“You buying something?” France spoke in a voice scarred by cigarettes.
“Two tall Budweisers, two bags of salt-and-vinegar chips, and two Mars bars.”
“That’ll be twenty dollars. The phone’s on the wall over there.”
Margaux fished her emergency twenty out of the inside pocket of her shorts. It was sweaty, and France gave her a disgusted look as she took it by the edge of her chipped red fingernails. Margaux went to the phone and made a collect call, which she was half-amazed still worked. They’d be picked up in twenty minutes.
When she was done, France was bringing their loot to the table on a beer-stained tray.
“Chips and Mars bars too. Fantastic,” Liddie said.
She ripped open one of the Mars bars with her teeth and wolfed half of it down. “I’m starving. Should’ve eaten something before I went out.”
Margaux’s own stomach rumbled in response. She hadn’t had anything to eat since that breakfast sandwich at McDonald’s, which was stupid of her. If she hadn’t stopped when she caught up to Liddie, she probably would’ve bonked in a couple of miles. She sat down and ripped open her Mars bar, biting into its soft center. She’d forgotten how sweet these things were. And how delicious.
“God, that’s good.”
She picked up her beer and took a long swig. Budweiser was her camp beer. It tasted like her youth, like things best forgotten.
“This is fantastic.”
“And how,” Liddie said, clinking her bottle against hers.
“Sorry I screwed up your foot.”
“I’m sure it’ll be fine tomorrow.”
Margaux took another drink. She could already feel the beer’s effects. Or maybe it was this place, and she was placebo drunk. Memory drunk.
“We should train for something together,” Margaux said. “What about the half marathon in October?”
“Now you want to run with me?”
“It could be fun.”
“I’m already signed up for it, actually.”
“Perfect.”
“I’m running it with someone else.” Liddie looked into her bag of chips as if she were expecting to find a prize inside.
“Do I know her?”
“Why do you assume it’s a her?”
“I wasn’t . . . I . . . Who is it?”
“Owen.”
“Who’s Owen?”
“You know Owen.”
“The only Owen I know is Owen Bowery.”
Liddie popped a chip into her mouth.
“Oh, wow.”
Margaux worked the thought of Owen, the cute camper who’d turned into a sort of rock star, and her sister she assumed was gay, or at the very least asexual, around in her mind. Liddie looked shy, not herself. Could she have been wrong about her all these years? Or did the fact that she was transgender mean she was, in some sense, gay? Margaux felt stupid and confused but still smart enough not to ask these questions out loud.
“Have you been in touch with him all this time?” she asked instead.
Liddie shoved a few more chips into her mouth. “We ran into each other a couple of years ago. And then I designed the cover for his album.”
“You did?”
Margaux wasn’t up on all the latest music, but working in a high school kept her more exposed to modern culture than she might otherwise have been. She’d heard of Owen’s band, Free-fall, and when she realized she had a connection to it, she’d started following their career. She could even sing some of their big hit, “Another Round, Another Town.”
“Yep.”
“Wow. You’re dating a celebrity.”
“Don’t you be like that. You’ve known him since he was thirteen.”
“Sure, but that was before.”
“Before he was famous?”
“Exactly.”
Margaux opened her bag of chips and ate one. She started to cough. She felt as if the first layer of skin had been scraped off her tongue.
“These are crazy strong,” she said once she’d rinsed her mouth out with beer.
“Right?”
“So . . . Owen. How long have you been seeing him? You are seeing him, right? Not just running with him.”
Liddie nodded. “A couple of years.”
“Wow.”
“Will you stop saying that?”
“Sorry, it’s just . . .”
“You thought I was gay?”
“Maybe?”
“Or trans, right? That fucking show.”
“I didn’t know what to think, Liddie. You never told us anything.”
“You never told me you were straight either.”
“One doesn’t though.”
“Exactly my point.”
Margaux picked up her beer and took another long drink. “I guess you’re right.” She put the bottle down. It made a hollow sound on the table. “My beer’s empty. How did that happen?”
“Magic.”
She started to giggle as the front door banged open.
Liddie turned to look. “You called Sean?”
“Who did you think I was going to call?”
Liddie tossed back the rest of her beer. She stood up and held her arms out to Sean. “All right, Prince Charming. You going to carry me or what?”
CHAPTER 16
SOMETHING’S COOKING
Kate
If the wind had been strong enough, Kate might’ve gone for a sail. Take one of the Lasers out by herself and sail down to the other end of the lake, where she could be anonymous. That was the problem with camp. Everywhere and everything was memories. Whether they were your own or other people’s. You couldn’t escape them. The person you were, the person you used to be, it didn’t matter. All that mattered was how others saw you.
Good girl. Together. The even-keeled one who always went along with everyone else because that was easiest. She knew what people thought of her.
She was that girl, but she hated how it defined her. She had other sides—hidden sides—that no one ever gave her any credit for. Which meant she never got to be anyone else when she was around her family. Only good ol’ reliable Kate.
