“You’re such a patient man,” my Lizzie would tell me, sometimes with a watery fondness that made me feel like my life was worth something, other times as a terse rebuke that with her pursed lips made me feel inadequate and empty. I suppose it was the truth. It was the summer again, and I was staying out on the dock late. In a worn vinyl deckchair, I waited for silence, enduring bug bites, rowdy parties on big loud motorboats. Eventually, at a late hour, the world would quiet. For reasons I can hardly articulate, it was important I sat out there listening to the lake’s soft lap and nothing else.
Long ago, I tried to explain this to Lizzie, when even after long days taking care of Sam and Dani, I would steal a few moments out there. I said something like, “It’s just for me.” It was a long time ago, but this was the sentiment. She never followed up, never asked again. We didn’t have much time for patience then, and whatever small corners of life we needed for ourselves were allowed as a rule. Maybe my hours on the dock were like small savings of time, stores of patience that showed up in me and led Lizzie to say, “you’re so patient. I don’t get it.”
The truth is, I never really thought about any of this, nor sat on the dock for my family or even just myself. There was something else important about it, something like a desire for unity or oneness with all that buzzing life.
***
I walked into our kitchen, which had tall windows that framed the backyard, the dock, the lake, and I saw Lizzie standing in the golden slants of afternoon light. Her features were soft in a familiar faraway gaze as she thoughtlessly dragged a washcloth around a wine glass. She didn’t notice me, and for a moment, I watched her. Dreamily, she continued to ring the glass although it was already dry.
“Hi,” I said.
She blinked as if waking up, as if stepping into sunlight from dark, and looked over at me. For the briefest of moments, her eyes were neutral, blank as if she’d never seen me before. Then she smiled, and the familiar creases returned.
“I was spacing,” she said.
“Tired?”
I wasn’t really listening to Lizzie’s response. We had been married for nearly twenty years, had grown up together. I knew what she was going to say: “no, not really,” even though she was, she was exhausted. The reward for me was in the motions of it all. Out the window, the light pooled and spilled in between the small crests pushing against the dock. I was looking at the mass of tarpaulin and thinking, automatically almost: it’s time for an upgrade.
“And he was a football coach of some kind,” Lizzie said.
“Who was?”
“I really don’t remember what Chris said. Oh, it was some big school. A college.”
“Who is this?”
“The guy,” she said irritably, “moving into the big place down the block.”
I was less interested in sports than many people in this area, but I knew a decent amount because that was what men spoke about.
“Interesting,” I said.
“Guess we’ll be seeing him.”
“Probably will.”
Lizzie returned to the dishes, a few last glasses. I turned back to the windows and stared out at the dock. I wondered if this coach was someone I would recognize from TV. The tarp flapped and sputtered in the breeze. Someone whose face would be known to the husbands in the area, whose teams had been some kind of national success.
***
I was in the living room with the TV on looking at Facebook on my phone when the front door opened and abruptly slammed. Hurried footsteps up the stairs. I looked over at Lizzie, we met eyes, and she called out, “Sam?”
I swiped over to his contact info and checked his location. The blue dot hovered over our address. I showed Lizzie.
“A little late,” she said.
“Want me to check on him?”
“Might be good.”
I went upstairs gladly. We had been watching some show about wives in Salt Lake City. They were all obsessed with wealth, as many people in town were. Lizzie enjoyed “the psychological element,” but really, I think it just made her feel our own life wasn’t so bad. On Facebook, I’d been watching videos about dogs, then grills, then boats. Beautiful hilarious dogs, stainless steel grills with multiple technological features, boats with crazy horsepower, more than one could ever need. It was entertaining, but I didn’t know where the time went, and I’d grown antsy, I realized, as I shut the phone.
I knocked on Sam’s door. I said into the wood, “Sam?”
“Yeah,” I heard, his voice loud and agitated — Sam’s constant tone these days—and lower in pitch than I was yet used to.
“Everything cool?”
“Yeah.”
“Can I come in?”
I heard a chaotic rustling within, whispers, a commotion.
“I’m coming in—”
“Dad!”
