“There it is!” Lise said for the kids’ benefit. As if obeying, Ken glanced away from the road.
Below, a mile away, the water spread wide and silver beside them in the long afternoon light, a boat cutting a black fantailed wake. Trees flashed up to block the view, a wall then a gap, a gap. They caught another opening, a vineyard letting them see all the way across, a fat calendar shot.
“Wake up,” Lise said, “you’re missing it!”
Ken checked them in the mirror. They were groggy with sleep. Ella’s new braces made her pout. She stretched her arms above her head and groaned. “Yeah, yeah.”
“Yippee Skippy,” Sam deadpanned.
“Start getting your shoes on,” Lise said, though they had another twenty minutes in the car.
Ken marveled at how calm she could be. It wasn’t just his mother (his father, the cottage, the whole trip), and it wasn’t the job, though he was prepared to hear his mother laugh at the irony of him processing other people’s pictures all day, say it served him right for leaving Merck. That would set Lise off, and then forget it.
It was everything. While he knew it was temporary, all the way from Boston he’d been thinking of money. On their way out of town they’d stopped at an ATM and he discovered their checking account had a negative balance. He didn’t understand. He’d been keeping a close eye on their bills. He was sure he’d left a good cushion.
“I use the card for food shopping,” Lise told him. “That’s probably it.”
“Yeah,” he said, “that would do it.”
“We have to eat.”
“I know,” he said, controlled, “it’s fine,” aware of Sam and Ella listening in the backseat, his failures apparent.
It wasn’t the way he wanted to start the trip. He’d had to transfer five hundred from savings, and now he couldn’t get the current balance out of his head. His next check from the lab wasn’t due till the first of the month.
Part of it was the cottage, obviously. All July he’d been thinking of his father, the confines of his life, whether he’d been happy or not. The hardest part was understanding why he was with his mother, the two of them were such complete opposites.
“I don’t know how he did it,” he said. “How many years?”
Lise laughed but did the math. “Forty-eight?”
“I wouldn’t have lasted five minutes with her.”
The irony of it was that he and his father were so much alike, a fact Ken had fought off as long as he could and that, privately, Meg never tired of citing. Once, stoned over the phone, she’d teased him with it—“God, you turned into him!” Only his sense of how hurt she would be prevented him from coming back, not at all joking, “And you turned into her.”
Lise could have had a week at the cape with her family but agreed to come this one last time. Now, as they crossed the Veterans Bridge, trying to spot the Stow Ferry—there, loading cars on the Bemus Point side by the old casino—she was making gentle disclaimers. She knew how important this week was to his mother.
“Listen,” Lise said, “I know you’re going to disappear when we get there.”
“I will not.”
“Yes you will, you’ll go off looking for shots.”
He shook his head because he knew it was true. Not that he’d find any.
“Just don’t leave me alone with her, all right?”
“Arlene’ll be there.”
“What about Meg?”
“She probably won’t get in till around dinnertime.”
“Interesting how she’s always the last one to show up and we’re always the first.”
“What can I say,” he said. “I’m the good son.”
“You’d never know it from the way she treats you.”
“I can take it.”
“You shouldn’t have to.”
He shrugged. She wasn’t so bad. She was his mother, it wasn’t like he had a choice.
They made it across the bridge and he got off 17 and waited at the stop sign for traffic to clear (the sign was bent and scratched as if brushed by a truck, the gouges rusted; he’d need his wide angle to get it, but already he could see how dull the print would look, how sixties). Behind him, Ella and Sam sat peering out the window at Hogan’s Hut, the combination gas station, general store and ice-cream place they sometimes stopped at on the way in. He’d wanted to give them a special treat after nine hours in the car, had planned on it since Binghamton, but it was just too late. He turned and gunned the 4Runner, paying attention to his shifts, checking the bikes through the sunroof, watching Hogan’s Hut dwindle in the mirror, and, bless them, the kids let him off the hook.
This was the easy part. Once Meg arrived with her kids it would be bedlam, and their mother wasn’t used to the noise. All week he would be stuck in the middle of them just as he had been as a child, trying to defuse or at least delay the inevitable, and then he would be accused of taking the wrong side, when all he wanted was peace. He couldn’t see how his father had managed an entire life of this. He would just have to make it through the week, counting down the hours like he did when he was a boy.
