French Braid(15)

“Did you throw him in?”

“What?”

“Did you throw him into the water?”

“No, I didn’t throw him into the water! Why would I do that?”

“Like some sink-or-swim thing? You and Bentley doing some he-man thing?”

“What are you talking about?”

She walked over to the rocker and sank down into it. Trent had abandoned the couch by now; he was waiting by the front door while Lily rolled her towel into a cylinder around her swimsuit. “I’m going to Trent’s house,” she told Mercy, but Mercy just looked at her blankly.

“He wasn’t in any danger, Mercy, I swear it,” Robin said. “Me and Bentley were standing right there on the end of the dock. All I had to do was jump into the water and lift him up by one arm and he was fine. Soaked my shoes pretty good, though.”

“Bye, Mama,” Lily said. She and Trent left. Alice asked her mother, “Shall I put some things out for lunch?” But Mercy just dropped her shopping bag to the floor and rocked her chair back.



* * *



—

David did emerge from the bedroom, after a bit. He appeared while Alice and her parents were eating lunch; he crept quietly into the kitchen and hoisted himself onto his chair and plucked a slice of bologna from the platter. He still had his trunks on, but he’d added a sweatshirt, and he’d brought along his cowboy doll, which he laid facedown across his lap. Even Mercy knew enough not to make a fuss. She just moved the sack of bread a little closer to his plate and went on telling Robin about their trip into Dunnville. “Dullville, they ought to call it,” she said. “I was expecting they might cater some to the tourist trade, but they don’t.”

“Missing out on a good thing there,” Robin said. “Some guy with a little business sense could come along and make a killing.”

“Well, sooner or later, I suppose—careful, honey,” she broke off to tell David. “You’re getting mustard on Bobby Shafto.”

“Bascomb,” David corrected her. Bascomb was who the doll had been before he became Bobby Shafto. (The Garretts’ mailman was named Bascomb.)

“Oh, excuse me,” Mercy told the doll. David moved Bascomb from his lap to the seat of his chair and went back to spreading mustard.

“In town I bought us an avocado pear,” Alice told him. “I thought we could have it on Friday with our special last-night supper, how’s that.”

“Okay,” David said.

But he didn’t sound very interested.

“Now, an avocado pear is one thing I just never have understood,” Robin said. “In what way is it a pear, I ask you. Is it even a fruit? Doesn’t it seem more a type of vegetable?” He looked over at David. “What do you think, son?”

David shrugged almost imperceptibly and screwed the lid back on the mustard jar.

They let him be, after that. He would come around in his own good time. Robin walked over to Bentley’s cabin after lunch to help out with a little electrical problem, and Mercy set up her paints on the kitchen table, and Alice changed into her swimsuit and went down to the lake. She did invite David along, but when he didn’t bother answering she dropped the subject. She left him curled up on the couch with Bascomb, and when she returned an hour or so later he was sound asleep. Mercy told her he’d slept the whole time Alice had been gone. “It’s a kind of healing process, I think,” she said. “Clearing a troubling memory out of his brain. He’ll be his normal self when he wakes up again.” And she smiled at Alice and stirred her paintbrush around her white porcelain palette.

Lately, she’d been painting different sections of the cabin. A suggestion of pink-splotched wallpaper in the girls’ room, with the facets of one cut-glass bureau knob minutely outlined by a brush with a tip like a pinpoint. A baseboard in the living room dissolving into the floorboards, distinct specks of something Alice took to be sand scattered all around it, except Robin said it was not sand but evidence of carpenter ants.

“I believe I’m more an interior kind of painter than an exterior kind,” Mercy told Alice. “I was thinking this vacation might, oh, expand my vision, but when I was out there in the woods I felt so overwhelmed, you know? Like I was drifting in space.”

“I do like the cabin paintings the best,” Alice said.

She had the sudden peculiar feeling that she had somehow become older than her mother—her dainty little mother drifting in space. Because the awful truth was that Alice did not much like any of her mother’s paintings, although she would never be unkind enough to tell her so.



* * *



—

The next morning, it was raining. Robin was the one who minded most. He said, “An arm and a leg this week cost us, and now a whole day of it is going to go to waste.”

“Oh, not really to waste,” Mercy told him. “We’re still having ourselves a holiday, aren’t we? Still spending time together as a family.”

“Hmph.”

“Besides, it’ll do you good to get out of the sun for a while.”

It was true that Robin’s face had turned a bit ruddy. (All that standing about in the lake with Bentley.) At this rate, he would be the only one of them coming home from vacation with something to show for it, because Alice’s baby-oil-and-iodine mixture had not had much effect, and Mercy and David hadn’t been outdoors enough. As for Lily, well, Alice had to wonder how much of Lily’s time at Trent’s had really been spent swimming. She was still very pale. This morning when she arrived at the breakfast table—the last one up, as usual—Mercy asked her, “What are you going to do today now that you have to be inside?”