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“Cry! What for?” Hugh asked her.
“It’s the … circularity, I guess. When we first saw the next-door people the daughters were the ones bringing friends, and now the grandson is, and it starts all over again.”
“You sure have given these folks a lot of thought,” Hugh said.
“Well, they’re us, in a way,” Jea
But you could see Hugh found that hard to understand.
On the Friday that the Whitshanks arrived, only the men and the children went down to the water. The women were busy unpacking and making beds and organizing supper. But by Saturday, when Amanda and her family showed up, they’d all settled into their routine of a full morning on the beach, and lunch at the house in their sandy swimsuits, and then afternoon on the beach again. The canvas canopy sheltered the white-ski
Elsewhere on the beach, teenagers built giant sand castles, and mothers dipped their babies’ bare feet in the foam, and fathers threw Frisbees to their children. Seagulls screamed overhead, and a little plane flew up and down the coastline, trailing a ba
Amanda and Amanda’s Hugh didn’t seem to be getting along. Or Amanda wasn’t getting along; Hugh appeared cheerfully unaware. Anything he said to her she answered shortly, and when he invited her to take a walk on the beach, she said, “No, thanks,” and turned the corners of her mouth down as she watched him set off on his own.
Abby, sitting next to Amanda but outside the canopy, under the sun, said, “Oh, poor Hugh! Don’t you think you should go with him?” (She was eternally monitoring her daughters’ marriages.) But Amanda didn’t answer, and Abby gave up and went back to her reading. A stack of trashy magazines had been discovered beneath the TV, no doubt left behind by a previous renter, and they had passed through the hands of her granddaughters and then her daughters and ended up with Abby herself, who was leafing through one now and tsk-ing over the silliness. “All this excitement about could so-and-so be pregnant,” she told her daughters, “and I don’t even know who so-and-so is! I’ve never heard of her.” In her skirted pinkswimsuit, her plump shoulders glistening with suntan lotion and her legs lightly dusted with sand, she looked something like a cupcake. She hadn’t ventured into the water at all so far, and neither had Red. In fact, Red was wearing his work shoes and dark socks. Evidently this was the year when the two of them were declaring themselves to be officially old.
“I remember when I first met him, I thought he was a jerk,” Amanda told De
“Oh, Amanda! Honestly,” Abby said, but Amanda didn’t seem to hear her. “I don’t know how he knew it was me,” she told De
“So, now does he recycle?” De
“You’re missing the point,” Amanda said. “I’m talking about his nature, the very nature of the man. It’s all about what’s expedient, for him. He’s just arranged to sell the restaurant to someone for next to nothing, for a song, merely because he’s bored and he wants to go into something new. Can you believe it?”
“I thought you approved of the something new,” De
“Oh, I was just being supportive. Besides, it’s not the something new I mind; it’s the way he goes about getting rid of the old. He didn’t even consult me! Just took the very first offer he got, because he wants what he wants when he wants it.”
Abby touched Amanda’s arm. She sent a meaningful glance toward Elise, but Amanda said, “What,” and turned away again. And Elise just then stood up in one long graceful movement and began walking toward the water, as if nothing the grown-ups said could have anything to do with her.
“I didn’t know that was how you met,” Abby said. “That’s kind of like a movie! Like a Rock Hudson — Doris Day movie where they start out hating each other. I thought you met in the elevator or something.”
“The man is impossible,” Amanda said, as if Abby hadn’t spoken.
“You can see why he’d jump at the chance to sell, though,” De
“Well, it’s not married to turkey. It could serve other things. And it’s got tons of equipment, ovens and such, that are worth a lot of money.”
“Oh,” Abby said, “poor Hugh. Men don’t handle failure well at all.”
“Mom. Please. Enough with the ‘poor Hugh.’ ”
“Want to take a walk, Ab?” Red asked suddenly. It wasn’t clear whether he’d been listening to what was being said. Maybe he really did feel like a walk just then. At any rate, he heaved himself to his feet and stepped over to give Abby a hand up. She was still shaking her head as they started off down the beach.
“Now they’ll have a long talk about what a bad wife I am,” Amanda said, watching them go.
“Dad walks so slowly these days,” Jea
“How does he manage at work?” De
“I don’t notice it so much at work. It’s not as if he does anything physically demanding there anymore.”
They watched their parents meet up with Nora, who was returning from a walk of her own. She exchanged a few words with them and then continued toward Stem and her children, floating ethereally through a group of teenage boys tossing a football at the water’s edge. A black tie-on skirt fluttered and parted over her modest one-piece swimsuit, and her dark hair lifted from her shoulders in the breeze. The teenage boys halted their game to follow her with their eyes, one of them cradling the football under his arm.