Sarah was startled. “Do people throw things at your house?” she asked, then thought of something worse. “Are they not feeding you?”
He squeezed her hand. “No, no, there’s food. There’s just not, you know. Meals, with vegetables and side dishes, and setting the table. And it’s less about the throwing things than the yelling.” He sighed and picked up a piece of driftwood and used it to trace patterns in the sand.
“So, um, what are meals like?”
Owen shrugged. “My mom doesn’t eat much.” He gave another tight smile. “She says it’s harder to get a buzz on if your stomach’s full.”
Sarah must have looked shocked. Was Sass an alcoholic? Before she could figure out how to ask, Owen shook his head at her expression.
“It’s not that bad. Anders and I fend for ourselves. There’s frozen pizzas, and chicken nuggets. And most nights, somebody’s grilling on the beach. We’re scavengers.” With that, he grinned, baring his teeth, grabbing Sarah by the shoulders, rolling her onto her back, nibbling at her neck in a way that always made her shiver. Sarah closed her eyes, holding him tight, and it wasn’t until later, after Owen had gone home and she was alone in her bed, that she thought about what he’d said, and what he hadn’t said. She’d never been introduced to anyone in Owen’s family; had never been invited to a meal; had barely spent any time at the Camp, which was what Owen called the collection of three buildings where the Lassiter clan stayed in the summertime. The largest building, called Papa Bear, was the house with scabrous red paint. It had a kitchen and a living room, two bedrooms, and a screened-in porch. Mama Bear was a one-room cabin, with, Owen told her, a double bed and a set of bunk beds crammed inside. Baby Bear, the smallest building, hardly had room for a twin bed and a dresser. It was still the spot Owen and his sister preferred—and the only building where Sarah could claim to be familiar with the inside as well as the outside.
“But why?” Sarah asked after Owen showed her where he slept. “Don’t you get claustrophobic?” She would have felt like she was sleeping in an elevator if she had to spend a night there.
Owen had shrugged. “It’s farther away from the big house,” he said. And the fighting, Sarah thought.
In addition to the Three Bears, there was the boathouse, its roof still unrepaired, slumped in on itself like a toothless mouth. There was also a bathhouse, which boasted a single toilet and an old-fashioned sink in a cinder block enclosure. The bathing facilities consisted of a showerhead nailed up on a tree, with a flimsy plastic curtain hung on the tree’s branches, in a gesture toward privacy （Owen had told her that his mother got up early and took a bar of soap and a container of shampoo into the pond, where she took her bath. “Is that okay for the pond?” Sarah asked, and Owen had shrugged and said, “I don’t think Sass is much of an environmentalist”）。 The whole setup was very different from the Levy-Weinberg house, where there was a pool and a hot tub, where each of the four bedrooms had its own bathroom, where there was a caretaker employed year-round and a handyman on call, where every meal featured all four food groups and where anything broken was immediately repaired or replaced.
Finally, in the middle of August, Owen brought Sarah to a bonfire on the beach. That was where she met his mother at last. Sass gave Sarah a cool, limp-fingered handshake, her lips, painted the same shade of hot-pink lipstick that Sarah remembered, lingering over the syllables of Sarah’s last name. “Sarah Levy-Weinberg. You’re Veronica Levy’s daughter?” Sass turned to one of the other women Sarah had been introduced to—there’d been, she remembered, a Mimsy, and a Bunny, and a woman named Laurence—and said, “Veronica Levy, the novelist,” in a tone that turned “novelist” into what sounded like an insult.
Eat before you go, Sarah’s mom had told her. “If it’s like any WASP party I’ve ever been to, there’s going to be oceans of booze and not a thing to eat.” Once Sarah escaped from Sass, she walked down the beach, weaving through the clusters of people, looking around. On a card table, draped in a plastic tablecloth that flapped in the breeze, she saw plastic bags of tortilla chips and potato chips, a plastic jug of cheese balls, and a container of onion dip. There were jars of salsa and honey-roasted peanuts, and a paper plate with hamburgers and hot dogs. So not a complete absence of food, but there definitely wasn’t as much as there would have been if her parents were hosting, and the card table that held the booze did seem extremely well stocked. Most of the party crowd was clustered around it, squeezing chunks of lime into plastic cups of gin and tonic, or opening beers. Sarah could hear Sass’s shrill laughter. She saw Owen’s mother with her head thrown back, throat exposed, streaky blonde hair blowing in the night breeze, her hand resting lightly on the forearm of a man who wasn’t her husband as she talked.