“Coffee’s on its way. Did you make it to the ocean?”
“I did. The tide was just going out. I found this.” I walk over to him, hold out my open palm. “I’ve never seen a horseshoe crab this teensy. It’s perfect.”
“How was the water?” my mother asks.
“I didn’t swim—I was in my running clothes.”
“You could have swum naked,” Mum says. A criticism.
“I could have,” I say. It has begun. “I ran into Jonas on the road. He invited us all for a drink later.”
“Excellent,” Peter says.
“Did you notice? The gypsy caterpillars are back,” Mum says.
“The road to the beach looked fine.”
“They’ll get there. They’re like locusts. Half the trees between here and Pamela’s are bare. It’s too depressing. That horrible pattering sound of droppings raining down onto the path. I had to put my rebozo over my head and run, yesterday morning.”
“Caterpillars shit?” Peter asks.
“It looks like beige coffee grounds,” I say.
“That happened to me once,” my mother says. “It turned out I had an ulcer.”
“Your mother is speaking in tongues again, Elle,” Peter says.
“Your husband is impertinent,” Mum says. “In any event, if you ever find what appear to be coffee grounds in the toilet bowl, you’ll know.”
“That’s disgusting,” I say.
“Nevertheless.”
“Coffee, Wallace?” Peter asks, coming out of the kitchen with a fresh pot.
I adore my husband.
Four weeks ago. July 4, Wellfleet, Massachusetts.
We hear about the dead child at the Fourth of July parade. A five-year-old girl, buried alive this morning when a dune collapsed on her at Higgins Hollow. Her mother was out on a sandbar doing yoga. When she turned to check on her daughter, all she could see was her daughter’s pink bucket, which at first appeared to be floating four inches above the ground.
“I will never get that image out of my head. That little hand sticking up out of the sand.” I’m standing with Jonas and his mother under the shade of a towering maple, watching the parade. Gina, Maddy, and Finn have waded into the crowd hoping to get a front-row view.
“What did I always say to you kids about climbing on the dunes?” Jonas’s mother says now, with a tone of smug “I told you so” satisfaction. “See?”
Jonas looks at me in amazement and bursts out laughing.
“That’s extremely insensitive of you,” his mother says, and turns her back to us. “You’re disgraceful.”
I’ve been trying my best to keep a straight face. But I can’t help it. I feel like I’m fourteen again, standing in Jonas’s living room being chided by her for ever having liked an overtly racist television program like Little House on the Prairie. Or the time she preached at Anna on the beach about the evils of wearing a bikini. “You’re allowing yourself to be objectified by men.” Anna had pulled off her bikini top and shimmied at her like a stripper, before walking down to the water topless. Once, Jonas’s mother made the grave mistake of chastising my mother for bringing a bag of charcoal briquettes to a bonfire. “Charcoal, Wallace? There’s barely a tree left in the Congo. You might as well go to Virunga and shoot the mountain gorillas yourself.”
“I would, but the airfare is extravagant,” Mum had said.
Then she’d dumped the entire bag of charcoal onto the bonfire, which rose in a glorious blaze. “You’re disgraceful,” Jonas’s mother had spat. Jonas and I had stood there, jaws dropped, thrilled by the sight of our mothers doing battle, before running away down the beach, laughing and shouting, “You’re disgraceful!” at each other.
Jonas grins at me. “You’re disgraceful,” he mouths.
“You’re disgraceful,” I mouth back.
A float of teenage girls in lobster suits drives by. They wave and smile, throw candy corn into the crowds. Behind them, the local middle school marching band plays an off-key version of “Eye of the Tiger.” Gina approaches us with Maddy and Finn in tow. All three of them are waving plastic American flags stapled to balsa sticks. Maddy is wearing a candy necklace.
“What’s so funny?” Gina puts her arm through Jonas’s.
“Look!” Finn waves his flag at me. “Gina bought us flags.”
“You shouldn’t have,” I say to Gina. “Those things are a waste of money.”