’ve been pooping in my shoe.” Elyse tries to join in but she’s laughing too hard, so my father sings the chorus alone:

“Every little creature’s gotta shine shine shine.

Every little creature’s gotta shine.”

It’s hard to leave the next afternoon. I want to go, but it feels awful, like I’m leaving my father all over again. I keep putting it off, letting Elyse talk me into a game of Candyland, making water balloons with Patrick.

They’re in the sunroom when I go to say goodbye.

“I’m going to hit the road now.”

“All right,” my father says, looking at Mrs. Tabor. “See ya.”

I go over and kiss him on the cheek. He keeps his eyes fixed on Mrs. Tabor and does not kiss back. “I’ll be back Friday.”

“When school starts, come with Patrick in the car pool. I think it’s Mrs. Utley on Fridays,” Mrs. Tabor says.

I don’t know if I should kiss her. “Okay. Thanks for everything.”

“You’re welcome.”

As soon as I cross the threshold, my father begins his hoarse whisper and Mrs. Tabor shushes him and then begins whispering, too.

At the end of the driveway I almost turn my bike around. I picture going back in the sunroom, asking if I can stay just one more night. But once I’m out on the main road, my legs start pumping the pedals hard and I don’t even look at the front of the house as I whiz past.

I feel light and free as my bike drops down the long hill into town. I flip it into the hardest gear and pedal the whole way down, moving faster than I ever have on my bike, not bothering to look around for cars turning in or out of side streets and driveways. A few hippies hanging out on a bench in the park shout something to me but I’m going too fast to hear. I rise up from the seat going over the train tracks. The bike bucks and twists but I stay on. I pass the gas station and the sub shop, the kids on the steps of Bruce’s (who make no comment today), the gift shop, the library, the Congregational church, and the chowder restaurant. This is still my town. I’m still home.

I remember Neal. I forgot to ask Patrick about him. How did I forget? It’s like I had static in my ears up there on Myrtle Street and I couldn’t think about the other parts of my life. I feel like calling him up when I get to the apartment, then remember where he is and that my father might answer and how weird that would be.

I turn left down Water Street. I pass our apartment building to see what’s at the end of the street. It dead-ends at the harbor. There’s a tiny patch of dirty sand and a bench. Two teenagers are sitting on it, making out. My bike makes a tic-tic-tic sound as I make a wide U-turn, but it doesn’t bother them.

The apartment is nicer than I remember it. The carpet is clean and soft, the ceilings are high, and there’s a picture window looking out onto the make-out bench and the harbor beyond that lets in two huge squares of light. My mother is in her bathrobe, straightening chairs at a new table.

She hugs me hard. She smells of lemon furniture polish. It seems at that moment like the best smell on earth. I remember I need to ask her a lot of questions about taking care of her garden.

“How was it?” She pulls away just far enough to see me clearly. She pushes hair from either side of my face. Her skin is shiny from lotion.

“Good.”

I feel her eyes raking across my face, as if I’ve hidden something there really well.

It’s the moment I could tell her about the whispering, the drinking, the word boner, but the moment passes.

“I’m so glad.” She takes her eyes off me and points to the table and the high-backed chairs that surround it. “What do you think?”

“Nice.” I stand next to a chair. It has a silky striped cushion sewn into it. “Fancy.”

“And,” she says, pointing to the walls. She’s hung paintings from Myrtle Street. She took the ones of the sea, which are my favorites too. In her bedroom she hung the portrait of me and Garvey sitting on the lip of the fountain when we were much younger. In the painting I have no freckles, and my eyes are too far apart, and you can see where the artist had to paint in more background over Garvey’s head when my mother brought it back, complaining his hair was too poufy.

Her room looks even bigger than I remember. I see the canopy bed and know that I’m not done feeling angry about her having it, along with the big beautiful room and the deck.

My mother has climbed up onto the bed and is dangling her legs off it and staring out the French doors. I’m aware of something different about her, something lighter. She is happy. Beneath her is a folded duvet, velvet on one side, satin on the other.

“Nora called, sweetie. She really wants to see you.”

“Oh.”

“You know your father let her go.”

“Yeah, I guess I put that together.”

She looks like she’s going to say more but stops. Then she says, “You should call her.”

“I will.” But the idea of Nora is like my stuffed animals. It feels like there is suddenly no place for her. I stroke the velvet blanket. “Is this new?”

“Yes,” she says. “Isn’t it divine?”

“Did you get me one?”

“They only had them for a queen-sized bed.”

“It’s a good thing you have the bed then. Good thing you got that, too.”

“Daley.”

“I don’t know where you’re getting all this money. All you did all summer was worry about money, and now you’re buying yourself all kinds of things. I guess you sold some of Granny’s jewelry.”

“What?”

“I know about how you emptied the safe.”

“I didn’t — I needed to have some — Jesus. He told you that?”

“He told me you cleaned it out. I saw it. It’s empty.”

“I didn’t steal it. I just needed to get some protection, Daley. For you. For me to take care of you. But we’ve agreed now on a settlement.”

“I wish you’d tell me things, Mom. I wish I knew what they were talking about when they say things like Al Carr. I wish you’d told me you weren’t going to see Sylvie but to meet some guy so he could stick his boner into you.”

My mother has gone pale. She is pointing a finger at the door. “Go. Go to your room right now.”

“Go to your crappy shit-hole room, Daley.” The anger is like vomit. I can’t stop it from coming out. “I’m only here five nights a week and I’m not sleeping with anyone, so it makes perfect sense to give me the dark smelly room with the little shitty beds.” I slam her door hard. Bitch, I think. Bitch bitch bitch.

5

School starts. Five new kids join our grade. It’s always the same with new kids. They come on the first day in their public school clothes, their huge pointy collars, polyester blends, and all the wrong shoes, but by the next Monday they’re in topsiders and Bean shoes, the boys with tiny buttons at the tips of their little collars and the girls in wraparound skirts. Then, once they look like the rest of us, they change everything around. No one is in my homeroom with Miss Perth. Mallory, Patrick, Gina, and Neal are all with Mr. Harding. I think on the first day that Neal will explain why he didn’t write back. I stand right behind him in the lunch line, but he never says a word. By Thursday I hear he likes a new girl named Tillie Armstrong. I decide never to speak to him again.

On Friday I take a suitcase to school and in the afternoon I wait with Patrick and the other kids from his carpool for Mrs. Utley to pick us up. She’s late because she had brownies in the oven. She brings them and we pass the warm pan from the front to the back to the way-back, cutting out huge squares. She’s even brought napkins. The brownies are dense, undercooked, and delicious. Like many of the mothers I’ve seen since I’ve been back, she’s curious about my summer “adventure” and wants me to be sure to say hello to my mother for her. I feel her watching me in the rearview mirror more than she watches the others.

All week Patrick has been saying there’s going to be a surprise at Myrtle Street, but he won’t tell me what it is. I think maybe my puppy is back, but when Mrs. Utley pulls in I see that the surprise involves construction of some kind. There’s a bulldozer in the driveway and a huge truck piled high with dirt and brush. Embedded in the dirt are glints of pale blue. I grab my bookbag and suitcase, holler out a thank-you, and run. I stop at the stone wall. The rose garden is gone. There’s still the terrace off the living room and the steps leading down, but the scrolled bushes and flower beds, the roses, the fountain, the stone steps, and the iron door leading nowhere are all gone.

“We’re building a tennis court!” Patrick has big teeth with flecks of white and he flashes them at me until I punch him hard in the stomach.

“Goddamn,” he gasps, bent over. “I thought you liked tennis.”

My father comes home from work early on Fridays. He is sitting in that armchair in the kitchen, the dogs pooled at his feet.

“Well, what do you think?” He’s proud of himself. He wants me to show my shock. He wants that satisfaction.

“Looks good,” I push out. I go outside again so he won’t see me cry. The bulldozer and the truck have driven away, but the smell clings to the air. The smell of my mother.

I have to get off the property. I head to the front, and once on the road I know where I’m going. I cross the street and follow a thin pretty driveway down to the little house at the bottom. They have geraniums in pots on either side of the front door. The bell is the old-fashioned kind, attached to the middle of the door, that you twist like a can opener. It makes a racket inside, but no dog barks.

The taller, gaunter one answers.

“Hello, Miss Vance.” I rehearsed my speech on the driveway. “I was wondering if I could just say hello to your dog.” I know I have to say your dog, so they won’t think I’m coming to reclaim him. “I’ve been away all summer.”

“Yes, you have.” Her voice is low. “Step into the parlor.”

We stand in the black-and-white entryway. She makes a funny sound with her teeth and tongue, as if she is cracking nuts, and the puppy races from a room, leaps down a few steps, and scrambles across the tiles to me. He’s whining and pressing his nose hard into my hand, but when he jumps up Miss Vance says, “Major!” and he puts his paws back on the floor quickly. When I squat down he nuzzles his nose in my neck and his tail whaps so fast back and forth I think he’s going to hurt himself. He’s grown in height and girth and his hair is longer and soft. His eyes are a pale olive green. He is a much more beautiful dog than I remember.

“Well, I think someone was greatly missed.” She sounds angry, but when I look up her narrow face has bunched into a smile. “He likes his tea in the garden at about this time. Would you like to join us?”

I follow her to a door at the back of the house. Before opening it, she calls up a thin set of wooden stairs, “Teatime, Mother.”

I thought there was just a sister. The mother would be at least a hundred. How will she get down those stairs?

Major bolts through the door as soon as Miss Vance turns the knob, but then he tears back to lick my hand. He hears a squirrel rustling in some leaves and he’s off again. The whole time I’m there he seems torn between his usual routine of chasing and sniffing and making sure I’m still there.

Miss Vance and I sit in white latticed iron chairs that press the bare skin of my legs into small cubes. A woman in a white dress and white shoes comes out with a tray and sets it on a glass table nearby. On the tray is a silver teapot, a small pitcher of hot water and an even smaller one of cream, half a lemon wrapped in cloth, three blue teacups, four saucers, and a plate of thin lace cookies.