Inside, Sam was lying on his bed, headphones in, holding his arms up at me in protest, his whole being shocked, disgusted by my presence.
“What the fuck. I’m in here.”
It reeked of cologne. Far too much cologne. Underneath, I recognized a burned almost sweet scent.
“You’re late. It’s a school night.”
“And you’re just like barging in.”
“I knocked.”
“So? I didn’t give you permission.”
I recalled the many fights we’d had with Dani regarding her space, her privacy—or that her mother had waged, screaming fights, silent fights, whole years of up and down warfare. I was always good cop with Dani, which put pressure on Lizzie, but it was what worked with her. With Sam, our roles were opposite. Lizzie needed it to be that way, she was still unwinding from the pressure of Dani’s intense teenage years. But I couldn’t stand being disliked by my own son.
I shut the door behind me.
“I know you’re out getting high with your friends. I’m not punishing you.”
Sam, a cute, now good-looking kid with his doe eyes and long brown curly hair, gawked at me, his face red with the shame of discovery.
“I just want to have a conversation about it sometime. Not now. For now, I just want you to tell me where you were doing it. You’re not in trouble. I’m not disappointed.”
“A friend’s boat.”
“Whose?”
“I can’t say. He’d get in so much trouble.”
I sighed. It was the cycle of life. I had done the same. I was determined to do better at this than my father had done with me.
“Go take a shower.”
He stiffly stood up, half-frozen like an animal escaping danger. He kept looking at me as if to double-check I wasn’t tricking him.
“You smell,” I said.
At this, he hurried out. I headed back down the stairs.
Lizzie looked at me as I sat down on the couch.
“So?”
“He’s fine. He was playing basketball.”
“Playing basketball.”
“He’s showering.”
I could feel her gaze on me as I pretended to watch the show. Inwardly, I was proud of myself for being a different kind of dad, one who could hold a son’s secret and instruct him, too. It was a new tradition, progress.
“Showering,” Lizzie said again flatly.
Then she opened her phone and vaguely watched the videos on screen.
***
Many people in the area had boats. I wouldn’t say that made them happy. Lizzie had wanted one, back when we were twenty-three and just married, but then she got pregnant. We got kayaks instead, and a rack by the dock. Some lashes, some tarp, and we had our makeshift boathouse. We never had much money. But we also didn’t need it. There were plenty of wealthy people in the area, vacationers from the city and retirees and people like that. They were always agitated, yelling or sulking, leaping from one thing to the next. I don’t judge them, but a boat never solved their issues. And I enjoyed kayaking. It made me feel close to the lake, to nature. Lizzie mostly put up with it. She didn’t use the dock much, citing the bugs.
***
I was out there again at sunset, still in my work shirt and slacks. Usually, I changed before going to the dock, but I didn’t bother to today. I’d just gone straight from the car to the water. In the gray light — it was cloudy, spring is a fickle season in these parts — there was a certain placid clarity over the lake. A legibility. I felt I could see every dock in our curve of waterfront, boats I knew so well they often faded into the background. Today, they had a specificity, as if they were outlined in black. Sam might have been in one of them the previous night, high with friends, girls, whomever. In my mind’s eye, the scenes were those of my own past, on the opposite shore, where I’d grown up. Sam was lying on the deck of a rusted clipper, glazed eyes staring up at the stars, baseball games or 90s music in the background. Friends, like Chris, were present but elsewhere, in a corner with those girls, sucking up to them, or with our rough group of guys, tossing someone overboard. This was me — but it was also my son. He was more like Lizzie, I knew. A social butterfly. And if he wasn’t lying on the boat deck staring at the stars, perhaps he was at the prow like Chris, below deck like Chris, whom I’d so wanted to be like at that time, fondling some girl. Maybe even Lizzie, as I’d always suspected. I’d wanted to be the man like that. It was an odd feeling, this jealousy, an old one, to have tied up in my love for my son, which of course had its quirks but was straightforward and whole.
It was then I noticed the new boat in our little arc. In the dock on the property of the big house.
