I’d left my bucket on the steps and it wasn’t there now. I looked for it under the house, hoping it hadn’t gotten washed away by the tide. Ben was standing under the deck, in stripes of sunlight.
I walked over there. He was striped and now so was I. “Your mom is looking for you,” I said in a loud whisper.
He made a motion with his hand that kind of shushed me and told me to go away at the same time. So I did. Yesterday this would have hurt my feelings. Yesterday I felt sure he didn’t want to walk with me because he thought I was a little kid. Today I knew he just felt like being alone.
I saw that the tide had washed my bucket up behind the house. When I went to get it, I saw the car and was reminded of Daddy’s cell phone. I felt a whole lot better all of a sudden. I could call Mom.
Since the time Daddy went into the water with his phone in the pocket of his shorts, the rule has been no cell phone at the beach. I found it in the glove compartment.
When I flipped it open and pressed Power, nothing happened. Daddy hadn’t recharged the battery. For a second I got really mad at him. Then I remembered he didn’t know I was going to want to use it. I put it back in the glove compartment and started for the beach.
I didn’t get to call Mom and I’d had a terrible thought. What if she called here and Vicky picked up the phone? I hoped Mom was out to breakfast with George this morning. But sometime today I had to call.
I could feel a frown on my face, sort of pinching. I’d had a few minutes to be by myself and I was still crabby. Ben was still standing there in the shade of the deck. He looked like somebody waiting for a bus. I acted like I didn’t see him, the way he wanted me to.
He walked over to me. “I’m tired of being company, that’s all.”
“It’s okay,” I told him. “I’m tired of having company.” I kept on going.
I didn’t know what it was like to come to the beach not knowing how to swim, worried that I couldn’t go into the water without being attacked by sharks. I doubted I would think it was a fun place, even if my mother wasn’t acting like Mary Tyler Moore. Because right at the moment, I didn’t think it was such a fun place anyway.
I hadn’t gotten ten steps away from the house before I heard Vicky calling me. I turned around with a new bad feeling coming over me. “What?”
“Ben didn’t happen to tell you where he was going?”
I looked at Ben. He stepped into the darker shadows under the house. I looked up at Vicky. “He’s probably really close by. There’s only the shore and the marsh.” I couldn’t see Harris, but I knew he was up there. I could hear his motor.
Vicky looked along the shore, probably hoping to see Ben. I looked at Ben, wondering why I had lied for him. I felt my forehead for a fever. Daddy says people with a fever can do things and not know why. My forehead felt kind of hot. I hoped it was the sunburn.
Vicky turned back to me. That bad feeling got stronger. “Can Harris come with you, Lexie?” I knew she would ask that.
It wasn’t that he had sticky hands and sounded like a truck. The thing that came to my mind right off, he was much littler than me and I didn’t want to play babysitter.
I looked at Ben, or at the shape that was Ben. When he didn’t want to explore the shore with me because I was too little, I didn’t like it. More than that, I didn’t like being Ben.
“He has to stay out of the water so he won’t drown,” I said. I still didn’t want to take him. “Anything he picks up is mine if I want it. I’m beachcombing out here.”
“Lexie,” Daddy said, coming out of the house to stand beside Vicky. He sounded unhappy with me.
I didn’t care.
He didn’t tell me we were having company until we got to the shore. We weren’t having our time together the way I thought we would. I was taking Harris with me.
And now Daddy wanted to act like he had complaints about me.
I was feeling brave, I guess. Or mad. Things were not working out the way they were supposed to and I was tired of it. I was tired of pretending I didn’t mind.
I tried to give Daddy the death look. “This is my vacation too. This is my beachcombing trip and I don’t have to take him with me.”
I could feel my knees knock together. Actually knock. But somebody had to stand up for me and I guess it had to be me.
“You hear that?” Vicky said, looking down at Harris.
His engine revved.
“Lexie has rules, and you have to abide by them.”
His engine revved again agreeably.