“Thank you, Heloise,” Miss Vance says, leaning toward the tray. She makes the nut-cracking noise again and Major comes to her side. Onto the extra saucer she pours tea up to the rim and sets a lace cookie to float on top. She nestles the saucer in the grass by her foot while Major sits watching. Another crack and Major bends down to eat and drink.

“There you are,” she says, without looking at the woman approaching in the grass.

This is the shorter, rounder one, the one who always wears a blue wool coat in winter, the one I thought was her sister.

“You’ll have to pull over a chair, Mother.”

I jump out of my seat. “Please, sit here. I’m happy on the grass.”

The woman waves me off, heading toward another cluster of chairs. I don’t notice the garden until the old woman walks into it. It’s a wilder, more chaotic garden than my mother’s, the stone pathways overgrown, the flowers tall and frizzy. There are tufts of long tangled beach grasses, wildflowers, and even a few miniature trees in no particular design. She moves slowly; both her legs are wrapped in bandages. She pulls out a thin green chair from the chaos, and as she sets it down she knocks the tray slightly and mutters something that sounds awfully like, “Sorry, Father,” under her breath.

I stare at her face. Its flesh is soft and powdery, but no more lined or weathered than the other Miss Vance’s. They couldn’t be more than a few years apart in age. They fuss about the tea together, asking me how I take it — strong, weak, or in between; milk, lemon, lump sugar, or sifted — and then argue pleasantly about the amounts put in and their effects on the hue of the tea. “It’s too pale now!” “It’s just right, just right for me,” the plumper Miss Vance reassures her.

I feel like a character who has stumbled into another world where things are slightly creepy but also beautiful and soothing. The tall flowers in the garden cast long shadows on the grass and everything that is not shadow is gold in the low late-afternoon sun. If they asked me to stay the night, I would.

After he’s finished a second saucer of tea and cookie, Major lays his head in tall Miss Vance’s lap. She bends her head over the dog and strokes him for a long time, then she straightens up to look at me. “I understand if you want to take him back.” She begins the sentence loudly but finishes in a tremble.

“Oh, no. Oh, no.” I shake my head furiously. “I just wanted to visit, to make sure he was really here. I wasn’t very attached to him.”

“Oh,” she says sadly.

“I’d only had him for a few days. I knew even when we got him that I was going to be leaving, but my father didn’t.”

“That sounds like an awfully big secret for one little girl to carry around.”

I’m careful not to nod. I don’t want them to think I feel sorry for myself or anything, which is what Garvey always teases me about. Is widdew Daywie feewing oh so sowwy fo’ hewsewf again? My throat aches, and I wonder if I’m coming down with something.

A warm hand clutches mine. “Father, I think a game of Parcheesi would do us all a world of good.”

On Saturday my father and Mrs. Tabor have friends over for lunch. Some of the guests are old friends of my father’s, people I’ve seen in our living room for years, and some are Mrs. Tabor’s friends, a few married couples and a lot of divorcées like her. The two groups don’t mingle much. Mrs. Tabor is younger than my father; her male friends look like they come from Garvey’s generation with their shoulder-length hair and thick sideburns, and the women wear looser clothes in bolder colors than the wives of my father’s friends in their stiff pastel dresses.

Patrick and I mix the Bloody Marys at a table we’ve set up on the lawn. Elyse turned five this week and rides her new red bike with training wheels around the edge of the pool. By three, no one has had lunch and the adult faces are red and screaming at each other. At least that’s what it sounds like to me.

“What do you mean you’re giving up paddle! Gil, did you hear this?”

“Did I hear what?”

“Your wife. She’s giving up paddle this winter to volunteer at the loony bin.”

“Precisely where she belongs!”

Mr. Porters goes running into the poolhouse and comes out with an umbrella. Then he leaps off the diving board in his clothes, the umbrella open above him like Mary Poppins.

Everyone screams and hoots. A man I don’t know jumps in with a set of golf clubs. More shouting. Wives towel off the clubs and the leather bag and spread everything on the grass to dry. The sun slips down farther and they switch to gin-and-tonics and martinis. Mrs. Tabor sends me inside to make up a platter of cheese and crackers, and Patrick is sent downtown on his bike for more ice. When I come out, I see Elyse ride her new bike straight into the pool. I drop the platter on the grass and run.

“Elyse went in the pool!” I scream, but my voice is swallowed by the boom of the adults’ talk.

I dive in. She’s still on the bike at the bottom, tilted toward the drain. I grab her, expecting her to come free easily. But she’s clutching the handlebars, and though everything is lighter underwater I can’t lift the two at once. I tug at her hard but she’s so stubborn, even underwater, even when she doesn’t know how to swim, and will not let go of her new bicycle. Then the water shudders with a muffled crash and the man who jumped in with the golf clubs is lifting me, Elyse, and her bike to the surface.

Elyse doesn’t need CPR. Her lips are blue, but her face is bright red and she comes up hollering about her bike being wet and ruined.

“Let me take you to your mommy,” the man says to her once we’re all out and dripping on the cement. Mrs. Tabor has her back to the pool, waving an arm in the air, shouting out a story.

“I don’t want my mommy. I want to dry off my goddamn bike!”

I can’t catch my breath but I look at him gratefully and he touches the top of my head before he drips off and blends back in with the crowd.

Sunday is quieter. By noon it has begun to rain. Mallory comes over and we make prank calls in the kitchen. Patrick is really good at voices.

“Is John Wall there?” he asks, becoming a man calling on business. “Then is his wife Susie there?” He smiles at us, then takes the smile right out of his voice when he speaks again. “Well, aren’t there any Walls there?” He tilts the phone away from his ear and we can hear the lady saying no. Patrick switches back to his regular kid voice. “Then what’s holding up your house, lady?”

We always save the best for last. Patrick gets out his stop watch and we each pick a number in the phone book. The minute the person answers, the timing starts. The goal is to keep your person on the line as long as possible. My trick is to always go for the old-sounding names, Lillian or Evelyn or Elijah. Old people are much more trusting and have time to talk. My record is twenty-five minutes. No one has been able to touch it.

Today Mallory goes first. She pretends to be a little girl who burnt herself. “It hurts,” she says. “Mommy isn’t here. She ran away. With the garbageman.” Patrick and I are dying. “They live at the dump now. I don’t like to visit.” And then she slams the phone down fast. “He said he was going to call the police.”

The phone rings beneath her hand and we jump and crack up but don’t dare answer it. It rings five, then six times. Finally I realize it could be about my mother: Car accident. Hospital. I pick it up. There is a long pause at the other end; then a woman asks for Mrs. Tabor. “I wouldn’t have called here,” she adds, “but it’s important.” I recognize the voice but can’t place it.

“Who is it?” Patrick and Mallory whisper as I set down the receiver.

I shrug. “Where’s your mom?”

He points to the den. But the rest of the downstairs is empty. I call up the stairs and think I hear something. I go up. My father’s door is slightly ajar and I can hear the TV.

I knock and no one answers. “Mrs. Tabor?” I say as I poke my head through.

I can’t make sense of what I see except their faces, which turn toward the door in shock and then fury.

“Get the fuck out!” my father hollers at me, and when I don’t move instantly Mrs. Tabor echoes him: “Get the fuck out of this room, Day-lee!”

I’m down the stairs and back in the kitchen before I even know I’ve moved away from their door, before I even register what I saw: my father naked on his hands and knees on the bed, his shoulders between Mrs. Tabor’s spread legs, licking her red vagina like a beast bent over its kill.

“She’s busy right now,” I hear myself say into the mouthpiece.

The woman lets out a sigh. “Will you just tell her to call me about the orange slices for the game on Wednesday?”

“Okay.” My voice wobbles. Patrick and Mallory are staring at me. I don’t want to get off the phone and have to explain.

“Daley, I’m so sorry about your parents. It must be very hard for you.”

“Yeah.” It’s more a breath than a word.

“You can always come talk to me if you want. Anytime. My door is open.”

I still have no idea who she is.

My father, bent over, head low between his shoulders, nothing more than an animal. I didn’t know about that, I want to tell her. I never knew about that.

That night my father and I begin a ritual that will last until I get my driver’s license. After Mrs. Tabor feeds us, I put my book bag and my suitcase by the back door. My father makes a drink. I wait. He makes another. He snaps at Patrick to turn down the radio. He tells Frank a joke about a black couple going to a costume ball. The punch line is the word fudgsicle. I’ve heard it before. He glances at the clock. I glance at the clock. I play solitaire on the kitchen floor. Elyse kicks all my cards and I tell her to put them back and Mrs. Tabor tells me to pick on someone my own size. Mr. Seeley calls to say the dogs are barking so loud he can’t hear himself think. My father is polite on the phone, then slams it down and marches around the room swearing. My cards get kicked again. He makes another drink. I need to go home and start my homework. The cuckoo clock chirps eight times.

“I’m putting the steaks on now,” Mrs. Tabor says to him, which is his cue.

He puts down his drink and moves slowly to the drawer across the room where he keeps his checkbook. It’s a blue binder and he turns the pages slowly. With the ballpoint pen he keeps in it, he writes out the check for my mother. He folds it in half and hands it to me. He looks at me like I’m draining the blood from his veins.

He doesn’t speak much on the short ride to Water Street. We pull into the farthest spot from my mother’s car. He bought that car for her birthday last year. He doesn’t cut the engine or walk me to the door. He will never once in seven years get out of the car, as if the pavement around my mother’s apartment is radioactive. He keeps his fists clenched on the steering wheel as I kiss him. I get my suitcase out of the back, call out a last goodbye, and walk away. He has driven off before I reach the door.

My mother has put big pots of plants on the doorstep, and there is a window box outside my bedroom. All the lights are on, even in my room. The door is unlocked, the air in the apartment warm and moist. I find my mother in the kitchen, boiling up a packet of chipped beef. She is in a new bathrobe, her hair wet from a shower. The bathrobe is white with a striped sash tied tight to one side. Her waist is tiny. There’s an ashtray drying on the dishrack, though my mother doesn’t smoke.

She hugs me and she feels small in my arms. Her kiss on my cheek is greasy. “How was it?”

The demolished rose garden, Elyse at the bottom of the pool, Dad feeding between Mrs. Tabor’s legs — it all blurs into a feeling that seems to have no name. “I’m tired.”