It was a blue-silver aluminum pontoon, a sleek Bennington, which gleamed even in the cold light. I knew it to be top-of-the-line, what men in my circle wished for, pined for, after four beers, their eyes wet and their fists clenched. Its curving hull was almost womanly, suggestive of a buxom celebrity in a blue sequin dress — yet it was manly too, its bow not an arrow but a thick wedge in the water, a front like an offensive line. It was a clench in the gut. It was the thing you always wanted.
I turned away and looked back to the other shore. I reminded myself that I had won the most important thing in life: Lizzie. She was intelligent and witty and desirable. Others had desired her. Chris had. I hated to admit it, but that made her more valuable to me.
Our pile of royal blue tarp, greening and ripped, flapped pathetically in the wind.
In a sudden rush, I grabbed it out of the water, muscled it up in dripping armfuls that soaked my shirt. Unwieldly, massive, riddled with algae, I threw it over my shoulder, hoisted it up to the garbage bins, and threw it down like the worthless thing it was. I folded it into rough smaller squares so it would fit in the can. Then, reeking of lake water, I went inside.
Lizzie was on the couch staring at me.
“What was that?”
“We need a new tarp.”
I washed my hands. I was thinking about jealousy, and trying to not think about jealousy, and thinking about doing something about it. How foolish it is to desire what we don’t have, a part of me was saying. Another part disagreed in hot waves.
“Did you see the new boat?” she asked.
I turned to her. She had her brow raised at me, challenging me ever so subtly.
“You like it?” I said.
“Well, objectively, it’s nice.”
“Well, we’ll just sell the house and get it, then.”
I really didn’t have time for her games. I felt strongly I had something to do, but I wasn’t sure what it was.
“It’s just a nice boat,” she said.
“Sure,” I said. I headed for the stairs.
“What?” she said, with a kind of force that demanded I stop.
I was closer to her then. I could see she was still beautiful. But time had passed.
“Nothing. I have to change.”
I turned up the stairs, went to our bedroom, and shut the door behind me. For a moment, I was there breathing hard. Then I opened my phone and added to my to-do list: get a new tarp. Then: consider building boathouse.
***
Chris invited me over for a beer. I wasn’t sure why. I’d known Chris since I was ten years old, and the only times we’d ever sat down for a conversation outside the context of a party or social event had been graduation, our weddings, and our fathers’ deaths. I hadn’t heard anything, so I guessed something important was on his mind.
But we sat down in the backyard, his steady old pontoon Lady and his dock — a lot like mine, the wood graying — in view, and he seemed fine. With his sandy full head of hair and well-managed paunch, he seemed healthy as ever.
“How’s Dani?” he asked.
“Good. She’s liking school.”
“Good. Coming home for the summer?”
“In a couple weeks.”
“Be glad to have her back?”
“Of course.”
“Didn’t mean anything by it. Sure it’s just good to have some more space sometimes.”
Chris had three kids, one Sam’s age, Kyle — they were friends — and two younger ones, twins, handfuls, a decade younger. They’d aged his wife, Erica, now sprouting gray streaks I thought wilted her. I kept those thoughts to myself.
“It is,” I said. “But when they go off. Man.”
It had been overwhelming. Bittersweet. Chris wasn’t wrong about the space, I just didn’t like agreeing with him.
“It’s a lot, huh?”
“You’ll see with Kyle.”
“Yeah. See if he makes it there first.”
I’d been looking off toward to the lake. The day was bright, but a sharp gust kept sweeping in from the west, rustling the leaves, bending the distant treetops, sending frothy miniature crests to the shoreline. The light was glimmering rapidly in bluish spangles and blinks on the choppy surface. But now I focused on Chris. He did not actually look how I’d assumed he did. His hair was graying, his eyes were emotional, downcast toward the carefully mowed sod.
“He struggling in school?” I asked.
“Just not paying much attention to it.” His eyes flicked toward me. “And Sam’s doing all right?”
“Doing fine.”
I could feel my abdomen tighten, become a clinch of steel.
“He was over here the other night. He and Kyle, out back. Did you know that?”
“He goes where he goes.”
“But you know. You’ve got his location.”
“Sure.”
Chris was fiddling with his fingernails. A nervous tic I’d seen thousands of times.
