“I’m bored,” says Ursula.
“Oh, come on now,” he says. “There’s a million things to do here.”
“There would be. If you’d play with me.”
“I will,” he says. “Later.” There is that supplicating tone to his voice again that always makes this tight place in Claire’s throat when she hears it. “Stop it!” she wants to say.
“I’m hot,” Ursula says. “I want a drink.”
“We’ll get some Cokes at the snack bar a little later,” he tells her. “If you’re thirsty now, you can have a nectarine.”
Claire turns her page. Tim picks up his book too. She squeezes his hand.
“I hate this bathing suit,” she says. She is examining the folds of skin around her belly. “It makes me look fat.”
“That happens to everybody when they sit down in a bathing suit,” Tim says. “Even Claire probably has a fold or two, right, Claire?”
“Right,” she says.
“Not to mention your old dad.”
“You have tons of fat, Daddy,” she says. “You should see my dad’s love handles,” she tells Claire, almost proudly. Then she realizes that Claire has seen them, of course. Ursula is no longer the sole possessor of his secrets.
Another minute passes. “This place sucks,” she says.
“Oh, come on, sweetheart,” he says. The pleading tone is worse now. “Go play.”
“You hate me,” she says.
“You know that’s not true,” he says, desperate now.
This is so ridiculous, Claire wants to scream. Now you are arguing with your daughter about whether or not you hate her.
“See those kids over there?” she says. “There’s a little girl just your age working on a sand castle. I bet she’d love some help.”
“I don’t know her,” Ursula says.
“Here’s what you do,” Claire says. She has gone through this fifty times with her own children, though by the time they were Ursula’s age they had long since figured out how to do it for themselves.
“You bring your pail and shovel over and say, ‘Hi. What’s your name?’ She says, ‘My name is such and such’—”
“Poop head,” says Ursula.
“Right. She says, ‘My name is Poop head.’ You say, ‘Pleased to meet you, Poop head. My name is Ursula, although you are welcome to call me Silly Goose if you want. Can we work on your sand castle together?’ ”
“She called me a silly goose, Daddy,” says Ursula. That whining tone. The worst.
“You listen to Claire,” Tim says, sounding like a doomed man. “She’s trying to help you make friends.”
“You want me to come with you?” says Claire. When Ursula gives no answer she puts her book down and rises from the towel. She brushes herself off and takes Ursula’s hand firmly. She hopes she is managing to conceal her irritation as she says, “I sometimes feel shy too. But you’ll see. This will be easy. You’ll have fun.”
“Hi,” says Claire. “What’s your name?”
The little girl looks up from her digging. “Meredith,” she says. “What’s you two’s?”
“I’m Claire. This is Ursula. We wondered if you wanted help with your castle.”
“Sure,” says Meredith. She points to a pile of stones. “We got to build the wall before the waves come up,” she says to Ursula. “You can help.”
Ursula just sits there. Claire reaches for a handful of stones.
“Maybe we could make a moat,” she says. “What do you think, Ursula?”
“The waves are just going to wash it away anyways,” Ursula says. “This is a dumb castle.” After a minute she gets up and wanders back to the towel.
“Lucky I got you to help,” Meredith tells Claire. “Or we’d never get this wall made in time.”
They leave the beach a little after lunch. Ursula says she’s getting sun poisoning. When she says this, Tim looks like a cornered animal.
“It’s okay,” Claire says. “I think it’s going to cloud over soon, anyway.”
They go for ice creams. Ursula says she doesn’t want any. Then she says she does. Then she says she doesn’t. Claire and Tim are licking their cones out on the patio of Barnacle Billy’s when Ursula decides she does want an ice cream after all. A sundae.
Walking through Ogunquit looking in shops, Ursula is briefly cheerful, holding each of their hands and skipping. “This is fun isn’t it Daddy?” she says in the TV commercial kid voice Claire heard the night she met Ursula.
“I bet her kids are jealous they didn’t get to come, aren’t they?” Ursula says to Tim.
