Lexie

by Audrey Couloumbis

  Further down the shore were some small birds, running toward the ocean as it washed out, and running away as it washed back in.

  Daddy ran past, splashing water as his feet slapped down, and I laughed when some cold drops hit me. And finally the water swept in, foamy as soapsuds, covering my feet.

  I ran with Daddy a couple of times. He’s still too fast for me.

  “Hungry?” he asked me as he came to a stop, breathing hard.

  “I was hungry before.”

  “Race you!” Daddy shot across the sand and up the stairs. I couldn’t keep up. “One of these times,” I shouted as I ran after him. Mom always said that when I lost a race.

  I unpacked enough stuff to make turkey sandwiches while Daddy checked the water pipes. My stomach growled the whole time. When Daddy unscrewed the mayonnaise jar for me, he said, “Oh, mayo. I forgot about that.”

  “Well, Mom sent enough.”

  “No, I mean, I forgot about mayonnaise entirely. I don’t think I’ve eaten it since last summer.”

  He forgets all kinds of things. “Do you want a little or a lot?” I asked him.

  “I love mayo,” he said. “Slather it on.” He went outside to do something to get the water heater working. To turn on the water, I remembered, as air and water began to blast from the kitchen faucet.

  I turned it off there and in the bathroom. Now that there was water in the pipes, the house sounded right. Not noisy, once I’d turned the water off, but not silent either.

  Daddy came back into the kitchen, carrying his grocery bag and some sheets he’d scooped up on his way in. “Put everything in the fridge,” he said, putting his grocery bag on the top shelf.

  The refrigerator hadn’t been turned on yet, and the doors stood open. Inside it, a brown smear of ketchup or something was growing fuzzy white mold.

  Usually when Mom closed the house at the end of summer, she wiped out the refrigerator so it would be clean, clean, clean when we came back. Last year we’d left early. We left Daddy there by himself, and he didn’t know how to clean up, not really.

  There were crumbs in the bottom of the fridge and a yellowed piece of waxed paper that had been folded around a sandwich last summer. Over the winter, mice had chewed through the paper. Maybe Daddy left the sandwich there by accident.

  He shoved the sheets into the washing machine. He bumped the refrigerator door shut when he went past again.

  “You have to turn it on,” I said.

  “What?”

  “The refrigerator. You have to turn it on. There’s a dial, remember?”

  “Oh, yeah.” He opened the door and turned the dial. “I have to go back out. I forgot to turn on the gas.”

  I thought about the table. Mom had always pushed it up against the kitchen counter. That left three sides for sitting at, which was perfect for three people.

  I pushed and pulled the table over to the sliding doors and put one chair at each end. That way, when we came in for breakfast in the morning it would seem like that was how things had always been. Sort of.

  A cabbagey smell invaded the kitchen. It was the smell of the gas coming on. I looked through the drawers for the matches, because that was what Mom always did when we smelled the gas.

  I remembered Vicky was coming, probably tomorrow. I figured she wouldn’t show up before breakfast. Maybe she was a person who slept late on weekends. We’d have most of the day to ourselves.

  Daddy came in and used the matches to light the stove. Then he stretched out on the floor, poking lit matches inside the water heater until he got it started. It took a lot more tries than the stove. By then, I had our sandwiches ready.

  The deck chairs were still inside, in a tiny bedroom we use like a closet. So we sat on the deck, letting our legs hang over while we ate. Our elbows rested on the lower railing. My legs felt a little itchy where sand had dried on my skin.

  The tide was coming in and water would cover the bottom step. Lap, slap. It was quiet at the shore, except for the sound of the ocean. That went on all day and all night, lap, slap. The ocean seemed quiet. But it drowned out all the other noise around us.

  We couldn’t hear the neighbor’s radio or cars on the road. If we didn’t look to the left or the right, if we looked straight out to sea, we could imagine we were the last people on earth.

  Daddy asked, “Wouldn’t it be great to live here all year around?” which was the next thing we said every year.

  I tried to remember what Mom used to say.

  Voices came from inside the house. Daddy’s face brightened. “They’re early,” he said.

