Commonwealth(25)

Every door in the long row of bright-blue doors at the Pinecone was closed and the drapes over every window were pulled together. The cars parked in front of the rooms were wet with dew, or maybe it had rained during the night. The girls stood outside and knocked on Cal’s door, the one to the right of theirs. Cal opened the door a crack. He kept the chain on and looked out at her with a single eye. “We’re going to breakfast,” Holly said. “Come or don’t come.”

Cal closed the door, took off the chain, and opened it again. Behind him they saw Albie sitting on his double bed watching cartoons, his feet rhythmically kicking the end of the mattress. Whenever any of the girls thought to complain that there were four of them in a room sharing two beds, they thought of Cal, sharing a room with Albie. Cal shared a room with Albie at home so maybe he was used to it but probably not.

“Let’s go,” Cal said.

Cal was built on his father’s model. He was a tan boy with tan hair, and in the summer both the boy and his hair took on an undertone of gold. Cal had blue eyes, his father’s eyes, while the other three had dark eyes like their mother. Albie may have looked a little bit like freckled Holly but Holly’s good sense and Albie’s lack of it scrubbed out any physical resemblance between them. All four of the children were thin but Jeanette was too thin to look like any of them. She was never described by her pretty face or by her hair, which was glossy and the color of dark honey. Jeanette was referenced only by her elbows and knees, which did, in fact, resemble doorknobs. When the six of them were together they looked more like a day camp than a family, random children dropped off on the same curb. There was very little evidence of their relation, even among those who were related by blood.

“They’ll sleep until noon,” Holly said, meaning the parents. In the diner she pushed her eggs around in circles with her fork.

“And when they do finally get up they’ll just tell us they have to take a nap,” Caroline said. It was true. The parents napped like febrile toddlers. All the children nodded their heads. Cal was next to the window in the booth and he turned away from the rest of them to stare at the road. Albie was pounding the bottom of a ketchup bottle with the flat of his palm until finally the ketchup poured out onto his pancakes.

“Jesus,” Cal said and snatched the bottle away. “Can’t you sit here without doing something disgusting?”

“Look,” Albie said, and held up the pancake, dripping ketchup, in front of his face.

Jeanette pinned her toast to her plate with two fingers and removed the crusts with a knife.

“I’m not just going to sit here all day waiting for them,” Caroline said.

“What else can we do?” Franny asked, because there wasn’t anything to do. See if the motel had any board games maybe? A deck of cards? It was still so early, just now seven o’clock, and the sun came through the window of the diner like an invitation delivered to their table on a silver tray. It would have been a good day to swim.

“We came here to go to the lake so we should go to the lake,” Caroline said, reading her sister’s mind, or half of it. She was wearing her swimsuit under her clothes. They all were. Caroline was a lot angrier than the rest of them. It was there in her voice all the time. Then again, it could have been that Cal was the angriest and his anger just manifested itself in different ways.

Jeanette lifted her eyes from her toast. “Let’s go,” she said. It was the first thing she had said since they left Arlington the day before and so that settled it. Why should they wait for the parents to wake up? When they did go out with the parents, the children were divided into two groups—the big kids: Cal, Caroline, and Holly; and the little kids—Jeanette, Franny, and Albie. The big kids were allowed to wander off, swim in deep water without life jackets, hike out past anyone’s view, and decide what they wanted for lunch. The little kids might as well have been tied to a tree and made to eat from a single dish. The little kids were never to be trusted. With no further discussion, the six of them decided it would be better to see this as an opportunity.

At the cash register they added a six-pack of Coke and twelve candy bars to their breakfast tab, enough to see them through to lunch if necessary.

“How far is it to the lake?” Holly asked the waitress who was ringing them up.

“Maybe two miles, a little less. You just get back on Route 98.”

“What if you walk?”

The waitress studied the children for a minute. So many of them looked to be exactly the same size. Franny and Jeanette were thirty-eight days apart in age. “Where’re your parents?”

“Getting dressed,” Caroline said in the voice of a bored child. “They want us all to walk together. They said it was going to be an adventure. We’re supposed to get directions.”

The other children beamed at her for lying so deftly. The waitress took a paper placemat off the stack and turned it over. “There’s a shortcut if you walk.” On one end of the placemat she drew a rectangle to represent the motel (which she labeled “P”) and on the other end a circle for the lake (“L”). The broken line she drew to connect the two was their ticket out.

In the parking lot, Cal tried all the doors to the locked station wagon. Franny asked him what he needed out of the car and he said, “Something. Mind your own business.” He cupped his hands around his eyes and peered in the window, trying to see whatever it was he wanted.