He didn’t think Margaret was drinking, if only because she looked so good. He’d come in for a Ziploc bag to hold the screws from the screen porch tie-downs and found her in the kitchen, microwaving a cup of coffee. Since Christmas she’d lost weight, her face noticeably thinner, an achievement that, knowing her history, must have cost her a great effort. He was shocked by her resemblance to Emily at that age, the same high cheekbones and generous lips. He always knew she could be beautiful. He wasn’t sure if she’d ever be happy, and wondered if it was too late.
In a T-shirt, camp shorts and sneakers, she was dressed for work. When she gave him a hug, her hair smelled of cigarettes, another addiction she’d supposedly quit.
“Hi, Dad.”
“Thanks for coming. You look good.”
“Ew, I’m all scuzzy, but thank you. I’m sorry Sarah couldn’t make it. She really wanted to.”
“I’m sure she’s having more fun there.”
“She is. She loves it. We never see her. I think Justin’s a little jealous, so this is a nice break for him.”
He thought she might volunteer something about Jeff, but she didn’t, so he didn’t ask. It was past ten. He and Kenny were almost finished with the porch, Ella and the boys busy washing the screens, Emily and Arlene off food shopping.
The duty roster was posted on the fridge.
“I’ve got you turning the garden, if that’s all right.”
“I’m glad I didn’t take a shower.”
“You can muck the gutters if you’d rather do that.”
“I’m good,” she said. “I’ll be there in a minute. First I’ve got to have my coffee.”
Outside, Kenny had the last tarp off and was folding it on the lawn. He stopped to dig the screws out of his pocket, dropping them in the bag Henry held open. He’d marked all the tie-downs with a Sharpie so they’d know where they went next year—a bonus.
“What’s next?”
After they put everything away, Henry had him scrape the spongy tufts of moss off the roof with a putty knife and spot-clean the shingles with a bleach solution, a tedious job made harder by the steep slope. While the sun was out now, there was a good chance of a thunderstorm later. The goal was to be done with the gutters before it hit so the rain would finish the job. The antenna could wait.
Alongside the garage, Ella and the boys were scrubbing the screens.
“Whatever you do,” he said, bending over to inspect their work, “do not get your old grandfather wet,” and lingered, giving her time to squirt him and Rufus, to the boys’ delight. As they grew older, they would turn sullen and superior, tending some secret inner drama. For now he could still charm them with silliness.
“All right,” he said, “enough lollygagging. Back to work.”
When he looped around to the garden to check on Margaret, she was nowhere to be found. The shovel lay in the dirt where she’d stopped, maybe a tenth of the way done. She wasn’t in the kitchen or the living room. He called up the stairs, but there was no answer. As a teenager, she’d been a notorious shirker, hiding in the bathroom after dinner, leaving Kenny to do the dishes solo. The Duty Rooster owed its existence to her as much as to Henry’s days pulling KP. They created it to make sure she did her fair share. Kenny had drawn up the very first one, misspelling the fateful word, cementing its place in their family history.
Henry was cutting through the screen porch when he saw her at the far end of the dock, pacing with her phone to her ear, jabbing the air with a cigarette to reinforce a point. Justin was watching her too. They were leaning the screens against the Adirondack chairs to dry in the sun. He set his down and paused a second, looking her way, and Henry wondered how much he knew. He was a quiet, sometimes fearful boy, and while Henry tried to give Margaret the benefit of the doubt in her marriage, he blamed her for his skittishness. Her anger was a mystery to him, its source impossible to fathom, well beyond the simple disappointments of childhood. Unlike Emily, he would never believe it was their fault.
Ella and the boys started another set of three, dipping their scrub brushes in the bucket of suds.
“Good job, you guys,” Henry called, loud enough, he hoped, for Margaret to overhear, though she didn’t seem to notice. For a long minute he stood on the lawn, his arms crossed like a foreman, watching her pace. At one point she stopped and looked directly up at the sky, her other hand covering her forehead as if in pain or disbelief, then kept walking, gesticulating, making her case. When he realized she was going to be a while, he left her to it and moved on to the woodpile, choosing only the best logs to bring inside. It was going to be a cool night after the storm came through, and they’d want a fire.