The House on Fripp Island

by Rebecca Kauffman

  “Yes.”

  Ryan carried towels and his snorkel gear, Rae took a book and her binoculars, and Alex and Kimmy took plastic buckets and shovels and goggles and a boogie board.

  All four adults settled in the kitchen, where they could easily see the children through the glass doors that led to the patio and, beyond it, the beach.

  Lisa stirred up a pitcher of sangria. She sliced apples and dumped them in, along with a can of mandarin oranges.

  They sat on barstools and sipped their sangria.

  Poppy said to Scott, “I like your thingie,” touching her own chin.

  He turned to Lisa. “Told you so,” he said, then turned back to Poppy. “She thinks goatees are sleazy.”

  Poppy said, “I think it suits you.”

  Lisa said to John, “Poppy says work has been busy for you?”

  “Can’t complain,” John said, shifting his posture. The legs of the slender barstool looked like matchsticks beneath his big bottom. “Couple months ago our company landed a huge student housing development, so we’re locked into full-time work for the next five years.” John worked for a contractor in Wheeling specializing in interior painting and trim. After decades of spotty work and short-term contracts, news of this project had come as a big relief.

  Lisa reached across the counter for her purse and withdrew a disposable camera. She handed it to John, draped an arm over Poppy’s shoulders, and said, “Before I forget, grab a picture of us, would you? I want to fill up the film by the time we leave.”

  Poppy wormed out from Lisa’s arm. “I don’t want my picture taken. You have to get my consent first, don’t you? In writing? I’ll sue.”

  John quickly snapped a picture before Poppy could move outside its frame.

  Poppy glared at him, then at Lisa. “I’m unphotogenic to begin with, and put me next to you . . .”

  Lisa said, “I’ve always thought you photograph really well, Pop.”

  “That’s even worse,” Poppy whined. “That means I’m ugly and delusional. Just fill that film up with pictures of the kids, why don’t you. Leave me out of it.”

  John asked Scott about his work.

  “Just coming off a great quarter,” Scott said. “Record profitability for the firm. So.”

  “You still working for that big law firm?” John asked.

  Scott nodded.

  “Well,” Lisa interjected, “not exactly.”

  Scott’s face darkened.

  “It’s a debt collection firm,” Lisa explained. “He’s in the legal department.”

  Poppy said, “Po-tay-to, po-tah-to,” attempting to mitigate things. She glanced anxiously at Lisa.

  “Exactly.” Scott grinned fixedly and tipped his glass in Poppy’s direction. “That’s what I say.”

  Lisa explained to John, “Basically, Scott files lawsuits, small civil claims, against people who owe somebody else money. People whose credit cards were charged off, or people with, you know, outstanding debt to a hospital or a utility company, stuff like that. Lenders sell the bad debt to Scott’s firm, then he goes after the borrowers for that money. Sues them.”

  John considered this for a moment. “But if these people couldn’t pay off their credit card or whatever, how are they gonna have money to pay for a lawyer if they’re getting sued?”

  Scott’s eyes darted nervously around the room as he said, “Well, usually they don’t show up to court, so we win a default judgment.”

  “Gotcha.” John sipped his sangria. He didn’t particularly want to know what happened next in this scenario.

  “So then,” Lisa continued, “when the people can’t pay up, Raslowe and Associates garnishes their wages. That’s basically how they make their money, in a nutshell.”

  John stared at her. “Is that when they take money right out of your paycheck?”

  Lisa nodded. “Scott processes the highest volume of these lawsuits in the company. He bangs out paperwork for, you know, dozens of these cases a day. That many lawsuits in a single day. Can you imagine?”

  Scott said, “Babe, you make me sound like the friggin’ Antichrist.”

  “It’s your job,” Lisa said.

  Poppy was uncomfortable, so she laughed. Lisa had to know that explaining Scott’s work to the sort of people who would max out a credit card on groceries would make Scott feel like a real piece of shit. And Poppy had never been a big fan of Scott’s—she’d always found him insufferably arrogant—but she was not yet drunk enough to enjoy watching him squirm.

