“Oh, my God,” I said. I leaned over the front porch railing and saw, sure enough, the same dog loitering by the edge of our driveway. “Shoo!” I yelled at him. “Get out of here!” He glanced at me, then trotted past our driveway and out of sight, but I had a feeling he’d be back before too long. “It’s just this dog,” I said, as the jingling of his tags grew fainter and fainter. “He thinks he lives here.”
“Ah,” my dad said, still looking a little puzzled, and I could see that I hadn’t really clarified anything. He crossed the driveway and climbed the stairs, leaning a little bit on the railing. “Well, just don’t let your brother see him.”
“Right,” I said, and followed my dad to the screened-in porch, where he shook out the box’s contents, a thick sheaf of papers, many marked with brightly colored flags. He’d gotten a similar delivery from his law firm every day so far, all apparently pertaining to a case that he’d been working on. When I’d asked why his firm couldn’t just e-mail the documents, instead of sending a FedEx truck through the mountains of Pennsylvania every day, he’d told me that it was due to security issues.
I slumped down in the chair across from him and sighed, all the while aware that I wasn’t even managing to do the one thing my dad had asked of us—that is, stop hanging around the house.
On our first full day, it quickly became obvious that Warren and Gelsey and I had no idea what to do with ourselves. And so, the three of us spent the first two days simply following my dad from room to room, in case he wanted to bond or something. After the second straight day of this, we’d been sitting around the table on the screened-in porch while my father worked. Gelsey had her battered copy of Holding On to the Air, the ballerina Suzanne Farrell’s autobiography, I had my magazine, now with the spider-tainted cover removed, and Warren had a textbook in front of him. We were all reading, kind of—except every time my dad would glance up from his work, we would look up too, and Warren would smile unnaturally, all of us waiting for some cue, someone to tell us how to act. But it was becoming very clear to me that it was called quality time for a reason—by definition, it didn’t mean spending every waking minute together.
And in summers past, we’d certainly never spent much time inside unless it was raining. As its name implied, Lake Phoenix was a summer community on a lake, and the lake—and its beach—was pretty much the main attraction. There was also a pool, complete with a waterslide that I’d spent a lot of time at when I was younger, plus tennis courts and a golf course. It was like a strange combination of a country club and camp—except that it wasn’t at all fancy. There were no million-dollar houses or estates, but you did have to buy a membership to be able to go to the beach and pool. And because it was so far removed from everything, and such a small community, Lake Phoenix was incredibly safe, and I’d basically had free run of the place from when I was about seven. There was a bus for kids, the shuttle bus, that ran from the Recreation Center around to the pool and beach. But I’d taken it only rarely. Most of the time, I’d ridden my bike everywhere.
When we’d been up here before, my mother would spend her time either at the beach or playing tennis, my father would be working outside or playing golf, and my siblings and I were either at the tennis and golf lessons our parents had forced us to take, or at the beach or pool. We would all come back for dinner and eat together on the screened-in porch, everyone a little more tan than when we’d left that morning. But we’d never just stayed home, all day, when it was gorgeous and sunny out.
“Enough is enough,” my dad said, after he’d glanced up to find us all looking—and Warren still smiling—at him. “You three are driving me crazy.”
I looked at my brother, who shot me a questioning look back. I really wasn’t sure what my father was talking about—especially since I had been so careful not to do anything that might drive him crazy. “Um,” I finally said after a moment, when it became clear my siblings weren’t going to jump into the breach, “what are we doing?”
“You’re not doing anything,” he said, sounding aggravated. “And that’s the problem. I don’t need the three of you staring at me all day. It makes me feel like I’m in some kind of science experiment. Or—even worse—some kind of reality show.”
I saw Warren open his mouth to respond, but then close it again—further proof that none of us were acting like we normally did. I had never seen Warren back down from an argument.
“Look,” my dad said, his tone softening a little, “I appreciate what you are all trying to do. But while we still can, I would like to have as normal a summer as possible. Okay?”
I nodded, even though I wasn’t sure what a “normal” summer was. In a normal summer, or at least what they’d looked like over the last few years, we wouldn’t have been together.
“So,” Gelsey said, and I noticed she was sitting up a little straighter, a glint coming into her brown eyes, “what should we do with our time, then?”
“Whatever you want,” he said, spreading his hands open. “Just so long as it doesn’t involve just hanging around the house all day. It’s summer. Go have fun.”
That seemed to be all the impetus my sister needed. She bolted from the table and ran into the house, yelling for my mother, asking if they could do a barre. My father watched her go, smiling, then turned back to me and Warren, who still hadn’t moved.
“I mean it,” he said, waving us away with his hands. “In addition to this case, I have to start work on a very important project soon, and I’d like some peace to do it in.”
“Project?” Warren asked. “What kind?”
“Just a project,” my dad said vaguely, looking down at the papers in his hands.
“So,” Warren said, and I could tell he was trying a little too hard to sound casual, the way he always did when his feelings were hurt and he didn’t want to show it. “You don’t want us to spend time with you?”
“It’s not that,” my dad said, and he looked pained for a moment. “Of course I want to spend time with you. But this is just weird. Go enjoy your summers.” Warren took a breath, probably to ask my dad to qualify what, exactly, that meant. Maybe sensing this, my dad went on, “You can do whatever you want. I just want you to do something. Get a job. Read the collected works of Dickens. Learn to juggle. It doesn’t matter to me. Just stop lurking about, okay?”