When Meg was at camp one year, he spent every Tuesday and Thursday at the Putt-Putt, his father dropping him off and picking him up. All day they gave out prizes; his pockets were thick with discount tickets. For lunch he ate Milky Ways. The time flew by, the speakers playing “Hold Your Head Up” and “Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey,” #1 and 2 week after week. Between songs, notes from the practice cabins drifted across the road, squealy reeds and the dark farts of horns. By summer’s end he’d mastered the course, pared his score down to the low thirties, even won a tournament. His mother had a faded picture of him smiling in front of the windmill with his trophy (still in Pittsburgh, in the attic room he’d moved to). He’d been so proud, felt so lucky. “I wouldn’t have known it was you,” Lise said when she saw it. He could have said the same thing. The boy holding up the trophy was gone.
He wondered if he would ever be happy like that again. Happy for Ella and Sam perhaps, but that was a different kind of happiness.
At B.U. he’d been thrilled to lose himself again in studies of light and long conversations about art and the photographers he loved, but the work he’d done there embarrassed him now, seemed sterile and over-composed, just an extension of his technical skill. The eye Morgan tried to help him find had eluded him. His new stuff wasn’t much better, and the setbacks of the last few years had forced him to admit that maybe he didn’t have what it took. Love had done it once, his happiness with Lise. Could that come back and surprise him again? And if it didn’t, what then? Would he be like his father, quietly dedicated to getting along, so steady and stoic that he seemed inscrutable, disconnected from everything except what was in his head and the newest project on his workbench?
He’d only brought one camera along—the Nikon. The Holga was just plastic, it wasn’t real. It was supposed to teach him to rely on his eye or, better, as Morgan said, his gut. By its very simplicity it was supposed to make him see.
What he would see was the cottage. The screenporch, the lake. He’d made it his assignment, as if he were back in grad school. Twenty rolls of black and white, twenty rolls of color. One week of light, weather permitting. At one time that would have been enough to fill him.
“Does everyone have their shoes on?” Lise asked.
“Yes,” they said.
“Mom?” Sam asked.
“What?”
“Does a Game Boy count as a video game?”
“Yes,” Lise said.
“Ella said it doesn’t.”
“I did not,” Ella said.
“For this trip it does,” Lise said.
Sam sighed heavily in protest.
“Listen,” Lise said, turning around and warning each of them with a finger. “We’re here to visit Grandma, not to play video games. I expect you to be polite and help out. And Sam, I don’t want to hear any more sighing out of you. When someone asks you to do something, you do it. All right?”
“Yes,” they said.
“Thank you,” Lise said, looking forward again. “That goes for you too, buster.”
“Aye-aye,” Ken said.
A farm stand slid by on their right, flocked with minivans. PIES, a handmade sign said. He suspected there might be a shot in it—the cars parked cockeyed, the cut orchids in a white bucket—but couldn’t find it, and he wondered if all vacation spots were the same, numbingly familiar.
“Are we going to have pie for dessert?” Sam asked.
“Would you like pie for dessert?” Lise asked.
“Yes.”
“There’s another one up here,” Ken said, seizing on her mood.
“How about we surprise Grandma with a pie?” Lise said. “What kind should we get?”
“Apple!” Sam volunteered.
“Ella-bella?” Lise said.
“I don’t care. Anything but peach.”
He pulled in behind another 4Runner, this one from Virginia. Ella stayed in the car and read while the three of them split up among the tables. Sam went straight for the pies, ranked in the slots of an old-fashioned high-rise safe, each wrapped in a plastic bag with a twist tie, a slip of paper like a Chinese fortune listing the ingredients. Sam had to stand on his toes. They seemed expensive to Ken, but after the fiasco at the ATM he didn’t want to make an issue of it. His favorite was there, cherry with a lattice crust. Lise had made one for him at Christmas.
“What’s peck-tin?” Sam asked.
Ken had to admit he didn’t know. Maybe Mom did. Sam looked the apple pies over before grabbing the biggest one with both hands.
They found Lise checking out the produce. Pectin was like jelly; it was the stuff that kept pie filling together, like a thickener. “Are you guys all set?”
He lifted a pint of Grade-A maple syrup to read the price on the bottom.
“I think it’s called stalling,” she said.
“I think you would be right.”
