Lexie

by Audrey Couloumbis

  Ben eyed the canal. He was one of those people who like to get things just so. Who think things have to be perfect. Daddy would probably get on Ben’s nerves.

  He might get on Vicky’s nerves. I looked back at Daddy and Vicky, who were further off, and it didn’t matter so much that they were laughing. They walked so they bumped into each other, the way I walked with my friends when we were having a really good time.

  So he hadn’t gotten on her nerves much yet.

  Harris was running along the edge of the water, and Vicky swooped in to grab him and spin him around. Her skirt got really wet. I knew how the sand would be clumping up around the hem. She didn’t stop to shake it off. Maybe she didn’t mind. I liked that.

  “Do you think that’s safe?” Ben asked.

  “What?”

  “Walking in the surf.” And then, like I’d missed something important, he added, “There are sharks in the water.”

  “Out where the water is deep,” I reminded him. “This one got stuck here when the tide went out.”

  He watched them for another few seconds, then went back to digging. “Where’s your dad?” I asked him.

  “He lives in New York. He trades.”

  “What does he trade?” I said, watching Daddy put his arm around Vicky’s shoulders.

  “Corn and oats, stuff like that.”

  Before I could wonder about that, he added, “Mack’s father is in Baltimore. He has a car dealership, so he’s lots more reliable.”

  “My mom is in Baltimore too,” I said.

  “I know,” Ben said. “Listen, do you think the tide is coming in?”

  “Probably not yet,” I said. “It has something to do with the moon.”

  “Let’s dig this canal deeper,” Ben said. “Then we can put more water in the pool. Maybe it will be enough to carry him out and we won’t have to wait for the tide.”

  After a while Vicky and Daddy came back and helped. That is, Daddy and Ben stood the same way, each with a hand over his chin, and talked about how deep the canal needed to be. Vicky and I dug.

  She acted a little helpless at first, but when I started digging, she pitched in. She didn’t get annoyed about her skirt, which got pretty sandy all over.

  Harris scampered back and forth in the canal. After a warning from Ben, he stayed between his mother and the water’s edge, running on a new, deeper motor. He said he was a steam shovel.

  He could talk if he wanted to.

  “Seems to me we’re doing more than our share of the work,” Vicky said to me.

  I stopped digging. She didn’t sound too unhappy about it. Not the way Mom would have sounded. I didn’t know what Vicky expected me to say. After a moment of looking at me looking at her, Vicky turned to Daddy and said cheerfully, “I think it’s about time you two engineers put a little shoulder into this effort.”

  “All right,” Daddy said. “Ben, you give a hand with the digging. I’ll get some more water into the pool.”

  Daddy filled the pool near to overflowing, making about ten trips. He did it a lot faster than Ben could. Of course, he was bigger and stronger than Ben, which counted for a lot. And he hadn’t done any digging.

  The water seeped through the sand that still kept the tide pool dammed up. “It won’t hold much longer,” Ben told us.

  “You’re ready to give it a try, anyway,” Daddy said.

  The sand shark had been swimming more rapidly around and around since Daddy had added the fresh cold water to the pool. The shark looked like it was getting ready too, making a sudden turn into a figure eight, or giving its tail an extra little flip now and then.

  Vicky took Harris by the hand and stood back from the pool. Daddy took up a position halfway between the tide pool and the sea. He held an extra bucket of water to help wash the shark along in case it got stuck on the way.

  “You keep an eye on the shark,” Ben told me. “Let me know if he looks like he’s going to go for me.”

  “Right,” I said. I was too tired to find this even a little bit funny.

  Ben dropped to his knees, and chopped at the sand with the bucket. The dam broke. Water gushed into the canal.

  Ben fell backward for safety, but the shark acted like it had been given a set of instructions. It skimmed the surface of the water, racing for the sea. Daddy poured the extra bucket of water into the canal as the shark rushed past him.

  I ran a little ways, hoping to keep up as the shark raced the water to the sea. A few seconds later, it was gone.

  “Well,” Ben said. He’d come to stand near Daddy, his hands on his hips. He sounded a little disappointed that things had gone so well.