“All right, then. You can go.”
He was something to see as he came down the steps. He had blue paint on his nose and cheeks and shoulders, and on the tops of his bare feet. Well, not paint. Some kind of sunscreen. My sitter has some in Pepto-Bismol pink.
“He needs a bucket or something,” I said.
Vicky dashed inside, and by the time Harris reached the sand, she was throwing a plastic bag over the side of the deck. It didn’t float on the breeze. It dropped straight down. Harris picked it up and looked inside. He pulled out a carrot.
“So it won’t blow away,” Vicky said. For somebody who sounded so much like Mary Tyler Moore, Vicky was pretty smart.
Harris dropped the carrot back into the bag. I showed him where I’d found the horseshoe crab’s shell, right in front of the next-door deck.
Further down the shore we saw Mrs. Brady walking her pink poodle. When he barked at us, we wiggled our butts to bother him more. I always did that when I was little like Harris, and he thought it was pretty funny.
There were a lot of people outside today. People getting there for their first day at the shore, people leaning on deck rails and eating bagels. Hanging out damp blankets to dry in the sun.
We walked over a clam bed and I told Harris about putting his toes over the holes. Thoop, thoop, thoop. He did it and stood there for a moment. Then he smiled at me, the sweetest smile, and said, “Clam kisses.”
I don’t know what happened, but all at once I really liked Harris. “So you like people to call you Mack, huh?”
“I’m the biggest,” he said.
“I guess so,” I agreed, and put my toes over as many holes as I could stretch them to reach. I’d call him Mack if that was what he wanted. I didn’t think he’d forget his name was Harris, and if he did, there were people who would remind him.
Mack’s motor started and he ran off along the shore. I stopped counting clam kisses and stayed close enough to save him if he ran into the water.
I had almost forgotten I’d come out here to look for sea treasure. Mack found the first piece. Squatting beside it to look it over, he didn’t touch it.
“It’s a sand dollar,” I said. “It’s the first one I’ve ever seen. Washed up, I mean. Dead.”
“My parakeet’s dead too,” Mack said.
“That’s sad,” I said. “When did it die?”
“Yesterday.” He thought this over. “A long yesterday ago.”
“Oh. Well, I’m very sorry.”
“We buried it in the backyard.”
A little breeze blew and the stink of dead fish lifted into the air. I still had my shovel in my bucket. “We could bury this sand dollar if you want.”
So we did. I dug around and under the sand dollar until it lay a little deeper in the sand. I gave the shovel to Mack. “You can help me cover it up.” I used my hands to scoop up the sand I’d dug out.
At first he worked without talking to me, just kept his motor running. But when we had finished the job and I was deciding if we were supposed to say a prayer or something, Mack said, “Ben says we’re getting married.”
“Who are you getting married to?” I asked.
“Your daddy.”
I felt really stupid. Of course it would be Daddy. Vicky wouldn’t be spending the week here if she was marrying somebody else.
“I didn’t know that,” I said.
“I didn’t know it either,” Mack said.
He didn’t look any ha
ppier to have found out about it than I was. In fact, he looked like a little kid whose parakeet had died. I knew how he felt.
After a moment I took his hand. It was crusted with sand. So was mine.
On the way home, Mack combed the shore. Now and then he wanted me to look at something, and he put some stuff in his bag with the carrot and he put a couple of good things in my bucket. But I might as well have been walking through a fog.
Who was going to tell my mother?
It would have to be Daddy. What if he didn’t tell her before I went back to Baltimore? I didn’t want to know this if Mom didn’t.
Maybe I could pretend not to know it. Maybe I could pretend to come down with something that gave me such a high fever I got delirious. The good thing about pretending is sometimes it feels true.
What worried me about that was if I got delirious, maybe I would accidentally tell her. Just thinking about it made me feel sick and dizzy.
I couldn’t stop thinking. I imagined Vicky would move her boys into Daddy’s tiny apartment. Daddy couldn’t give them my bedroom, which is really a corner next to his desk. Two boys could sleep there only if they hung from their heels like bats.