“Have you eaten?”

“Yes.”

“Homework?”

“Tons.”

“It’s nearly eight-thirty.”

“I know.”

“Daley, you’re going to have to—”

“I can’t do homework over there.”

“Then come home earlier.”

“I can’t.”

“Then call me and I’ll come get you.”

“No!” The idea of my mother driving that car into the driveway of my father’s house, where she lived for nineteen years, horrifies me.

She smooths out my forehead. “Don’t make that face. You’ll get wrinkles.”

I hand her the check and she unfolds it, then chucks it on the counter.

“It’s fifty less than he owes me.” Her mouth presses into a straight line.

She goes to her desk, writes a short note that begins Gardiner—in her big round letters. When she is done, she rereads and underlines several words, including the word lawyer. Then she slides it into an envelope, puts a stamp on it, and shoves it into her purse on a chair by the door. I don’t need to know all the words now — I’ll hear all about it next weekend. Next weekend my father will be waving it around like a flag.

“Come sit with me while I eat. Then you can start your homework.”

We sit at the shiny dining room table. I hate chipped beef and the smell of chipped beef. It looks like dog food mixed with phlegm. Bulbs of steam rise from her plate but she doesn’t blow on the food and doesn’t seem to get scalded as she eats. Her mood has shifted since the check. My mood is the same — a burnt-out flatness that I know bothers her. My answers to her questions are short and unimaginative. I don’t want to be sitting there watching the chipped beef go into her mouth but I don’t want to do my homework or go to sleep or watch TV. There’s nothing I want to do.

“I saw A Chorus Line this weekend. I really want to take you.”

“You saw it already? With who?”

“My friend Martin and his son.”

Martin. There it was, just like my brother said.

“You said you’d take me.”

“I want to. I just said that.”

“No, you said you’d just seen it.”

“And that I’d like to take you.”

“But you already saw it. And plays are expensive. You’re always telling me that.”

“Daley.”

“I can’t believe you saw it with somebody else’s kid.”

I sit back in the chair and cross my arms over my chest.

My mother laughs. “You’re acting a little bit like a two-year-old right now.”

Before I know it, the chipped beef smashes against the wall. My mother is still holding her fork and knife. Her voice is very very quiet. “Leave this room right now. I do not want to see you until morning. Any privileges you had are gone.”

I stand up and start down the hallway.

“I swear, Daley Amory, you are like a wild animal every time you come home from your father’s,” she says, before I slam my door on her.

6

On the Wednesday night before Thanksgiving, Garvey comes home from college. A friend drops him off. I hear him shut a car door and shout something. Then he is there in our apartment for the first time, his long lanky body making everything — the sideboard, the desk, the walls — seem smaller. He is growing a sparse rust-colored beard, nothing like the hair on his head, which is thick and dirty blond. His eyes are small chips of blue in murky water. He smells like the sleeping bags in the shed on Myrtle Street. I breathe him in. I cannot get enough of it. I have missed him so much more than I knew. He has to peel me off of him to introduce himself to Pauline, my babysitter. He makes a point of shaking her hand, even though she’s across the room and has to take off the oven mitt for the macaroni she’s just about to take out of the oven.

“So you’re taking care of the pipsqueak.”

“We take care of each other.” She smiles at me. I hear her accent—each otha—more distinctly with Garvey in the room. She comes every day after school until my mother gets home at seven-thirty, and we laugh a lot. At first I didn’t understand why we couldn’t have Nora. She’d moved in with her sister in Lynn and came sometimes to take me out to Friendly’s and didn’t seem to be working at all, but my mother thought I should have someone younger, and less expensive. Pauline is in tenth grade and her boobs are growing so fast they pop the buttons off her shirt. We’re always finding buttons and cracking up. I see my brother taking all this in.

We eat the macaroni on the sofa. Garvey drills Pauline with questions: where does she live, what’s that neighborhood like, does she have siblings, did her parents grow up here, has she done much traveling, where would she like to go most? Maybe we’ll all take a trip there, to California, one day, he concludes.

And then Mom comes home and Pauline leaves.

“Wow,” my brother says, smoothing down the back of his hair. “Va va voom.”

“She’s barely fifteen,” my mother says.

“She’s not going to be able to balance on two feet if she grows any bigger.”

“She’ll manage just fine.” My mother hangs up her coat and gives my brother another hug. “Oh, it’s so good to see you,” she says through gritted teeth. She always grits her teeth when she’s feeling affection.

“It’s good to be here. Nice pad, Ma.” He swings his head around. “You got some serious loot from the big house.”

My mother eats the rest of my macaroni standing up. We’re all still standing up. I’m not sure why.

“How’s it going there?” she asks him.

“Oh, fair to middling.”

“Yeah?” Meaning she wants to hear more.

“I’ve been in school so long.”

“Garvey.”

“I’m just saying. I was in boarding school for four years before this. Everyone else runs around like they’ve been let out of a cage, and I feel like it’s just another cage. A less interesting cage, actually.”

“Three and a half more years. That’s all. Then it’s over forever.”

“Yeah.” He slumps to the sofa and puts his boots up on the coffee table. Mom doesn’t tell him to take them off. He pulls out a new pack of cigarettes, smashes both ends into his palm a couple of times, unwraps the cellophane, then slides one out and lights it. “Then I get to go out and find my perfect career that will swallow up the rest of my promising life.” He blows out a long stream of smoke. “It all may be quite moot. I wasn’t able to register this week for next semester’s classes. Dad’s a little late on the payments, it turns out.”

My mother sits down on the couch beside him. “You’re joking, right?”

“I am not joking.”

“You need to talk to him about that. Tomorrow.”

Garvey taps the ashes onto his jeans and rubs them in. My mother brings him an ashtray but he doesn’t use it. “I don’t need his money.”

“Garvey, you need this degree.”

“I can pay for it myself. Brian Foley pays his own way. He works in the library I think. I visited him a few weeks ago.”

“UMass only costs three hundred dollars a year. Of course he can work it off. Harvard is several thousand.”

“So I’ll go to UMass. Harvard is a bunch of self-inflated morons. They all walk around in tuxes on the weekend. I’m not kidding. I met this bartender last weekend and he’s starting a moving company, furniture and crap, and he asked me to do some jobs for him. Might have to miss a few classes, but it’s good money.”

“Please talk to your father.”

“No.”

“I’m worried now.”

“I’m worried too.”

My mother gets up and rinses off the plate in the kitchen. She takes her time. Eventually the dishwasher squeaks open and the plate is slotted in. I know there’s nothing else for her to do in there but she stays in there, thinking.

I watch Garvey smoke.

“Dad and Mrs. — I mean Catherine—are married now,” I say.

“I heard. A little Nassau combo platter: divorce, wedding, and a nice golden tan for the holidays.”

“Frank’s got your room.”

Garvey snorts. “I’ll have to show him my Playboy stash.”

“He already found it.”

“Really? Cagey bugger.”

“He’s weird. “

“With a mother like that.”

“How’s Heidi?”

“Who?”

I give him a look.

“She’s got a new boyfriend. He’s very dependable.” He says the word dependable with nunlike primness, tilting his head, pursing his lips.

I laugh and that eggs him on.

“He shows up at precisely the right time, he says precisely the right things, and he always, always has a condom.”

Frank has condoms. When we’re really bored, Patrick and I sneak them out of his room and fill them with water and lob them at Elyse. She calls them greasy balloons and shrieks whenever she sees one.

“Do you have a new girlfriend?”

“Not really.”

“What about Deena?”

“Who?” This time he really doesn’t know who I’m talking about.

“That girl in your apartment in Somerville.”

A grimace, as brief as a gust of wind, passes across his face. “I never had anything to do with her.” He’s a bad liar. He keeps talking to cover it up. “She’s a very fucked-up young woman.”

That’s what she said about you, I want to say but I don’t. I don’t want to push him any lower than he already is.

“And you, my little hermitoid. What is going on in your sixth-grade world?”

I knew he’d ask this and I know just the kinds of thing he likes to hear so I prepared just the right story. “Funny you should ask,” I say, warming up. He smiles and I continue. “There’s this new boy, Kevin.”

“Kevin what?”

“Kevin Mackerel.”

“Mackerel? Like the fish?”

“I don’t know. I think so.”

“Oh, Kevin Mackerel,” he begins to sing. “Is he a fish or a man? I can’t tell and nobody can!”

My mother comes in then, all fired up with new reasons why Garvey has to stay in college and how she will talk to Al about how to proceed, and I never get to tell my story about how Kevin Mackerel got suspended for farting so much.

No way, my brother would have said.

Yes, way, I would have said, he did so. He just kept doing it really loudly and really stinkily and wouldn’t stop. He got warnings, demerits, a note home but nothing stopped him. So now he’s out of school until December first.

No way! I can hear him, his hands pulling at his hair, his face full of real laughter.

The next morning we get ready to go up to Dad and Catherine’s. We’ll have lunch there and dinner with Mom. I wear a black velvet dress. It has white lace cuffs and a white lace collar.

“Oh look, it’s the first pilgrim!” Garvey says.

He’s wearing the same jeans and a faded flannel shirt with a ripped pocket that flaps around. His hair is matted in the back. Because we’re going to see Dad, I notice these things. So does my mother. “The shower’s free,” she says.

“Oh goodie,” he says, and lights another cigarette.

We drive up in Mom’s car. I know this is a mistake. We should have left earlier and walked.

My father comes out on the back porch. He’s laughing and shaking his head.

“I thought,” he begins, fake chuckling, waiting to make sure we’re in earshot, “I thought your mother had decided to come for Thanksgiving dinner!”

They shake hands. I haven’t seen them together since the beginning of last summer. I’ve never noticed their similarity before, the sloping backs, the narrow eyes.

“When d’you get here?”

“Me and a buddy drove up last night.”

“Oh yeah?”

“You’re looking good, Dad.”

“Can’t complain too much. Things good?”

“Yeah, things are good.”

“Good.”

I can’t bear the fakeness and flee to find Patrick.

Frank is in the kitchen, fishing through a drawer in the kitchen.

