The High Season(2)
“She won’t be here for three hours.”
“Don’t bother, Daddy,” Jem said, stuffing shirts into a duffel as she walked. “God forbid we do some actual living in this house. For the past month I’ve had to eat my muffin on the porch.”
“What say we finish loading the truck!” Ruthie suggested in what Jem called her “me-hearties” voice.
Jem settled the duffel on one shoulder and picked up a canvas tote stuffed with last-minute items—books, soap, sandals, a rolled-up pair of shorts, a box of linguine. She’d worn the same aggrieved expression all morning. It was an old fight; at fifteen, Jem had long passed the age where Mike and Ruthie could make a game out of packing up her room to make way for strangers who would eat off her plates and swim off her beach. It was no longer an adventure to stay in a borrowed trailer at a campground, or flop in a garage apartment. Jem was old enough now to realize that a sofa bed was no lark to sleep on.
They watched her go, blond braid swishing, flip-flops snapping a rebuke.
“We had a fight this morning over the bleach,” Ruthie said as soon as the screen door banged. “She promised me she’d help me do the last-minute clean, and she tried to wriggle out of it. Meret wanted her to get a hot wax pedicure.”
“What’s that?”
“Seventy-five dollars.”
“Meret,” Mike muttered. “A fur cup of trouble.”
“A fur cup with toenails.” Jem’s lovely best friend Olivia had moved away a year ago, and Ruthie still bemoaned the day Meret Bell had stopped by Jem’s table in the cafeteria and said, “I like your hair that way.”
“She’ll be okay,” Mike said, watching through the screen as Jem leaned against his pickup, texting furiously. Boxes and suitcases and a broken chair surrounded her in Joad-like fashion. “She’s going through a girly stage.”
“She’s not going through a girly stage, she’s a girl. She’s a girl who thinks she’s a woman.”
“Didn’t Gary Puckett and the Union Gap sing that?”
“You know, it would make me so happy if you’d worry with me.”
Mike sock-skated across the wood floor, heading for his shoes on the porch.
“Sweetie, give me something worthy to worry about, and I can worry with the best of them. I can’t worry about a pedicure. Whereas you like to exist in a fog of general anxiety. Probably why we’re incompatible. Irreconcilable worry patterns.”
“Reason number three hundred and thirty-seven,” Ruthie said, following him to the door. It was an old joke. “Can you pick up Jem after work today? I’ve got Spork prep, and it’s going to be crazy.”
“Sure.”
“And you’re not allowed to call me sweetie, remember?”
“Ah, Rules for a Good Divorce. Thank God you remember them or we’d be in worse trouble.”
“Hey. They were just suggestions.”
“You emailed me a list. There were asterisks.” Mike stood at the screen door. Dodge, the artist who lived down the road in the summers, honked and waved from his yellow convertible, yelling something as he went by, most likely “Cocktails!” All summer they would promise to have cocktails together and never do it. Dodge was the new breed of summer renter in Orient; he had a social calendar.
“Every year we watch them come back,” Mike continued, waving at Dodge. “Every year we give up our house. How long can we do this, anyway?”
“Do what?”
“This,” Mike said. “Live next to things we can never have. It gets worse every year. Did you see the house they’re renovating over on Orchard? Dave said there’s a home gym and a lap pool. A home gym! It’s a death knell, I’m telling you.”
He gazed out at the bay, a powdery blue today, with a scattering of white sails skittering toward Bug Light. A rainstorm the night before had failed to clear the humidity, and the world had summery blurred edges. “We wouldn’t have to uproot Jem every summer if we sold it. And we’d have money. We’ve got to be at the top of the market right now.”
When they’d sat down to discuss the divorce three years before, child custody had been decided in an exchange of less than ten words (And Jem? We just have to…Of course.)—but the house, ah, the house. Marital vows they could abandon, but a shingled house with a water view in an escalating market? They had put everything into the house, they had borrowed and scraped in order to renovate it. It was their version of a hedge fund, held against disaster and college tuition. If everything fell apart, they said, they could sell the house.
Divorce papers were inevitable, but it became an item on an ever-growing to-do list that could have been titled “Things to Ignore for Now.” Divorce needed attorneys and turned amicable separations into expensive fights. They decided, for now, to treat divorce as a state of mind rather than polity. Yes, they were divorced. No, the state of New York didn’t know it yet.
So Ruthie stayed in the house with Jem. Mike had moved into an apartment in the bigger village of Greenport, a few blocks from the hardware store, which was at least handy for a carpenter.
Her phone vibrated again. Mindy, no doubt. She ignored it.
“We should move to Vermont, or Nova Scotia,” Mike said. “To the real country. Where hot wax is on a candle where it belongs, not on your daughter’s toes. Where people think Pilates is next to the Big Dipper. Where they’ve never heard of kale chips.”