As they waited for the girl to ring up the pie, Lise laid a bouquet of wildflowers on the counter. “For the house.”
“A peace offering.”
“It can’t hurt,” she said.
“We got apple,” Sam announced in the car, holding the pie in his lap.
“Big whoop,” Ella said, but the mood had shifted and they all laughed at her, poked fun at her gloom.
“I guess you don’t want a piece,” Lise said.
“I didn’t say that.”
“Mmmm,” Ken said, “pectin!”
They got going again, a wraith of dust leaping up and then vanishing behind them as they pulled out, as if it had given up chasing them.
It was only another mile, not enough time to bother asking for a new CD. He’d had five hundred miles to get used to the idea of visiting his mother, but only now, speeding toward her, did it become real, something he would have to deal with, and while he knew he had no choice but to come, he felt tricked and trapped, the past closing around him, thick as humidity. This would be the first time they’d all been together since the funeral.
He didn’t have time to process his thoughts. The used-book store floated by on their left like a warning (NEW $2 HARDBACK BARN), and the campgrounds with their plywood cutouts of Yogi Bear welcoming RVs, and the Willow Run Golf Club, a failed farm turned into a par three where his father had taught him not only to make contact but the etiquette of the game before he was allowed on the Chautauqua course. Around the bend squatted the Snug Harbor Lounge, a local dive with a portable sign advertising that night’s band, a vintage Firebird for sale gleaming beside it. And then they were spinning alongside the fishery, its complex of square ponds ranked neatly as an ice tray, and from habit he was searching the far edge for herons, stealing glances from the road.
He would take the Holga over there, he thought, shoot the fish in the pump-house well, dark shapes in the water. The expectation of something to do soothed him, making the sign for Manor Drive less of a shock.
“Here we are,” he said, and turned in, rolling the 4Runner through the slow curve by habit, the action of his hands practiced.
How well he knew this place, even the trees—the gnarled crab apple in the Nevilles’ yard with its contortions he and Meg had been sure sprung from some underground evil; the two big oaks that pinched the road, lifted one lip of asphalt like carpet. He knew every cottage and even the big houses now, how each held that family’s unguarded hours, the damp, casual passing of the summer. When they left, those long days would still be here, waiting the winter beneath the snow, the lake beneath its ice like the pike and muskie huddled in the mud, heartbeats slowed to a discrete thump. All the gin-and-tonic card games and chicken-salad sandwiches on the dock would be waiting for them, the arms of the willows swinging in the breeze, but they would not return, and wherever they went next year he would miss this place, would always miss it.
He realized he was panicking and caught his breath.
“Are you all right?” Lise asked.
“I just had this big nostalgia attack all of a sudden.”
“Think it’s your father, maybe?”
“Maybe. I don’t know.”
Again he was aware of Ella and Sam listening in. They learned more about their parents on one long car trip than all year at home.
There was the cottage, tucked under the big chestnut, and the mailbox with his mother’s daylilies. They’d brought Arlene’s car. He aimed the 4Runner off to one side, under the chestnut, so they could both get out. The top of the car rattled the branches.
“The bikes!” Lise cried, and he stood on the brakes and the car stalled, rubbery chestnut pods bonking the roof.
“Goddammit,” he said, because he’d been careful with them all day, estimating their height from his own, checking the clearance before hitting the ATM and the gas plazas.
Lise opened her door and stood on the running board.
“What’s it look like?”
“I think if you back up you’ll be all right.”
He started the car with a roar.
“Wait till I get in,” she said.
He was aware of the anger that made him clench his entire face to maintain control. This was exactly the kind of shit he hated. He hadn’t even wanted to bring the bikes. The kids barely rode them.
His mother and Aunt Arlene came out of the house, Rufus bounding around them. His mother was laughing, saying something.
He rolled down his window.
“Having a little tree trouble, I see,” she said.
“I just need to back it up. If you could keep Rufus out of the way.”
She stepped back again, displeased with him not seeing it as a joke. “Go ahead,” she said, “he’s fine.”
He looked over his shoulder to find Ella frowning, her head down, as if mortified by his driving.
He eased the clutch up. Branches plucked the spokes, thumped against the roof, then let go with a swish and a sprinkle of leaves.
“All clear?” he called.
“All clear,” his mother said, and he turned off the car.
