Osprey Island

“Squee,” Roddy called gruffly. He didn’t look at the boy, just flicked his head. “Get down there, help Suzy,” he ordered, in a voice more Lance’s than his own. With one hand he held the screen door open. Roddy didn’t look at Lance, lest Lance take the opportunity to object. Instead, he squinted into the distance as though trying to make out something he couldn’t quite see.

Squee let his spoon fall into his cereal bowl and, also without looking at his father, walked stiffly across the room, past Roddy and outside. On the path, Peg clapped her hands to her thighs as if calling a puppy to come. The boy held the banister as he descended the porch steps, and there was something wrong about his carriage: he was off-center, or lopsided, as if favoring one side of his body but not sure which. When he’d made it to Peg—who put her arm around his shoulder and walked beside him down toward the Lodge—Roddy let the screen door close. Slowly he turned to face Lance, who was nodding his head with a patronizing swagger. “You got talking to do, Rodless. How’d you get in with that, old boy? Who’d ever think you’d grow up such a big stud? Such a fucking ladies’ man . . . RodLESS!” he cheered again.

Roddy took a big breath. “How’s things going, Lance?”

Lance looked around himself as if to assess his own situation right then and there. He looked down at yesterday’s clothes, unclean when he’d put them on. “Life’s a fucking piece of shit,” he said brightly, his smile pinched with sarcasm. “But who the hell cares about me? Who cares about me when our own little Rodless Dickless Rod is fucking the boss’s daughter? She good, Dickless? You know, I know how good she is, Rodless. You know, I fucked little Miss Chizek back then, when all you could do was cream your bed over her at night. Remember how it was back then, Rodless? Remember how much you wanted that fucking . . . that . . . You know, I’d’ve given her to you, buddy, back then, you know?” Here Lance’s eyes started to well with tears, and he lifted his cigarette to his lips and drew in long and hard. “I didn’t need . . .” He choked, coughed, took another long drag. When he spoke again his voice was wet and ragged. “I didn’t need that. I had Lorna. What’d I need with fucking Suzy Chizek? Suzy-fucking-Bud’s-daughter Chizek. I didn’t fucking need that shit.” Lance ground his cigarette out into the stained porcelain sink. “Get the fuck out of here,” Lance said, and turned on his heel, slamming the bathroom door behind him.

Roddy went to his truck, turned over the rumbling engine, and started out toward Sand Beach Road. Stalking across the north parking lot was a girl in a baseball cap and shorts, and it wasn’t until he got a lot closer that he realized it was Suzy and pulled the truck up alongside her. She jumped as though she hadn’t heard him approaching, then saw who it was and put her hand on the door to climb in. There was a moment, then, as they looked at each other and went from seeing nothing but the roiling inside themselves to catching on and realizing that something was not right with the other. A different sort of concern crossed each of their faces. Quickly, and at once, they said, “What’s the matter?” then both laughed for a pained half second, which was all they had in them.

“Get in,” Roddy said.

Suzy inhaled deeply. “I have to . . .”

“Just get in. You have lunch?”

She shook her head no. She got in.

“Mia’s with the girls?”

She nodded.

“Squee too.” Roddy pulled the truck out onto Sand Beach Road and headed north. They rode without speaking, each sorting their own thoughts all the way to the Luncheonette on Old Post Office Road. Suzy leaned to check her face in the rearview mirror but bumped the bill of her baseball cap on the way. She tore off the hat as if she’d just discovered the ugly thing to be the root of all that was wrong, and she shoved it behind the seat of the truck.

Sixteen

A LONG TIME HELPLESS IN THE NEST

This is a typical predator’s foot, better for gripping than for walking.

—“Function Forms the Foot,” Life Nature Library’s The Birds

LANCE WAS NOT A GOOD FATHER. He knew that. It didn’t take a genius. He could see himself, sometimes—the way you catch a glimpse of something from the corner of your eye—as the kind of father Lorna wanted him to be: a father out of a pancake syrup commercial, or from those sepia stories old people told about their back-in-the-day Norman Rockwell childhoods. Lance occasionally caught a moment’s understanding of fatherhood, but then it would slip from him and he’d be back to being Lance Squire, whose fatherly instinct was a sentimental hiccup.