And yet, here she’d stayed, long past the others, every summer starting in May with precamp, then setup. Painting cabins and pulling mattresses out of storage. Clearing brush and debris and the leftover leaves. Through the staff arrival, and then the campers, right on up until mid-September, pulling it all apart again, a LEGO set being put back in its box. When you worked at a camp, you couldn’t have a normal job. Even in college, she’d spent the fall semester catching up on the classes she missed. It had seemed worth it to Kate because she was going to—someday soon, her parents kept assuring her—take over the running of Macaw when they finally retired.
Only they didn’t. Instead, on her twenty-seventh birthday, they’d sat her down to a special lobster dinner that she’d had to share with Liddie, like everything, and told her they’d decided she wasn’t going to get to run camp after all. They didn’t think she had it in her. She was too accommodating, too nice. People would take advantage. The whole time they were telling her this, Liddie was cracking the claws of her lobster, prying the loose meat out of the carcass, methodically, as if she were conducting an autopsy. Oblivious to the fact that Kate’s life was being equally dissected, bit by bit, across the table.
At least she hadn’t begged and pleaded with her parents. She had that point of pride. Instead, she’d pushed her plate away and left. She’d called a friend, and they’d gotten drunk on sugary margaritas at a taco joint in Saint-Henri. Later, Kate had kissed a boy for the first time since high school. It felt dangerous and stupid, which matched her mood.
She’d woken up alone and with a splitting headache. It was the first of May. Normally, she’d be heading off to camp. Her bags were already packed for the summ
er. But that was all off. She’d had to find something else to do. Her parents said she could continue as she’d been, working alongside them, doing all the real work without the decision-making power, but that was too humiliating.
The funny thing was, mostly, once she got used to it, she didn’t miss camp. It was weird that first summer, when the days warmed up, not to be on the lake, living in a musty cabin, ignoring the news. But by then she was working at an organic grocer, helping out on their farm on the weekends. She made some friends her own age. She took an interest in things other than the social sphere at Camp Macaw. She certainly didn’t miss her parents. When some of the counselors invited her to come to their annual Thanksgiving dinner, she declined. She was okay. So long as she stayed away.
That was the rub, as her father might say.
She didn’t miss it if she stayed away.
But now that she was back? She missed it like crazy.
• • •
Feeling restless, Kate went to visit Amy. She’d been putting this off, the way you do sometimes with the thing you want the most so you still have the anticipation of it.
Kate found Amy where she always was—working in the kitchen. Amy hadn’t been the chef when Kate was small. She joined the kitchen staff the year Kate worked as a kitchen helper. She’d gone by “Aimee” then, and her English had been as broken as her spirit. She’d been twenty-five to Kate’s sixteen. She’d escaped a bad marriage and had a young kid in tow. No hard skills except the ones she learned growing up helping her mother take care of a large family. Kate’s parents had a habit of taking in strays—like Sean—and Amy certainly fit that bill. That first summer, you could still see the bruises along her collarbone until changeover.
She’d been hired on as an assistant to June, the long-term chef who’d been around Kate’s whole life, and had taken over when June finally retired.
She and Kate had clicked from the start—could they both tell, then? Something about each other that neither could yet admit? Kate often wondered. She spent hours with Amy, always speaking in English, even though Kate was bilingual, because Amy insisted she needed to learn, to be perfect, “So I won’t be stuck anymore,” she said. Two summers later, when Amy was making her come for the first time with her fingers down the front of her shorts and up inside her underwear, her back pressed against the hidden side of the nurse’s cabin, Kate didn’t care. Amy’s tongue was hot in her mouth, and she wanted that mouth sucking and licking every inch of her.
Afterward, when it had started to rain, she and Amy slipped into the back room of the nurse’s cabin, taking a risk but not a huge one because it was the nurse’s day off, and no one was sick. She’d slipped off her shorts and guided Amy down her body, pressing up into her while her own fingers sought out Amy’s hard nipples. She’d come so hard that time it hurt, and she knew then she was lost. Lost to whatever Amy wanted from her, or anyone else who could make her feel like that.
Amy had been scared though. Scared they’d get caught, that she’d lose her job, which was the only security she had for her son. She’d withdraw until Kate almost had to beg for it, beg to let her reciprocate. In those months when she wasn’t at camp, Kate would seek out that high elsewhere, always looking for the intensity of that first time as they lay damp and groaning on a cot bed while rain spat at the windows.
Except for briefly at the funeral, Kate hadn’t seen Amy in five years. Her break with her parents had brought about a final break with the woman who held sway over her sexual happiness, and most of the rest of her happiness too. She hadn’t wanted to leave Amy behind, but it was the only way she could move on.
Kate watched Amy as she moved about the kitchen. She was in her early forties now, and time had not been kind, though she was still beautiful to Kate. Amy wore her dark hair short, like Liddie, more comfortable in her identity since Kate wasn’t there to blow her cover. The ties of the apron she wore hugged her waist, cinching it in, and when Amy turned and saw her, something in Kate let loose. The years and resentments fell away, and all that was left was bare, naked want.
