Amanda had a novel she could barely follow, with a tiresome central metaphor involving birds. Clay had the kind of book he normally had, a slender and unclassifiable critique of the way we live now, the sort of thing it’s impossible to read near naked in the sun but important to have read, for his work.
His glance kept straying to the lifeguards. So did Amanda’s. How could they not? There was a metaphor less tiresome—what would stand between you and death at the hands of nature but beautiful youth, flat stomachs, nipples the size of quarters, swollen biceps, hairless legs, browned skin, dry hair, mouths perfected by orthodontia, unquestioning eyes behind cheap plastic sunglasses?
They ate turkey sandwiches and chips that kept breaking off in the pasty guacamole (a smaller portion without the acrid herb, for the doted-upon son), then watermelon, bracing and cold. Archie slept, and Rose read one of her graphic novels. Archie woke and goaded his father into the waves, which were terrifying. Amanda watched for sharks because she had heard there were sharks. What would one of those teenage lifeguards do if there were sharks?
It was pleasant, it was diverting, it was exhausting. The sun was not waning, but the wind was winning. “We should go.” Amanda packed their empty plastic containers back into the insulated bag she’d found in the kitchen. It was in precisely the spot where you’d store an insulated bag in your kitchen (a cabinet beneath the microwave).
Rose shivered, and her father wrapped her up in a towel just as he had when she’d been a toddler fresh from the bath. The family trudged back to their car, strangely defeated, and drove back across the bridge.
“There’s a Starbucks.” Amanda pressed her hand onto her husband’s right forearm, excited.
He pulled in to the lot, and Amanda went inside. Alee, away from that wind, the air was still hot. The shop was the same as all locations of a chain tend to be, but wasn’t that comforting? The signature colors, those dependable brown napkins—always a stack in the car for blowing winter noses or mopping up spills—the green plastic straws, the heavyset devotees paying seven dollars for cream-topped milkshakes in cups the size of athletic trophies. She ordered black coffees, though it was after three and it would keep her up late, or maybe it wouldn’t, because proximity to the ocean always made her so tired.
There was a desultory de-sanding of limbs, using the backyard hose. Archie sprayed the thing directly down the front of his suit, his balls shellacked with actual tiny shells, then figured that was good enough and dove into the pool. He rubbed his scalp and could feel sand being dislodged, drifting away into the water.
Amanda washed her feet and then went inside to shower. The house felt reassuringly familiar after fewer than twenty-four hours. She played a podcast on the computer—something to do with the mind, she barely paid attention to it—and shampooed her hair again, hating the effect of the salt water on it. She dressed and found Clay whistling as he rinsed the sandy Tupperware.
“I’ll make pasta,” Amanda said.
“The kids are in the pool. I’m going to run to the store and get some cereal for Archie.” He meant he’d run to the store, smoke a cigarette in the parking lot, go inside, wash his hands, come back with a hundred dollars’ worth of food. “They’re saying it might rain tomorrow.”
“You can almost feel it.” A promise in the air, or maybe it was a threat. She had brought her computer into the kitchen with her so she could keep listening to the podcast. She set it on the counter. “Get something sweet? Like . . . a pie. Get a pie. And maybe some more ice cream?” The night before, postcoital and woozy from the hot tub, they’d eaten an entire pint between the two of them. “Maybe some tomatoes. Another watermelon. Some berries. I don’t know, whatever looks good.”
He kissed her, an unfamiliar thing to do when running out on a simple errand, but sweet.
The window meant that she could watch the children as she did something else. She zested the lemon, dumped that into the softening butter, minced garlic and added that. She used the kitchen shears to hack at the parsley, which had a sharp and astonishing smell. She folded this all together into a thick paste. The hot pasta would dull the taste of the garlic.
She used the pot filler over the stove, helped herself to the kosher salt in the pantry, poured a glass of red wine. It made her stomach churn, red wine over black coffee. The water boiled. Her attention had drifted. Beyond the pool, through the woods at the property’s perimeter, Amanda saw a deer, then adjusted her eyes and saw two more, smaller. Mother and children! Wasn’t that fitting. The animals were cautious, nosing through the brush in search of—what did deer eat? Her ignorance embarrassed her.
She strained the cooked pasta, dropped the herbed butter into the nest of noodles, replaced the lid, and opened the glass door. The air had grown cooler. It would rain, or something would happen, and they would have to spend the next day inside the house. There were board games, there was the television, maybe they’d watch a movie, there was a glass canister of dried corn in the pantry, maybe they’d pop some, lie about all day.
“It’s time to come inside, guys.”
Archie and Rose were in the hot tub, pink as cooking lobsters.
Amanda insisted the children bathe and banish that chlorine smell. She poured herself another glass of wine. Clay returned with a surprising number of paper bags.
“I went a little overboard.” He looked sheepish. “I thought it might rain. I don’t want to have to leave the house tomorrow.”
Amanda frowned because she felt she was supposed to. It wouldn’t ruin them to spend a little more than was usual on groceries. Or maybe it was the wine. “Fine, fine. Put those away and let’s eat?” She wasn’t sure she wasn’t slurring a little bit.
She laid the table. The children, redolent of marzipan (Dr. Bronner’s, in the green bottle), sat. They were the best kind of tired, docile, almost polite, no burping or name-calling. Archie even helped his father clear the table, and Amanda lay on the sofa beside Rose, her head in her child’s warm lap. She didn’t mean to sleep, but she did, full of wine and pasta and bored by the television’s prattle. Amanda was perplexed when she was roused twenty minutes on by an especially shrill commercial and Rose’s need for the bathroom. Her mouth was dry.
“Have a nice nap?” Clay was teasing, not amorous (he was still sated) but romantic—even better or rarer. They’d made a nice life for themselves, hadn’t they?
Amanda did the New York Times crossword on her phone—she was afraid of dementia, and felt this was preventative—and the time passed strangely, as it did when measured in minutes before the television. If the night before she’d been eager to look at her work and fuck her husband, tonight it felt important to linger on the sofa with her children, Archie dopey in his too-big hooded sweatshirt, Rose infantile, wrapped in the itchy woolen throw left on the sofa’s arm. Clay served bowls of ice cream, then collected the bowls, and the dishwasher ran with its reassuring gurgle, and Rose’s eyes looked blank and Archie yawned loudly, suddenly, so like a man, and Amanda sent the children to bed, telling them to brush their teeth but not standing sentry to verify that they did.
She yawned, was tired enough to go to bed, but knew somehow that if she moved, she would not fall asleep. Clay changed the channel, pausing a moment on Rachel Maddow and then switching to a thriller that neither of them were able to follow, detectives and their prey.