“All right,” Lise said for the benefit of the kids, “everyone help bring stuff in.”
They set after the task in a squad, Lise doling out the bags, glad to have something to do, leaving him the job of saying hello to his mother.
She came toward him, smiling, and from habit he bent down and wrapped his arms about her bony shoulders. He could not say she looked good, since each time he saw her now her scrawniness shocked him. Instead, he gave her a quick hug and asked, too sincerely, “How are you?”
“A little overwhelmed but hanging in there. How about you?”
“The same.”
It was not a lie. There would be a right time to tell her about the job.
“I’m so glad Lisa could come.”
“She wouldn’t have missed it,” he said, and realized how false it sounded. “The paint looks good.”
“Of course. Now that we’ve sold the place, it looks great.”
Lise came by with the flowers in one hand and a duffel in the other, his camera bag over her shoulder. His mother accepted the bouquet, protesting, just touching one arm, as if tagging her back. “I’m so glad you could make it.”
“Don’t be silly, Emily,” she said, and headed for the door.
Sam struggled out of a hug from Grandma, while Ella, acting grown up, lingered over hers, consoling his mother, patting her back. They were both all long bones, and their glasses nearly matched. While he and Lise always commented on how much of his mother was in Ella—the moodiness, the love of books—in person the resemblance was almost comical, two sisters separated by sixty years.
Arlene gave him a lipsticked kiss on the cheek, smelling of cigarettes. She leaned in close, conspiratorial.
“I don’t know if your mother told you, but we’re shooting for a moratorium on video games this year.”
“Lise already read them the riot act.”
“How’d they take it?”
“Ella was fine with it, as you’d expect. Sam, well …”
“I don’t think it’ll be a problem, as long as it doesn’t rain.”
“What’s the weather supposed to be like?” he asked, but no one knew.
They said hello to Rufus too, Ella kneeling beside him, enveloping him in a hug. He lay in the shade of the chestnut as they unloaded their tennis rackets and sleeping bags, Sam’s backpack full of Star Wars Legos and Pokémon cards, Ella’s crammed with bottles of nail polish and library books. Merck had occasionally sent Ken to their plant in Baltimore, and he’d learned how to fit a week into one carry-on. At some point his children would have to learn to make choices, to sacrifice. He feared, in the future, some crippling repercussions from these early indulgences, and thought that was due to his own childhood being for the most part idyllic, the hard facts of life reaching him only in his mid-twenties, as if until then he’d been swathed in a cocoon of his parents’ making, composed of equal parts love and money.
Bringing the bags through the living room, he wanted to stop to look at the familiar sailing pictures on the walls, the ugly orange shag rug, the mobile of Spanish galleons that poked you in the eye. It was like entering a party full of good friends, and the memories each piece of furniture, each object on the mantelpiece stirred up as he passed orbited like overheard conversations. He would have time later, he thought, and envisioned documenting it all with the Holga.
He lugged the bags upstairs where they would be sleeping, in the one long room under the peak of the roof. This floor was also shag-carpeted but in red, white and blue, the dresser drawers and brick chimney where it came through painted to match the bicentennial scheme. The walls were an old sort of pressboard, sky blue, soft as cork and flaking along the seams. He could see the ghosts of his father’s hammer blows around the nails. The past was as thick as the air up here—games of spin the bottle and post office, Meg blowing her cigarette smoke out the window, drinking illicit beers while their parents entertained the Lerners and Wisemans on the screenporch. There in front of the mirror on the low wardrobe was the 7UP bottle with the taffy-twisted neck his father won for him at the carnival in Mayville, and there on the cedar chest between the beds, the ashtray he made at camp, beating the square of metal until it took on the shape of the leaf at the bottom of the mold. The TV that hadn’t worked in twenty years, the fire truck he’d had as a boy that Ella cut her chin on when she was three. The room was so full of history he had to fend it off, concentrate on getting the kids settled. There would be time—and light, he hoped. He hadn’t brought his strobes.
“Can you put the fan on?” Lise called from the bathroom, and he found the switch. The fan was built into the wall at the top of the stairs; it did nothing but make noise, even when he opened the two windows at the far end. The air smelled moldy and faintly, sweetly fecal from the generations of bats that had lived in the walls. At night you could hear them bumping and squeaking, and for a long time Sam had refused to sleep up here. He was still scared of them, but there was no graceful way out now without Ella calling him a baby.