“If you have something to say to me, say it to me,” Claire tells Ursula, as she has many times.
“If you have something to say to Claire, say it to Claire,” Tim tells her.
“Can we go bowling?” she says. “Canwecanwecanwe? Please-pleasepleaseplease?”
It is as if a cold wind has blown across Claire’s heart, so bitter and sudden it has not simply frozen, it has cracked. Ursula lets go of Claire’s hand and stands there on the sidewalk, looking her dead straight in the eye.
“I know just what you’re thinking,” she says, not in the baby voice or anything close. “And I like you anyways.”
While they were away on their vacation and Tim’s downstairs neighbors were taking care of Jenny, she got into the garbage at their apartment house. Now the landlord says the dog has to go.
Tim tries reasoning with the guy. “You don’t understand,” he says. “Ursula’s had Jenny her whole life.”
“Tough luck,” the guy tells him. “You weren’t supposed to have a dog here in the first place. Tenants before you had their mutt put to sleep when they moved in. It’s the rule.”
Ursula is inside setting up her collection of motel shampoos when Tim gets the word about Jenny. “What am I supposed to tell my daughter?” he says. “You don’t understand what this dog means to her.”
“Yeah,” says the landlord. “And I guess you don’t understand what my trash bin means to me. No pooch. No budge.”
“She doesn’t have any brothers and sisters,” Tim is saying. “And her mother’s sort of abandoned her. She counts on the dog. This is going to sound crazy, but she talks to it. It’s like therapy for her.”
“Sad story, bub,” says the landlord. “But I ain’t letting you keep no canine.”
Hearing this, Claire tells Tim she and her kids will take Jenny at their house. “Pete’s been begging for a dog, anyway,” she tells him.
“Sweetheart,” Tim says. “Are you sure you can handle it?”
“She was going to end up in our house soon enough, right?” says Claire. They have talked about Tim’s moving in with Claire and her kids a little further down the line. “Your dog is just getting to move in with us a little sooner than you.”
Ursula comes back outside. “Come see my potion laboratory,” she’s saying. Then she sees them. Her dad is kissing Claire with one of those tongue kisses. His hand is under her sweater. Ursula might as well be invisible.
So now he’s given Jenny away. “Why don’t you just send me out in the forest like Hansel and Gretel?” Ursula weeps. “Don’t worry. I won’t bring any bread crumbs. I wouldn’t want to find my way back to this place.”
“Listen to me, Ursula,” he pleads. “It was either let Claire and her kids take care of Jenny or have her put to sleep. Would you have preferred that?”
“She’ll probably sleep on the boy’s bed,” says Ursula. “But I’ll never show him our special newspaper trick.”
“Urs,” her father says to her. He has that begging voice again. Ursula feels powerful and big.
“I hate him,” she says. “Maybe I’ll teach Jenny to bite him.”
“Pete’s doing us a huge favor,” Tim tells her. “You know how much work it is taking care of a dog.”
“He’ll neglect her. He’ll be one of those people that just takes her out the door to pee and brings her right back in. He won’t run with her. He won’t scratch her spot.
”
“Maybe you’ll help him,” Tim says. “You can go over there all the time and help out.” This is a new idea. It could be a trick her father’s using to make her go along with the idea, knowing how much she likes going over to Claire’s house. Ursula needs to think about this.
“Sure,” he says. “And in the fall, you could stop by Claire’s house on your way home from school. You could get off the bus at Claire’s stop and take her out for walks every day. You can even bring her over to our yard and sit on the front steps with her. Just not inside. You can talk to her like you always did.”
That was her secret thing. He wasn’t supposed to know about that.
“I don’t really talk to Jenny,” she says. “I’m just singing.”
“You can do anything you want with her,” he says. “She’s still your dog. She always will be.”
“You love Claire best now, don’t you?” she says. And she could be right.
Ursula’s dad has gone to the supermarket—that’s what he said—and she is home alone. She goes into his room. Her birthday is in five days and she’s looking to see if he’s got more presents.
