The blank, unbearable heat of the day has alchemized into a perfect summer night. Soft breezes in the dark. The kids have run off somewhere to watch the fireworks with their friends. Peter, Mum, and I drink white wine from paper cups, waiting, anticipating that first spiraling whistle. Any minute now, my mother will start to complain.
“Mind if I pull up a chair?” Jonas materializes out of the night, a phantom, silent approach, just as he used to do when we were young and I walked to the beach on my own. I have rarely if ever heard his footfall.
“They said nine p.m. on the dot, but as usual they’re making us wait,” Mum says.
“Gina not coming?” Pete asks, as Jonas sits down beside him.
“She sends her love. She badly wanted to come, but she’s been feeling a bit under the weather.”
I look over at Jonas, surprised by the white lie. It is unlike him. I know he can feel my steady gaze, but he doesn’t turn.
An hour later, when all that remains in the air is the tang of gunpowder and the skies have regained their gravity, we head back to round up the kids. Peter and Mum are in the lead, laughing and bickering. I slow to let them pull farther ahead of Jonas and me before bringing up his lie.
“I wasn’t lying,” he says, annoyed. “I was making Gina’s excuses. It’s called being polite.”
“Actually, it’s called lying, when you lie,” I say, not letting him off the hook.
“She was having a shitty day. Am I really required to explain that to Peter and your mother?” he snaps.
“Don’t be a jerk. I was just asking. I saw you shouting at each other outside the pharmacy.”
“Sorry.”
“So? What’s going on?”
“Gina lost her gallery in May. She hasn’t told a soul—she feels too humiliated. Meanwhile I’m having my big show in the fall. She thinks I told you, and she’s upset.”
“But you didn’t.”
“Well, I have now.”
We slow to a stop, stand together looking out at the sleeping boats. I wait for him.
“The fight was my fault,” he says. “I was extremely angry with her for speaking to you that way. I lost my temper.”
Jonas championing me over Gina gives me a jolt of cat-cream pleasure I shouldn’t feel, but I say, “That was dumb.”
“Gina loves you, you know that. But she knows we talk about everything. I think that if my oldest friend was a man, it would be easier for her.”
“That’s ridiculous,” I scoff. “Gina is the Rock of Gibraltar.” But I know what he says is true. I’ve seen it: a fissure; the vulnerability she revealed today when she thought no one was watching; the way her body luffed, wind knocked from her, as Jonas walked away and didn’t look back. And yet some lizard-brain instinct in me recognizes that openly acknowledging even the slightest rift between Gina and me will leave all of us more exposed—though to what, exactly, I don’t know. A nervous energy.
“You should have stayed home with her tonight,” I say. “Patched things up.”
“We did. We’re good. And you and I always watch the fireworks together.”
“We could have skipped a year.”
“It’s our tradition.”
“So is eating turkey at Thanksgiving. But frankly turkey is dry and bland. Who really likes it?”
“I do,” Jonas says. He links his arm tightly through mine and we head down the pier to join the others.
Five Days Ago. July 27, the Back Woods.
Sunday. Peter, Mum, and the kids have gone off to the flea market, their weekly ritual of looking through tables of other people’s junk to find pearls, usually in the form of some hideous laminated reproduction of a Gibson girl drinking Coca-Cola, or a book about fly-fishing that Peter thinks might one day come in handy. Afterward they have lunch at the Clam Shack, where every time Peter tries to convince the kids to eat raw oysters and lobster rolls, and every time they order foot-long hot dogs in buttered buns.
I walk down to the edge of the pond, take off my bathing suit, lay my towel on the warm sand. Above me, the trees wave their branches to me as if they are greeting an old friend. I’m thinking about Bain de Soleil, its thick, orange oiliness, burnt caramel smell, zero sun block—how Anna and I used to try to attract the sun rather than block it—when the phone starts ringing in the Big House. I try to ignore it, but it doesn’t stop. Mum doesn’t believe in answering machines. “If they want to reach me they can call back.”