Five Tuesdays in Winter(4)

Hugh changed all our rhythms. The children waited for him to wake up. I waited for him to come downstairs before we left the house. Kay waited for the afternoon, when he would join us at the pool and she could talk freely without her mother around.

“She insists that the children eat with us,” Kay said to him that afternoon, “but a fucking hour after their bedtime. It’s the only time she sees them all day and they are at their absolute worst. She keeps calling them sensitive and fragile. They’re fucking exhausted, Ma.” With Hugh, Kay sounded like my father after a couple of drinks. She sounded nothing like who she’d been before.

Hugh lay on his back on the cement, his feet and shins bent into the water. He was tossing one of Stevie’s stuffed animals, a blue bear with a white star on its chest, high up in the air and catching it. Stevie looked on nervously from the shallow end where I was towing him around in a red ring. I was a long-finned pilot whale, he told me, guiding his boat to shore.

“I’m not sure we’re going to have kids.”

“What? Why?”

Hugh didn’t answer.

“Raven doesn’t want them?”

“Stevie,” Hugh said, “this bear wants to get on the boat.” His throw was short, and the bear landed facedown in the water. Stevie moaned that the blue bear didn’t know how to swim and I got it out quickly, before the fabric could absorb much liquid. Kay was still waiting for an answer from her brother, but it never came.

Hugh had married Raven (I wasn’t sure if that was really her name or a name he had given her, like he gave me Cara, but everyone in the family used it, except when Kay called her Molly Bloom, an allusion I wouldn’t get until twelfth-grade English) in the garden the previous summer. Before he arrived no one had mentioned this, but now it came up all the time. After a while I noticed it was Mrs. Pike more than anyone else who brought it up. I got the sense that it was an expensive wedding and there were still some outstanding bills in town (there were stores to be avoided, particularly the liquor store, and trips had to be made to vendors farther away because of it). Money was tight for Mrs. Pike, though I heard Thomas say once that that was all in her mind and she made terrible trouble for herself because of it. But Mrs. Pike didn’t seem to resent Hugh for the wedding. She just needed to confirm, several times a day, that it had been worth it. For her, remembering it and talking about it increased its value, or at least helped her get more and more of her money’s worth, as if they were still using it, like an expensive appliance whose frequent use justifies the cost.

Within a few days, I knew so much about that one weekend I could nearly block it like a film: Hugh’s friend Kip’s long and inappropriate toast at the bridal dinner about Hugh’s old girlfriend Thea; Raven’s black dress (that did not match her hair—despite her name she was blond) that made “the aunties” (not sure whose) gasp; Stevie carrying the rings on Night Night, his special—and filthy— little sleeping pillow; the weepy minister; the family friend who at the end of the reception drove right off the seawall and was very, very lucky the tide was out.

Until Hugh arrived, Mrs. Pike had never come out to the pool with us. Now she came out after her “lie down” every afternoon. On the second day of his visit, Hugh and I were playing seals with Stevie and Elsie. The children floated in their plastic rings and water wings and we dunked underwater in tandem to tickle their feet and listen to them shriek.

“You bited me!” Elsie said after several rounds of this.

Hugh snapped his teeth together and she squealed.

Margaret came out the patio doors, down the four flights of stone slabs, and across the sunken garden to the pool gate where she said, “Your wife is on the phone for you, Hugh.”

“Hugh, me sir?”

Margaret’s face split into a grin. “Hugh, you sir.” He rose up out of the pool in one sinewy motion. The water sluiced off his head and down his back. His green bathing suit clung to his bum and I could see its exact shape, two bony teardrops. He gave it a little wiggle then, as if he knew someone was watching. He jogged across the grass and by the time he reached the steps his ringlets had sprung back up.

“Well, you can’t say he’s not still utterly smitten,” Mrs. Pike said.

“No, you cannot,” Kay said.

Without Hugh there, they seemed barely acquaintances now. Kay was stiff in her chaise longue, her hands resting on a facedown hardcover in her lap, which I knew she wanted to get back to. But Mrs. Pike, in one of the smaller upright chairs under the umbrella, had no reading or distractions. And while she didn’t make continual conversation, she made just enough to keep someone from picking up their novel. I was glad I was an employee in the pool, now a gentle blue-ringed octopus who gave rides to gentle children. Stevie wore earplugs because he was prone to ear infections. (Hugh teased Stevie by mouthing words just so Stevie would shout: I can’t hear you I have my pugs in!) Elsie pinched one out of his ear and Stevie let out a screech.

“Isn’t it naptime?” Mrs. Pike asked. Usually when she asked this it was not, but this time it was.

I gathered up the towels and swim toys, the diaper bag and snack boxes and plastic cups.

Kay said, “I can take them up.”

Mrs. Pike said, “Let Cara do it.” She knew my name but she decided she liked Cara better. There had been a girl in her Sunday school class when she was little named Carol whom she hadn’t liked. “It’s what she’s here for.”