She has already found the Barbie in his closet. Also a box of smell markers and a puzzle and a set of panties with the names of the days of the week on them, but that doesn’t really count, since a person needs panties anyways. Ursula is sure there must be something else for her though. Her magical present.
She looks in his underwear drawer first. Nothing. Then she checks the drawer where he keeps his T-shirts and sweats. Also nothing. Nothing in his night table and nothing on the top shelf of his closet. She is just about to give up. (Who knows, maybe that’s where he is right now? Getting her special present.) Then she thinks to check his desk.
Papers are everywhere. There’s a picture of Ursula here. Also a picture she drew for him a few years ago on his birthday of the two of them fishing. Her dad is reeling in this tiny little sardine. Ursula’s got a giant fish on her pole. She wrote X’s and O’s all across the bottom. She was just in kindergarten then. She didn’t know how to write Love.
In the middle drawer she finds something. In among the paper clips and unsharpened pencils, there’s a little velvet box with a ribbon around it. Ursula draws in her breath. She opens it.
It’s a ring, with the most beautiful purple jewel in the middle, and pearls—Ursula’s favorite—all around. Her magical present. Better than a toy. Better than a Barbie Town House even. She puts in on.
“Oh, Ken,” she says, holding the ring out the way she saw Pamela do on “Live and Let Live” last week, when Todd proposed. “You shouldn’t have.”
She studies the ring for a few moments, then places it very carefully back in the box and ties the ribbon. She shuts the drawer.
For the first few days Pete stays at his dad’s house it feels good sleeping late and playing lots of Super Nintendo, which Pete’s mom won’t let him have at their house. Pete’s dad buys any kind of cereal Pete wants and never makes him pick up and do chores the way his mom does. He cooks chili and they can eat in the living room with the TV on. They watch ball games and compare notes on whose sneakers smell worse. When Pete farts he doesn’t have to say, “Excuse me.”
But his dad goes to work most days, and then Pete and his sister are stuck at the house. He could ride his bike but there isn’t anyplace to go now that all his friends are back in Blue Hills. Plus he has to listen to his sister complaining about how bored she is. Sometimes when they stay at their dad’s their old babysitter Melanie drops by and takes them places, but she’s been away at summer school.
For the first week they were with their dad, Travis was calling Sally every day and driving over to see her every time he got the chance, at which point the two of them would disappear for hours in his Impala. It didn’t take a brain surgeon to figure out why. By the first weekend, Sally told their dad it was nothing personal, but she really couldn’t stick around any longer. A part-time job had opened up bussing tables at Friendly’s. She was out of there.
Pete’s dad was going to take him camping then but it rained, and then his dad got called on a job. So for the last week Pete’s been alone in the house most days. He never thought he could get sick of video games, but he is.
Pete’s dad is the coolest person he knows. But Pete’s glad when the two weeks are up and it’s time to go back to his mom’s. Baseball season’s over, and he didn’t make the All Stars, but there’s still baseball camp to look forward to, and hanging out with Jared and Ben.
The other thing is, Pete misses his mom. He remembers last summer, how the two of them would ride their bikes into town and get a frozen yogurt. Saturday mornings they like to drive around and check out yard sales. One time they took their canoe down to the river and paddled upstream to this place where they tied up the canoe and had a picnic. There was this one particular rock you could climb on and jump into the water. Paddling home, they sang all these corny songs Pete learned at baseball camp last summer, like the theme song from “Rawhide,” “Hello Mudda, Hello Fadda.” They didn’t talk much, mostly just paddled quietly. The nice thing was for once the phone wasn’t ringing and his mom wasn’t worrying about bills or trying to do ten things at once or getting after him to pick stuff up.