“Shit, you can be hard to talk to sometimes.”
“I don’t know what you’re trying to tell me.”
He dropped his hands.
“I’m sorry, man. The stuff is just around the house. I think that’s what it is. He’s used to it. So Kyle doesn’t — he can’t understand why it’s bad. Because I use it.”
He looked in the direction of the big house, the new boat, on the other side of the lake.
“And with that fucking coach around.”
“What does the coach have to do with it?”
He shook his head and looked to the sky. He shut his eyes.
“I don’t know. I don’t fucking know.”
The Lady was bobbing in the windswept waves. Sam had been on that boat the other night with Kyle. As I had been, on the very same boat, with Chris, years ago, doing the same thing.
“It just never ends,” Chris said. “It’s always the same thing. My dad, your dad. Now us. Now the kids. Does it ever end? Or is it just this, over and over?”
Chris and I often thought the same things at the same time. But I never told him because I don’t like to give Chris anything. It was a competition with us, vestiges of our days together when he beat me at everything. Now, I didn’t have the heart to make an argument. Normally, I would compliment the Lady. That typically cheered him and cost me nothing. But now, against Chris’s slumped sad body, it looked small and old, like the hand-me-down it was.
***
That night on the dock, the gusts continued late. Eventually though, they calmed and left a cool churning night behind. I was stargazing, thinking of old navigators who worked without compasses, just stars, which were actually past stars, a dead old map hanging in the sky.
To my surprise, Lizzie came out. She was bundled in a gray cardigan. She held it tight to herself and stood shivering in the dark.
“You okay?” she asked.
“Yeah. And you? You’re freezing.”
“I’m fine.”
I stood and wrapped my arms around her. Her little body vibrated and shook in my embrace. After a few moments, she stilled.
“Gotta get the house back in order for Dani,” she said.
“It looks fine.”
“Just needs some work.
After a moment she said, “I know Sam wasn’t playing basketball.”
“No,” I said. “He wasn’t.”
She stepped out of my arms. “I just don’t know why you’d hide it from me.”
“I think to protect him.”
Lizzie shook her head with a kind of tired exasperation.
“I don’t get it,” she said. “It’s the same with you and her. I’m on your side.” I caught her eyes then as she looked at me, then back at the house. There was a coldness, a confusion, an impatience there. A frustration with so many things.
“Not going to say anything. Okay. That’s great.”
What I wanted to say was that I was angry too, I was frustrated too, but I kept it in and let her, disgusted, return to the house.
The door slammed. I took a deep breath. I remembered to be patient.
I sat back down and looked up at the stars.
***
On Thursdays, we had family dinner. It was a tradition, and we stuck to it. Lizzie’s family started the ritual. My mother and father rarely did anything together. I don’t remember him around much, only when it was time to punish. My mother is a shroud behind cigarette smoke, her face lined, her body stooped. She is still alive. I don’t see her much.
That Thursday was warm and sunny, a perfect balmy day. After work, I put on loafers, a Hawaiian shirt, and grilled some burgers. The days were getting longer again. This was enough to make me happy, although Lizzie was barely speaking to me. While the burgers cooked, I looked at Facebook and laughed at whatever I saw. I don’t remember any of the videos at all.
Lizzie and I made the table in silence. She’d squeezed some fresh lemonade, and she poured it in glasses while the twilight orange light brazenly shone in through the windows. I placed heaps of steaming grilled veggies into a glass bowl. We called down Sam. He dutifully arrived, looking at his phone. Then I served the burgers.
“Phone down,” Lizzie snapped as she sat.
That shifted the tone. I could see Sam’s eyes widen slightly.
“Well, dig in,” I said.
The utensils clattered. Lizzie frowned as she wielded the tongs.
“Beautiful day,” I said.
“Yeah,” Sam croaked.
Lizzie said nothing.
We filled our plates and began to eat.
“Burgers are good, dad.”
“Thanks, Sam. I got a leaner beef this time.”
“Cool.”
“Something a little special. I think it makes a difference.”
“Nice.”
Lizzie said nothing. Chewed. Sipped her drink.
Then she said: “I accepted an invite to the Hargraves’ party.”