“Hey,” I say.

He grunts back, then, realizing my usefulness, calls out, “Where do you guys keep the tape around here?”

“I dunno.” I keep moving. “Where do you keep it?”

Patrick and Elyse are watching the parade on TV from the recliners. Patrick moves over for me. His thumb is red and shiny with little indentations under the knuckle from his teeth. He’s been sucking it, which he does when he watches TV and forgets people can see him.

A ten-story Snoopy floats down a crowded street.

I hate that parade, and get up.

I hear the screen door slam.

From the French windows in the living room, I see Garvey walking onto the tennis court. It’s the first time he’s seen it, seen the garden gone. I can’t remember if I told him about it. The court’s surface is unblemished, a deep dark green with bright white lines. He stands at the far service line facing me but he can’t see me. He looks small. As I pass the stairs, I can hear Dad in the upstairs hallway, whispering loudly.

“It’s a disgrace. Honestly. He’s got on a filthy pair of jeans and an old shirt that smells like cat piss. And his hair.” I know my father is waving his hands around his head. “It’s a goddamn hornet’s nest. You couldn’t take him anywhere. ‘Me and my buddy drove up last night.’ Goes to Harvard and he can’t even speak English. You couldn’t take him to the club anymore. You couldn’t. And she doesn’t care. She let him leave the house like that. And then she lets him drive up here in the car I bought her! He has the nerve to bring that up here to my house!”

And then he’s downstairs, at the bar, rattling in the ice bucket, cracking the paper on a new bottle of vodka. I go and stand beside him, watching him carry out the motions. On top of the vodka he pours a few drops of vermouth. He puts the tops back on the vodka and vermouth and then, with a small spoon, slides out four tiny onions. I put out my hand and he drops one into it. He puts the rest in his drink, which he stirs with a finger. He straightens the line of bottles, the line of glasses, wipes off the spoon and the counter with a paper towel. Only when he is sitting in his chair does he close his eyes and take his first sip. The clock above him says 11:35. The turkey is on the stove, pale and pimply. Catherine hasn’t put it in the oven yet.

I sit beside him on the floor. At some point during the day, I have to tell my father that I’m going back to my mother’s until Saturday morning, until Garvey leaves. “You have a good week at school?”

“Yeah,” I say, stunned by the question, wishing I prepared for it. Then I realize I can tell my Kevin Mackerel story. This time I won’t use his distracting name; I’ll get right to the point. “A kid in my class got suspended for farting.”

He’s bent over his drink. He drinks and shakes his head. It seems like he hasn’t really heard. On another day he might jerk up, eyes big and delighted, and say, “You’ve gotta be kidding me.” Then I remember Patrick will have already told him.

“So who’s coming for lunch?” I say.

“No one, thank God.”

All my life we’ve had old Mrs. Waverly who had her voice box removed and buzzes out her words with the help of a little silver gadget that looks like an electric razor that she presses to her throat, Mr. Harris who owns the garden shop, and Cousin Morgan, Grindy’s cousin who lost a leg and most of an arm in a war. They are all Mom’s people and they’ll never come to this house again.

My father lifts his lighter to his neck and speaks in Mrs. Waverly’s robotic rhythm. “Hel/lo/Da/ley. Are/you/en/joy/ing/school/this/year?” My mother never found his imitations funny, even when he pretended to be Cousin Morgan insisting on passing the heavy gravy boat with his one hand and spilling it in my lap, which did happen one year. My mother’s disapproval always made it hard not to laugh, but without it, it isn’t as funny. Even my father isn’t enjoying it. He starts to pull his arm out of his sleeve to do the gravy routine and then stops and looks at me like he’s wondering where he is. Then he smiles and shakes his head. “Jesus Christ. Good riddance to all of them.”

He goes back to the bar and I go into the dining room. It’s set with Catherine’s china, green and brown. I go to the sideboard my mother didn’t take and open the top drawer. There they are, the place cards with the painted wooden fruit glued onto a corner and all the names in my mother’s big handwriting: Olivia (Mrs. Waverly), Donald (Mr. Harris), Cousin Morgan. There is also Gardiner, Meredith, Garvey, and Daley. And way in the back are Dad (Grindy), Mom (Nonnie), Judy (my mother’s sister), and Ashley, Hannah, and Lindsey (Judy’s daughters). I scoop up every place card and stuff them in my pockets. Then I go out to find Garvey.

He’s still on the tennis court, with Frank. They’re playing in bare feet. I’m not sure if Garvey has met Frank before. They aren’t playing by the regular rules. The alleys are in and you get two extra points if you hit the other person with the ball. Four extra if you ace your serve. And you can serve from anywhere on the court, even right at the net, which Garvey is doing when I come down the old rose garden steps and stand at the green netting that goes around the whole thing. He whales on the ball and it nicks Frank in the shin before skidding off.

“Hit and ace!” Garvey says. “Six points.”

They both crack up.

“Shit,” Frank squeaks. He’s bent over, his hands on his knees for support, laughing hard. I’ve never seen him laugh before.

I go around and sit on a lawn chair at the side of the court.

Garvey holds his racquet out to me. “Wanna sub in?”

I shake my head. I want him to be friends with Frank. If he’s friends with Frank, maybe he’ll come up here to Myrtle Street with me more often. I like having him here.

Frank serves the next one and Garvey returns it, a lob that Frank lets bounce as he prepares for an overhead slam. Garvey says, “Oh fuck,” and bolts off the court, through the netting, and into the brown leaves beyond. Frank’s slam bounces just inside the baseline, then flies up over the netting. To reach it, Garvey runs through leaves and brush and, with a yelp of delight, lobs it back. Frank is laughing too hard to finish the point.

It’s the happiest game of tennis I’ve ever seen.

Patrick and Elyse come out and join me in the chairs. It gets colder and we have to run in for hats and mittens, though Frank and Garvey have unbuttoned their shirts.

After a long time, we are called in for Thanksgiving dinner.

Catherine is wearing a silky lavender shirt cinched over her short skirt by a gold chain belt. She hasn’t done up very many buttons on the shirt and I can see the lace of her bra just beneath the four heavy necklaces on her freckled chest.

She doesn’t bother with hellos or a Happy Thanksgiving to me or Garvey. She says, “I need plates, now” to me, and, “Will you open these fucking bottles of wine?” to Garvey. She’s holding a carving knife and already talking with her eyes closed.

But Garvey, who often kills my mother’s bad moods with kindness, isn’t going to let her get away with that. “Don’t I get to kiss the bride first?” he says, opening his arms.

Catherine puts the knife down hard on the counter but then gives up a small smile.

Even though there is only one less person than we normally have for Thanksgiving, it feels like a sparse gathering. My mother always said a prayer, but Catherine just starts cutting into her meat.

“Ahem.” My father, from the other end of the table, looks at her in pretend sternness. “Aren’t we forgetting something?”

“Oh, yes.” She looks up at the ceiling. “Thanks for nothing, Lord. Next time you cook the goddamn turkey.”

My father loves it. “You’s a funny one,” he says.

She kisses the air in his direction noisily.

He puts out two hands and squeezes, like he’s squeezing her boobs.

Garvey raises one eyebrow at me from across the table, and I have to look down in my lap to keep from laughing.

“So.” My father turns to Garvey. “Classes good?”

“Yup.”

“What’re you taking?” It seems less out of curiosity than to get Garvey to prove he’s actually going to college.

“Calculus, Middle English, Psych, Anatomy.”

“Anatomy? You find out where your dick is yet?”

“Jesus, Dad. You’ve got little kids here.” He turns to Elyse who is finger painting with gravy on the table. “How old are you?”

Without stopping to look up, she says, “None of your beeswax.”

“I’m just asking if you’ve found out where your dick is.”

“I’ve got a pretty good idea,” Garvey says, and then he seems to make a decision. He turns to Catherine. “What was Nassau like?”

She doesn’t look at him either. “Hot.”

“I have some friends who lived there for a couple years. They said there’s a grotto out on the north side of the island with all these sea lions and then there’s this funky bar where—”

She waves those things away. “We didn’t see any of that stuff. We just stayed at the resort.”

“They must have had some good-looking tennis courts down there.”

Catherine nods.

Garvey pours himself another glass of wine. He’s the only one drinking it. “What do you wear when you play tennis?” he asks her. “I mean, are women switching over to shorts or do they still have to wear skirts?”

“I like wearing skirts.”

“You have more freedom of movement, don’t you? Maybe that’s why Billy Jean King beat Bobby Riggs.”

“That was a setup,” Catherine says.

“You think it was rigged?”

“No pun intended,” I say. No one hears me.

“Of course it was rigged,” my father says. “He could have beaten her with his left toe if he’d wanted to.”

“So why didn’t he?’

“Because he got a hell of a lot more money for losing.”

“He let himself be a laughingstock for a couple of grand?”

“More than that.”

“Where are you getting your information, Dad, from Don Finch?”

My father laughs in spite of himself. Everyone at the table does. Even Elyse knows Don Finch is the worst player at the club and the most hilarious to watch. There’s a story that he once played a whole set without making contact with the ball once.

“You know who I saw at the club the other day? Gus Barlow.”

“Gus Barlow,” Garvey says. “Shit. How is he?” Gus was a classmate of Garvey’s at Ashing Academy.

“He’s good.” I can tell my father is going somewhere with this. So can Garvey. “He’s a good kid.” My father puts down his fork and knife slowly. “You know, if you cleaned yourself up a bit we could go over there for a meal this weekend.”

Garvey shakes his head. “My buffet days at the clubhouse are definitely over.”

“Yeah? You’re done with the club. Too good for the club now, I guess.” He picks up his silverware again then points them at Garvey. “How does your mother feel about the way you look?”

“She hasn’t mentioned it.”

“Well I can tell you that when she lived in this house she would never have let you come to the Thanksgiving table looking like that. Never.”

“I guess she’s just lost her marbles.”

“I think she has. I really do.” His face is bright red.

“Well good for her,” Catherine mumbles.

Garvey smiles at her. “Said the new wife, ambiguously.”

Catherine laughs loudly.

“Garvey, I gotta show you something after dinner,” Frank says.

