“No! I need this!” London said indignantly. “I found it!”
“Okay, everyone put your staffs in a pile here. You can have them back when you find Hale a new one.” The boys grudgingly tossed their sticks into a pile and ran into the woods beyond the playground. “You wouldn’t believe how much time we spend fighting about sticks in our house.” Fran rolled her eyes.
“Good thing they grow up, right?” Caroline tipped her chin toward the basketball court where Eben had just checked Colin with his hip so that Max could shoot.
“Flagrant foul!” Van decreed.
“Stop being a pussy!” Stavros called back, cackling. Caroline turned to Fran, wide-eyed, and they both snorted.
Fran stretched her legs out and let the grass tickle her feet. The sun felt good on her face. In a little bit she’d get up and reapply the kids’ sunscreen.
“What about Colin?” Caroline asked. “I can’t really get a read on him. He barely talked to me the whole time in Maine.”
“Oh, he’s just quiet,” Fran deflected. While Colin was a little more reserved than the other guys, Fran suspected he was also followingAugusta’s orders to give Caroline the cold shoulder. Colin came from a traditional family, and he sort of came off as a finance bro on the surface, but over the years Fran had gotten him to open up. He could talk forever about music, he knew a lot about politics, and he was always going off down these funny rabbit holes, learning everything he could about hot sauce, or pickles, or kimchi. Like RJ, he was kind of a bro, but he was an evolved bro.
“God, you guys are such a tight crew, all old friends, all coupled up.” Caroline’s voice sounded wistful.
It was true. They were a writhing ball of honeybees. “Do you have a friend group from high school?”
“I have a few different groups rather than one big one,” Caroline said thoughtfully. “I have my best friend, Nina. I have my college crew, mostly actors. A few of them are in LA now, doing auditions, then two of my closest friends booked a gig singing musical medleys on a cruise ship. And I have my work friends, but since I quit my job, I’m realizing we don’t have as much to talk about.”
“You quit because you published a story inThe New Yorker, right? What kind of story was it?”
“Oh.” Caroline looked embarrassed but pleased. “It was about this young American woman who gets mugged on the street in Portugal. It’s sort of about American privilege and the illusion of childhood.”
Fran wanted to ask her more about it but suddenly her children arrived, Hale carrying what looked like a metal shower curtain rod. “He has a new staff!” announced London, and the boys all grabbed their sticks from the pile, each remarkably able to identify exactly which particular stick was their own.
“What on earth is that pole?” she asked, horrified.
“We found it on the edge of the driveway!”
“It’s mine!” Hale said protectively.
“No, no, no. You’re not going to be bashing around with a metal rod.” Fran directed the older boys to return the metal thing to the neighbor’s driveway and get Hale a different stick. Hale burst into tears and Fran pulled him into her lap, giving him a juice box and shooing the other children away.
As Fran cuddled Hale and wiped his sweaty forehead there was suddenly a shout on the basketball court, grunting and scuffling and a mess of elbows and knees and then two of the men fell to the asphalt. Colin was down, his brother-in-law, Eben, sprawled on top of him. “What the FUCK?” Colin shouted. The others helped them up, and Fran watched as they circled around Colin, looking at his hand. “It’s fucking broken,” Colin cursed. His hair was mussed and he had a red mark on his cheek, maybe from the pavement. He held up his arm and Fran could see that his pinky finger was sticking out at an odd angle.
Caroline leaped up and she and Van rushed Colin across the parking lot to her house to get ice.
“Shit. But he was pulling on my shirt and fucking with me,” Eben said, exasperated. Max muttered something Fran couldn’t quite hear. “Yeah, let’s go.” Eben and his husband made to walk to their car.
“Dude, you can’t leave.” RJ jogged after them. “You have to hang out and make sure Colin’s okay.”
“It’s his finger,” Max said, rolling his eyes. “He’s not a concert pianist, he’s fine.”
“No, come on, Eben,” RJ protested. “Your sister is going to freak out. If you leave then this becomes a big thing with Augusta too. Just stay until Colin comes back out. Stavros and I against you two. Come on.”
“Fine.” Eben and Max reluctantly walked back to the court and checked the ball to start.
Would this be the day Colin and Eben finally had it out? Fran had been bracing herself for an eruption between them ever since Augusta’swedding. It seemed like such a small thing—a finger—but it really could tip them over the edge. It was funny how often life worked that way.
Back in high school, when they all started drinking and going out, they became obsessed with “the shampoo effect.” When they had a big night of partying and followed it with a beer the next morning, they could get drunk again in an instant, the way a second squirt of shampoo in the shower produced outsized suds. It was because the alcohol hadn’t been fully metabolized, because instead of starting with a blood alcohol content of zero they were really starting with .03 or something. Fran thought about the shampoo effect at moments like this, and the way it applied to so many interpersonal dynamics—the way that in these old relationships nobody was ever really working from a clean slate, new feelings were built on old feelings. Fran’s own brothers had been so rude to her for so long that even a grunt or an eye roll was enough to send her spiraling into a dark mood. Van and Bailey had been sleeping together for so long that they fell back into bed with each other at the slightest provocation. Colin and Eben, best friends, now brothers-in-law, had so much unspoken frustration between them that a small moment in a pickup basketball game could instantly work them into a lather.
Fran waited nervouslyfor Colin to come back to the asphalt court, watching Max and Eben play against RJ and Stavros, but when Colin strolled down from Caroline’s house, waving his hand and laughing, she saw he was going to sweep it under the rug and let the tension between him and Eben go.
“Look, Caroline taped my finger to a popsicle stick!” He leaned in and showed off his hand to Fran. “And we decided that holding a coldbeer counted as icing.” He flopped down in Caroline’s beach chair and popped the can open, sipping deeply and closing his eyes. They sat there together, Hale sipping his juice box, Colin his beer. There was a thing they said at Hale’s school when he was having a hard day. They said he was having “big feelings.” That never really went away, did it? You just got better at swallowing them, pushing them down to a place where those big feelings didn’t show quite so much.
“Hey Fran!” hollered RJ. “If I hit this shot you have to do bedtime stories tonight!”