  Daddy stood up and set his sandwich on the deck railing, so I did too. He’d only had about two bites, and my sandwich wasn’t half eaten either.

  They came outside one by one. First a little boy running, his arms out before him as if he was driving a runaway truck. He made noises like a truck. Vrrrroom! Vrmmmmm. He braked to a stop. Eeeeeeeech!

  Then Vicky, looking happy and excited. She was wearing all white clothes, a long skirt and a sheer scarf that hung to her knees and lifted in the breeze like she was in a commercial. “We would have knocked but the door was open.”

  “That’s the welcome sign,” Daddy said in a big voice.

  “Then it’s okay that we’re here a couple of hours early?” she asked. “I couldn’t hold the team down any longer,” she said with a helpless shrug. “I figured you’d had all afternoon to get things set up.”

  “We got here a little later than I expected,” Daddy said.

  The little boy vrrrroomed once and sort of bucked, like his motor was about to run through a stoplight. He throttled down to a dull humming sound, his hands resting on an imaginary steering wheel.

  His hands were dirty. Not mud-puddle dirty. More like he’d reached under the bed for something and picked up a lot of lint. I thought maybe he’d eaten something sticky in the car.

  “We need to wash our hands,” Vicky said, although she didn’t seem to be saying it to anyone. So it wasn’t too surprising that Daddy didn’t move to show her where the bathroom was.

  Daddy looked like he didn’t know what to do with his arms. He kept crossing them and uncrossing them. Finally, he leaned back on the deck railing like somebody who didn’t know where the bathroom was.

  An older boy—older than me, anyway—sort of slouched into the doorway behind Vicky, looking bored. He had a knapsack slung over one shoulder and wore earphones that he didn’t take off to talk to Daddy. “Hey, dude.”

  “Ben,” Daddy said.

  I didn’t know they knew each other. I could see how they probably would. “You never answer when people call you dude,” I reminded Daddy.

  “This is Lexie,” Daddy said.

  “Cool,” the kid said. He’d pulled his hair back into a very short ponytail. More like a tuft. And the hair at the sides had pulled loose and hung like parentheses over his earphones. “Some view from here,” he said.

  “This is Ben,” Vicky told me, “and Harris. Stop that and say hello to Lexie.”

  “Vrrrroom!” Harris took off around the deck.

  Ben spoke up. “I’m fourteen, and Harris is three. He likes you to call him Mack.”

  I looked doubtfully at Harris. “Mack?”

  “As in Mack truck.”

  Harris rumbled once more around the deck before he ran back into the house. Vicky sighed, looking pretty much the way she’d looked standing over the vacuum cleaner. She reminded me of somebody.

  There’s this old TV show that Mom loves, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, on one of the cable stations. That was who Vicky acted like. Mary. She looked like Mary, a little bit. When I got a voice like Mary’s, or Vicky’s, Mom always said, Don’t whine.

  “Where’s the girl?” I asked.

  “What girl?” Ben asked, and I was glad he did. Daddy and Vicky just stared at me.

  “You said there would be kids my age,” I said to Daddy, and then I got it. The kid my age could be a boy. From the looks on their faces, I realize
d the kid my age could be Ben, and he didn’t look any happier about it than I was.

  “My, you’re tall for ten years old, aren’t you?” Vicky said, as if she’d never seen me before.

  “I’m going to be eleven,” I said, “in twenty-three days.”

  “You take after your daddy, I guess,” Vicky said. “Those long legs.”

  “Mom is taller than Daddy,” I said. “In her bare feet.”

  Vicky crossed her arms over her chest and shot Daddy a worried look. I could hear Harris’s truck noises from inside the house.

  “Well, why don’t we figure out where everybody sleeps?” Daddy said. He hurried into the house without letting Vicky go first or anything polite like that. Ben let us go first, or at least he wasn’t in a big hurry.

  We found Harris jumping on my bed, saying vroom every time he lifted into the air. Since everyone was looking at him, he worked at jumping higher.

  I’m not allowed to jump on the bed.

