Mom kisses Karen on the cheek.
“Partly because I was happy. But partly because everything was about to change. It wouldn’t be me and Janice anymore.”
“Hmm,” Karen says, sitting back in her seat.
“Donnie,” Dad says, looking at me in the mirror, “maybe one day you’ll be lucky enough to have the woman you love cry when she finds out that you want to marry her.”
What the fuck do I say to that? He’s not even saying it to me. He’s saying it to Mom, who just sighs and snaps, “Oh, you know that’s not what I meant.”
Dad shrugs and turns up the radio. Mom looks out the window, occasionally laughing out loud again and then saying, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I’ll stop.”
There’s a road stand a few miles past the swamp.
“You kids want to stop?” Dad asks.
“I’m not hungry,” Karen says immediately.
“Come on, Karen.” Mom turns around and winks at her. “It’s vacation. Calories don’t count when you’re on vacation.”
“I’m hungry,” I say.
“You can pull over, but I’m not eating anything.” Karen’s leaning forward, talking right into Dad’s ear.
Dad pulls into a space in the parking lot and we all get out of the car, reaching up and out to stretch our back and arms. Mom bends over till her fingers are brushing the pavement. Karen is staring at Mom’s butt, her lips curled.
“God, Mom, do you have to do that?”
Mom is still bending over. “Oh, I’m sorry, Karen, is my behind embarrassing you?” She starts to shake her rear, and Karen gets back in the car and slams the door and refuses to look out the window.
“You guys are no fun,” Mom says, standing up straight and hurrying to catch up with Dad and me who are already walking toward the end of the line that starts at the window where people are ordering. Mom links her arm through Dad’s and says, “Come on, it’s vacation. It’s supposed to be fun.” Dad nods, his eyes still on the menu.
“What are you going to get Karen?” he asks.
Mom sighs. “Well, she has to eat something.” She studies the menu.
There’s a girl in front of us in line. Really short blond hair. I think we must be close to the lake because she’s wearing the top of a bikini and shorts. She has a tiny mole right above where the bikini ties under her hair. Her shorts are low, and if I lean forward the tiniest bit I can see the top rim of her bikini bottom and the pale strip of skin where her tan line stops. What if she’s our neighbor at the lake? What if one night their electricity goes out and her family has to come stay with us? What if Mom and Dad and Karen aren’t home and it’s just me? What if their house doesn’t lose electricity, but the rest of her family does get lost hiking and she comes to our house and she asks if she can sleep over because she’s scared? What if she doesn’t want to sleep in a room alone and asks if she can sleep with—
“Donnie.” Dad brings me out of my stupor. “What would you like? They have hamburgers, hot dogs, French fries . . .”
“I can read, Dad,” I say, but then quickly add, “I’ll have a cheeseburger and fries,” so he knows I’m not mad at him. That’s a lie. I am mad at him. I’m mad because he’s being a jerk to Mom. But he’s my dad, and we’re on vacation, and everyone is already fighting, and I don’t want to add to it, so I ask, “What are you getting?” just to keep the conversation going.
We get our food and Dad doesn’t want to lose any driving time, so we’re going to eat on the road. When we get back to the car with our food, Karen has her feet hanging out the rolled-down window, bouncing to whatever is playing on her headphones. A kid with a shaved head and a neck tattoo is across the parking lot staring at Karen, and she’s staring back in that challenging way she has that doesn’t let you look away. I block her view.
“Move over,” I say. “You’re in my seat.”
While Karen scoots over, I turn and try to give the shaved-head kid a death look, a don’t-mess-with-my-sister look. But now he’s too busy making out with the blond short-haircut girl to notice. His left hand is low on her back, the tips of his fingers hidden in her waistband. Figures.
I get in the car just in time for the battle. Mom is turned around in her seat, holding a packet of French fries out to my sister, who says loudly, over the music on her headphones, “Mom, I told you, I’m not hungry.”
“Turn down the music. You haven’t eaten since we left the house.”
“I had grapes,” Karen says, ignoring what Mom said about turning down the music.
