Commonwealth(23)

“He does too!” Caroline said, turning on her mother so fast she spilled half a bag of flour on the counter. “Maybe he didn’t when you knew him but you don’t know him anymore. Now he likes nuts in everything.”

Albie was in the dining room. She could hear him singing through the kitchen door. His single-pointed focus was astounding. Franny was in the living room, pulling the cat’s front legs through the armholes of a doll’s dress and crying so quietly that her mother was sure that every single thing she had ever done in her life up until that moment was a mistake.

There was no place to go, no place to get away from them, not even the linen closet because Jeanette hadn’t come out of the linen closet since surrendering the cat. Beverly took the car keys and went outside. The minute she closed the door behind her she was underwater, the summer air hot and solid in her lungs. She thought about the back patio of the house in Downey, how she would sit outside in the afternoons, Caroline on her tricycle, Franny happy in her lap, the smell of the orange blossoms nearly overwhelming. Fix had had to sell the house in order to pay her half of what little equity they had and make the child support. Why had she made him sell the house? No one could sit outside in Virginia. She got five new mosquito bites just walking to the driveway and each one puffed up to the size of a quarter. Beverly was allergic to mosquito bites.

It was easily 105 degrees inside the car. She started the engine, turned on the air conditioner, turned off the radio. She lay across the scorching green vinyl of the bench seat so that no one looking out the front window of the house could see her. She thought about the fact that if she were in the garage rather than the carport she’d be killing herself now.

Because California public schools ran slightly longer than Virginia Catholic schools, Beverly and Bert had had five days alone in the house between her children’s departure and his children’s arrival. One night after dinner they made love on the dining room carpet. It wasn’t comfortable. Beverly’s weight had steadily dropped since their move to Virginia, and the bony protrusions of her vertebrae and clavicles were so clearly displayed she could have found work in an anatomy class. Every thrust pushed her back a quarter inch, dragging her skin against the wool blend. But even with the rug burns it made them feel daring and passionate. It hadn’t been a mistake, Bert kept telling her as they lay on their backs afterwards, staring up at the ceiling. Beverly counted five places where the glass crystals on the chandelier were missing. She hadn’t noticed it before.

“Everything that’s happened in our lives up until now, everything we’ve done, it had to happen exactly the way it did so that we could be together.” Bert took her hand and squeezed it.

“You really believe that?” Beverly asked.

“We’re magic,” Bert said.

Later that night he rubbed Neosporin down the length of her spine. She slept on her stomach. That was their summer vacation.

Here was the most remarkable thing about the Keating children and the Cousins children: they did not hate one another, nor did they possess one shred of tribal loyalty. The Cousinses did not prefer the company of Cousinses and the two Keatings could have done without each other entirely. The four girls were angry about being crowded together into a single room but they didn’t blame each other. The boys, who were always angry about everything, didn’t seem to care that they were in the company of so many girls. The six children held in common one overarching principle that cast their potential dislike for one another down to the bottom of the minor leagues: they disliked the parents. They hated them.

The only one who was troubled by this fact was Franny, because Franny had always loved her mother. During the regular part of the year they sometimes took naps together in the afternoons after school, spooning so close they fell asleep and dreamed the same dreams. Franny would sit on the closed toilet lid in the morning and watch her mother put on makeup, and she would sit on the toilet lid again at night and talk to her mother while her mother soaked in the bath. Franny was secure in the knowledge that she was not only her mother’s favorite daughter, she was her mother’s favorite person. Except in the summer, when her mother looked at her as if she were nothing more than the fourth of six children. When her mother was sick of Albie, she announced that all children had to go outside, and “all children” included Franny. Ice cream had to be eaten outside. Watermelon—outside. Since when had she not been trusted to eat watermelon at the kitchen table? It was insulting, and not just to her. Maybe Albie couldn’t eat a dish of ice cream without dropping it on the floor but the rest of them were perfectly capable. They went outside all right. They went outside and slammed the door and took off down the street, loping across the hot pavement like a pack of feral dogs.

The four Cousins children didn’t blame Beverly for their miserable summers. They blamed their father, and would have said so to his face had he ever been around. Cal and Holly gave no indication that they thought Beverly’s behavior was inexcusable (and Jeanette never said anything anyway, and Albie, well, who knew about Albie), but Caroline and Franny were horrified. Their mother made everyone line up in the kitchen according to age and come to the stove with their plate instead of putting the food on the table in dishes as she did every other night of the year. In the summers they wandered out of the civilized world and into the early orphanage scenes of Oliver Twist.

It was a Thursday night in July when Bert called a family meeting in the living room and announced that in the morning they were going to Lake Anna. He told them he had taken the next day off from work and rented three rooms at the Pinecone Motel. On Sunday morning they would drive to Charlottesville to see his parents and then come home again. “It’s a vacation,” Bert said. “All arranged.”