My stomach clenched again, this time with warmth. “Me, too.”
Twenty-Four
Natalie returned with brown paper bags from the market. She unloaded the supplies on the Formica: sharp cheddar, slick Kalamata olives, salted roasted almonds, lavash bread, Brie, and green grapes, followed by two bottles of sweating Sancerre. I flipped on the sole overhead light. The bulb inside was one of those remodernized Edison-style ones, its filament like the trail my sparklers used to make at night. I hiked myself onto the counter to hand a rattling group of fish-shaped ceramic plates to a shirtless Wells, whose hair was damp from his outdoor shower. A beach towel clung to his hips, the cleave I used to kiss just barely visible above it. Beneath a white ring of skin on his hairline where his hat must’ve covered, his face was sun-kissed, pink.
“You didn’t wear sunscreen,” I said.
He looped his hand around my hips, helped me down. “Living dangerously,” he joked. I winced.
We’d be at my parents’ house in two hours, but we still heaped our tiny plates with snacks. Natalie and I sat at the two-seater round table beside the rainy-day cabinet; Caleb took my spot on the counter. Wells vanished to get dressed. When he returned, he stood behind my chair, clutching a green bottle of beer. “The ceiling fan in our room makes a clicky sound,” he said.
And even though I knew it would destroy me in the middle of the night—even though I knew Wells thought he was lookingout for me—something about this information irritated me. “I’ll grab another fan from my parents’. They have extras.”
An olive fell from Caleb’s plate, fat and plump; it rolled an oily path across the floor. He slid from his perch to clean it.
Olives.Oliviameans olive tree, peace. My parents’ olive branch.
Caleb tossed the olive into the trash. A metaphor for no one, like the egg on the street outside the hotel that first day.
“Cheers,” Natalie said, holding her glass midair.
A List of Topics We Discussed
The weather
The increase of great white sharks on Cape Cod in the last decade
Which games we played on family vacations as kids
The possible weather
The store markup during vacation weeks, and whether or not things are worth buying anyway
When the weather will turn to fall/how it’s shifted since we were kids
A List of Topics We Did Not Discuss
Soulmail
Weddings
From Yes to I Do
My new job
The article depicting Wells and me
My special airing in three and a half hours
Despite the raging anxiety coursing through my veins, I fidgeted with excitement the entire traffic-laden drive to my parents’, and my heart split when they greeted us at the door.Dad wore a button-down shirt I was sure was a recent purchase from either Marshalls or T.J. Maxx. Mom was in the off-white linen jumpsuit that I’d bought for her when she’d come to the city for wedding dress shopping, the one she’d reportedly been wearing all spring and summer.
Growing up, we always had two things, even when we had almost nothing: seafood and stories. We had been dealt a brutal family hand, and being able to latch on to certain truths about the world allowed me to prepare how I could feel about it. Facts, narratives, informed consents, educated hypotheses—what they all shared was the currency of information. My father always said that on long days with empty lines, they might have had no control over the ocean, but that gave them no right to be bored. He and Petey competed to out-entertain each other with stories. I didn’t understand who Dad really was until I was a little older and I went out on the boat with him, and he morphed into the equivalent of a fishing stand-up comedian. The things he could control, he did: the amount of line he cast, where to drop the anchor, the length of time we spent on the boat. Boating facts.
Back then, my belly had always been almost full enough, my body usually warm enough. Those two needs met, I’d been able to ignore the fact that never once had the four Adlers been on a plane together. We never went out to dinner unless it was a special occasion, and even then, the plates were paper, and we knew the waitress—always a waitress—by name. In the last five years, I’d asked them often about what their retirement portfolios looked like, and they’d brushed me off every time until it dawned on me: they didn’t have them.
I had thought every family celebrated Meatless May. I had thought wrong. Behind the scenes, Dad counted down until June first each year, when the season opened. By that fifth month of the year, we were down to the bare bones: last summer’s canned tomatoes, preserved fruit jams, Mom’s sourdough breads baked from the solemn mother starter in her glass jar.
The two times Sabrina had gone out fishing with him, she returned with green skin, hair tacky with puke. But I had loved the still-dark mornings, the hooded sweatshirts, the fine trickle of salt on my face and on the skin of my lips.