“What?” Patrick asks.

“Shut up,” Frank says.

“Is that jade?” my brother asks, touching the chunks of stone around Catherine’s wrist.

“Jade and mother of pearl.”

My father is glaring at her. She pulls her arm away.

Garvey and I do the dishes. There is no discussion about this. Everyone else brings their plates to the sink and walks away.

“Cinderella and Cinderello, the two stepchildren left in the scullery all alone.” He feigns hunger and weariness, limply carrying the turkey platter to the counter. “Hey, I have a movie idea.” He always has movie ideas. “Oh my God, it’s going to make us millions. Okay, it’s Thanksgiving night and this old man lives in a house all alone. His children came that afternoon with the meal but now they’ve all gone home to their families. He’s been married three or four times but all his wives have left him and he’s all alone on Thanksgiving night, all doped up on tryptophan but too depressed to sleep. And then he hears this noise outside. He goes out into his yard and there’s this enormous turkey, the size of a house, gobbling at him. But the turkey has a human face, a gruesome one, like Mrs. Perth’s face. You have her this year, right? I still have nightmares about her. And this turkey has all the man’s wives tucked under its wings. They’re all naked and they all have papers for him to sign because he screwed every single one of them out of his money.”

Dad has come in to make a drink and is standing there, listening.

“Knock it off, Garvey,” he says. “I don’t want you corrupting her. She’s an innocent little girl and she doesn’t need a slob like you filling her head with bullshit.”

“Look who’s talking.”

“I’ll tell you something. Any bullshit either of you has gotten comes from your mother. Look at you. Just look at you. I tell you, I feel sorry for you with a mother like that. She left me a goddamn note right there.” He points to the counter because the kitchen table isn’t there to point to anymore. “Right there. Wouldn’t even tell me to my face she was leaving.” I think for a moment he’s going to cry.

“She was scared you’d hit her.”

“She was right about that. I would have hit her. Cowardly bitch.”

Garvey laughs. My father joins him. My heart is racing and I scrub the scalloped sweet potato dish as hard as I can.

We leave as soon as the kitchen is clean. I mention to Dad that I’ll be back up here Saturday morning and he just shrugs, like he couldn’t care less, which is a lot better than getting yelled at.

We are late, very late, getting back to Mom’s. I can see her trying not to let it bother her, but she’s been cooking alone all day and now the dishes that she covered with tinfoil are cold and she sits down and picks up her fork without saying grace either.

“Where’s Mrs. Waverly and Cousin Morgan?” Garvey asks.

“Oh, Mom,” I remember the placecards in my dress pocket. “Look what I rescued!” I spill them onto the table. The wooden fruits clatter together.

She shakes her head at them. And then scoops them up and throws them all in the trash in the kitchen. “Sorry,” she says to me, “but they give me the willies.” And then she says to Garvey, “I thought it would be better to just have it be us this year. I’m not used to this electric oven and I didn’t know what time to invite them for because I didn’t know what time Catherine would be serving lunch up there and they never stick to a schedule anyway and I just thought it would be easier, but now I’m feeling so guilty. Who knows where they’re eating. Probably at a restaurant. And they could have kept me company while I waited for you two.” She looks sad, sadder than I’ve seen her since we moved here.

Garvey doesn’t seem to notice. He puts his fingers to his Adam’s apple. “You/didn’t/want/to/hear/Mrs./Wa/ver/ly/com/plain/a/bout/her/an/gi/na/this/year?”

“Stop it,” she says harshly. “Stop that right now.”

Garvey just laughs at her tone. I wish I could do that. “Oh my God, Mom, it’s a scene up there. Catherine’s walking around with her boobs falling out of her dress and they’re both pounding down the martinis and her kids seem kind of shell-shocked. Frank is high as a kite and little what’s-her-name is like a feral child. She’s like Helen Keller.” Garvey shuts his eyes and gropes around for my hand and when he finds it he moans and scribbles in my palm with his finger. Mom can’t help laughing.

“You shouldn’t let Daley spend too much time up there,” he says.

I flail around blindly, too, but when I open my eyes no one is laughing.

They start talking about politics, about congressional seats and public funding. They can flip into this language I don’t understand so quickly. When Garvey asks Mom about her boss, things get more interesting. Garvey has a way of sniffing out the real story. For three months, all I’ve known is that he is a lawyer named Paul Adler, and when you call his office you get a lady named Jean who is never pleased you are calling. I know that Mr. Adler is involved in politics, too, and that my mother often has to stay in town for fundraisers. But Garvey, in a matter of minutes, susses out that he is thirty-six, Harvard undergrad and law, unmarried, handsome, Jewish, and has a crush on my mother.

“I think you like this guy. I think you like him a lot more than Martin.”

“Oh, Martin.” My mother waves him off.

“You like your boss,” he says in playground singsong.

“He’s much younger than I am.”

“Five years. And look at you. You look like a coed.” It’s true. Garvey has more wrinkles around his eyes than she does.

“It’s all that grease she puts on her face at night,” I say.

“Like a bug in amber,” my brother says.

“He leaves me these little cryptic notes on my desk.”

“I can just see him. Some poor kid in jail’s life hangs in the balance, but he’s busy at his desk composing the perfect little bon mot for you. Has he made a pass at you yet?”

“No.”

“Oh c’mon. He hasn’t even kissed you yet?”

“No. On the cheek.”

“You’re lying.”

“I am lying.” She bursts out with a huge long laugh. She is happy again, and relaxed, her hands dangling off the arms of the chair, her head off to one side. She keeps laughing, her mouth wide open, her front teeth slightly bent together but still white and pretty and young.

7

It turns out it’s serious with this guy, Paul. Mom brings him home one Thursday night to meet me. He reminds me of a greyhound, lean and quick. He wears glasses. He notices everything.

“How do you like Ashing Academy Founded in 1903?” he asks when my mother has abandoned us to arrange the take-out on plates.

“You’ve done some research,” I say.

He tips his head toward the corner of the room. “I saw it on your bookbag.”

“I like it. I’ve never gone anywhere else so I don’t have anything to compare it to.” There’s something about him that makes you sit up straight, makes you want to say things right.

He looks at me like he’s really taking it in. “It’s funny that way, isn’t it? I’ve only worked for this one law firm, so I don’t know any better either.”

“Do you like it?” I’ve never asked a grown-up if they like what they do. I just assumed they all came home and complained about their work like my father did.

“I have a ball at work.”

I must have given him a face without knowing it because he says he’s serious; he loves his work. He tries to tug his pant cuff down closer to his shoe. He looks like he’s a tall kid pretending to be a grown-up. Then he asks me if I feel cut off from the town, going to private school, and I tell him I didn’t used to, but living down here has made me realize how few of the neighborhood kids I know. “Pauline, my babysitter, knows everyone,” I say. “It’s weird.”

“It’s not weird. It’s to be expected.”

I stand corrected, my math teacher says when someone finds a mistake on the board.

My mother puts the food on the table and calls us over.

“You are here,” she says to Paul, patting the top of the chair she usually sits in.

“Couldn’t I be over there?” he says, pointing to a side spot, next to the wall.

“No, no, you’re the guest of honor,” she says.

Paul sits but keeps looking up and flapping his hand above his head.

“What on earth are you doing?” my mother says, smiling, looking up to the ceiling, too.

“Just checking for swords hanging by hairs.”

My mother bursts out laughing but I have no idea what he’s talking about.

“They haven’t taught you about Damocles yet?”

I shake my head.

In the fourth century B.C., he tells me, there was a terrible tyrant of Syracuse named Dionysius. He was brilliant in battle and mean as a snake to everyone around him. He liked to surround himself with intellectuals like Plato, but he also liked to toy with them. Paul leans back in his seat, as if he’s telling a story about his own family. Dionysius once read some of his poetry to the famous poet Philoxenos, and when Philoxenos didn’t like it much, Dionysius had him arrested and banished to the quarries. A couple of days later, he had the poet brought back to hear some more of his poetry. Once again he asked Philoxenos what he thought, and Philoxenos whimpered, “Take me back to the quarries.”

We laugh, and Paul helps himself to the food my mother passes him.

“But why were you looking for a sword?” I say.

“Dionysius had a big court full of people and this fellow Damocles was the most obsequious courtier of all. He laughed when Dionysius laughed and hung on his every word — kind of like me with your mother.”

“Ha,” my mother says.

Dionysius got tired of it, Paul continues, and told Damocles he could wear his crown and sit in his seat and be king for a meal. Damocles was thrilled. But the crown was very heavy and he had to wait a long time for all the tasters to taste the king’s food to make sure it wasn’t poisoned, and then, in the middle of the meal, he leaned back and saw a double-edged sword just above him, pointing directly at the middle of his skull and hanging by one long horse-hair. He begged to change places, but the king refused. He said he wanted Damocles to become closely acquainted with the fear that a great king lives with every minute when he is surrounded by his so-called friends. “I didn’t bring any tasters with me tonight,” Paul says, “but let’s eat.”

My mother has put food on my plate, noodles with crumbs all over it and some sort of soupy thing over rice.

“What is this?”

“It’s Thai. You’ll like it.”

It smells very spicy. I don’t like spices except oregano and basil in spaghetti sauce, but this is not bad. The crumbs in the noodles are crushed-up peanuts, and the sauce is sweet and creamy.

“Now, not to undermine your story,” my mother says.

“Uh-oh, here we go,” Paul says to me.

“But I do think you are conflating the two tyrannical Dionysiuses of Syracuse. Dionysius One banished the poet, and Dionysius Two hung the sword.”

“She thinks I’m conflating,” he whispers to me, then turns to my mother. “There was only one. You’re thinking of Hiero One and Two.”

My mother pats her lips primly with her napkin and Paul laughs. He was right — he does laugh at everything she does. Then she stands up and goes to the bookcases and pulls out our huge Columbia Encyclopedia. They flip through it together, giggling when a page tears slightly in their haste.

“Dionysius,” Paul says loudly, then he looks at me. “One and Two.”

He reminds me of a younger, more playful Grindy. “How on earth did you know that?” he asks her.

“My classics teacher at Miss Pratt’s School for Girls wrote a book on Greek history. She branded every name and date on our hide.”