“Who are the Hargraves?” I asked.
“Do you not listen?”
“They’re the new people,” Sam said quietly.
“Ah. When is it?”
“Tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow?” I didn’t like plans being made without my consent. “When did you hear about this?”
“Monday,” she said, false and bright.
“Didn’t think to tell me?”
She looked at me like she couldn’t believe what I’d said.
“Don’t even with me.”
I glanced at Sam. In his eyes, I saw a young boy’s need for protection. I nodded at him calmly. Patiently.
“Did we ever find out what team this Hargrave coached?” I asked.
Sam said the name of the college.
I blinked. Felt my eyebrows raise. I coughed.
“Oh.”
Lizzie scoffed. “Oh,” Lizzie said, mocking me.
“I mean it’s pretty big, mom,” Sam said.
“I know it’s big, Sam.”
“Don’t speak to him like that,” I said.
“Oh, look at this. A little united front.”
“What, Lizzie. What is it?”
I could see Sam sinking into the chair and I felt a pang of regret. My throat was sore and hot with strain.
“Nothing!” She held her hands up, posture of innocence. “It’s nothing. Never mind me.” She dropped her hands and looked over at Sam, smiling. “Sorry, honey,” she said. “It’s nothing.”
“Okay,” he said.
I glared at her. Right into that part she was hiding from me.
“It’s nothing,” she said. “See? I’m smiling.”
We ate the rest of the dinner mumbling about nothing. Then Sam excused himself. Lizzie and I cleaned up the kitchen in silence. Then we looked at our phones in separate rooms until it was time for bed.
***
The man who previously owned the big house was not someone I’d known at all. He was aloof to the community, quiet. Rumor was his wife had died years ago in the basement, and he’d spent twenty years waiting to join her in death. Sightings of him at the store — stooped, gray, his gaze set downward — were exceedingly rare. He was not from here, so no one knew what his kids looked like, or his aides. Nonetheless, I’d walked and driven by the large house many times to see it well-kept, if not vivacious then not crumbling to pieces either. It took on a haunted sense, with its big brown façade, its stillness, its dark interiors, the fable of the wife’s passing. But I’d only ever seen it from afar.
That night, we stood in a row at the gate and the house was bright with lights and activity. Cars lined the driveway. People were bobbing in and out of the windows, laughing, holding drinks. Music blasted from an open side door. Times had changed.
I rapped the mahogany door with the iron knocker, shaped surprisingly like a mermaid. Moments later, a woman answered looking back at someone she was still speaking to within.
“I gotta host! Just one—”
She turned to us then, jokingly flustered, rolling her eyes. Her blonde radiance was striking, like a blow. She was beautiful and made to be, the work was evident, in the style of southern football wives you see on TV standing beside their men. It was feasible I’d seen her on TV before. She was in her fifties but had the bearing of a much younger woman.
“Lizzie! Come in, come in.”
With a big embracing arm she herded us into the house. I could smell her French floral perfume. My eye went up to the ceiling, vaulting, lit with a searing artificial light. There was not a single shadow anywhere in the beige chamber.
“Wow,” I heard Lizzie say. “You have a beautiful home.”
“Beautiful,” I heard myself say. “Thank you for having us.”
“This is my husband,” Lizzie said.
She smiled at me, all suntan and white teeth, and she held out a limp pretty hand. I shook it — like shaking a sleeping child.
“This is our Sam,” I said, gesturing to my son, abashed, not knowing where to look.
She extended the same limp hand and said, “Hey, handsome.”
Blushing, he replied, “Nice to meet you, Mrs. Hargrave,” and shook.
It was winning, and I was proud of him. But there are moments when we sense the future in an instant, sometimes it passes too quickly to really see, it’s more a feeling that somehow is a prophecy, a leap, like a branch falling in a dense forest: there’s a crack, and suddenly, out of sight, something has changed. I saw a comfort in him. An ease. He had dealt with this too easily, in a way I never had, and in a sense, I feared him.
“What a little charmer,” she said. “Now, my ball-and-chain is around here somewhere.”
As she brought us into the party, the light, she yelled to nobody: “Has anyone seen Hank?”