  “This is my room,” I said, hoping Daddy would make him stop.

  Daddy cleared his throat. “I thought we might give this room to the boys, since it has two beds,” he said. Harris stopped jumping to listen in. I mean, his motor was sort of rumbling, but he was listening.

  Me too.

  I figured that left two bedrooms and a lumpy pullout couch in what we called the family room. This is a wide spot as you go through the house, where all the rooms with doors open up, including the bathroom. No privacy at all.

  And one of those bedrooms had the bed Mom and Daddy used to sleep in. I felt my eyebrows pull together in a frown.

  Vicky said, “Um, Harris sleeps with me when he’s in a strange place. So it’s the sofa bed for us?”

  “You’d better take my—uh, the double bed,” Daddy said.

  “Are you sure?” Vicky asked.

  “Of course,” Daddy said.

  Ben had been looking through the rooms while they talked. “If Lexie takes that room with the single bed, I can bunk in here with Jim. Then nobody has to sleep on the couch.”

  Now he was calling my daddy Jim. I didn’t like it that he sounded like he’d known Daddy longer than I had.

  “We’ll have to clear some junk out of there, though,” Ben added, “if that’s where Lexie’s sleeping.”

  “That’s not junk, that’s the deck furniture,” Daddy said. He looked a little sunburned.

  I also didn’t like to have Ben deciding where I’d sleep. The two “big” bedrooms in the shore house were smaller than my room at home. The room he was talking about was the size of a closet. And the window wall slanted so that I had to walk bent over in half the room. The bed in there was my old junior bed.

  “Lexie?” Daddy said. His voice went with the words, Are you my big girl or are you still a baby?

  I wanted to be a baby but it felt too late for that. I had already gotten too grown up. I really didn’t want to share with anyone and I didn’t want to end up on the couch either.

  “Okay,” I said. It seemed the best way to fit everyone in and I still had my own room.

  “That’s okay, then,” Daddy said. He looked relieved. When Harris gave a little jump, Daddy pretended not to see. “I’ll help Ben bring your things in, okay?”

  Harris started jumping again.

  Vicky had left some stuff on the table as she’d come through the house. “I guess we ought to put away the groceries,” she said, still like she was talking to the room.

  Harris went on jumping. I didn’t think I should be the one to tell him about the rules around here. Or Vicky either.

  Vicky and I walked back to the kitchen. When she opened the fridge, she made a face. “Mom wasn’t here to clean it up last summer,” I said. “She always left it clean, clean, clean.”

  “That’s okay, Lexie,” she said. “With two boys I’ve learned to live with a little fuzzy ketchup.” She left her groceries in the bag, like Daddy did, as she put them in the fridge.

  “It’s probably a good idea if I give your dad a hand,” she said. “Where can I find sheets for the beds?”

  I showed her the space over the water heater, where a lot of sheets and towels and pillows were stuffed. They smelled like the house. “Mom usually washes all of them before we use them.”

  She looked into the washer. “Daddy hasn’t gotten around to it yet,” I said.

  “I’ll do it,” Vicky said, and pulled down a few more sheets to stuff into the wash. She added soap and turned on the machine.

  We heard a loud thump from my bedroom. From my old bedroom. Vicky dropped the soap box and ran. I stayed right behind her. We found Harris sitting on the floor next to the bed, his mouth so wide open I could have counted all his teeth.

  He caught his breath and let out a loud wail.

  He’d slipped off the bed, the way I’d done that time when I was little. I bit my lip and it bled all over the place. I had to eat baby food for days to keep it from starting up again.

  He sure could yell. Vicky picked him up and sat on the bed and rocked him, crooning over him. Harris’s face had turned beet red. But he wasn’t bleeding and he didn’t look broken, the first things Mom always checks. He looked like he would live.

  Daddy hurried in from outside, still holding a suitcase.

  “He jumped too close to the edge of the bed,” I said. Loudly.

  Daddy frowned. He said, “That’s why we don’t jump on beds around here.” He’d lost the polite voice he’d been using and sounded pretty much the way he did that time I’d slipped off the bed the same way. He sounded like he meant And that’s final.