After my mother puts the encyclopedia away, she asks about the Delaurio boy, but Paul puts up his hand and says, “We’re not going to inflict our work on Daley.”

We eat a little more and then he asks, “So who are your friends and enemies, Daley?”

Even my mother looks surprised by this one. I look across at her and she shrugs.

“‘You shall judge of a man by his foes as well as by his friends,’” he explains to us.

“Who was that?” my mother asks.

“You promise not to correct me?”

“No.”

“Joseph Conrad, I believe.”

“Plausible,” my mother says.

He bows his head briefly to her. And to me he says, “So tell me.”

“I don’t know. My best friend is Mallory. I’ve known her since nursery school.”

“What do you like about her?”

There’s something about the sound of his voice that pulls more words from me than I mean to give. “She’s kind of unpredictable. I’ll go over to her house to make chocolate chip cookies and we’ll end up wearing wigs and pretending we have our own cooking show. And then we pee our pants because we’re laughing so hard. Who is your best friend?”

He smiles. He wasn’t expecting the question back at him. “That’s a tricky one. There’s Eddie, who was my Mallory growing up, but he lives in Chicago so I don’t see him much. Here I have some good buddies from law school, and this new friend who appeared in my office last fall, but I probably can’t tell you anything about her that you don’t already know.”

They smile at each other. It’s weird. The whole thing is strange, but not awful. He has barely touched the glass of wine my mother poured him.

“Any other friends you want to mention?”

“Not really. There’s Gina and Darcie, but I only call them when Mallory’s busy.”

“And there’s Patrick,” my mother says.

It’s funny to hear her say Patrick’s name. It reminds me that there was a day last spring when she took us to the Mug for donuts and Patrick asked my mother if he could drink the extra creamers beside her cup of coffee and the cream left a tiny crescent of white above his lip and my mother wiped it off for him with her napkin. He told me that afternoon that he thought my mother was the most beautiful mother he’d ever seen. He said she looked like a prettier Jackie Onassis. Now he doesn’t dare say her name.

“And Patrick,” I say. But that’s weird now, too.

“And your enemies?” Paul says.

All I can think of is Catherine Tabor. But my mother wouldn’t like me to say that. “With a family like mine, who needs enemies?”

“What’d she say?” my mother says, but Paul is laughing a loud hiccuppy laugh. I feel all warm inside, making him laugh like that. It’s almost as good as when I can get my father going. But that’s becoming harder and harder.

My mother serves dessert in the living room area. Paul takes a seat on one side of the sofa and my mother folds her legs up beneath her on the other side so I sit on the middle cushion. I catch them smiling at each other.

“What?” I say, but they won’t tell me.

“No homework tonight?” my mother asks.

“I did it in study hall.” The ice cream is coffee and I swirl it around until it’s soup. Paul has big shoes, dark brown leather with laces, and thin socks that show the boniness of his ankles. He jiggles his leg a bit, like Garvey. Everyone seems to have run out of things to say.

When he stands to leave, Paul puts out his hand and we shake. “You are everything your mother said you were, only more so.”

“You too.”

I don’t know why he thinks I’m so funny, but it’s nice.

My mother has a huge grin on her face when he says, “Adieu, m’lady,” and doffs a pretend hat.

“Not quite so fast,” she says. “I’ll walk you out.”

They put on their coats and shut the door behind them. I race to my room. The lights are off and I have a perfect view of the parking lot where they stop beside his car.

I know they’re talking about me. He’s pointing back toward the door and she’s laughing. I hope I’ve made a good impression. They talk for a long time, leaning against the door of his car, looking down, looking up, looking at each other. He takes her hand and then the other hand and when he tells her something she nods and says something and they laugh at the same time. He bends down and they kiss on the mouth, not for a long time, not any longer than my last kiss with Neal. They end up in a long hug. She pulls away to look at him and says something and I wonder if she’s telling him she feels like she’s in a novel. I do, just watching them.

8

“Oh my God, it’s not possible,” Catherine says. “Gardiner, look at this. She’s got another one.”

My father looks up from where he’s spreading the large hotel towel on the chaise. “Oh Christ. What’s that called, Out to the Out-house by Willie Makit? Overpopulation in China by Wee Fuckem Young?”

I’d heard these jokes so many times. “It’s Not the End of the World by Judy Blume.”

“Blume,” he says and shakes his head. “You’re always reading the Jews. Just like your mother.”

He has no clue about Paul yet.

“What’s it about?” Catherine says.

“A kid whose parents get divorced.”

She snorts. “What would you want to read about that for?”

She doesn’t like all the reading I do. Neither does my father. They say it’s rude. They make fun of the titles, the covers, and the way I chew on the skin of my lower lip when I get deep in a book.

But I have nothing else to do. We’re in St. Thomas for spring vacation, and Patrick has made friends with the golf pro and now drives his own little cart, picking up elderly players at their cottages and driving them around the eighteen holes. He gets paid for this in snack bar tickets, so every afternoon when he gets off work we go have peanuts and papaya juice by the pool. Elyse has attached herself to another family for the ten days, a couple from Salt Lake City and their one-year-old son. Elyse loves babies. The mother from Salt Lake sensed her usefulness immediately, and now Elyse spends her days under their cabana on the beach. No one knows where Frank goes. He leaves after breakfast and comes back before dinner with a secretive smirk and half-shut eyes that scare me.

Almost everything scares me these days. I have been on planes before, but this time I was terrified of the distance from earth, the smallness of the plane, and the flimsiness of its metal walls. When we actually landed, my gratitude didn’t last long. There are lizards on the floor, red jellyfish at the shore, and shark fins farther out. I don’t want to snorkel or water-ski or windsurf. And it isn’t just the outside world I’m scared of. I’m scared of inside of me, too. On the second day I ran back to our cottage to go to the bathroom, and as I stood there on the tiles pulling down my suit, a feeling wrapped around my chest like a boa constrictor. The dead star feeling, out of nowhere. I struggled to breathe. I knew I was alone in the cottage and yet the bathroom felt crowded. My heart began to pound and made me so scared it pounded harder and harder until I thought there was no way my body could withstand the force of its beating. I’m just going to the bathroom, I kept telling myself, but my body felt something completely different, as if it were having a whole other invisible experience. Back on the beach, I felt weak and shivery and wrapped myself in a towel. I’ve been in the cottage alone since then, but at night the feeling edges in and I have a hard time falling asleep. Reading is the only thing that calms me down.

“You have your Jews,” my father says to me later, when we are all showered from the beach, waiting to go to dinner, “and I have my magazines.” He picks up the Penthouse he got Frank to buy at the airport.

“Read another letter, Gardiner,” Patrick says.

“All right.” My father flips through the pages. “Dear Penthouse Forum,” he begins. “I never really believed these letters were written by real people, but since last Thursday night, I’m ready to believe anything.”

“They always start like that. It’s so fake,” I say.

“Shhh,” Patrick says

“Yes, Daley, shhh. This is serious literature.” My father grins at me. He is in a good mood, with his drink at his elbow and the magazine in his hands. He reads about a girl who describes everything in her life as boring — her job, her boyfriend, her dog. My father thinks this is hilarious. “Even the fucking dog is boring!” She works in an office building in Chicago.

“Is she ever going to get to the point?” Elyse says, and everyone cracks up. It is cozy in our little cottage by the beach, sitting all of us together on the wicker furniture with big comfy cushions. My father continues to read.

One night she has to stay late to catch up on some work. She gets a little uneasy when the last person leaves, but then she waves her fear away. She knows she’s being a baby. About an hour later she hears the elevator rise and her fear returns. She shuts off all the lights. The elevator stops on her floor and opens. She stops breathing. She thinks if she stays very still — she’s in the corner, facing the wall — he won’t notice her. She doesn’t dare turn around. She thinks she hears something but she can’t tell because her heart is beating so loudly — and then she feels hands on her neck. They are warm. “For some reason I feel myself relax then. I know everything’s going to be okay. His hands are so big. They slide down over my shoulders and around to my breasts. I’m wet instantly. I can hear him breathing and I smell cigarettes on his breath and I feel his stubble on my cheek but I never see him. He takes off all my clothes and pleasures me in every way imaginable and then, finally, he puts his long rod-hard cock inside me and—”

“Gardiner, really, this is going too far,” Catherine says. “Elyse is going to tell this to her class when she gets back.”

“Elyse Tabor! Well, I never!” Patrick imitates the first grade teacher’s constipated grimace.

We all laugh.

“Two more sentences,” my father says. “—and I feel him explode. And then he leaves the building. I never saw his face. I’ll never know who he was.”

The first morning in St. Thomas I went with my father to collect our passports at the front desk in the main building. Everyone else was still asleep. At home there was three feet of snow on the ground but now I was in bare feet and shorts. Our cottage was one of the farthest away, right on the water. We walked on the wide stone paths that connected everything at the resort, and, because it had rained a little before dawn, the stones were wet but warm. We watched a lizard chase another up a palm tree until we couldn’t see them anymore.

“Your mother and I stayed in a place like this in Barbados,” he said. It almost sounded like a fond memory. He never spoke about my mother in front of Catherine except to insult her. It was so much better when we were alone, but we were never alone. I pretended all the way to the front desk and back that we had come by ourselves to St. Thomas.

I have a crush on a blond boy I see at the pool in the afternoons. He’s small and slender and wears long green swimming trunks with orange fish on them. He knows I like him. I can tell from the way he’s always checking to see if I’m still watching him. He’ll pretend to look beyond me, leave me off to the side of his gaze. When we first got there he was hanging out with two girls who looked a lot older than us, but they left after a few days and now he has no one.

“Stop looking at him. He’s a total jerk,” Patrick says. “Do you know what he did in the shop yesterday? He—”

“Shut up. I don’t care.”