There wasn’t really a reply, and I looked at Lizzie. Her eyes were gleaming as she studied Mrs. Hargrave — what she wore, how she acted. I could see Lizzie fitting herself into Mrs. Hargrave’s shape, her clothing, inch-by-inch putting herself into her shoes, as she did vaguely, when we watched the women on TV. Now it was focused, intense, and Lizzie’s comparative drabness stuck out as she attempted to straighten herself, fix herself, to match Mrs. Hargrave’s elegance, which was a factor of something other than will. I wanted to tell her to stop.
“Oh, god knows what he’s doing. Here, let’s have a drink, shall we?”
Lizzie looked at me blankly. Then we joined the party.
It didn’t take long for us to get separated. Maybe we were wanting a break from each other, and in some way made it happen. Maybe there was just a lot to see for ourselves.
Sam was the first to leave. Chris was here, and he had brought Kyle. Once they saw each other and dapped each other up, they went off furtively and spoke together in a lingo I had no understanding of.
Chris and Erica came over. The twins were with a sitter, Erica told us, explaining with an exhausted breathlessness the difficulty of finding someone reliable. Our sitter had long since left town, and we couldn’t help her anymore. Chris kept glancing at Lizzie, even more than he usually did. Soon after, Mrs. Hargrave pulled the girls away, saying conspiratorially to them, “there’s just someone you have to me meet.” She winked at us as she left with our wives.
Chris and I stood awkwardly, as we had stood awkwardly together at parties for thirty years.
“Not too shabby,” he said.
“You think?”
“Lizzie’s looking good.”
“Erica too,” I said, lying. She looked exhausted, frail.
A few men in polo shirts and khakis — what I was wearing too, what Chris was wearing — waved us over. These were not locals. I’d never seen them before in my life.
A red-faced, tall, extremely athletic middle-aged man said loudly, “So have you seen Hank’s new sweet sue? Lordy, lordy.”
“We live around here,” Chris said.
“I can see it from my dock,” I said.
Another man, serious and thin, said, “oh, you live here?”
“Born and raised,” Chris said.
“No kidding,” the serious man said. “No kidding.”
The garrulous athletic man said, “but have you seen the boat? I mean, wowee wowee.”
“I’ve also got a pontoon. Nothing like that,” Chris laughed. “But I’m a connoisseur. So to speak.” Chris never said words like connoisseur, and I was embarrassed for him.
“It’s a fine piece, no doubt,” I said.
He turned to me. “What you’ve got packing? Viz-a-viz boats? Are you also a pontoon connoisseur?” he said the last words with a superiority, emphasizing the oo sounds in both words. The serious man cracked a smile and stuck his glass to his mouth to hide it.
“A couple kayaks,” I said.
The man roared laughing. The serious man, however, did not join him. He looked at me intently. Then glanced at my shirt, my pants, my shoes. Then looked into my eyes.
“That’s rich. That’s gotta be some Poconos backwater humor. Here, let’s get some drinks in ya.”
The serious man brought over two glasses and poured in generous servings of Johnnie Walker Blue.
“This stuff is really good,” he said.
“I’ve had it,” I said.
“Drink up,” the red-faced man said. “Now where the fuck’s Hank at?”
He lumbered off, the serious man tailing.
Chris and I sipped our drinks, not meeting eyes.
I wasn’t much of a drinker. I got the spins too quickly, and because of that, I often felt completely disconnected from events after only a few drinks. That night, the party became blurry and slanted quick, and I turned to water to try and slow things down. Nonetheless, walking around, listening to the Hargaves’ friends, the world was spinning and roiling. Lizzie was nowhere to be found. I ran into Sam every now and then, and he kept grinning at me, as if we were sharing some secret. But I didn’t know the secret. I resisted the urge to rustle his hair, which he’d carefully combed before we left. At one point, he and Kyle were talking to some slouchy teenage girls who seemed moderately interested in their Poconos-boys stories of dicking around on the water, but they were hamming it up, and I wished I could tell them to be quieter. To make sure they weren’t being laughed at.
As always Chris ingratiated himself with everyone he met without any discernment or self-respect.