Then I realized Daddy would probably move in with them, wherever they lived. Vicky probably wouldn’t have a bedroom for me. And when I had to sleep in a closet, it wouldn’t even be my closet.
And out here at the beach, when I came for the weekend, Ben wouldn’t be company. I would.
Vicky would be my stepmother. I thought about Vicky giving me the death look. I couldn’t help it. Actually, they didn’t seem so terrible, those looks, but then, she had only looked them at Ben and Daddy. I might feel differently if she looked a death look at me.
Ben and Mack would be my brothers.
Stepbrothers, but what difference would it make? I have three friends with older steps and one friend with a younger step and nobody ever says, Oh, this is my stepbrother.
No.
At first they might say, That’s my new brother. Sooner or later, they get tired of explaining their whole family. Mostly sooner, what they say is That’s my brother.
Then that person with the ponytuft or the person with furry hands is related to them in everybody’s mind. I looked at Mack, who trudged through the sand a couple of steps ahead of me.
He dragged his sack with the carrot and a few small pieces of car-shaped driftwood. The blue sunscreen had mostly worn off and his face was too pink. His hair flipped up at the front when a breeze blew, which made him look strong and brave, the way a sailboat can look when it heads into the wind.
“We’re almost home,” he said to me as we neared the house. He started his motor up and sped off to show Vicky all his finds.
Home. Mack called it home. Like he’d already lived with us forever.
By the time I climbed the steps, Mack was laying out his finds.
Ben was back. If he was in trouble with Vicky, it didn’t show. She was sitting in the sun on a deck chair and having iced tea. Ben was eating from a plate full of some of these rolled-up cookies they’d brought with them that taste kind of like apple pie. I think Ben was eating them for breakfast.
Daddy had been swimming. His hair was still wet and stood up in little spikes. But I’d had worries all morning and I didn’t really care if he was having fun.
“You look like you’re a million miles away, Lexie,” Vicky said. “What are you thinking about?”
My mind was kind of a blank before she asked that, so maybe that was why I said, “I’m thinking about getting married.” What I meant was, I was thinking about them getting married. It was too late to take it back. Vicky had been about to take a sip of her iced tea. Now she held it a few inches from her lips.
Daddy had been admiring Mack’s stuff, but he stopped to look at me hard. Like I was in trouble. And we hadn’t been having the best day already.
Ben was drinking soda. He snorted and it spurted right out of his nose.
“Ow, ow, that burns,” he yelled.
Mack was the worst. He didn’t get that I had repeated what he’d told me. He looked at me sadly, like he thought I’d had a secret I hadn’t told him. Once Ben stopped yelling, Mack asked, “Is everybody getting married?”
Daddy tried to act like the whole thing was a big joke. “This sounds pretty serious,” he said. He winked this big fake wink, looking at Vicky. “I think I ought to at least meet the fellow before you start thinking about marrying him, Lexie.”
I felt myself go hot all over. There was probably nothing Daddy could have said that would have been right. But there was nothing he could have said that would have been more wrong.
The plate of cookies was right in front of me. I reached out and hit the edge of it so cookies flew up into the air and fell all around. “You didn’t tell me you asked company to come for the week,” I said. “You didn’t tell me you’re marrying Vicky either. You always told me it’s the same thing as a lie if I don’t tell you something important. But that’s what you keep doing.”
Daddy stopped looking like there was something funny going on. “You’re right,” he said.
Suddenly, I was crying. “I don’t want to be right.” And then I ran into the house. Daddy hates it when I cry. I do too, I hate it when I cry.
I ran to the closet that was all I had after we’d made room for Vicky and Ben and Mack. I slammed the door as hard as I could.
The thing is, usually once I get by myself, I don’t feel so much like crying anymore. Sometimes I try to go on crying if I want to make Mom feel sorry for me. She probably knows that extra crying is fake. She’s never said so, but I think she knows.