  John was not enjoying this moment either. He still owed the hospital six thousand dollars from the procedure on his back. Insurance had covered a portion of the surgery, but not nearly the whole thing. He had worked out a payment plan with the hospital but had missed a few payments over time and was now considering the possibility that the hospital would sell the debt to Raslowe & Associates, that he would get sued and start having to turn over a portion of his paychecks to guys like Scott. John quickly drank two-thirds of his glass of sangria. He was allowed to drink with the medication they had him on, but not much, and they advised against operating heavy machinery. He stole a glance at Scott, who looked utterly miserable. John thought it was likely that he and Poppy reminded Scott of all the stressed-out rednecks he sued, who couldn’t quite make ends meet, and Scott was obviously not accustomed to sharing a pitcher of sangria with their kind.

  Poppy abruptly pointed out the window at a bird that circled above the kids on the beach. “That thing’s massive!” she remarked. “What is it?”

  “Osprey, I’d guess,” Lisa said. She squinted toward the sand. “Is that Ryan with the snorkel gear?”

  Poppy nodded. “He’ll be at that all week.”

  Ryan was loping, shoulders hunched, along the water’s edge with his snorkel gear fully in place, looking like some disoriented extraterrestrial.

  Poppy said, “Kid’s got some interesting interests. On the drive down, he was going on about how the moon might not actually exist.”

  Scott grunted a bit of laughter through his nose. “Kids and conspiracies, man.”

  Lisa said, “If the moon doesn’t exist, what are we looking at up there every night?”

  Poppy said, “A hologram, so he says. The real moon has been eaten away by pollution or inhabited by aliens or something, so now the government projects a false image. You’d have to ask Ryan for more details. Don’t look at me like that! Those are his words, not mine.”

  John added, “It’s hard to keep up with the kid. Last week he was talking about brainwashing people with fluoride the government’s putting in the water.”

  “Least he’s got imagination and asks questions,” Lisa said. “It’s groupthink that scares me more than any conspiracy theory. Better to have some radicals out there shaking us all up. Better if we’re not all sheep. Bahhhhhh,” she bleated.

  Scott gazed at his wife. “I’ve never heard you say something like that,” he said with what sounded like a hint of annoyance or disapproval. “Sheep and radicals.” Then he muttered to himself, “Fake moon.”

  Lisa faced him. “Never heard me say something like what?”

  “Never heard you say anything about conspiracies, period.”

  “You’ve never asked what I thought about them.”

  “Well, you’ve never shown an iota of interest, so why should I ask?”

  Lisa offered a brief and unconvincingly apologetic look to John and Poppy, then turned back to Scott. “Some men ask their wives about things other than whether or not the dry-cleaning’s been picked up, ya know.”

  Poppy ooohed tremulously and dipped her fingers into her sangria to draw out an ice cube, which she held to her forehead. “Let’s not fight,” she said.

  Watching the drama unfold between Scott and Lisa this early in the vacation was making Poppy feel claustrophobic and unsettled. She couldn’t look away, but she didn’t like what she saw and certainly didn’t want to know it this intimately—it was like sharing sustained eye contact with a shitt
ing animal.

  “Let’s not,” Scott agreed. He polished off his glass of sangria, crunched on ice, and rose from his barstool. He slapped John on the back. “What do you say we get a round in this afternoon?”

  John said, “I hope Poppy relayed that I’m not much of a golfer.”

  Scott said, “I bet you’ll be a natural with those shoulders. Whaddaya say? Let the ladies get settled in, be back for dinner around five?” Irritated as he was with Lisa, Scott glanced briefly at her to confirm this plan.

  Lisa said, “Sure, let’s grill tonight, plan on five.”

  Scott said, “I’ve got clubs for both of us, and do you need golf shoes? We passed a rental place on the way in.”

  “Sorry to say I’m stuck in these,” John said, pointing down at the ergonomic Brooks sneakers he wore. Last week, John had asked his doctor about golf, half hoping his doctor would forbid it so he would have a good excuse to avoid one-on-one time with Scott. But the doctor said golf would be fine as long as John did some stretching beforehand, didn’t get overzealous, and wore those Brooks sneakers rather than something with less support.

  “Doctor’s orders,” John explained to Scott, and he offered a small, shy smile.