  “This deserves a celebration,” Daddy said.

  “Celebration?” Ben echoed.

  He missed that shark, I could tell. He missed the shark or maybe the feeling he’d had before he set it free. Like it was a moment to save in his memory. I could have told him it would be like that, but he wouldn’t have believed me.

  I hoped he would look my way, that he would have something to say to me. I hoped we would have a story to tell each other later, the way Daddy said.

  “Hamburgers on the grill and all the marshmallows we can eat,” Daddy said.

  “Yea-ay,” Harris crowed.

  Vicky said, “You guys make a great shark rescue team. I never saw anything like it.”

  And Ben gave me a big grin.

  Vicky made dinner. That is, she put the burgers on the grill and went back inside to make a salad. Daddy put on a CD and danced around the deck, singing along. Sometimes he stopped singing to say things like “Wonder what that shark is telling all his friends?”

  Once he threw his fist in the air and yelled, “Sharkbusters!” loudly enough that they heard it on the deck next door. Over the sound of the ocean.

  Everybody waved.

  I entertained Harris. He sat next to me while I spread out all the stuff in my bucket to dry on the deck. There were mostly shells and bottles, a couple of pieces of pale green glass rubbed smooth. He had to touch everything. I didn’t mind. Stuff that comes out of the ocean has its own furriness.

  Ben watched us for a while, then went inside and came back with his earphones on. He sat on one of the steps down low. I figured he had to sit there to get away from Daddy’s music.

  Harris wanted to look at the stuff I keep on the bookshelves in the kitchen, my collection. He brought out a couple of the pieces of tangled fishing line, which are always my favorites. I took them away from him and carried them back in.

  That they’re tangled is what makes them so good. One of them is wound tight around a piece of sea glass. When we hang it in a window and the sun shines through, it showers the room with blue dots of light.

  Vicky didn’t see me put them back. She was busy making a salad.

  Then Harris brought out the horseshoe crab I’d found last summer. Daddy let me keep it because it had been dead a long time and only smelled a little bit. It was my favorite too.

  The tail broke when Harris used it for a handle.

  Vicky caught up with Harris in time to see the pieces fall on the deck. He yelled and Daddy hurried over to help. Vicky bumped heads with Daddy, grabbing to be the one to pick it up. “Ow!”

  Harris dropped the horseshoe crab tail and it broke.

  He stood like a statue.

  I knew Harris was sure he was going to get yelled at. I wanted to yell at him. But I said, “I guess it was getting pretty old.” I still had all the parts, after all.

  Ben stood up, and although we couldn’t see him before, I could see him now, watching to see how things were going to go. I felt a little lump in my throat, from embarrassment, but also sort of being afraid that he’d think I wasn’t being nice to Harris.

  Vicky told Harris he couldn’t take anything else off that shelf. She didn’t say it like she thought I was being selfish. She knew some stuff was mine and that’s all.

  Harris’s face was red and a little sad, like I’d seen before. “You could bring o
ut one of my picture books,” I told him. “They’re on the shelf right below. There’s a beach book for every summer I’ve come here.”

  “How about that, Mack?” Vicky asked him. “We’ll read one before bed.”

  He nodded, going indoors with her. Probably he thought “before bed” meant anytime starting now. I picked up the pieces of the horseshoe crab.

  Maybe the broken tail could be glued together. I could set it back on the shelf with the tail partway inside the shell so it would look fine.

  Daddy said, “Maybe that’s one to toss.”

  “No,” I said. “It’s part of my collection.”

  On her way back into the house, Vicky asked Daddy if he was keeping an eye on the meat. He hurried over to turn the hamburgers.

  “Hope everybody likes them well done,” he called inside to her.

  Vicky came out holding a towel and said, “Does that mean you haven’t been watching? I should have put Ben in charge.” She scratched her leg.

  “Probably true,” Daddy said, and got Vicky to dance around the deck with him in these big sweeping circles. I don’t think she was mad at him to start with but dancing made her all smiles. She flipped the towel around like it was something fancy.