Daddy knocked on my door. “Go away,” I said.
“Lexie, you can’t sit in there like Cinderella in the ashes.”
Another little flash of anger shot through me. Not as bad as when I’d knocked cookies all over the deck, maybe, but I could easily have spit sparks at Daddy. What I did was open my door and say, “Come back when you know enough not to make jokes.”
It was nearly the same thing he says to me when I should apologize for something. Come back when you know how to behave. Come back when you can sound nicer. It was just perfect.
And then I shut the door.
Things were pretty quiet out there for the next few seconds. And then there was some whispering. I figured it was Vicky. And maybe Daddy. Probably Daddy.
I wasn’t feeling sorry for myself anymore. I waited to see what Daddy would say. And it had better be good.
I opened my book and pretended to read.
Mack opened the door and motored on in. I could see most of the hallway and I couldn’t see anybody else out there. I figured Daddy and Vicky had gone back to the table to talk.
Mack didn’t look right at me. He had his pink Volkswagen in his hand and he imagined a kind of S-shaped road to the end of my bed and let the Volkswagen putt-putt its way across the sheet to stop at my foot. “Vroom, vrroooom,” he said softly. And then he let the motor die out.
“Hi,” I said.
He leaned both elbows on my bed and rested there. “Are you coming out?”
“Later,” I said.
“I want to dig up the dollar,” he said.
“It’s too smelly. We can’t keep it.”
“Can too.”
“I guess so.” We could lay it in the sun to see if it would dry out like those sand dollars we could buy for a dollar at the marina. And if it didn’t, I could buy him one. I had a dollar.
I thought about leaving my room and wondered whether Daddy would think that meant I wasn’t mad at him anymore. I wasn’t quite as mad at him after getting to say the perfect thing but I thought it might be important to let him think I was. Mom usually had to be mad at Daddy a pretty long time to make him sorry. I wished I had a death look.
“Later,” I said to Mack.
“Now,” he whispered. And he leaned forward and kissed my big toe. My very dirty big toe.
My heart just melted. “You’re
a nice boy, do you know that?” That is my most favorite thing my grandmother says to me. Except she doesn’t say that I’m a boy.
He nodded. He knew.
“I have to sit here right now. Then I have to call my mom, and after that, I’ll go help you dig up the sand dollar.”
His motor started right up, but he didn’t go anywhere.
“There’s a sand pail over there in the corner,” I said, pointing to a blue bucket with a green shovel. “It’s my very favorite one.” It used to be, until it couldn’t hold enough stuff. It had been in the storage room for a couple of summers without getting used. “I could meet you on the steps.”
Daddy came down the hall and stuck his head in the door. “Can we try again?”
Mack gave me a look that said he knew I was sort of bribing him. He took the bucket and motored to the doorway.
“I want to call Mom,” I said to Daddy. “I told her I’d call yesterday.”
“Now, look, Lexie …,” Daddy said.
I said, “You have to call her first.”
“Lexie’s right,” Vicky said from the hallway.
“I know that,” Daddy said. “Weren’t we saying that?”
“Of course,” Vicky said. She stepped around Daddy to look in. “We’re letting Lexie know we agree with her. Mack, why don’t we go outside?”
Daddy came in and perched on the end of my bed, bumping his head on the slanted ceiling. “Ow! Guess it’s a good thing you’re short.”
“Only Mack is that short,” I said, pulling my knees up so he’d have room to sit.
“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you Vicky and I are making plans. I should have made sure you got to know each other sooner.”
I wished he’d said that before instead of making that stupid joke.
“I thought we’d tell you here at the beach,” Daddy said. “I meant to wait until the end of the week.”
“Mom might be sad about you and Vicky,” I said.
“I’m a little sad about this too,” Daddy said. “I still care when your mom feels bad. I think I know how she’ll feel this time. Like the sad part is a whole lot less important than the happy times she has with you and also the man she’s dating.”
Lexie Page 8