Dolly All the Time(2)
I slide my phone into my back pocket and grab a pair of gloves from the dispenser. “Who’s next?” I call to the line.
* * *
The rush is over at four, and I take a second to enjoy the Zen of it. The ceiling fan whirring slowly overhead, the hum of the refrigerated case. We usually get only one or two more customers before we close at five, so we spend the hour cleaning up and settling the cash register. My dad emerges from the back room, white-haired and sun-leathered in his faded blue apron and yellow rubber gloves. He places a fillet knife and two fully cleaned haddocks on the counter.
“You guys really saved me today,” he says.
“Well, we’re here for the summer,” I say. “Happy to pick up some shifts.”
“But I’m probably doing that lifeguarding camp,” Gus says.
“Yes!” I say, too enthusiastic. “We need to look into that. Tomorrow. On my list.” I mentioned it to him on the drive this morning, and it’s the first thing I’ve seen him excited about since his social life took a nosedive in January. I wonder if a summer away is just what he needs to set things right. He’ll have a few low-stress months with family, sunshine, and salt air. We’ll head back to Boston before Labor Day just in time for him to start high school, where he will bloom socially. Just overnight, poof! Look at all these friends and that cool, easy confidence. He’ll whiz through those four years, grabbing an apple from the fridge and polishing it on his shirt like happy teenagers do on TV. He’ll give me an appreciative smile and a quick squeeze on his way to do something both meaningful and fun. At thirty-nine, these are my fantasies as I close my eyes at night.
Dad tosses his gloves onto the counter. “We’ve got the till, the mopping, and a delivery. Who wants what?”
“The till!” Gus says like he’s calling shotgun. It’s the only job you can do sitting down, and I’m sure he’s beat.
“I’ll do the mopping,” my dad says. “Dolly on delivery. The Whitfields.”
I roll my eyes. “Let me guess. A gross amount of shrimp and they want it before cocktail hour.”
“On the west veranda, of course,” he says with a smile.
“To catch the sunset,” I say. You don’t grow up in the town of Whitfield without knowing every detail of the Whitfields’ precious routine. “I’ll bike up there,” I say. “Gus, maybe you can unpack the car when you get back. And I’m on Cook House. Hamburgers.” My dad gives me a smile at our old joke. The Cook House is where circus performers take their meals, and we have long considered ourselves to be the ringmasters of our household circus.
“Cheese,” Gus says.
“Promise,” I say, and kiss the back of his head. A sneak attack.
I bike away from the fish house, down Main Street, through Whitfield. I pass bars and restaurants and the yacht club where I worked nights laundering linens as a teenager. The Whitfields’ yacht is on display in perpetual drydock in front of the yacht club. It’s its own kind of museum and people circle it, admiring the polished wood of the hull. I shake my head as I always do at the idea of people who have yachts they don’t even use. Extra yachts.
I bike to the edge of town, away from the shops, to where the summer people live. Elm trees line the streets and touch in the middle, giving the roads the most delicious spattering of dappled light. My legs are a bit sore from my morning bike ride, but as I smell the thick salt air, it’s hard to believe this is still the same day. I ride my bike in Boston only when I need to pick up my car. I rent out the parking spot that comes with our apartment to a Boston College student for $200 per month and then park my car four miles away for $90. This life hack has been a highlight of my year. It pays for Gus’s baseball and makes me feel like I’m getting paid to exercise. More than anything else, it reinforces my sense of self-sufficiency. I can pull resources out of thin air. Every time I get on that bike, I mentally pay myself for the Peloton I never bought.
My primary worry of the day is Gus’s perpetually sullen mood, but my background worry is that I still need to email his Boston baseball league and ask for a refund for summer ball. I have about $1,200 in my checking account, and the lifeguard camp he wants to do here would cost $1,000. It’s pretty tight, though I guess we’ll be eating fish all summer for free. I picture Gus in a white T-shirt with the word Lifeguard stamped in red. When he’s sixteen, it would be an actual paying job, probably better pay than the fish house. We could start coming back here for entire summers and sublet our apartment in Boston to students. I pedal faster with the excitement of having just pulled more money out of nowhere.
The houses start to get larger and farther apart as I approach the Whitfield estate, Eight Oaks. My younger sister, Patsy, and I used to do deliveries out here together because it was a fun ride at the end of the day. We’d laugh and play music off our iPods, until we got to Eight Oaks’s gate at the end. Then we’d get churchly quiet. Theirs is a black iron double gate adorned with gold acorns. There are eight of them, intricately fashioned to have the exact imperfections of actual acorns, but each at least the size of my head. They should be in a museum, not out here where birds can crap on them. I think of my mother and how much she loved the careless way rich people treat valuable things. If carelessness is aspirational, my mother nailed it when she walked away from us, easily her most valuable things.