“Don’t be ridiculous.” Mom’s getting mad. “That’s not enough.”
“I am not hungry,” my sister says again, and she stares straight at Mom and turns the music up so loud her headphones make a buzzing noise. We’re on the road now, and I can tell Mom’s back is starting to cramp, turned around in her seat like that.
“I’ll just leave them on the seat and you can have them later,” she says loudly. “You can have them if you get hungry.”
She sets the fries on the seat between Karen and me. Dad watches in the rearview mirror.
“I’ll eat your fries,” I say, reaching for them, hoping maybe it will shut everyone up. Karen yanks her headphones off her head and yells, “I don’t want the goddamn fries!” And in a second she’s rolled down the window and thrown the fries out. They hit the windshield of the car behind us and the driver leans on the horn, zooming past us. All four of the people inside give us the finger, even the little kid in the car seat, except he holds up the wrong finger. We watch the car go by, and Karen and I burst out laughing. Dad mumbles, “Nice, Karen. Very nice.” He cranks up the air conditioning and the radio, not looking at Mom even though she’s staring straight at him. After a second she goes back to her book, but not before she says, “Well you’re eating when we get to the lake and that’s the end of it.”
We bite down on our tongues to stop laughing, because it’s obvious that Dad’s about to lose it.
4
The stairs up to the front door of the lake house are narrow, so we have to stand single file, Dad at the top of the stairs, jamming the key the realtor left under the worn mat in the lock over and over again. Mom’s getting red behind him, saying, “Try it the other way. No, the other way!”
I stand behind her, sweating. Karen sits down on the bottom step, her headphones on, chin on her knees, scraping patterns in the dirt with a stick. We aren’t even in the house yet and Mom and Dad are fighting.
“Joseph, let me try.” Mom taps Dad’s elbow with the tips of her fingers, and he shoves them away like she’s burning him.
“No. It won’t open.”
He’s sweating; it’s running down the sides of his face, making a wet V down the back of his shirt. Karen looks up at me, rolls her eyes, and goes back to the stick and the dirt.
“Joseph, really, let me try.”
Dad moves his body to block Mom’s reaching arm, pulls off his T-shirt and wraps it around his fist. I never noticed how hairy his back was; it’s all matted down with sweat. Nasty. If I ever get hair like that on my back, I’m shaving it off. Dad punches through a pane of glass, reaches his hand through, and unlocks the door from the inside. He pushes it open and makes a welcoming motion with his arm, “Come on in. Home sweet home.”
Mom stalks past him, making a huge point of having to step over the shards of glass.
“Donnie, Karen, let’s go. Inside.”
I step one foot inside the door and Karen bumps into me from behind. Mom’s standing in the kitchen with her hands over her mouth, looking hard at Dad, like she’s asked him a question he hasn’t answered yet. I don’t know what’s going on till I take a breath, or half a breath. I turn and run, pressing my hands over my mouth, my nose; even my eyes are stinging. Karen’s got her tank top pulled up over her face, and we knock into Dad as we run past him and down the front steps. He stays on the top step, leaning his back against the railing and groaning, “Of course. Of course this would happen.”
“
Ack! What was it?” Karen’s on her hands and knees, spitting in the grass. I’m stooped over doing the same.
“Something died. Something dead.” I stick my tongue out, trying to get the air to lift the taste off.
Mom’s on the steps with Dad. They lean against the banister, looking into the house. Mom nudges him with her elbow, saying softly, “Hey, it’s all right. It’s going to be fine.”
He sighs in response and moves himself closer so they are just barely touching.
Karen rolls in the grass, making loud retching noises and grabbing her throat.
“What died? An elephant?” Karen rolls on her back. “How many?” She laughs. “An f’ing herd?”
I look at Mom and Dad for a moment more, then drop to the grass and roll, grabbing my throat. “Ack! What was it?” I give my high-pitched, squeaky imitation of Karen’s voice. She squeals in mock anger and sends a handful of grass flying at my face. Mom and Dad give us one-and-a-half smiles and don’t tell Karen to watch her mouth. At least that’s something.
5
Mom takes a chance.
