Out at Mrs. E.’s, the farthest house on Seashell, I’d never have to see them.
I can practically smell my freedom—salty breezes, green sun-warm sea-grass, hot fresh breezes blowing over the wet rocks, waves splashing, white foam against the dark curl of water.
“I’ll do it.”
It’s an island job. But only for one summer. For one family. It’s not what Mom did, starting to clean houses with my Vovó, her mother, the year she turned fifteen to make money for college, still cleaning them (no college) all this time later.
It’s not what Dad did either, taking over the family business at eighteen because his father had a heart attack at the grill.
It’s just temporary.
Not a life decision.
“Hon . . . did your dad pay you for your days yet? We’re running a little behind.” Mom brushes some crumbs off the couch without meeting my eyes. “Nothing to worry about, but—”
“He said he’d get it to me later in the week,” I answer absently. Em has moved from Mom’s feet to mine, not nearly as sore, but I’m not about to turn him down.
Mom stands, opens the fridge. “Lean Cuisine, South Beach, or good old Stouffer’s tonight? Your choice.”
Gag on Lean Cuisine and South Beach. She stabs the plastic top of a frozen entrée with her fork, but before she can shove it into the microwave, Grandpa Ben saunters in, his usual load of contraband slung over his shoulder, Santa Claus style. If Santa were into handing out seafood. He pushes one of Nic’s sweat-stiffened bandannas to the side of the counter, unload-ing the lobsters into the sink with a clatter of hard shells and clicking claws.
“Um, dois, três, quatro. That one there must be five pounds at least.” Excited, he runs his hands through his wild white hair, a Portuguese Albert Einstein.
“Papai. We can’t possibly eat all those.” Despite her protest, Mom immediately starts filling one of our huge lobster pots with water from the sink. “Again I ask, how long will it be until you get caught? And when you go to jail, you help us how?” Grandpa’s fishing license lapsed several years ago, but he goes out with the boats whenever the spirit moves him. His array of illegal lobster traps still spans the waters off our island.
Grandpa Ben glares at Mom’s plastic tray, shaking his head.
“Your grandfather Fernando did not live to be one hundred and two on”—he flips the box over, checking the ingredi-ents—“potassium benzoate.”
“No,” Mom tells him, shoving the tray back into the freezer.
“Fernando lived to one-oh-two because he drank so much Vinho Verde, he was pickled.”
Muttering under his breath, Grandpa Ben disappears into the room he shares with Nic and Em, emerging in his at-home mode—shirt off, undershirt and worn plaid bathrobe on, car-rying Emory’s Superman pajamas.
“Into these, faster than a speeding bullet,” he says to Emory, who giggles his raspy laugh and races around the room, arms outstretched Man-of-Steel style.
“No flying until you’re in your suit,” Grandpa says. Em skids to a halt in front of him, patiently allowing Grandpa Ben to strip off his shirt and shorts and wrestle the pajamas on. Then he cuddles next to me on Myrtle as Grandpa fires up a Fred Astaire DVD.
Our living room’s so small it barely accommodates the enormous plasma-screen TV Grandpa won last year at a bingo tournament at church. I’m pretty sure he cheated. The state-of-the-art screen always looks so out of place on the wall between a cedar-wood crucifix and the wedding picture of my grandmother. She’s uncharacteristically serious in black and white, with the bud vase underneath that Grandpa never forgets to fill every day. It’s a big picture, one of those ones where the eyes seem to follow you.
I can never meet hers.
Lush, romantic music fills the room, along with Fred Astaire’s cracked tenor voice.
“Where Ginger?” Emory asks, pointing at the screen.
Grandpa Ben’s put on Funny Face, which has Audrey Hepburn, not Ginger Rogers.
“She’ll be here in a minute,” Grandpa tells him, his usual answer, waiting for Emory to love the music and the dancing so much that he doesn’t care who does it.
Em chews his lip, and his foot begins twitching back and forth.
My eight-year-old brother is not autistic. He’s not anything they’ve mapped genetically. He’s just Emory. No diagnosis, no chart, no map at all. Some hard things come easy to him, and some basic things he struggles with. I wrap my arms around his waist, his skinny ribs, rest my chin on his shoulder, feeling his dark flyaway hair lift to tickle my cheek, inhaling his sun-warm, little-boy scent. “This is the one with the funny song, remember? The sunny funny-face song?”
At last Em settles, snuggled with his favorite stuffed animal, Hideout the stuffed hermit crab, in his arms. Grandpa Ben won him at some fair when Emory was two, and he’s been Em’s favorite ever since.
I nudge aside Fabio, go outside to the front steps, because I just can’t watch Audrey Hepburn being waifish and wistful.
At nearly five eleven, nobody, no matter how nearsighted, will ever say I’m waifish.
Squinting out over the island, over the roofs of the low, split-level houses across from ours—Hoop’s squat gray ranch, Pam’s dirty shingled white house, Viv’s pale green house with the redwood shutters that don’t match—I can just barely catch the dazzle of the end-of-day sun off the water. I lean back on my elbows, shut my eyes and take a deep breath of the warm, briny air.
Which reeks.
My eyes pop open. A pair of my cousin’s workout sneakers are inches from my nose. Yuck. Eau de sweaty eighteen-year-old boy. I elbow them off the porch, onto the grass.
The screen door bangs open. Mom slides down next to me, a carton of ice cream in one hand, spoon in the other. “Want some? I’ll even get you your own spoon.”
“Nah, I’m fine.” I offer a smile. Pretty sure she doesn’t buy it. “That your appetizer, Mom?”
“Ice cream,” she says. “Appetizer, main course, dessert. So flexible.”
She digs around for the chunks of peanut butter ripple, and then pauses to brush my hair back from my forehead. “Anything we need to talk about? You’ve been quiet the past day or so.”
It’s ironic. Mom spends most of her spare time reading romance novels about people who take their clothes off a lot.