  Ben looked sort of disgusted with them. He had looked that way once or twice before when they acted romantic.

  It did feel weird to see Daddy doing all the things that got on Mom’s nerves and then see Vicky make it okay. Or just let it be okay. I don’t know which. Sometimes when Mom got mad, Daddy would say this or that didn’t used to get on her nerves.

  Harris came back outside with three books. He sat down close to me and started to look at the pictures in one of them. I put some bottles back into my bucket to be cleaned up later.

  When Daddy and Vicky took the burgers off the grill, Vicky was the one who put them on a plate. Daddy sort of hung around her, holding the plate and looking at her in a way that made Vicky blush.

  Ben seemed embarrassed by the whole thing. When he took the chair at the end of the table, he said, “We’ll let you two teenagers sit together.”

  I expected Daddy to say something, like Ben wasn’t in charge of where people sat. Or that Vicky would shoot Ben the death look. But Daddy played along and slid into the chair next to Vicky.

  Vicky laughed in this flirty way and said, “Harris, come to the table, honey.”

  So he did. He climbed onto the other end chair and gave me what I’d come to think of as his big boy smile, lots of teeth showing. I was glad my chair was right in the middle. And I gave him a bigger big boy smile right back.

  That made him look down at his plate and—I don’t know why—made me feel a little ashamed of myself. Okay, he’d broken my horseshoe crab, but I knew he didn’t mean to.

  Vicky was complaining about new flea bites on her ankle, so I don’t think she saw anything. Neither did Ben. “These burgers aren’t as done as they looked,” he said as red juice trickled down his wrist.

  After the first bite, he ate without talking. We all did. Harris could keep his motor going while he chewed, but now he was mostly quiet. Saving sharks was hungry work.

  We were almost done before Daddy tried out one of his riddles. “How do you know an elephant’s been in your kitchen?” Daddy asked.

  Ben answered, “His footprints are in the peanut butter,” as if he was bored.

  “Ow,” Daddy said. “Got me.”

  Ben rolled his eyes and said, “That’s the one you told me the first time you took Mom out.”

  “I never heard that one before,” I said. I never knew Daddy told riddles for anyone else either. It was kind of a sickening thing to find out.

  “Knock, knock,” Daddy said, looking at me.

  I decided to get over it. Otherwise Ben might think I was a baby after all. I said, “Who’s there?”

  “Wendy.”

  “Wendy who?”

  Daddy said, “Wendy phone rings, answer it.”

  Harris laughed. Really laughed. Ben looked at me like What a baby, so I didn’t dare laugh. I didn’t think this was fair. Just because Ben was mad, it didn’t mean I had to be mad. But it wasn’t the right time to say so. Besides, if I was going to be mad, we might be mad about different things.

  Harris laughed enough for both of us. Daddy asked Harris, “What was Tigger doing in the outhouse?”

  “Bathroom,” Ben said in a rude way.

  “Ben,” Vicky said.

  He said, “Harris doesn’t know what an outhouse is. He’s a little kid,” making Harris look down at his plate again. I’d only known Harris for a day but I knew he didn’t like it when somebody made being a little kid the same thing as being stupid. I didn’t like it either.

  “Okay, okay,” Daddy said. “What was Tigger doing in the bathroom?”

  Harris was still looking at his plate.

  “Looking for Pooh!” Daddy shouted like everyone was having a good time, and Harris squeezed his eyes shut and laughed this loud fake laugh.

  “More potato salad?” Vicky asked, offering the container to Daddy.

  Daddy told her he’d never really liked potato salad from the deli. Ben got a funny look in his eye and told Daddy it wasn’t from the deli. His mom made it herself.

  “We didn’t get this at the store?” Daddy said, looking innocent.

  “I brought it from home,” Vicky said. “I use the containers over again.”

  So Daddy said he was sorry about the potato salad. He really liked the fruit salad with the marshmallows in it. Vicky said that was from the deli. And Ben pushed the bowl across to him, saying, “Here, have another helping, dude.”

  “Ben.” This went with Vicky’s death look. So nobody else saw how sad Harris still looked.