We’re finishing up our papaya juices. We’re so badly sunburned that we sit at the edge of our chairs, careful to let our skin touch the least amount of chair as possible. We don’t have sun lotion. We only have something called Hawaiian Tropic, which is coconut-smelling baby oil that promises to increase the sun’s rays. We’re obsessed with getting the deepest darkest tan possible. Elyse has had the worst reaction to the sun. Her skin has bubbled up on her arms and back, and the Salt Lake City family took her to the clinic in town where they wrapped gauze around her forearms, which had become infected. They bought her a long-sleeved shirt and sunblock and have hinted that we should be using those things, too. But we don’t have blisters, just a good burgundy burn that will turn into a deep dark tan by the time we go back to school.

My father and Catherine appear behind the blond boy in their tennis whites.

“Let’s go,” my father says.

We pick up our racquets and loop around the pool.

“Ace ‘em,” the blond boy whispers to me.

I smile, relieved that my sunburn hides my blush.

The courts are clay. A black man in tennis whites is sweeping ours. The instruments are the same as at the club at home, a wide broom the size of a narrow hallway that you pull behind you like a cart, and a small round brush on rollers. We sit on the green bench and watch him drag the big broom in long dramatic curves across one side and then the other, then clean the lines with the small brush that makes a scritch-scratch noise as it passes us. The lines he cuts are crisp and perfect, which is not easy to do. I can’t tell how old he is, in his teens or twenties or thirties, his hair cropped close, his thighs no thicker than his calves, and his legs and arms so long and so very black against the white of his clothes. I wish I could watch him do the other courts, but ours is ready and my father walks onto it with his big splayed feet, bouncing a ball off his racquet and scuffing it up immediately.

I think my father hopes, each time we step on the court together, that since our last match I have transformed myself into Chrissie Evert. I think he actually believes, despite years of witnessing the raw truth, that I possess that kind of talent and am stubbornly withholding it from him, deliberately making him suffer. He insists on getting me out on the court, even though it makes him miserable.

Garvey was the tennis player. His room, before Frank moved into it, was filled with trophies of little gold men getting ready to serve and Garvey’s name on the plaques at the bottom. He played on the varsity team at St. Paul’s his freshman and sophomore years and then quit. My father often refers to that moment as the greatest disappointment of his life.

So now there is just me, who’s never done any better than the improvement prize in any sport.

“Daley and I will take you two on,” my father says, to my relief. It’s easier playing with him than against him.

We confer at the baseline. My father has that hopeful look on his face. “Catherine’s wrist is hurting again. Play to her backhand. She barely has any strength in it. And Patrick — well, you can take on Patrick.” Patrick is a very good tennis player. I’ve gotten about four games off of him in all the sets we’ve played, but my father hasn’t forgotten them. “Okay, let’s go get ‘em.” He pats my shoulder and gives me the three balls.

My practice serves go in.

“Look at that!” my father shouts. “Look at that!”

My real ones are abysmal. The first slaps the bottom of the net. The second hits the fence. My father comes down to the baseline.

“Stand right here. A little farther over. Good. Now,” he stands behind me and lifts my racquet back for a serve, “try and snap your wrist at the top, like this.” He takes my arm and slowly lifts it over my head, flicking my wrist at just the right moment. He smells like lime and cigarettes, his Caribbean smell.

I double-fault two more times.

My father comes back down to the baseline.

“If you’d just leave her alone, she’d be fine, Gardiner,” Catherine says. “She just needs to warm up a little.”

After that, I get one in. Patrick, startled that it has gone in, misses it entirely. My father high-fives me. I win the next point, too, by hitting down Catherine’s backhand alley.

No matter what mood I begin with, I always have the same feeling playing tennis, a sort of claustrophobia despite the open space, fresh air, and wind in the trees, combined with a boredom bordering on despair. I keep looking at the clean lines and thinking about the black man in his white shorts. He has left glasses of ice water and a plate of sliced melon on our bench. For three sets a day I’m caged here, the white lines flashing in the heat, the sky too hot to be blue, and the sun searing our already burned skin.

My father never gives up. I don’t think he feels anything but completely alive and exhilarated on the tennis court. He can’t understand my mood, the stupor his ambitions for me puts me in. Even in the last game of the third set (0–6, 1–6, 0–5), he is still giving me tips, showing me the footwork involved in receiving an overhead lob. I watch him move at a backward diagonal, his lovely crisscrossed steps a dance I will never learn. I hit my best shot in the last point, a low crosscourt pass, but it falls just beyond the line.

“Out,” Patrick yells, thrilled not to have won but for the match to be over.

“Bullshit!” my father yells back. “It was a perfect shot.”

“Baloney, Gardiner,” Catherine says.

He’s too pissed to speak and threatens her with a finger as he marches over to their side. My father has a reverence for the rules of tennis, and is a gracious loser on those rare occasions when he does lose. But his desire for my one beautiful shot to be in is far greater than his abilities of perception.

The court is clay, however, and Patrick is pointing to the freshly made imprint, just outside the line.

“That’s bullshit,” my father says again, but weakly.

“I’m sorry, Dad.”

He shakes his head as we walk off the court. “You just need to play more. Practice makes perfect.”

But we have played every day for a week and I’m only getting worse.

I stand next to the blond boy that night at the salad bar.

“How’s your game?” he asks, staring down into the cottage cheese

“I suck.”

He smiles but does not look at me. “Beach afterwards?”

“Okay.”

“Don’t bring your boyfriend.” He flicks his eyes at Patrick, three people ahead of us.

“He’s my brother.”

“Step,” he corrects me. “Big difference, Daley.”

He’s found out my name and my family configuration. His power thrills me. I can barely eat. Things are tense at our table. Frank has not shown up.

“You play with fire, you’re going to get burned,” my father keeps saying. Even here he has his A-1 for his steaks. His nose has already started to bead up. Catherine isn’t eating much either. She jerks her head up every time someone comes through the thatched archway into the restaurant. She drinks. This pleases my father.

“You’s keeping up with me good tonight,” he says, trying to pinch her tit discreetly. She flinches away. “Oh fuck that,” he says under his breath.

Every night there is baked Alaska. The kitchen staff wheels it out and everyone is expected to stop eating and talking and watch it flame up.

“Oh for chrissake, don’t clap for these monkeys,” my father says.

There is dancing after dinner to a steel band. Usually my father and Catherine stay and dance while we go back to the cottage and watch TV, but tonight she doesn’t want to.

“It’s all right, my little pussy,” my father croons at her, but she’s just watching the doorway now.

“I know what you need,” my father says, and does something to her under the table.

“Keep your fucking hands off me!” she says loudly. People look, even Elyse and her new family all the way across the room. Even the blond boy who hasn’t glanced at me since the salad bar.

I tip my head to the beach. He nods. I get up then, leave Patrick, leave Catherine, leave my father and his purple sweaty face and yellow eyes and shaking hands and follow the blond boy to the sand.

The sun drops early at the equator. The sky is dark blue, no hint of a sunset left, just a cold pale line at the horizon. The sand is still warmer than the air. We walk down the beach away from the restaurant and all our cottages. We tell each other where we live. He’s from Connecticut. When we get far enough away from the last old lady collecting shells, he pulls me down on the sand and starts kissing me. His kisses are hard and wet, purposeful, like he is trying to get something out of my mouth with his tongue. His saliva is all over me and makes my skin cold. I think of stopping him, then remember where I am, in St. Thomas, staying at that cottage that I don’t want to go back to until all the fighting is over. So I refocus, try to remember Neal Caffrey’s kisses and how floaty I felt afterward, and I try not to think about the Penthouse letter and the dead star feeling, and when all that fails I think once more that I should stop him and go home, but then I remember where I am again.

He puts his hand up the back of my shirt. “No bra,” he whispers, his first words in a long time.

No breasts, I feel like saying, but he’s about to find that out. His hand begins to travel around to the front. When it’s just below my armpit, I reach up and pull it out. I stand up, the breeze blowing cold on my spit-soaked face.

“Prude,” he calls as I begin walking toward the lights of the cottages. “Stuck-up prude!”

There is only one light on in our cottage. The bedrooms are dark, and the other lamp in the living room is broken, smashed to pieces on the floor. Patrick and Elyse are on opposite ends of the couch, crying.

“They’re going to get a divorce!” Elyse wails when she sees me.

“No, they’re not.”

“I think they are,” Patrick says, the skin around his eyes even redder than his sunburn.

“They just had a fight,” I say.

“You weren’t here. It wasn’t a normal fight. She tried to strangle him.”

“They were drunk. They won’t even remember it tomorrow.” I realize they don’t understand about the drinking. They take the drunk behavior as seriously as the sober behavior. They don’t get the problem at all. “They’re alcoholics.”

“What’s that?” Elyse asks.

“It’s when you can’t stop drinking alcohol, like vodka and gin and all that stuff. The alcohol makes them behave like that. They can’t help it. It’s not really them talking.”

“They’re not alcoholics,” Patrick says.

“Yes, they are, Patrick.” My mother explained to me about my father’s drinking this winter. She figured out that he was an alcoholic on their honeymoon, and it only got worse. She tried to leave him twice before, but he promised to change and did for a while, but then slipped back. She told me it was like a sickness, only the people who have it don’t believe they’re sick.

“Gardiner has a job and a house and he’s the president of the tennis association at the club. He’s not an alcoholic.”

“Have you ever seen him sober at the end of the night?”

“Tons of times.” He’s lying. He can’t bear to believe my father has a flaw. But he’s crying. “That guy Murphy who sits in the corner of the sub shop. He’s an alcoholic, Daley.”

“I’m just saying that they drink a lot and they don’t mean half of what they say to each other. It will all be forgotten tomorrow morning.”

Elyse crawls into my lap and I stroke her arms and the bandages on her arms. Patrick sucks his thumb hard. I watch them both fall asleep, and after a while I carry Elyse into our room. I hear her fall back asleep immediately. I don’t go to sleep for a long time. My heart is throbbing and I find myself worrying that they are right, that they are going to get a divorce. As much as Catherine annoys me, I don’t want to be home alone with my father. I don’t want to be the only one left for him to yell at.

When I wake up, Elyse is not in the bed beside me. I hear laughter in the kitchenette, the coffeepot gurgling. No divorce. I put on my bathing suit and a pair of shorts. Frank is on the couch, just waking up, and when he sees me he shakes his head and tsk-tsks me with his finger. Why would I be in trouble and not him? The chatter has stopped in the kitchenette. They’re all there, my father, Catherine, and Patrick, all standing in the narrow space between the fridge and the counter, and Elyse on a stool, eating her sugar-coated cereal. Catherine whispers something to her children and they leave the room. Even Frank slips out the sliding glass door.