“This is silly. It’s our first day of vacation and we’re fighting.”
She gives a pleading look to Karen, who’s sulking in the back of the boat. Dad got the dead raccoon out from where it was rotting under the sink, but the house still needs airing out. So after eating leftover road-trip snacks out on the dock for an hour and not talking to each other, Mom made us all get in the rowboat. It’s cooling down a little, even though the sun is still pretty high in the sky. It’s quiet here and the air smells good. Mom looks at Dad, who’s grunting every time he pulls the oars.
“How about you, muscle man? Don’t you want to enjoy this? The beautiful lake, the clean air . . .” She gets the dreamy voice that’s usually really annoying, and I don’t want her to keep on embarrassing herself, so I say, “Yeah, let’s not fight.”
Mom shoots me this happy look that I can’t help but return.
“Karen? Do you agree? No more fighting.”
“Fine.” Karen gets the word out as quickly as she can.
Mom looks at Dad. “Honey?”
He shrugs, but I see one side of his mouth twitching up.
“I ain’t gonna stop fightin’,” Dad says, with the horrible cowboy twang he used to use to make us laugh when we were little. “I aim to keep on fightin’ till little miss there in the back of the boat tells us she’s done fightin’.”
“I said it!” Karen snaps. “I said I’d stop!”
“No, ma’am, you did not. You said ’Fine.’” He gives a spot-on imitation of Karen and she laughs before she can clamp her mouth shut to keep it in.
“I’ll stop fighting,” she says, trying to get her mad face back on.
Dad shrugs. “Can’t hear ya.”
“I’ll stop fighting,” Karen says louder.
“Speak up, girl. Your old pa can’t hear nothin’ since Cousin Vern set off them firecrackers next to his head.”
“I’ll stop fighting!” Karen half-yells.
“I think I heard somethin’, but it sounded like a mosquiter to me. Ma? You hear anythin’?”
Mom grins and shakes her head.
Karen rolls her eyes, leans back in her seat, and yells, “I’ll stop fighting!”
Her shout echoes back to us off the trees on the shore, and some guy walking his dog on the beach ducks like he’s dodging a bullet and then looks side to side to see if anyone saw. We did, and we rock the boat with our laughter.
Mom says that from the air this lake looks like a gull flying. We row to the tip of each wing. There are houses all along the lake and as we row by, families—having cookouts on their porches or fishing off the docks—wave to us. We row by one old man in a canoe with his dog balanced in front. He calls out to Dad, “That’s some hard work there!”
And Dad hollers back, “Yes, sir!”
The lake houses are mostly small, the size of the one we’re staying in. We pass a small, sandy beach where some kids are having a campfire. Karen makes Dad row farther out into the lake, but she stares at the kids as we go by.
Across the lake from our house is Jake’s, the general store. We row right up to it and tie the boat to the dock, all of us hungry and anxious to buy something to make dinner with back at the house. Jake’s has wide plank floors and leaning shelves made from knobby wood. I can tell Mom loves it as soon as the screen door closes behind us because she gives a little squeal and an enthusiastic “Hello!” to the old man behind the counter.
Karen and I wander up and down the aisles, laughing at how everything is mixed together—lighter fluid next to bread, fishing line next to deodorant. Mom walks by us holding a box of pasta, looking puzzled and asking, “Have you seen any spaghetti sauce?”
The old man hears her and answers from the counter, “It’s by the bug spray.” Mom winks at us and whispers, “Of course it is.”
When Mom and Dad are at the sloping counter paying for the stuff, the old man takes their money and says, “There’s an ice cream stand round back, if you’re interested.” He winks at Karen. “It’s where the young kids go to cause trouble.” Karen forgives the wink and smiles at him.
When we’re back outside, we all agree for once and decide that ice cream before dinner is the only way to go. It’s mostly teenagers in line for ice cream or sitting at the half-dozen picnic tables in the grass. There’s a dirt parking lot with a few parked cars, but it looks like most people get around by riding bikes. The sun is pretty much down now, and people are starting to swat at mosquitoes and put sweatshirts on over their swimsuits. Mom and Dad start talking to the only other adult in the ice cream line, a woman with white hair pulled back in a ponytail and a creaky black Lab lying at her side. Every time she moves up in line, the dog gets up slowly, takes a step, wags his tail once, and pretty much collapses again.