CHAPTER 17
DINNER BELL
Ryan
Ryan hardly knew how he spent the afternoon. Mainly he played the conversation with Swift over and over in his head, then tried to think of how he was going to tell Kerry about all of this.
And then he went and got drunk.
His dad might’ve had cheap taste in liquor, but who cared about the good stuff when your life was draining away before your eyes?
After he found a bottle of bourbon in the liquor cabinet, Ryan settled into his father’s favorite armchair and turned it so it looked out at the trees, the lake, all that should be his, one-fifth of it anyway, ready to be cut up and parceled off to the highest bidder. And now?
All those expectations, all those plans. Lost. Gone. And for what? An accident. An accident. Because it was the accident that had made his parents suspicious. That’s what they said, or Swift said, or someone said. It was said. One mangled girl they were prepared to ignore. But two? That was a pattern.
The thing was, part of him understood their reasoning. The cutting-him-out part, at least. If you thought you had a serial harmer of women in the family, then disinheriting him was the least you could do. But the rest of it? Putting his fate in his sisters’ hands? What was the point of that? They should’ve just turned him in to the police and let the chips fall where they may. The chips, the cards, playing out the deck.
Lord he was drunk.
And then Ryan must’ve drifted off, because the next thing he knew, the bell was ringing.
It was time for dinner.
• • •
Like Mary’s hand raise during the meeting with Swift, the sound of the bell invoked its own Pavlovian response in Ryan. Sean must’ve been ringing it; it was always Sean who rang it, those firm, even pulls, the last one extralong. Eight pulls, eight bongs, more than enough to get the message across.
Despite the nap, Ryan was still drunk, and now hungry, a bad combination. He’d better get some food in him. He went into his bedroom and rooted around in his bag for a fresh shirt and pants, feeling the ache in his balls from Liddie’s knee when he took off his pants, and again when he put on the fresh ones. He added a sweatshirt for good measure, an old one from camp days that he’d packed in a fit of sentimentality.
His phone beeped from the pocket of his pants. He didn’t have to look to know it was a text from Kerry.
What’s going on? Did they agree to sell?
Ryan concentrated hard to make sure there were no typos in his response. I’m working on it.
Should I come down? My mother will take the girls.
No, I’m handling it. Got to go. Dinner.
He could see the bubble of Kerry’s next text, but he put his phone down before he read it. If he didn’t read it, then he didn’t have to respond. She’d be pissed, but less so than if she knew the truth, and he didn’t trust himself right now not to tell her or tip her off in some other way. Kerry knew him too well.
Ryan placed his hand over his heart; it was still there ticking, beating up against his chest. Why did it feel as if it were missing? Was that simply the space left by his flown-away dreams?
He went to the bathroom, brushed his teeth, and rinsed out his mouth. He patted down his hair with a wet hand and squinted at himself in the mirror. Close enough, he thought, if he didn’t look too hard. He grabbed a couple of bottles of wine and left.
Outside, dusk was descending. The days were already shorter, the sun down over the lake by the time he got to the lodge. Sunsets were always beautiful at Macaw, but he’d check it out another day. Or maybe not.
Inside the lodge, half the tables were stacked on top of each other along the wall, like they used to be for dances. A table was set in the middle of the room, a bench on either side. One table was all they needed now that it was just the nuclea
r family and Sean. Always Sean.
“You made it,” Margaux said.
Ryan focused on her. “Everyone needs to eat.”
“Don’t be that way.”
“What way?”
She motioned for him to sit next to her. Sean, Liddie, and Mary were sitting on the other side of the table. Kate was in the kitchen helping Amy.
Ryan plunked the bottles of wine he’d snagged from the house on the table.
“Anyone got an opener?”
Mary wrinkled her nose. “Smells like you’ve had enough to drink already.”
“It’s fine, Mary,” Margaux said. “I could do with a drink.”
“The big beers at Twilight weren’t enough?”
“How did you . . . ?”
“Sean told me.”
“Right. Of course.”
Liddie reached for a piece of bread. “White squishy store bread,” they’d called it when they were kids, slathering margarine on it in thick layers.
“We had a beer in the middle of the day at the Twilight,” Liddie said. “So what? Not the first time.”
“How’s your ankle, Liddie?” Margaux asked. Ryan wondered what she was talking about. Wasn’t it her arm he’d grabbed? Yes, it was. Something else had happened this afternoon while he was brooding, like a TV show that continued when he wasn’t there to watch.
“I’ll survive.”
Ryan grabbed a piece of bread, rolled it up, and ran it into the tub of margarine.
“Gross, Ryan,” Margaux said. “Use a knife at least.”
He ignored her and stuffed the bread into his mouth. God, that tasted fantastic. He hadn’t had a piece of white-flour bread in years. And margarine . . . He wasn’t even sure Kerry knew what that was.
Kate and Amy came out of the kitchen carrying a tray of fish sticks and tartar sauce, mixed vegetables, and potatoes. The traditional Friday camp meal, never to vary, no matter what, even when it was only them. Friday fish. As if they were Catholics instead of heathens. Celebrants, instead of sinners.
“This looks great, Amy,” Margaux said. “Will you join us?”
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