  John had two dead teeth on the top left side of his mouth and a pinched-off smile that was trained to conceal them. Only when he and Poppy were alone did he laugh fully, allowing the muscles around his lips to relax, exposing those two brownish half-teeth without shame. Poppy had noticed over the years that the more comfortable John was with a person, the wider and more natural his smile became. Watching John now as he offered Scott and Lisa the grimmest, tightest smile she’d seen in years, Poppy was overcome by a swell of love for him that hit so hard, air locked in her throat for a moment. She gazed at John’s hands, large and red and textured with calluses, awkwardly clutching that small glass of sangria. She wished he’d talked her out of this vacation. She wished they were back at home.

  Once the men had left for the golf course, the high energy of reuniting with one another, exploring the house, and getting superficially settled into the place gave way to a familiar and comfortable connection between Lisa and Poppy.

  Their frequent phone calls over the past months kept them up to date on major goings-on with each other, so there was no need to refresh on the basics of Lisa’s mother’s health, the kids, or the husbands.

  Poppy gestured toward Lisa’s breasts. “Are they real?”

  Lisa laughed. “It’s just this bra. You look great too, Pops. Are you still doing those videotapes?”

  Poppy nodded. She was barely five feet tall, eight inches shorter than Lisa and much curvier in the hips, but she was managing to keep her waist tight with Cindy Crawford’s at-home workout tapes. “I’ve been slacking,” she said. “That’s why my butt’s the way it is.” Poppy reached out to tug on Lisa’s long red ponytail. “And is this real?”

  Lisa swatted her hand away. “The color? Of course not, you know that.”

  “I meant, it’s not one of those ponytail wigs? They’re all the rage in Wheeling. Eighty-five-year-old women sporting ponytails like this. They Scotch-tape them to the back of their bald little heads.”

  “Ew.” Lisa stirred up another pitcher of sangria, and she and Poppy took it out to the deck that overlooked the beach. Lisa pulled the door shut behind her.

  The hot air that met their faces felt as dense as a velvet curtain. Lisa’s pink lipstick liquefied and seeped beyond the edges of her lips. Poppy’s curls seized up.

  “I think the fridge is broken,” Lisa said, settling into a deck chair, wiping her lips on the back of her hand and examining this slick residue in the sunlight. “When we got here it was on the coldest setting and barely had the slightest chill.”

  “You want me to look at it? Or John when he gets back? He’s a whiz when it comes to appliances, though I imagine this fridge is way more high-tech than what he’s used to.”

  “I called over to the property manager already,” Lisa said. “He’s sending his maintenance guy, said he’d be here in the next hour or two.”

  Poppy chewed on a fingernail and spat a little shard from the corner of her mouth. “Probably warms up when the guests checking out are cleaning their stuff out. Might fix itself if you leave it be for a while.”

  “Might.”

  Poppy gazed out toward the water. Whitecaps rose and fell and tumbled and played along the surface of the giant rolling turquoise sheet of the ocean. A man making his way slowly down the shore was bobbing and churning and extending his arms to expertly fly a bald-eagle kite. It bounced and dipped and soared. No child in sight, just a grown man and his bird on a string. Thin, ribbed clouds drifted overhead.

  It was quiet for a bit, then Lisa said, “Sorry I made it awkward just there with Scott. Sometimes I’m convinced I’m a real bitch.”

  “What makes you say that?” Poppy said.

  “Mainly the fact that I behave like one.”

  Poppy laughed.

  Lisa said, “The way he talks about his job has really started to bug me. Drives me up a wall how he’ll skirt around the truth of it. He’s very good at that, you know, dodging the truth of things. I used to be the same when it came to his job. You remember, I’m sure. I didn’t want anyone to know and judge. Took me forever to fess up to you that he worked for a debt collection firm, not law. But I just don’t care anymore what people think of him and what he does for work. I’m sick of the charade.” Lisa paused and combed her fingers through her ponytail. “Not sick of the money, though. There’s always that to consider.” She lifted one shoulder in a slight shrug. The pretty features of her face were hard, as if they’d been set in a mold. “We had to take our names out of the phone book. Did I tell you that?”

