French Braid(13)

“It’s got a squelchy bottom,” he told her.

“How would you even know that?” Robin demanded. It came out like a sort of explosion. “You haven’t even put your feet in yet!”

“I’ve put my feet in,” David said. He stirred his Cheerios industriously.

“Half the time he doesn’t so much as take his sandals off,” Robin told Mercy. “He goes out to the end of the dock with his fishing rod, he calls it—piece of grocery twine tied to a stick. Not even a hook on the end. Sits there swinging his feet a good six inches above the water and sings those songs of his. While Charlie, now, Bentley’s boy…”

Bentley was Robin’s new friend—the father of the boisterous children Alice and David had spotted on their second day at the lake. The two men had struck up a conversation and found they had a lot in common; Bentley owned a contracting business and had recently installed his own plumbing in his family’s new addition. In fact Alice was surprised to hear that her father had even noticed whether David went into the water or not, because he and Bentley liked to stand waist-deep with their arms folded across their chests and talk about sewage or something. Every now and then Charlie would plow past them with a showy Australian crawl, sending up a violent backwash, but Robin and Bentley just absently blotted their faces on their bare shoulders and went on talking.

“Maybe Charlie could teach David how to swim,” Mercy said.

David stopped stirring his Cheerios. “Charlie’s too old,” he told her.

“Oh.”

“What are you talking about?” Robin said. “He’s not but ten or eleven, at most.”

David said, “I think he must be twelve.”

“Eleven, twelve…At least he’s not scared to get wet!”

“Oh, Robin, let it be,” Mercy said. “David will learn to swim when he’s ready, just the way the girls did.”

“The girls learned way before this. Alice learned when she was four.”

Actually, she’d been eight. But her father hadn’t worried about it.

There were advantages to being a girl and having nothing much expected of you.

Another advantage was that her mother announced after breakfast that she planned to take her girls shopping in the little town nearby. (Alice enjoyed shopping.) The fact that Lily was in bed still, and that when they woke her she said she couldn’t go because Trent was coming to get her, didn’t faze Mercy in the least. “So? He’ll just have to wait,” she said. “It’ll make him appreciate you.”

Then she added that, who knew, they might find Lily a new swimsuit. Lily had been complaining that her current suit was childish. “A bikini?” Lily asked.

“Well…a two-piece, at least.”

“I don’t want just a two-piece. No one but mothers wear two-pieces.”

“We’ll see,” Mercy told her.

“Oh, goody!”

“We’ll see, is all I said.”

“Daddy, will you tell Trent to wait for me if he comes before I get back?” Lily asked.

“No can do, hon. I’ll be down at the lake, teaching your brother to swim.”

“Leave Trent a note,” Mercy suggested. “Stick it in the screen door.”

Lily didn’t look happy, but she said nothing further. Apparently she figured a bikini was worth inconveniencing him.

Alice drove. Her mother sat next to her and Lily sat in back, sunk so low in her seat that her face didn’t even show up in the rearview mirror. They took the little highway they’d come in on, continuing in the same direction. They passed small houses set close to the road with rustic wooden signs out front carved with names like fishin’ fiend and retirement acres. The whole way, Mercy chattered merrily. She was in a very happy mood. “When I was a girl,” she told them, “I used to imagine how I’d take shopping trips with my daughter after I was married. Little did I dream I’d have two daughters! I pictured how we’d try on clothes together, and experiment with different shades of lipstick, and conspire to hide all our packages from her father when we got home.”

“Will Dunnville have that kind of store, though?” Lily asked. “Won’t it just have country kind of stores?”

“Oh, surely they’ll have some nice places. This is a tourist area! Rich people come here!”

Lily had been right to wonder, though. Main Street turned out to be the road they were already traveling on, except with sidewalks. There was a hardware store and a drugstore, a dingy-looking café, and then a shop called Hi-Fashion with a single mannequin in the window wearing a marcelled plaster hairdo from the 1940s and a green gingham housewife dress. They went in anyhow. A bell clanked over the door. “Do you-all carry swimsuits?” Mercy asked the woman behind the counter, and the woman—kind-faced and pigeon-bosomed—perked up and cried, “Oh! Yes! We do have swimsuits! Over there on that rack!” But all the suits were one-piece, many with skirts. “This one’s kind of cute,” Mercy told Lily hopefully, fingering a pink-striped seersucker with boy-cut legs.

“Oh, please,” was all Lily said. Mercy didn’t push it.

They thanked the woman and walked out. They went to the drugstore, where the lipsticks were kept in a locked glass case and it felt like too much work to ask the young man at the register to open it. “But aren’t these headbands pretty?” Mercy asked. They were crescent-shaped, covered with fabric in different colors. Nothing special, but for a moment Alice’s eye was caught by a wide black grosgrain one. It would be good for when she dressed up, she thought. She stopped to lift it from the rack. “Alice flung her long hair carelessly over her shoulder,” her narrator said. But she already owned a headband in black velvet, and really, that was dressier. She replaced it and continued toward the door, with Mercy and Lily following.