French Braid(11)

Eventually, her father’s work shoes and black socks appeared in front of her, and she raised her eyes to find him peering down at her. “Why aren’t you in the water?” he asked.

“I’m waiting till I get hot enough.”

“David? Want to come in with me?”

“I can’t; I’ve got an emergency here,” David said.

Their father was silent a moment, perhaps trying to figure this out. Then he tugged off his T-shirt and dropped it on Alice’s towel. “Well, I’m going in,” he said.

Alice sat up and gazed after him as he walked away. Several people were in the water this morning—a young couple, a man supervising a toddler, and someone unidentifiable swimming far from the shore. Not till Robin reached the very edge did he bend to take his shoes and socks off, and he set them side by side on the sand but spent some time watching the other swimmers before he began wading in.

He was not a born vacationer, Alice thought. There was something effortful about him. He kept his elbows raised above the water, and his shoulder blades stuck out from his back like fryer wings.

The beach itself was more populated today. The heavyset woman was back, lying on her striped towel as if she had never left, and a couple with a baby under a giant umbrella, and another couple with a whole crowd of boisterous children. The only boy among them looked to be about twelve or so—considerably older than David, but Alice gave it a try, even so. “Think you’d like to go talk to that boy over there?” she asked David. But he flicked the merest glance toward the boy, who was striding down to the water now. “No,” he said. “He’s too old.”

“He looks really nice, though.”

But David had already turned back to his veterinarians. He held one of them up over his head to watch a distant motorboat pass. “I saw three ships a-sailing by,” he sang, “a-sailing by, a-sailing by…”

Alice reached for her Brownie Starflash and raised it to one eye and squinted. She wondered if it was Trent and Lily in the boat, but she couldn’t tell from here.



* * *



—

You would think, judging from Mercy’s fondness for her book of blurry French paintings, that her own paintings would be equally blurred—less scenery than a shorthand for scenery. The fact was, though, that they were not that way; or not entirely, at least. Take the one she was working on when the three of them got back to the cabin. Her pine trees were vague green pyramids, her forest floor an expanse of brownish wash, but then in the foreground, at the lower left corner, her cast-off pompom sandals were as sharply defined as if they were sitting under a magnifying glass. The running stitches outlining each strap, the pores in the cork of the soles, even the tiny sweat bee that had alighted on a frond of one pompom: nothing had been left to the imagination. Alice found the contrast disturbing; the abrupt transition from hazy to specific made her eyeballs feel tight. Were the sandals meant to be a message? A clue to something? A symbol? Oh, she just didn’t get it!

But then, she never did. So she said what she usually said: “That’s nice, Mama,” and went off to change out of her swimsuit. Behind her, she heard David ask, “Could your paintings be in a museum, ever?” And Mercy said, “Oh, no no no,” and gave one of her tinkling laughs. “I just paint for me,” she said, and she sent him off to get dressed.



* * *



—

It was obvious that Trent didn’t have a steady girlfriend, Lily said, because the Ivy League buckle on the back of his khakis was unbuckled. “Maybe it’s unbuckled by accident,” Alice told her. “Maybe he’s just sloppy.”

“Are you kidding? It’s a statement,” Lily said. “Everybody knows that much.”

“Couldn’t you just ask him straight out if he’s going steady?”

Lily gave her a look.

By now it was the fourth day of their stay, and Lily had spent every one of those days exclusively with Trent. From the sound of it, they mostly hung out at his family’s lake house. “What do you do there?” Alice asked, and Lily said, “Oh, just swim and stuff.” The only time Trent appeared at the Garretts’ was when he stopped by to pick Lily up, sometime in the mid-morning. (He drove, although it was only a walk.) “Hey there, gorgeous,” he would greet her. And then, “Hey, Mr. Garrett. Mrs. Garrett, aren’t you looking fine!”

Robin, nursing his third cup of coffee, would merely grunt, but Mercy would say, “Why, thank you, Trent. How are you today?”

“I’m doing great, thanks.”

Alice he all but ignored. He would lift a hand a few inches in her direction and let it flop again. And to David he just said, “Hey, kid.”

“Hey,” David said, but he didn’t look up from what he was doing.

This particular morning David announced, after Trent and Lily had left, “Trent says things that aren’t real.”

Alice said, “Mm-hmm.”

But Mercy said, “What, honey? What are you talking about? What did he say that wasn’t real?”

“I don’t know, but it wasn’t,” David said.

“Oh, now. I think he’s cute,” Mercy said.

It was strange, Alice reflected, that a grown woman couldn’t see as clearly as a seven-year-old. But then, David often seemed weirdly smart about people.