  Poppy shook her head. “How come?”

  “People Scott was filing suit against would get his name off the paperwork and look him up. Then they would leave these messages on the machine, begging him to drop the suit. Sometimes crying, sometimes hollering, threatening him and the family. Desperate people. Who could blame them? God, what a mess.”

  Poppy frowned. “Did you feel unsafe?”

  “Not really. We had that ADT mumbo jumbo installed. Nothing ever came of any of it, and we don’t get the calls anymore, ever since we got an unlisted number. But . . . well, anyhow.” Lisa released a heavy sigh and drank an inch of sangria in one sip. “You know how things are with Scott. I don’t need to go too far down that road at two o’clock in the afternoon.”

  Lisa was deeply unhappy in her marriage, but that was old, old news to Poppy.

  Poppy fingered the stem of her sangria glass and said, “Why’s this thing so small? Am I supposed to stick my pinkie out like this? Is that how the rich do?”

  Lisa laughed but was finding herself slightly irritated by Poppy’s constant references to the expense of things around the house and her commentary on how out-of-place she felt there. It reminded Lisa of how uncomfortable her own mother was in her and Scott’s home. Though they had been living there for twenty years, Carol still tiptoed around the place like she was in a museum. One time she had spilled red wine on a cream-colored loveseat and almost cried, even after Scott and Lisa assured her again and again that it didn’t matter. Carol refused to wear shoes in their house, despite the fact that everyone else did. It was obvious to Lisa that regardless of what measures she took as a host, her mother would never, ever be at ease in her home, and now it appeared that would be the case here at the beach house with Poppy, too. It bothered Lisa that people without money seemed to think they could squawk on and on about people with money, all the ways their lives seemed so different and strange, whereas Lisa would never dream of breathing a word about their lives or homes.

  “Anyway,” Poppy said, chomping on an apple slice from her sangria, “why don’t you just have an affair? Or move back to Wheeling, find you a good ol’ boy.”

  Lisa laughed. She spread her polished nails over the table to examine them. “You joke,” she said. “B
ut I’m pretty sure Scott is actually having an affair by now. Been going on for quite some time, too, if I had to guess.”

  “Really?” Poppy stared at her. “You’re kidding.”

  Lisa said, “I thought about telling you before now, but then decided it could wait till I saw you in person. There’ve been a couple times I caught him in lies but never could quite prove it.”

  “Like what?”

  “Being in the wrong place at the wrong time.” Lisa picked at her nail polish, blew away a stray fleck. “He’ll say a happy hour with his buddy Jordan kept him out all evening, but then the next time I see Jordan, he won’t know anything about it. Or one time I was trying to reach him at his office and he wasn’t picking up his office phone, so I called the secretary at the front desk, and she said he hadn’t been at work all day. That evening I told him I’d been trying to reach him, and he said, ‘Oh, my office phone must’ve got unplugged again.’ Then, when I told him I’d gotten through to the secretary, he got all flustered and said she must be mistaken. Swore up and down he’d been there. I mean, come on.” Lisa rolled her eyes and laughed harshly without smiling. “But even if it weren’t for the lies, it’s obvious in other ways.”

  “How so?”

  “He’s just different. Distracted. Jumpy. Mind always somewhere else. And he was hounding me for sex all the time when we were younger. Even after the girls came, he was still pushing for, you know, at least a few times a week. But it dropped off suddenly a few years back,” Lisa said. “And nowadays, I mean, it’s like . . .” She paused and lowered her voice to a whisper. “Never.”

  “How long’s it been?” Poppy said, pushing black curls from her eyes.

  Lisa thought. “Before Christmas was the last,” she said.

  “Jesus.” Poppy drank the last of her sangria and crunched into an ice cube. She caught a chunk of cheek between her molars and warm iron flooded her tongue. She winced, then offered Lisa a grotesque, bloody grimace.

  Lisa recoiled. “Did you just lose a tooth?”

  Poppy laughed, wiping blood on the back of her wrist. “Doesn’t Scott fancy himself some kind of a saint? Dragging you and the girls to mass every Sunday, and that creepy crucifix around his neck? Isn’t he supposed to either behave right or shrivel up and die from guilt?”