“Can we go down to the dock?” Ella asked. Sam stood right beside her, her client.
“After you put your clothes away. Neatly.”
“And help make the beds,” Lise called.
“They’re already made,” Ella said.
“We have to strip off the old sheets and put on new ones.”
Ella sighed.
“And no sighing.”
“Yes, Mother,” Ella said, going along with the joke, but a minute later, trying to fit a contour sheet on, she almost burst into tears. “This stupid sheet won’t go on.”
Lise came out of the bathroom and looked at the problem. “That’s because it’s a double.”
“How am I supposed to know that?”
“It’s nothing to cry about, “Lise said. “Here, this one’s queen-size, it should work.”
Sam was done shoving his clothes into the dresser and stood there watching them.
“Ken,” Lise said, “help him with the other one,” and he stopped filling the medicine cabinet with their toiletries.
When they were done, Lise sent the children off to the dock and took over putting their clothes away.
“I swear, everything’s a crisis with her. And it’s only going to get worse.”
“I don’t think she’s so terrible.”
“Just wait,” she said, but halfheartedly. They both knew they were lucky with Ella. Sam was the tough one, always would be. Boys were supposed to be easy, but that hadn’t been the case with him.
The room was dim. Outside, the golden hour was starting, the light beginning to sweeten. Lise pulled her book from her beach bag, one of the kids’ Harry Potters. He unpacked his camera bag, the little he had. He would wait till tomorrow, slip out early and see if he could find something plain to start on. She stretched out on the bed and set her bookmark on the cedar chest.
“Just a few pages,” she promised. “It’s getting good.”
He laid a hand on the small of her back and bent down awkwardly to kiss her. “I’ll be downstairs.”
His mother and Arlene were on the screenporch, reading the Jamestown paper and watching the lake. The Steelers had crushed the Bills. He hadn’t even known they were playing, and suddenly fall seemed that much closer. Arlene said the chance of rain tomorrow was thirty percent. His mother was worried about Meg.
“It’s six o’clock,” she said. “Don’t you think we ought to get dinner started? I imagine these kids are hungry.”
“There’s no rush,” Ken said.
“Well I’m going to need something to eat soon.”
“What are we having?”
“We were planning on hamburgers, if you can manage the grill.”
“Not a problem,” he said, and went out to the garage, the screen slapping shut behind him. He was almost to the door when he slipped on one of the flat stones and fell hard on his bottom. “Son of a bitch,” he said, checking his wrist. The edge of one stone had gouged out a pale twist of skin but there was no blood. They were always slick; it had something to do with moss and condensation, the fact that the chestnut kept them in shadow most of the day. He was pissed that they’d tricked him again.
He was still shaking his head at his own stupidity when he opened the garage door and saw the shot. The whole garage was stuffed with his father’s junk, and everywhere he looked he saw interesting collisions. He stopped automatically, wanting to run upstairs for the Nikon. The light was wrong, too soft to get the detail he wanted—the extension cord coiled in the enamel basin like some Far Eastern delicacy, the child’s life jacket protecting the jug of wiper fluid. But this was exactly the problem, according to Morgan: he had to stop building his shots.
Tomorrow he’d bring just the Holga, leave the details to chance. He turned from the messy workbench and found the shallow grill and a bag of charcoal and dragged both out under the chestnut.
They had an old electric charcoal starter, a loop of wire the size of a spatula on a black plastic handle. He plugged it into an extension cord running from the strip of outlets on his father’s workbench and piled the charcoal on top of it. While he waited for the wire to warm, he took an Iron City from the little fridge in the garage and stood there sipping and looking out at Sam and Ella on the dock, Rufus tucked between them. He wondered if they were happy, and thought at least they were happy to be out of the car, away from their parents. He could not help but see them as himself and Meg, sitting there thirty years ago, but what he and Meg would have discussed at that point—she thirteen and ready to leave, he so far behind at nine, snug in his own private world—he could not recall. The water made everything seem possible, as if they could cross it and begin a different life on the other side, shed the past and be those other people they’d dreamed of. Perhaps that was why his work was so dull: his desires had become practical when they needed to be extravagant.