My father and Catherine look at each other and sip their coffee. There is some charge in the air I can’t identify. Maybe they are going to get a divorce. And they’re telling me first, so I can break it to Patrick and Elyse. I’ll be unemotional, I decide. I’ll say that it’s for the best.

“Daley,” Catherine begins. The V in her bathrobe has widened, and I can see the long nipples of her breasts.

“Sit down,” my father says to me, in a sudden guttural voice.

I move toward a counter stool.

“I said sit down.”

“I am,” I say, and my voice breaks. So much for unemotional.

“Daley, your father and I—”

My father breaks in. “I don’t know who you think you are, but I will not have you come down here with all the lies your mother has fed you. I’m sorry.” There is nothing sorry about him and the taut purple tendons running up his neck. “I’m sorry that you have to live with her, see her, listen to her, see those god-awful friends of hers. But if you start believing what she tells you, then you are an even bigger idiot than I thought.”

“Do you really think we’re alcoholics, Daley?”

I can’t find my voice. The stool feels so small beneath me.

“Do you really think this”—she points to the water through the glass door—”is the lifestyle of alcoholics? Are we passed out every night on the floor? Do we have bottles in our closets? Are we asking for money on street corners?”

I answer no to each of her questions.

“So what’s an alcoholic, in your opinion?”

“Someone who gets drunk all the time.”

“Do we get drunk all the time? Are we drunk right now?”

“I don’t know.”

“It’s eight o’clock in the morning and we’re drinking coffee. Are we drunk right now?”

“No.”

“Maybe you’re drunk right now,” my father says. “Maybe you were drunk last night when you had your little talk with Patrick and Elyse.”

Catherine pats his leg to shush him.

“Maybe you and your fucking mother were drunk when you left my house with all my mother’s goddamn jewelry. If I’m an alcoholic, she’s a goddamn criminal.” He makes like he’s going to hit me and I almost want him to, want to have some mark my mother will see when I get back. But he just walks out of the cottage, muttering fucking bitch a few times and shaking his clenched hands around before careening down the path out of view.

Catherine finally notices that her boobs are hanging out of her robe and pulls it tighter. “We leave tomorrow, Daley. Could you just keep your trap shut until we drop you off at Water Street?”

The blond boy is at the pool, hanging his feet in at the deep end, talking to three sisters from Wisconsin who arrived yesterday. They all look at me as I go down the shallow end steps, then he says something and they all burst out laughing. I go under quickly. They are still laughing when I come back up. The youngest girl swims toward me.

“Is your name Prudence?” she asks, and the others behind her crack up again.

“Go to hell,” I say, before I register how young she is, not much older than Elyse. Her eyes widen and fill with tears. She didn’t know what she was asking, and I feel terrible.

I skip lunch and spend the afternoon in the cottage alone. I don’t care if my heart starts to pound. I’m not scared of that anymore. I look at the phone and think about calling my mother at work, but there’s the disapproving Jean to get past and I know I won’t be able to speak anyway. I’ll just cry when I hear her voice and she’ll get worried that something is really wrong. Or I’ll yell at her for telling me he was an alcoholic in the first place.

Frank leans in the doorway of my room, clucking. “Namin’ the names.”

“What?”

“Callin’ spades spades.”

He’s wasted. I’ve seen him high, but not like this.

“Puttin’ on the labels. Big white and red Campbell’s soup labels. Splat. Right on the ‘rents. You should have seen them wriggling under the pin. Fucking eels. Someday we’ll cut off their heads and their tails and see if anything grows back.” He undoes the button on his jeans and starts unzipping his fly and I’m just about to slam the door on him when he rolls around the doorjamb and heads for the bathroom.

In the taxi we watch the sun seep up over the water. It is still dark on the roads, but the water and the sky just above it are starting to glow. My father is up front, talking to the driver, who is a black man about his age. My father is turned toward him, fully awake. “Holy smokes, you can’t beat that!” he’s saying, and the driver is laughing. My father is wearing bright red cotton pants, a white oxford shirt, and blue blazer. His smell of Barbasol, Right Guard, and Old Spice fills the van. It is his morning smell, the smell that obliterates the A-1-cigarette-vodka smell of the night before. He is close-shaven, squeaky clean. We all admire him. We cannot help it.

The airport doesn’t have walls, just a long red roof and palm trees on all sides. The driver unloads our bags onto a long cart. My father hands him a thick wad of money and the driver smiles and pats my father on the arm. My father pats him back and tells him to take care of himself and his family. The man cannot seem to take his eyes off my father and stands there by the side of his car long after my father has moved away.

Beneath the roof it is chaotic, with one check-in counter open and about fifty families trying to leave the island. We stand in the same place for a long time. We are hungry and it is starting to get hot. Our sunburns begin to throb beneath the stiff New England clothes we have not worn in thirteen days.

Patrick goes to sit on Frank’s duffel bag and Frank swats him hard.

“Sit on your own fucking suitcase,” he says.

Catherine’s head snaps around and she fixes her meanest stare on Frank. “Chh,” she says, spraying my arm with spit.

There are several boys my age in line but I do not look at them. I worry the blond boy is here somewhere or is about to arrive. I look down at my suitcase. It’s my mother’s old blue suitcase. I remember her taking it when she went on trips with my father, and then, when they returned, there would be presents nestled in it for me: an enameled ring from Venice, a cloth doll from Acapulco. I drape my parka over it, just as I did on the way down, hoping my father will not recognize it.

Another line opens up, then another, and we are through— our bags tagged and tossed down a chute — and sent to security. It’s not like regular American security with one guy taking your ticket and asking you to step through the metal detector. Here there are many men in uniform with big gold badges and dogs on complicated leashes, dogs not panting in the heat but eyeing us seriously.

One of them twitches and the other two bristle in response. Their ears lift and their wet black noses flare and tremble. Then they are all barking at once, showing their long yellow teeth, straining on their leads, yanking the men who hold them across the brick paving to Frank. The dogs surround him. The rest of us watch from the other side of the metal detector. Frank and his duffel are taken out of line immediately and led away. The dogs follow, their barking drowning out all other sounds except one loud brief, “Mom!” before Frank is shoved around a corner and disappears.

Catherine stands with her hand over her mouth. On the loudspeaker our flight to Miami is announced.

“I’m getting on that fucking plane no matter what happens, you hear me?”

Catherine nods her head slowly.

“This is not my fault. I have nothing to do with this. Nothing.” My father looks down the corridor and laughs his disgusted laugh. “Jesus Christmas. What kind of idiot would—”

“Shut up.” Her voice scrapes viciously, like she learned it from my father.

“You,” he says quietly, sifting through the pile of tickets he is holding with shaking fingers, “have a nice trip home.” He hands her four tickets. “C’mon, Daley. I’m getting you out of here.”

We follow the flow of people out across the tarmac, up the flight of metal stairs, and inside the small plane.

My father stops halfway down the small aisle and points to two seats on the right. “Here we go.”

“You can have the window,” I tell him.

“You take it.” He is trying to be nice but he looks like he wants to lift me up and shove me in the seat.

I slip in and buckle up.

My father pushes the stewardess button next to the light above us, but she is busy directing traffic up front and doesn’t come. He pulls down the tray even though he’s not supposed to. He puts his hands on the tray and wipes it with his palms in wide sweeps. The backs of his hands are wide and brown, with veins bulging up, crisscrossed around the fine bones that connect to his fingers. I remember what it feels like to hold his hand, something I always did— crossing streets, walking through stores, driving in the car — but now never do. And then to my surprise he reaches down and takes my right hand in his. It is as warm and large as I remember.

“We’s going to be okay,” he says, and pushes the button again.

Nearly an hour later, after there has been an announcement about mechanical difficulties, after the stewardess has brought me a Coke and my father three tiny bottles, two of vodka, one of vermouth, Elyse comes running down the aisle.

“Gardie!” she says, and climbs carefully into my father’s lap without knocking the tray with the bottles on it. I’ve never heard her call him that before — I’ve never heard anyone ever call him that.

“Hello, little peanut,” he says, and pushes some hair back into her headband.

Catherine and Patrick appear at the front of the plane and look down the aisle nervously until they see us. Patrick’s face relaxes immediately and he nudges his mother toward us. Despite all the sun she’s gotten, her skin has gone sallow, dark gray beneath the eyes. She takes the seat across the aisle from my father but does not look at him. Elyse climbs off my father and takes the window seat next to her mother, and Catherine fusses with their seatbelts much longer than necessary. Patrick sits in front of me and I see his eye peering through the crack in the seat. I stick my finger in and touch his cheek. “Ow,” he says and we laugh. And then Frank slumps into the seat beside Patrick, rattling everything on my father’s tray. My father reaches out to steady the bottles, then lifts the plastic cup, still half full, and hands it to Catherine.

“I bet you could use this even more than me.”

Catherine snorts a laugh and takes the drink. Then she reaches for my father’s hand.

“Big pussy,” she says.

“Little pussy,” he says.

“What happened?” I whisper to Patrick when we are in the air.

“They couldn’t find anything. They made him strip twice, they sent his clothes through this machine, the dogs were going wild, but they couldn’t find a thing.”

I peer through the crack at Frank. An unwashed, unbrushed clump of hair covers one eye. The other is shut. The skin of his face is blighted with zits and the scars from zits. His thin lips are bunched tight. Even in sleep, he looks like he’s scheming something.

I’ve saved most of my last book for the two flights home. It’s by Edith Wharton. Paul gave it to me for Christmas. He said it was just the beginning of the edification of Daley Amory. I’d had to sneak off and look up the word edification. When I get home from St. Thomas, my mother will tell me that Paul has asked her to marry him.

I pull out the book. When Catherine notices she elbows my father and points, and my father mutters, “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph— another goddamn book.”

But I don’t care. Archer has just sent the Countess Olenska the yellow roses, and my father and Catherine’s world is already slipping away.