That night, over a fresh pot of beans, we were silent. You could hear forks scraping the tin plates as we poked and stirred. Then more silence. Finally my dad said, “I think we need to leave.”
“Leave?” echoed my mom, and she choked out a fake laugh.
“Yes,” said my dad.
Mom started to sputter. “But—,” she said. “Ron’s crazy. He’ll calm down. It’s not just us.”
“I don’t care about the others, who snuck in what, who corrupted whose children. It’s not working for us. And I’m starting to—” He put his head in his hands. “I’m starting, I think, to lose my mind.” He raised his head and smiled helplessly, and for a second he was my old dad again. The dad who would see a joke in everything, who would be able to place the whole idea of our having to leave early—the quadruple humiliation of it all—as just one more detail in the absurd tapestry of life.
But his smile faded quickly. That funny, easy dad was not hungry, sick, and exhausted. That dad was not well on his way to cutting down two hundred trees by hand.
My mom shook her head, stood as if she could pretend that the meal—and thus the conversation—was over. She laid her plate, which still had a bunch of beans on it, in the basin. She took my plate and put it in the basin as well. I wasn’t finished, but I didn’t say anything. I was too scared of whatever was happening between my parents. But when Mom tried to take Gavin’s plate too, he protested. “Hey,” he said. “I’m not done.”
My mom sighed and sat back down at the table. My father took another bite. I took a bean off Gavin’s plate and popped it into my mouth. Then Mom looked up at my dad and there were tears in her eyes.
“Okay,” she said. “Okay, this is maybe—probably—not exactly what we all imagined it would be.”
“At the least,” Dad said. “I know this makes you sad, but you have to admit it goes deeper than being different from what we imagined.” My mom didn’t say anything. “Come on,” he said. “Admit it. This was a mistake. You’re the only one who wanted to come and even you are miserable.”
My mother sniffed, looked around for something to dry her eyes on, and found nothing. My dad fumbled for a moment in his pocket, pulled out a bandanna handkerchief, and passed it across the table to her. “It will be hard to go back home and tell everyone we failed,” he said. “It will be hard to admit to Ron and Betsy that we’re the first family in the history of the camp to give up. But we can go home, and we’ll be fine. We’ll get some rest. I’m still on vacation. We can plan a trip. We could even just rent a car here and do some sightseeing on the way back. We’re probably not far from some national park or something.”
“It’s nice to see you’re finally taking some interest in vacation planning,” my mom said, a sob escaping even as she cracked this joke. Or sort of joke. It also sounded like she was mad.
“I’m sorry,” my dad said. “I know I should be more involved with our vacation planning. With everything. And I promise I will be. Look, we’ll get past this. It’s a bump.”
“Is it?” my mom said. “Is it really just a bump?” It was strange how one little question coming from her could sink us deeper into the hole my dad was trying so valiantly to climb out of. “I don’t think it will be a bump for me.” She swallowed, and if I could have stuffed the bandanna into her mouth to keep her from saying what came next, I would have. “I think for me this will be a failure,” she said. “I think this is about us working together as a family, and if we can’t do it, I don’t know…” She let her voice drift away. “I don’t know what to say.”
“Okay,” my dad said, his head now in his hands. He looked up. “Then let me put it this way,” he said. “I’m going to finish that clearing. I said I would clear those trees, and I will. But after that I am leaving. If Gen and Gavin want to come with me, they are welcome to. You should feel free to stay.”
He stood up from the table and pushed back his chair, leaving his food on his plate. He lifted his hat from a hook on the wall and held it in his hands. He opened his mouth to speak, and then closed it again.
No one knew where he was going when he left the cabin, and after the door had swung shut behind him my mom continued to stare as if the back of the door might contain the answer to a puzzle she was desperate to figure out. After a few minutes, she stood. She poured boiling water over the basin of dishes, and I picked up a rag and a wooden spoon to begin trying to work off the grease. Before long, we could hear the sound of chopping. As usual. How much longer would he be out there? How many more days did we have left? I put down the dish I was scrubbing and stood in the open door of the cabin, looking out in the direction of the woods. “Is he trying to finish all those trees off tonight?” I said.
My mom sighed. “I don’t know,” she said. “I just don’t know.”
I felt like I could taste how it would be for us to rent a mini-van and drive to the Grand Canyon. I thought about eating at Denny’s and IHOP on the road, and my mouth began to water. Wouldn’t that be better?
But what about Ka? What about Caleb? And Nora—I hated thinking of her satisfied smirk on finding out that I had quit.
What if my mom didn’t quit with us?
She couldn’t stay here—no one could do the farm by themselves. Could they? If she tried, I’d be left sleeping in some hotel room, sharing a bed next to the bathroom with Gavin while my dad slept all by himself in the bed by the window. I shuddered. I squeezed my eyes and pushed the vision away.
This was all my fault. I should never have brought my phone. And yet, all I wanted right then was to have it back, to be able to tell my friends what was wrong.
I don’t know how long I was standing on the porch staring out at the trees, listening to the sounds of chopping, feeling stupid and sorry for myself and wishing things had been different. I do know that that’s where I was standing—on the porch, looking out toward the woods—when the screaming began.