I thought perhaps Mrs. Pike would send me home before breakfast, but the next morning she was particularly attentive and kind. She asked me how I’d slept and showed me how to use the little egg cutter to lop off the top of my soft-boiled egg. She proposed that she take me and the kids to the beach club for lunch, and Kay could have some time to herself. She could make an appointment for her at the hairdresser’s if she liked.
But Kay said she wanted to take the kids to a place called David’s Animal Farm, just over the New Hampshire border. I’d never heard of it before.
“Why on earth would you go all that way on such a beautiful day?” Mrs. Pike said.
“It sounds fun.”
“I hired Cara so you could get a break.”
“Thank you.”
“I mean, so you can have some grown-up time.”
“I know what you meant. But I want to be with my children on our vacation.”
We ate our soft-boiled eggs in the silence that followed, everyone except Elsie who had Cheerios on her tray.
Hugh pushed through the swinging door and laughed at us.
“The egg cups!” We were eating from little figure eight–shaped porcelain cups that matched the plates, pink flowers, gold rims. “Ah, isn’t it good to be alive in 1905?” He reached for the silver egg cutter and pretended to go after Stevie’s nose.
I smelled him and remembered how I’d put myself to sleep the night before with a story about him taking me out into the woods where there was this old tennis court no one used anymore and him teaching me to play and afterward kissing me, a tender, delicate kiss, not the gross kind you saw on TV when it looked like the two people were trying to eat the same piece of candy, and remembering that story—even more than Hugh himself—gave me a nervous stomach and I couldn’t take another bite of egg.
Hugh wanted to come with us to the animal farm. His mother told him he couldn’t, that she needed him to move some furniture for her. He pressed her on what furniture and why couldn’t Charlie do it and she wasn’t prepared for the fight. She left the room abruptly.
He leaned over to me, his smell stronger now. “My mother thinks you are trying to bedevil me.”
“Hugh, stop it,” Kay said. “Jesus. Carol, that is not what my mother thinks.” She was pouring more Cheerios for Elsie. “Bedevil,” she said and held it in for about ten seconds then broke into a fit of laughter. Hugh joined her and for a while all you could hear was the little snaps of their throats.
David’s Animal Farm wasn’t a farm. It was more like an amusement park for animal lovers. You bought tokens for the dispensers of food, which were just bubble gum machines filled with pellets. The pellets tumbled into your hands and baby goats and sheep would come running over and you put your hand out flat and felt their big black lips delicately nibble them up. Hugh squatted next to one of the machines, put Stevie on one knee and Elsie on the other, and gave them a steady flow of pellets. Soon they were surrounded by goats. Hugh started putting the pellets in his ear and on his nose and the goats mauled his face with their rubbery lips and Stevie and Elsie giggled madly until someone in a David’s T-shirt told him to stop. They also sold milk in baby bottles to feed the littlest goats. We got bottles for the kids and I sat on the ground with Elsie and we held the bottle together as a tiny black-and-white goat sucked the milk down.
Hugh tried to put his face where our goat was. “I want to be a baby goat. Feed me!”
But he was quiet on the way home. Kay tried to get him to talk but he would only answer with one or two words. I was in back with Stevie and Elsie who wanted to sing, and while we sang I heard Kay say, “You scare me when you get like this.”
We went through town, past our apartment, then out on the neck toward the Point.
“Why did they put these sorry little shitholes right here?” Hugh said. “Nice road, crappy house. Sorry about that.”
One of the shitholes up ahead was my father’s. I saw a woman in a yellow shirt crouched down in one of his flower beds. My mother. I felt a strange whirring in my chest.
Go home! I wanted to scream out the window at her. Let all his flowers die. We’d been through this so many times, the dry-out places, the circle of chairs, the specked linoleum, all the apologies and tears that meant nothing.
Before the kids’ naps, we all swam. The day had grown hot, hotter than it had been all week. Mrs. Pike joined us wearing a bathing suit. She had some blue knots in the veins, but her legs were strong, surprisingly muscular.