Osprey Island

Peg nodded fervently. Squee was looking around at all of them, trying to keep up with a game whose rules he didn’t quite understand. Roddy froze briefly, taking stock of the situation around him and formulating a plan. A second later he was moving toward Squee. He reached out his hand to help the kid up off the couch, then realized he had a hat in it. He gave the hat a shake, then, inspired, flapped it onto Squee’s head. “Shakes or Morey’s, Squee-man?”

Squee peered out from beneath the lavender brim of the hat. “Shakes!” Eden mouthed the same word—Shakes—at Roddy. She was nodding. Lot less of a chance of running into Lance at the ice cream parlor/snack shop than at the joint where the man’s mother tended bar.

Squee hopped up from the couch with surprising energy. He glanced toward the kitchen, briefly wondering what would become of Eden’s dinner (which surely involved some weird constellation of lentils and broccoli) from which he was pleased to escape. He stood before Roddy, who lifted the cap off Squee’s head, adjusted the band as tight as it would go, and replaced it on the boy.

“Let’s do it,” said Roddy, and he scuttled the kid ahead of him and out the door. He turned back to Eden. “I’ll call?” he said. “See when it looks OK to come back?”

Eden nodded. She waved him away, and then she and Peg watched from the living room window as Roddy and Squee climbed into the truck and began to back down the driveway. They were still watching seconds later when another truck came over the rise and sped up the driveway straight at Roddy and Squee.

Peg drew in a sharp breath, anticipating the impact—a sudden smash of glass and metal. Eden simply held hers. Roddy saw the other truck. He braked, then put his own truck in forward drive, ready to go over the lawn, around the side of Lance’s truck, and down the hill. In her mind, Eden saw Roddy hesitating over whether it would be wrong to run tire tracks through his mother’s lawn, and it wasn’t until Peg looked at her that she realized it was her own voice saying, “Go! Just go!”

Roddy pulled out forward, steering his truck to the right, onto the far side of the lawn. Lance—coming up from behind him, his vehicle bucking as he took the ruts too quickly—saw Roddy turn off the driveway and onto the lawn, and he swerved his own truck right as well, as though his plan—if Lance was capable of having a plan—was to block Roddy’s exit. Lance didn’t know who was in that truck, besides Roddy. He couldn’t see Squee in the passenger seat from that distance, four feet tall and hidden beneath the lavender hat.

Then came the crash that Peg had braced for, Roddy’s brakes squealing as he slammed them, Lance’s truck coming straight for Roddy’s passenger side as though he’d never thought to brake at all. The trucks seemed to hit in the flash of an instant, just a slam: the front of Lance’s truck into the side of Roddy’s. And then everything went slow: the protracted skid of the trucks across the lawn, joined in a lopsided T, Lance’s pushing Roddy’s as if to nudge it along, impeded by the surface of the grass, which tore beneath them and slowed them down as though the ground itself was offering what help it could by way of traction.

When the trucks stopped altogether, Eden and Peg were running from the house and across the lawn. There was a moment of nothing, no movement from the vehicles whatsoever, just the two women running, their steps nearly silent, across the grass toward the collision. Then, first, the door of Lance’s truck flew open and Lance stepped out, tall, and seemed to hover on his feet for a moment, his face wrenched with fury, before he pitched and stumbled sideways, his expression shifting from anger to confusion as his feet slipped from under him and he buckled to the ground.