I study the board listing the ice cream flavors in pink and green chalk and feel the eyes of everyone else in line studying me. I plan to look at the chalkboard till it’s our turn, because I’m sure as hell not going to look anyone in the eye.
Karen says, “I’m Karen, this is Donnie.”
Karen’s voice is almost challenging. And she nudges me with her elbow. I look down from the board and see all those eyes looking right at me. I croak out, “Hey.”
A few kids just turn back around and ignore us, but a couple say hi. A few start asking Karen where we’re staying, where we’re from. I let her do all the talking.
We eat our ice cream on the dock so Dad doesn’t have to row the boat with one hand, even though we all agree it’d be kind of funny to watch. The white-haired lady, Maddie, is coming back with us; she thanks us for saving Gustav the walk. She and Mom sit in the back of the boat and talk the whole way home. Karen and I sit up front with Gustav on our feet, dodging the water Dad keeps splashing at us with the oars.
6
Here’s what our summer at the lake is like:
First of all, it’s our summer, mine and Karen’s and Amanda’s. At first I thought they’d ditch me first chance they got, but they don’t. We see other kids when we go to Jake’s to sit on the picnic benches and make summertime conversation with whoever passes by, but Karen and Amanda never leave me for them. They never make me walk home and tell Mom they’ll be home later. I keep waiting for it to happen, but it never does.
Our summer sounds like this:
Cannonball Let’s row across the lake and get ice cream again Let’s race rafts Who wants to play tag? Let’s have an underwater breathing contest . . . I mean holding our breath contest I bet this house is haunted Let’s take naps on the dock Marco! Let’s put on a talent show Can you play duck-duck-goose with three people? Let’s drop a watermelon on the dock from the porch and then eat it Polo! Donnie let me put the drops in your ears Let’s play rummy I want another Popsicle Let’s ask Maddie if we can take Gustav for a walk Who can do the most push-ups? Let’s make a fire on the beach You’ve never had a s’more? Let’s race I’ll pull out that sp
linter for you Let’s stay here forever.
It’s like that; all summer. Only once is there a break in the momentum. Dad drives up with us, but he doesn’t leave with us. He leaves in the middle of the summer. One Friday he and Mom come outside where we’re on the porch, and he announces they are going back home for the weekend, and that Dad has to work for the rest of the summer. Work had called him, and they’d offered him a job at their new plant, the one that’s an hour away from our house. They even got him an apartment down the street from the new plant, just for when he works late and can’t make the drive home. Falling asleep while driving is really, really dangerous. I look at Karen, and see that Amanda is squeezing her hand. I know that something is happening, but since it’s summer and we are happy, we all congratulate him and make him an enormous s’more and sing him “Happy Birthday” just because we feel like singing.
Maddie and Gustav come to stay with us for the night so Mom and Dad can drive home, and Maddie tells us ghost stories and makes Karen and Amanda cry by telling them about her husband who died.
When Mom comes back up the next day, Maddie meets her in the kitchen and gives her a long hug. Mom’s shoulders shake and she lets out a long, shuddering sob. Karen looks at Amanda and then me and says, “I knew it. The bastard left us.”
Mom gives a loud sniff and pulls away from Maddie. She wipes her eyes and says, “He did not leave us. Your father and I are just taking a little break. He’s going to come home on weekends until we figure this out.”
7
The walk around the lake has us sweating, and we run inside the lake house as the first raindrops fall fat and heavy on our heads. Karen pouts, looking out the window.
“No nap on the deck for us today. Let’s play cards in Mom’s room.”
Mom’s room used to be a porch, but it’s been enclosed with three walls of windows. It has a wide bed with a white cover, and a ceiling fan, and we hang out there whenever it’s raining. We sit on the bed and play round after round of gin. We eat chips, taking turns brushing the crumbs off the bed.
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