  He put Vicky’s suitcase in the other bedroom. Then he went straight back out to the car. She kept looking at the door as if she expected him to pop back in and say something. Like, he didn’t mean to sound so final.

  Now I felt bad, because I didn’t tell her the rule.

  “I’m sure he knew Harris is going to be all right,” I said, to smooth things over. It wasn’t that I wanted to have her here. In fact, I hoped she would turn out not to like the shore very much. Now that she was here, I’d rather she and Daddy didn’t fight. She gave me a look that said pretty much the same thing.

  She bounced Harris on her lap and told him some baby rhyming story about his toes, Moses supposes da da da da da, but Moses supposes dadadadada, something like that. She kept saying it over and over, until Harris stopped crying so hard. He looked sleepy.

  I went to the window to see if Daddy was bringing more stuff in. He and Ben were walking around in the high grass, Daddy pointing first one way and then the other. It bothered me that he’d gone walking with Ben and didn’t ask me to come along.

  Harris wriggled off Vicky’s lap and started his motor. She let him go, saying, “We ought to get these beds made up. We’ll do another wash tomorrow.”

  Vicky brought some sheets back to the bedroom and I helped her sort out which ones went on which bed. She was kind of quiet, like she was worried that Harris would get on Daddy’s nerves.

  Or maybe she thought Daddy should have been in here giving her a hand. Maybe she and Daddy were about to have a fight. Maybe she was working out what she would say if they did. I began to get a knot in my stomach.

  Harris ran around making truck sounds. Speeding trucks, coming-to-a-fast-stop trucks, crashing trucks. I figured he was embarrassed about falling off the bed and now he wanted to show us what an excellent truck he was.

  After we finished one bed, Vicky went out to the porch and yelled for Ben to bring the rest of their stuff from the car. While we made the beds, Ben and Daddy made several trips.

  Vicky brought a lot more stuff than we did. “How long are you staying?” I asked.

  “Just the week,” Vicky said in this bright cheerful voice that still sounded a lot like Mary’s.

  “Me too,” I told her. “I didn’t need this much stuff.”

  “That’s because you knew what you needed,” Vicky said. “I’ll know better next time.”

  She looked at me right afte
r saying this and then looked away very quickly. Twice. Two quick looks.

  I knew now. She expected to come here again this summer. Probably every weekend. I wasn’t going to have a single weekend with Daddy. Not by myself, anyway.

  Not unless Harris was a real pain in the neck.

  I hoped he would be.

  Daddy put his head into the bedroom and said, “We got all the deck furniture out of your room, Lexie.”

  I didn’t say anything. But that wasn’t my room.

  With all the deck furniture out, I could sit on the junior bed. It was hard. And there wasn’t any lamp to read by.

  I pulled and shoved the bed over so I could turn out the ceiling light without getting up. Now the bed took up most of the space where I could stand straight. I didn’t care.

  Daddy looked in. “This looks, um, cozy.” He had his polite voice back in working order.

  “I don’t like to get out of bed to turn off the light,” I said.

  Daddy had already turned his head to talk to Vicky. He said, “There’s a nice little bar and grill down on the pier.”

  Vicky didn’t act like they’d been fighting. “That sounds wonderful,” she said.

  The knot in my stomach let go. I hadn’t known until right then how much I’d been dreading a fight. Even if it meant that Vicky would pack up her boys and go, I was dreading it.

  “Let’s go get a real meal,” Daddy said. “Grab a sweater, Lexie. The boys will need jackets when the sun goes down, Vicky.”

  I could eat a real meal. We’d left our sandwiches out on the deck. The seagulls would come along and clean up after us, Daddy always said.

  I got my suitcase and brought it back to that tiny room that was not my room so I could dig through it without having to worry about my underwear falling out in front of everyone or something.

  Mom didn’t pack a sweater, only a sweatshirt. I set out my book with the pink cover so it would feel a little bit like my room when I got back. Mom said that book always reminded her why people came to the beach. It’s fun to read a book with pictures. And it reminded me to use sunscreen.