Invincible Summer(43)

“Love would be the obvious remainder.”

“I thought you were supposed to hate each other after a divorce.”

“I don’t think there are any supposed to s with divorce besides divorce isn’t supposed to happen.”

“Insights from your couple’s counselor?”

He laughs and saws off the end of a board. “No, the couple’s counselor thinks divorce was the best possible solution for your mom and me. Though she does talk a lot about how hard it is on you guys.” Dad looks at me. “So how hard is it on you guys?”

It’s about four o’clock and wicked hot, and all my muscles hurt. Probably would have been smarter to wait until evening to deal with this, but after all these years with Gideon, we’re used to doing loud things when they can be seen.

Melinda and I always had sex with the lights on.

I can hear the kids shrieking down on the beach.

“I mean . . .” I shrug. “I miss them, but Gideon’s at Deaf school and Noah’s at college and . . . I’ll be at college in a year.

So it’s not like I would have seen them all the time anyway.

This was sort of how it was going to be even if you stayed together.” “Hmm. I seem to recall asking a completely different question than the one you just answered.”

I roll my eyes and laugh. “Yeah, it’s hard and it sucks.

I miss them all the time.” I look down at them all running around in the sand, tackling one another, screaming in their distinct voices. I can tell each of them apart, and all of them apart from everyone else on the beach. “I miss them right now, goddamn it, and I’m looking at them.”

Dad laughs. “You want to take a break? Go play with them?”

The problem is I’m sixteen, almost seventeen, and I don’t want to play with them as much as I want to want to play with them. Maybe this feeling is what Noah’s been running from.

God, he’d think that was a stupid thing to say.

“You don’t have to be afraid of this growing-up thing,”

Dad says.

“Shit, inspirational speech?”

“Camus-boy, you’re always going to be the same you, just older. It’s not like there’s a moment when you wake up and go, Shit, I’m grown up, I don’t feel like myself anymore.”

I don’t tell him, but this is the scariest f*cking thing I’ve ever heard in my life. Being grown-up should feel like a big transition. It can’t be something that, despite my best efforts, I’ve been drifting closer and closer to every summer. It needs to be a shock. I need to know at what point to stop holding on. And that moment will suck, and probably every moment after that will suck, but at least I’ll know that everything that came before really was valid. I really was young and innocent.

I wasn’t fooling myself.

Down on the beach, Shannon scoops up Gideon and holds him over a breaking wave, and Gideon kicks and kicks and— “Chase?”

I come back. “Sorry.”

“Listen,” he says. “We can talk about a new arrangement for next year. Maybe we need to rethink this. You could live with Mom for a little while, or go over to her house after school. Or Gideon could come stay with us for some of his breaks, or we could put you guys on rotation month by month or something, so you all get to live with each other for a while.”

I shake my head, digging out the nail my dad just bent.

“Claudia needs me.”

He waves his hand. “Claudia will be fine. Claudia’s always fine.”

I look at him. “You need me.”

He looks at me for a second, then pulls me into a hug, screwdriver and all. “Oh, you.” He kisses the top of my head.

“Just wait until you wake up fifty-four and alone.”

I’m playing guitar at night again. Why do I never play when I can see my fingers? I stretch my legs out in the sand.

“It’s going to be just how we planned,” Shannon says, holding Gideon on his lap. “I’ll marry Claudia and you’ll marry Bella and Noah will marry Melinda. Just like we always planned.”

Oh, Shannon.

Gideon reaches out and touches my fret hand. It’s too dark to translate to him but not too late for him to be awake.

The guilty hour, basically. After eight years of this, though, he accepts it, and sits quietly, playing with the sand on either side of Shannon.

I just say, “Mmm.”

Claudia’s down by the water, alone, in that green bikini, just staring out over the sea. She’s beginning to get a few curves, but mostly she’s stick straight all the way down, just like Lucy or Gideon or something.

Shannon sings, “Gid-e-on,” quietly, into the back of his head. “I’m going to miss him when he’s too old to be held.”

“I don’t think he’ll ever be too old to be held.”

Gideon sifts sand through his fingers. “God, I hate that I never get out here anymore,“ Shannon

says. “Next summer, I think we should get jobs together. We should be lifeguards.”

“That would be really cool, actually.”

“Yeah, wouldn’t that be awesome? We’d get to lie around on the beach all day with those big orange floats, have ladies coming and checking us out while we put on sunscreen?