He tipped the bottle and checked the starter, glowing away under the coals, just beginning to smoke. Another five minutes. The Lerners’ was for sale, and as he was wondering what they were asking, the balance from the ATM came back and stung him, hovered and flitted off again. He would not be done with it until he looked at their checkbook. He took another sip and realized the beer was already working on him, and he remembered his father doing this, standing out here by himself, tumbler in hand. When it rained, he’d set up directly under the chestnut and the smoke would filter up through the leaves. Before his father, his grandfather Maxwell was in charge of the barbecue. Now it was his turn.
The last sip was mostly air. He flipped the bottle and caught it in his palm like a gunfighter and went to get another. The interior of the little fridge impressed him in its simplicity, the beers he’d bought last year still vigilant, ranked shoulder to shoulder, the freezer compartment clogged with frost. He could see what the print would look like (another thing Morgan warned him against) and shut the door. All he’d had to eat today was an egg-salad sandwich around Albany; he’d have to be careful with these beers. The last time he was drunk he’d gone all maudlin on Lise, thanking her for sticking with him. It had made them both feel pathetic the next day.
“How are the coals coming along?” Arlene called from the kitchen door.
The top of the pyramid was on fire, the centers of the briquets dark. They always took longer than you thought.
“Five, ten minutes.”
“Is everyone going to want cheese on theirs?”
“Everyone but Sam.”
He unplugged the starter, leveled the coals with the glowing wire, then set it on the concrete apron by the garage. Rufus was smart enough to stay away from it, but he kept checking to make sure it didn’t catch anything on fire.
The lake had gone calm, flags limp at the end of the docks. The sun hung just above the treetops, throwing shadows. In the field across the road, a family of rabbits was out, feeding under the apple trees. They stayed close to the bushy edge of the field, brown balls in the dark light, cheeks working as they nibbled the grass. He counted five, one just a baby. This was what he would miss after the cottage was gone, these slow moments.
He decided he shouldn’t have had that second beer.
He held a hand over the coals, mostly gray now, then set the circular rack on its post.
Lise was in the kitchen, helping Arlene, who had spilled a potful of snap beans on the floor. Lise gave him a goofy look as he swung through. He warned her with a straight face, and she let him know he was being no fun.
“Are those coals ready yet?” Arlene asked.
The burgers were waiting on a plate. He grabbed a spatula and took them out and slid them on, watching the fat drizzle and flare up. Sam and Ella had come in from the dock and installed themselves on the screenporch. From around the corner he could hear his mother asking them questions. Lise and Arlene were working on the salad. He flipped the burgers, nearly dropping one through, saving it with his hand, wiping his greasy fingers on the grass. The burgers were thick and would take a long time, and he wondered where Meg was, not at all surprised that she was late. They would talk tonight, long after his mother and, grudgingly, Lise had gone to bed, and she would tell him about Jeff and exactly what happened. He hoped so. While it never played out that way, he always thought that together they could solve any problem by talking, the way they’d joined forces as kids, the two of them against the world.
It seemed they’d lost that battle—or maybe it was just him, his disappointment tinting everything. But Meg really was struggling. His own problems were ones he’d knowingly chosen. She’d never had that luxury.
He felt he’d let her down somehow, not been involved or helped out enough. Not that she would have listened to him. For months he didn’t hear from her, and then she was calling him practically every day, keeping him on the phone until his ear was sore. All she did was complain about Jeff, or the kids, or her therapist. Some days, she said, I call in sick and just lie in bed and read. I don’t get dressed, I don’t do anything, I just lie there. And then the next minute she’d be all excited about her promotion and this new program at her work, as if the rest of it didn’t exist, until one day she admitted she’d been fired months ago but didn’t want to tell him because she knew he’d tell their mother.
She was so fucked up.
He flipped the burgers and dug into one with the corner of the spatula, but it was still raw. The coals were hot enough, he just had to be patient. When he went inside to rinse off the plate the kitchen was empty, everything laid out on the table. He came back out with the cheese. He was tempted to peek again but held off.
It was getting dark, shadows filling in the trees, bats flitting like swallows. From the screenporch came a blast of laughter—Lise—and then his mother saying something, and Arlene, and more laughter, the children in it this time. What they were laughing at he could not imagine, this strange family of his. He stood under the chestnut with the spatula in hand, waiting, like his father.