“‘Those that do teach young babes/Do it with gentle means and easy tasks,’” says Timothy. “Othello.”
“‘It is a wise father that knows his own child,’” retorts Amy. “Merchant of Venice.”
“Touché. All I’m saying, Amy, is that everything goes fast. The older you get, the faster it goes. Don’t let this summer go to waste. Don’t wish Sam back home, don’t wish her off to college, don’t wish her anywhere but where she is, close enough that you can see her every day if you want to.”
“Thank you, Mr. Wisdom,” says Amy, but she concedes that he makes a good point, so she smiles when she says it, and she kicks his foot under the table. They’re still not finished, though, and she can see Timothy searching for the right thing to say.
“I just don’t understand one part of all of this. What do you want from me, Amy? What are you looking for? Do you want me to belessgenerous with my money? I already don’t send you Christmas presents, as per your request.” (Justper, Amy wants to say. Notas per. But she doesn’t.) “Less generous with my time? Or more generous? Do you want me to be closer to you, or do you want me to leave you alone? What do you want?”
Whatdoesshe want? It’s a fair question, and the answer comes to her in a rush, and yes, it might sound corny, and she cringes a little when she says it, but it’s also very true, and she wants to say it out loud. “I want you to see me, Timothy!”
“I see you. I’m looking at you right now.”
“I mean really see me. I want you to acknowledge everything I did, everything I do, without just offering money for it. I want you to take my life and my choices as seriously as you take your own, or Gertie’s, or even Sam’s.” Amy turns her head and looksout at the beach, where there’s a tongue of sand that turns into a breakwater stretching out into the ocean. On the stage, a band is beginning to set up. “Because they’re good choices, Timothy. I made good choices.”
A beat goes by, and then Timothy says, “I know you did. Your kids are amazing. And look at me. I haven’t raised so much as a cat.”
She thinks there might be a sadness around the edges of his eyes, but it vanishes so quickly she couldn’t have said for sure that it was ever really there.
“Cats are overrated,” says Amy. “If anything, you should get a rescue dog.”
“Maybe,” says Timothy. “Then again, maybe not. I’ve got koi.”
The band starts to make warming-up noises, and some of the bikini-clad young women leave the volleyball court to run over to the live music pavilion. Running, thinks Amy, seems almost as fraught in a bikini as playing volleyball. But they appear not to mind. There is squealing. A young man with dreads taps the microphone and starts to sing.
“There’s my cue,” says Amy. In her days at NYU she was no stranger to live music: the Aztec Lounge, Alcatraz, the Pyramid Club—she and her friends were all over the East Village in their vintage clothes, curated from a dozen amazing thrift shops. (This was before the wordcuratedbecame overused, affiliated mainly with social media posts.) “I’m probably going to skip the dancing today,” she says. Timothy snorts. “And if you’ll excuse me I have some mousetraps to deal with before I go home.” She tries to say this with dignity, but admittedly she’s not sure she lands the line.
Very formally he says, “Would you like help with those mousetraps?” and very formally she says, “I think I’ve got it. But thank you so much for offering.”
Before she departs, Timothy takes her hand, and he squeezes it, and when he lets go he says, “I see you, Amy. I do. I always have,even if it didn’t seem like it. And I think the choices you made are not only valid, but your choices led to the creation of my very favorite humans in the whole world.”
She takes a deep breath and says—what? What should she say? That this is what she asked for, but it somehow still feels inadequate, because she couldn’t articulate everything she was trying to get at? Should she say that she’s worried he’s just saying the lines, acting, but he doesn’t really mean it? Or should she say that they’re both still grieving the loss of their mother, and they both deserve to find their own way through it, even if the other person might not agree with how they choose to do that?
In the end she opts for this: “Okay, Timmy. I appreciate that.” Then, because even at fifty-three she’s still a little sister, and the job of the little sister is sometimes to inject levity when things get too heavy, she says, “Do you also see the check? Because I’m leaving you with it. You’re older, but you’re also rich AF.”
Timothy looks bewildered. “What doesAFmean?”
She shrugs. “I really don’t know, but I hear the kids at school say it all the time, and this seemed like the right context.”
He smiles. “I am more than happy to be left with the check.”
“Thank you,” she says.
“You’re very welcome,” he says.
She leaves Timothy at the table, remembering, as she walks back to the theater, when he was her sun and moon, her North Star. Sometimes he’d pop her in the front seat of their mother’s station wagon and drive her around the perimeter of the island in the dark. There’s a spot on Mohegan Trail, past Painted Rock, where he’d cut the headlights completely and take the turns a little too fast. Ever since, no coaster ride, no anything, has ever matched the terror and thrill of those ten seconds.
Timothy
After the drinks with Amy, Timothy can’t settle down. He doesn’t want to go back to Floyd’s house. Either nobody will be there, and he’ll be lonely, or Sam and Gertie will be there, and he’ll feel the obligation to make pleasant conversation when he’s not feeling pleasant at all, and that will make him feel even lonelier. He doesn’t want to risk the rehearsal barn in case the stage manager is there, nor the theater, because perhaps Amy hasn’t left yet.
So he does something he hasn’t done since arriving on the island: he drives Floyd’s jeep out to the house where he and Amy grew up, in the center of the island, not far from the airport, on a road that Timothy has had no reason to be on so far this summer. It is a small house, all one level, with three bedrooms and one and a half bathrooms, the whole thing under one thousand square feet, but sitting on a big piece of land. This is the house Timothy and his mother lived in alone for part of Timothy’s childhood. At that time, with just the two of them, it had seemed roomy. They were renters for a year, and when Rose met her second husband, David, Rose and David bought the house together and David moved into the house with them, and then Amy was born, and after that it no longer seemed roomy, but Timothy doesn’t remember it ever seeming especially cramped.
(His pool house in Benedict Canyon is a full fifteen hundred square feet all by itself, so it’s hard to believe the Block Island house didn’t feel cramped. But that’s what his memory tells him.)
Timothy remembers now, driving by the airport, that sometimes, especially in summer months, when air traffic was busy, they could hear the sounds of the small planes taking off and landing. He remembers also that you could be in the house, or outside in the yard, and not even realize you were on an island, because you couldn’t see the water without traveling at least a mile north or a couple of miles west. You couldn’t always smell it either. He remembers the days before stern-loading ferries were introduced, which made it possible to get many more building materials to the island, thereby increasing the cottage boom. He remembers when one of the top jobs on the island was bellhop at the Narragansett Inn. He remembers when there was only one boat per day, arriving on the island at 11:00 and departing at 3:45. He remembers when a night out was an ice cream cone and a movie at the Empire Theatre.
All these memories, he knows, are popping up because of the fight with Amy, the inequalities in their lives, her worries about her life being perceived as smaller than his. When he gets to the house and pulls off onto the shoulder of the road, not audacious enough to brave the driveway, he sees that something isn’t right.
