French Braid(17)

“Your father’s asking for you,” Mercy told David.

“I want to go back to the cabin,” he said. He stood up and brushed off his hands.

“Now?” Mercy asked. She looked surprised. She sent a glance toward the lake, but Robin and Bentley were having a conversation.

“He does seem a little flushed,” Tania commented from her towel. “Did you bring a sun hat for him?”

“Why, no, I—”

“I bet I have one. Somewhere, here…”

Tania started rooting through her tote. David turned and looked beseechingly at Alice. “I’ll take you,” she told him.

She got up from her towel and reached for his hand. Mercy sat back on her haunches, still holding a pebble, and asked him, “Don’t you want to finish our city?”

“No, thank you,” David said.

“Well…okay. I’ll finish it for you,” she decided.

She leaned forward to set her pebble in place on the city wall, and David and Alice left.



* * *



—

For lunch, Alice set out odds and ends—everything they needed to use up before they went home. Half a pack of bologna, half a container of coleslaw, a hamburger from last night’s supper, briefly reheated in a skillet…Robin was the one who ate the burger. “These came out pretty good,” he told Mercy. “Right?” Because he’d grilled them himself in the backyard, shielding them with a sheet of cardboard so they wouldn’t get rained on.

He was eating lunch in his swimsuit, and so were Mercy and Alice. David, though, had changed into shorts and a T-shirt the minute he’d reached the cabin. Clearly he wasn’t planning to go back down to the lake. Their mother must have realized this, but she pretended not to. “Wait till you see what I’ve done with our city,” she told him. “I’ll show you after lunch. It’s a masterpiece!”

“That’s nice, Mama,” David said quietly.

Mercy cocked her head at him, but she didn’t say anything more.

“Next time, though,” Robin announced, “I’ll let the coals sit a bit longer before I put the meat on. Tonight when I grill our…What am I grilling?”

“Pork chops,” Alice told him.

“Tonight when I grill our pork chops I’m going to wait till the coals are purely gray, solidly gray with no glow to them.”

“I’ve already got them marinating,” Alice told him.

“Marinating?”

“They’ve been sitting in this marinade I mixed from things I found in the cupboard. Really I just made it up, but I think it’ll be delicious.”

Robin frowned.

“You are such a creative cook, honey,” her mother told her.

“I even found wine in the cupboard. Red. Well, just a little bit in the bottom of a bottle, but it was enough with everything else I added.”

“How old was this wine?” Robin asked suspiciously.

“Wine doesn’t get old, Daddy. Well, it does, but that’s fine for marinades. All the magazines say so.”

He went on frowning. He said, “I haven’t forgotten the eggplant.”

Alice had once served the family Eggplant Parmigiana. Her father had taken a mouthful and then stopped chewing and asked, “What is this? What is this slippery part?”

“It’s eggplant,” Alice had told him.

“Oh, dear God,” he’d said, and he had set his fork down.

Perhaps remembering this too, Mercy told him, “The nice thing about marinades is, they enhance the meat’s normal flavor. They don’t add their own taste; they just enhance the taste of the meat.”

Actually, Alice wasn’t so sure about this. There were a lot of unusual ingredients in her marinade, including black sesame oil and some cute little bottled peppers with a long Italian name. But she told her father, “You’re going to love it.”

“Okay…” he said in a faint voice.

Mercy patted his hand.

After lunch Mercy and Robin went back down to the lake—Mercy had agreed to take a dip with him, seeing as this was their last day—and Alice said she would be along with David once she’d cleaned up the kitchen. She didn’t look at David as she said this, and David didn’t contradict her.

Once their parents were gone, Alice threw out any leftovers they hadn’t managed to finish and washed the dishes. Then she and David played several games of Crazy Eights. David said that they ought to keep score; play till the first person reached a hundred points. Ordinarily they didn’t count points, but just stopped when one of them ran out of cards. So she knew he was trying to put off going to the lake. “Tell you what,” she said, laying the deck aside. “Why don’t you and me figure out what to do with that avocado pear.”

“Yes!” he said, as if it had been weighing on his mind all along.

“I’m thinking a salad. What’s your opinion?”

“A salad. Goody.”

“What else should be in our salad?”

“Um, lettuce, bananas…”

“Bananas!”

“Or…I don’t know…”

“Tomatoes, maybe?”

“Yes, tomatoes.”