I drifted off and found myself alone, studying the Hargrave decor. Neutral, boring, out of a catalogue, mostly. It wasn’t very different from the homes in the neighborhood, but I felt it was lacking something important. One hallway was filled almost floor to ceiling with photos of family. Great-grandparents, grandparents, kids, cousins, aunts and uncles. Hundreds of people, it seemed, so similar across so many generations: the women bright-eyed and confident, the men stolid in either military or football uniforms. A massive chain of brutes and the mothers expected to raise them. There was something moving and also dumb and also painfully sad in it all. We were not that kind of family and never would be. My world had never and would never appear so smooth and so bright.
In the main living room hung records of Hank’s major accolades. Gleaming championship trophies of various sizes and shapes. Photos of Hank with famous broadcasters and athletes, faces everyone knew. It was boring. I was supposed to be in awe of this, but I was bored.
I looked around for a familiar face and saw Erica, alone on a corner of one of the four sofas arranged in a square in the living room. She was looking at her phone.
I came over and peeked at her screen. She was staring at live footage of a Ring camera outside her home. Nothing was happening.
“Have you seen Lizzie?” I said.
She jumped nervily and shut her phone.
“Outside, I think,” she said.
“Everything okay?”
“They’re fine,” she said.
Her smile faded, and she stared grayly ahead at nothing.
I went outside, where the music was loudest. People had gathered here. In the porchlight’s glare, I couldn’t see the stars or the lake and the music dampened my other senses, still swirling, off-kilter. Then underneath the music I heard laughter coming from the blue-black maw at the end of the lawn.
Out of the porchlight, away from the music, I entered what seemed a second sphere of the property. It was muted, intimate, the sounds of nature returned, punctuated by that high-pitched chorus of laughter, a man’s baritone above it it all. The Hargraves’ dock was dimly ahead.
I approached. At the end of the longish pier the big silver moon shone down on the sleek pontoon boat. A large man rose in silhouette above the shadowed mass of the hull, even above the cover, looking down on the bobbing heads of the women sitting below him in worshipful arc. The shadow gesticulated, the male black mass, and it cut the air with thick limbs, the throaty deep voice narrating some fable of humor and honor.
I went closer. I saw myself under the moonlight. A slender modest figure approaching, disrupting, a slim weird shard. But I had no intention to interfere.
Unseen, I stopped a few feet from the boat. I could see Hank’s face now.
He was a handsome man, fit and wide and dressed in a tight black tee that accentuated his square, barrel chest. His eyes were beady, but their comparative softness added a sweetness to the hard facts of his athleticism. Silver goatee hairs cut sharply a strong sharp chin. But it was the voice — of granite confidence and virility — that shone through him, that belied his years leading men. It touched the heart. It roused the passions.
“And I’ve got these boys around me. Boys I’m trying to make into men. Boy’s I’m urging, urging, to become men. I tell them: ‘This is it. Right now. We gotta get this offense off the field. Because we’ve got an NFL Hall-of-famer talent at quarterback.’ We all knew that’s what Tom was gonna be. We all knew. So I look them in the eyes, and I say, ‘Boys. It doesn’t matter what play I draw up, what coverage we’re in. If you are men, you will win this down, you will protect that inch, you will win this game. You will win.’ And guess what?”
He paused for dramatic effect. Then, in a furious instant, he leapt into a defensive lineman’s crouch. The boat rocked, some women gasped, some laughed, and he roared, “those boys pushed those fuckers back and back and back.” He shoved his hands up into an imaginary player’s jersey, a series of rapid, violent jerks. “And we put those boys on their asses. Like this, like this, like this.” He punctuated each “like this” with another heavy thrust of his hands, tipping the boat, sloshing the water loudly. Then he stood up straight and said calmly, “and that was how we won the Sugar Bowl. And that is why,” he said, louder now, his voice rising to a homey drawl, “you ladies are currently riding the Sugar Momma. Get to know her. Ain’t she a sweet thang.”
While the women clapped, I studied their faces — moon-eyed middle-aged faces looking up at Hank Hargrave.