This is what Pete’s thinking about as his dad pulls his car up in front of their house after his two weeks away. When his mom comes out of the house to greet him, and she’s holding a leash, he actually thinks she’s gotten a puppy to surprise him, and for a second there he’s so excited he wants to jump out right there, before his dad has even turned off the engine. Then this old, ratty-looking mutt comes loping out of their house with a bare patch in its fur, and lies down next to his mother while she clips on the leash. Not that there’s much danger of a dog like this one running away. It looks a hundred years old.
“Where’d the dog come from?” Pete says.
“I’ll tell you the whole story in a minute,” says his mom. “But first you have to give me a hug.”
He is just about to do that, too, when he sees her. Ursula. Coming out of his house like she owned it, eating a Popsicle.
Claire can’t understand how it can be that Tim doesn’t know the phone number of a single child from Ursula’s second-grade class. Or their last names even. “Didn’t you ever have anybody over?” she says. “Didn’t she ever go over to anybody’s house to play? Somebody must have invited her to their birthday party sometime.”
There was one girl, he says. Her family lived way out of town and they’d gotten lost driving over. Ursula was! so nervous that by the time they got there she was crying that all the games would be over, but it turned out there weren’t really any games, anyway. The girl had invited everybody in their whole class and they were all running around the yard throwing chips at each other. One girl was screaming because some boy had squirted ketchup on her party dress. The birthday girl was also crying, he remembers. “Nobody gave me anything good,” she said.
There was another time when Ursula had come home very excited, saying that this popular girl named Jackie was going to invite her to her party. She’d told her that on the playground.
“We got to get Jackie a very special present,” Ursula said. “She’s my best friend.”
She made him take her to Toys “R” Us that afternoon. She picked out a Roller Baby doll that cost $19.95. “That’s way too much for a birthday party present,” Tim told her. He may not have known much about birthday parties, but he knew that much, anyway.
Finally they settled on a Pretty Perm Stacie for $12.95. Still a little high in Tim’s opinion, but Ursula was so insistent.
A couple days later Tim asked her where the party invitation was. He wanted to be sure he wasn’t teaching a class that afternoon, or to make arrangements if he was.
“She’s giving it to me tomorrow,” Ursula said. But the next day there was still no invitation from Jackie.
By Saturday, when she had still not brought home the invitation, Tim said maybe they
should call Jackie. “I don’t know her number,” she said. “I left the invitation at school. I’ll bring it home Monday.”
Thursday he called her teacher during lunch. “I hate to bother you with this,” he said. “But Ursula keeps forgetting to bring home the invitation to Jackie’s party. I wanted to make sure we didn’t miss it.”
“Oh goodness,” she said. “Jackie’s party was last weekend. She brought her presents in Monday for show-and-tell. I keep telling the children not to do that because it makes the ones that didn’t get invited feel bad. Just try getting eight-year-olds to cooperate though.”
In the end they invited Sandy and Jeff and their baby, Keith, from downstairs. Claire asks Pete and Sally if they’d come over, just for the cake part maybe, but when they tell her they’re busy she doesn’t push it. So it’s just the six of them—four adults plus Ursula, and the baby.
Claire takes Ursula swimming while Tim makes dinner and decorates. At one point, when they’re lying on their towels, Ursula suddenly sits bolt upright and looks out across Burr Pond. “My mom is thinking about me right now,” she says. “I can feel it.”
“I bet you’re right,” Claire says. “Birthdays are important for parents, too. No matter how old your child gets to be, when it’s their birthday you always remember how it was the first second you saw them, when they were newborn. A baby is like the most special present anybody could ever get.”
Back at Tim and Ursula’s apartment, Tim has hung up streamers and a cardboard sign that says “Happy Birthday.” He has set the table with a paper cloth covered with pictures of Barbie in all sorts of outfits. He has made Ursula’s favorite dinner, macaroni and cheese, with chocolate cake for dessert and mint chocolate chip ice cream. At every place there’s a noisemaker and a paper hat that says “Let’s Party.”
This is the first time Tim has had Jeff and Sandy over for a meal. They’re very young—twenty maybe, twenty-one tops. Jeff works as a delivery man for Snapple. Sandy stays home with the baby.
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