My father was a physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. This was supposed to be his summer vacation. But I was in the front seat where Mom should have been, so it wasn’t a vacation at all.
“What do you say, buddy?” Dad turned to me, almost pleading. “Looks like a fun party. I see some kids your age. Some girls, even. It’ll be good for you to practice your social skills in that department before Langdon.”
The Langdon School was a private academy for gifted boys that I’d be starting in the fall. It was in Bethesda, a twenty-minute drive from our home and Dad’s work at the NIST. But I already knew I’d be taking the bus: With Mom gone, the chances that Dad would pick me up from school every afternoon were infinitesimally small.
I faced forward, swallowing hard. I recognized Brenton Park from past summers. Parents sat at picnic tables while kids, ranging from toddlers to preteens, threw Frisbees, played tag, or ran along the banks of a small pond. I knew there were fish in that pond—catfish, carp, and fathead minnows—and even a few turtles.
“We just got here,” I protested weakly. “We’ve been in the car for more than six hours. I want to go to the house and—”
“Oh, look. Those boys are playing ball.” Dad mustered a weak smile. “Doesn’t that look fun?”
It did not. How could anything be “fun” ever again?
“They don’t know me, Dad,” I said. “They’re not going to want to play with me.”
“You never know until you ask. You could make some new friends.”
I doubted that. I had no friends back home. Why would it be different here? I was “a major nerd” and “a freak from another planet.” Those would remain constants no matter how many state lines we crossed.
I chewed my bottom lip. Brenton Park was at least a six-mile walkfrom our house, and there was no bus. “When are you going to come back and get me?”
“I’ll be back soon. Before dusk,” Dad said. “A few hours, son. That’s all I ask.”
My father’s eyes—blue, like one of mine—were glassy. His lip quavered, reminding me of the neighbor kids back home when they scraped their knees. Dad didn’t need to work; he needed to cry about Mom. Fine for him. I wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction, even if she never knew it.
I looked straight ahead, jaw clenched. “You’ll come and get me at dusk? You won’t forget?”
“I won’t forget.”
“Okay.” I climbed out of the car. Dad gave me a little wave, like he was sorry but that he couldn’t help it, and drove away.
I put the odds of his coming back on time at sixty-to-one against. It wasn’t that he was a bad parent; his mind just didn’t work like everyone else’s. Mine didn’t either, but where I was sharp, organized, and remembered everything, Dad was scattered. Nervous. He could calculate hundreds of probabilities for quantum interactions but couldn’t remember to close the garage door. It’s part of why Mom left, I knew. I’d heard the fighting.
“If your head wasn’t screwed on, Russell, it’d roll right off!”
She didn’t say it in a funny way but in an angry way. Over this last year, she’d been angry a lot. I guessed she’d done her own calculations and concluded it wasn’t worth it to stay.
It won’t be forever.
My mind wouldn’t leave her cryptic words alone, turning them over and over, round and round, like a Rubik’s Cube but with missing color squares. An equation I couldn’t solve, and there was nothing worse than that.
Dusk was coming fast—light’s longer wavelengths dominated the sky in shades of red and orange as the sun sank toward the ocean. I figured I had less than an hour to kill until I’d know for sure if Dadforgot me.
Standing alone in the parking lot, I observed the party from a safe distance. In the clearing by the pond, kids were laughing, chasing each other, and throwing bread at the ducks and minnows. From the grill, the humid air trapped the scents of barbecued hamburgers and hot dogs. The grown-up men wore khaki pants and polos (like the uniform I’d wear at Langdon) and the women were in blouses and jeans with designer sandals. Richies of Castle Hill.
Castle Hill was south of Newport on a peninsula shaped like a shoe, where the Atlantic Ocean poured into Narragansett Bay. It was filled with Richies who lived in big houses on the water. They all had luxury cars and yachts, and they all belonged to the Castle Hill Country Club.
Not us.
At the top of the shoe, the land jutted up, then curved back down, like an elbow. The elbow was called the Bend, which was code for “poor.” Dad’s little house was on the Bend. He may have been a genius—a little famous even, for his work in particle physics and electromagnetic spectroscopy—but Mom was always complaining he didn’t publish enough papers in the right journals, so we were always on the “edge of ruin.”
I glanced down at my worn shoes and my jeans with the holes in the knees, then pushed my glasses up higher on my nose. I was a Bend kid all the way. No one—certainly not a Richie—was going to let me play with them.
I wouldn’t know how anyway.
An anvil-shaped boulder surrounded by weeds and tall, spiky Atlantic manna grass rested near the edge of the parking lot. I sat down on it and waited for dusk while the kids played and the grown-ups drank their wine and grilled their food.
My stomach growled. It had been three hours since the gas stop in Connecticut. The scent of the ocean, the grill, and the sounds of kids laughing carried memories of other, better Fourths of July. NowI was just a boy, sitting on a rock, wondering what I’d done to make my mom leave.