And there was Lizzie. Smiling like a teenager with all that sweetness and sex in her eyes, the unmissable brimming lips of a woman flush with admiration for a man.
“Who’s that there?” Hank said.
I noticed some women turning in my direction, trying to make me out in the shadow.
“Nobody,” I said.
I turned and left.
I walked up the path toward the house, the music. A woman was looking out toward the dock from the edge of the porchlight. Closer, I saw it was Mrs. Hargrave. I saw she was frowning. She was drunk and swaying as if with the wind.
“Said it wouldn’t be like this here,” she said, a kind of harsh drawl rising from her like a spout of oil. “Said it was far away from all that.”
“Nothing ever changes,” I said.
I didn’t wait to see her reaction.
***
Twenty minutes later, I was back out at the dock in my vinyl chair.
I’d just left. I could still hear the party from that distance, but it was muted, not so bad. Hank’s boat was visible, and his huge voice carried somewhat over the water. There may have been laughter, but it was harder to hear. I didn’t look that way. The stars were clear here. The mosquitos buzzed around me. I could smell the gunky water.
Lizzie had looked so much like Dani on that boat. That’s what was bothering me, but I could barely think of this. It reminded me she would be coming home soon, and I smiled at that, although the memory of Lizzie-Dani worried me. Sam texted me then. He said, “Dad did you go home?” I replied: “I wasn’t feeling well. But enjoy the night. Just be careful.” He liked the message with a blue thumbs up.
Some time passed out there. The noise of the party died down, the porchlight was turned off. Soon it went still. I finally felt I could breathe. I shut my eyes and the swirling, the tilting, subsided.
At some point later, I heard hard shoe bottoms on the dock wood. A gait I would recognize anywhere, any time.
Still in her dress, Lizzie sat down on the rotting wood. She brought her knees up and gazed listlessly out across the lake. She began to cry a little. Then she stopped, and blew her nose.
“What’s up?” I said.
“Nothing.”
Then, quieter, she said, “Dani.”
“Yeah.”
“It was so hard last year.”
“I know.”
“And I was just thinking. A whole summer of that? Will it be a whole summer of that?”
“It won’t be like that. She’ll have matured.”
“How do you know?”
“I think I can tell.”
“Over the phone?”
“I suppose.”
Then she said, “it’s been nicer here. For me. Is that bad?”
I sighed. I couldn’t look at her, so I looked out at the water.
“Do you want to get a boat?” I asked.
“What?”
“Do you want to get a boat?”
She was looking at me, so at last, I met her eyes. Her expression was quizzical, surprised.
“A boat?”
“You used to want a boat. When we were young. And tonight. I saw you out there. With Hank. You looked happy. And the other day. You made that comment about the boat. And I was just thinking, well, maybe that’s what you want. Maybe that would make you happy. So we could make it work if that’s what you want.”
Lizzie scoffed. Then the scoff turned into a laugh. The laugh into a bellyful, hysterical laughter. And I couldn’t help but join. We sat there laughing. I wasn’t sure at what.
“You men,” she finally said. “You’re idiots.”
I grabbed her hand and kissed it. I kissed every knuckle, turning her wrist to get to her thumb too.
She scoffed again, and I felt again what I had felt the moment I realized we would be together.
“It’s going to be okay,” I said.
She smiled dreamily. Then stood up, her dress hiking up to her thighs as she stood.
“Don’t stay out too late,” she said, wavering a bit.
She swatted at a bug on her forearm. “Fucker,” she murmured.
She ambled back to the house, swaying, slapping at her skin, murmuring “fucker.”
The placid water twinkled to the rhythm of the grasshopper’s shearing and in time with the bolt-bolt of my heart, steady and strong. The kayaks knocked against the pillars of the dock.
For an instant, it felt all together, all sensation and all life, a concert of one, a fusion. But it was just for one instant, and then it was gone. And no matter how still I sat there, it was always once again about to converge, about to cohere, before it didn’t, and soon even my patience wore out as the wave swept toward me, passing somewhere beneath my feet. Soon I turned from the dock and went back inside.
Image by Jamie Fenn on unsplash.com, licensed under CC 2.0.