  I felt bad for him. His hands were furry, it was true, but he was only a little boy. “Knock, knock,” I said in a low voice meant for Harris.

  “Who’s there?” he whispered without looking at me.

  “Wuv.”

  “Wuv who?”

  I said, “I wuv you.”

  He looked at me, the corners of his mouth turning up. Then looked quickly down again. I could tell he felt better.

  “I wuv you too,” Vicky said, and gave him a hand hug.

  Vicky reached across the table and squeezed my hand too. It was weird, but I didn’t mind that it was the same hand that touched Harris’s furry hand. Especially considering he wasn’t just furry but had potato salad between his fingers now too. I waited a little bit before I used my napkin.

  “Here, I’ve got one,” Daddy was saying. “What’s lumpy and brown and has X-ray vision?”

  “Are these glows-in-the-dark jokes?” Ben said in a way that made it clear he wouldn’t think that was very funny.

  I felt better suddenly, knowing this was one of Daddy’s made-up jokes, and knowing that Ben didn’t know that. Daddy was fighting back in his own way, and I was glad. I didn’t like when Ben said things that made everybody feel uncomfortable.

  Daddy asked again, “What’s lumpy and brown and has X-ray vision?” and then gave Harris the punch line to the joke. “A baked potato.”

  Harris laughed. Really laughed, like the first time.

  “I don’t get it,” Ben said, but not in the rude voice he’d been using.

  Harris laughed harder. “Poe-tay—ha, ha, ha—toes,” he said, “have—eyes.”

  “Har-ris,” Vicky said like she could hardly believe he got it. She was beginning to laugh too.

  Daddy loves to tell his vegetable jokes. “What’s purple, has a tail, and goes ‘bzzzzzzzz’?”

  Laughter seemed to burst out of Harris, and he hadn’t heard the end of the joke.

  “A beet, when you plug it in,” Daddy sang out happily. He loves when somebody appreciates his jokes. Ben looked at Daddy like he’d lost his mind.

  For some reason that struck me funny and I laughed too.

  “What’s green and sings ‘It’s a Small World’ when you plug it in?”

  Harris laughed
all the more. He could hardly stay on his chair.

  “Electric lettuce,” I said loudly, to be heard over Harris.

  Harris screamed with laughter.

  “Stop, stop,” Vicky yelled. She was still laughing. She leaned across the corner of the table, trying to hold Harris up. “I demand to know what you’ve put in the food. Silly stuff.”

  “Haaaa, silly, haa, ha, stuff!” Harris yelled. His face went dark red.

  “Harris, settle down. Mack,” Vicky said, shaking him a little. “I’m afraid you’re going to make yourself sick.”

  “Nope,” he told her. Another laugh burst out of him.

  “He’s overtired,” Vicky said to Daddy. “He gets like this when he’s missed his nap.”

  “I don’t mind when he’s like this,” Daddy said.

  “You’ve got potato salad on your sleeve,” Ben said to Vicky in such a mean voice Harris stopped laughing. I didn’t know why a little potato salad would upset someone who didn’t care that his brother’s hands were furry. Whose hands might once have been furry too.

  My mind went right past the surprise of it to understanding that he’d gotten upset about Vicky and Daddy. He’d been mad since they danced on the deck.

  “Ben, we’re all going to quiet down now,” Vicky said, giving him what was definitely a death look. “So nothing is going to slip by me. Change your attitude right now.”

  It was Ben’s turn to look down at his plate. After a long moment of everyone being too quiet, Harris looked at Daddy and said, “Tell some more.”

  “After dinner, maybe,” Daddy said, going along with Vicky. He was pleased to have Harris thinking he was so funny, but he didn’t push it.

  “I’m still itching,” Vicky said, rubbing her legs.

  Daddy said, “Put some more calamine lotion on.”

  “Sometimes it takes a while to get over flea bites,” I told her. “It took Mom a whole month once.”

  Vicky scratched again and Daddy looked sort of disappointed. When I looked in Ben’s direction, he smiled at me. A real smile. The thing I found myself thinking, Ben didn’t want to be coming here on weekends.