She left, clicking across the porch with a brisk, energetic stride, like someone triumphant in the knowledge that she had set everybody straight.
“What is she talking about?” Denny asked after a moment.
Abby said, “Oh, you know how she is.”
“I can’t abide that woman.”
Ordinarily Abby would have tut-tutted, but now she just sighed and headed for the kitchen.
The men went into the dining room and settled at the table, none of them speaking, although Red did say, as he dropped onto his chair, “Ah, me.” They waited in a kind of drained silence. From the kitchen they could hear the burble of the little boys’ voices and a clatter of utensils. Then Nora emerged through the swinging door, carrying a casserole. Abby came behind with a salad. “You should see Merrick’s leftovers,” she told the men. “A smidgen of store-bought pasta sauce in the bottom of a jar. A wedge of Brie completely hollowed out inside the rind. And … what else, Nora?” she asked.
“A cold broiled lamb chop,” Nora said, setting the casserole on the table.
“A lamb chop, yes, and a Chinese take-out carton of rice, and one single, solitary pickle in a bottle of scummy brine.”
“We should put her in touch with Hugh,” Denny said.
“Hugh?” Abby asked.
“Amanda’s Hugh. Do Not Pass Go. She could call him before every trip.”
“Oh, you’re right,” Abby said. “They’re made for each other!”
“He’d tell her he knows a soup kitchen that’s dying to have her leftovers, and he’d come by her house and collect them and take them off to the trash.”
This made the others laugh—even Nora, a little. Red said, “Oh, now. You folks,” but he was laughing too.
“What?” Tommy asked. He’d cracked open the door from the kitchen. “What’s so funny?”
None of them wanted to say; they just smiled and shook their heads. To a child, they must have looked like some happy, cozy club that only grown-ups could belong to.
It took a total of five vehicles to carry them all to the beach. They could have managed with fewer, but Red insisted, as usual, on driving his pickup. How else could they bring everything they needed, he always asked—the rafts and boogie boards, the sand toys for the children, the kites and the paddle-ball racquets and the giant canvas shade canopy with its collapsible metal frame? (In the old days, before computers, he used to include the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica.) So he and Abby made the three-hour trip in the pickup, while Denny drove Abby’s car with Susan in the passenger seat and the food hampers in the rear. Stem and Nora and the three little boys came in Nora’s car, and Jeannie and Jeannie’s Hugh started out separately from their own house with their two children, though not with Hugh’s mother, who always spent the beach week visiting Hugh’s sister in California.
Amanda and Amanda’s Hugh and Elise traveled on a whole different day—Saturday morning instead of Friday afternoon, since Amanda always had trouble getting away from her law office—and they stayed in a different cottage, because Amanda’s Hugh couldn’t tolerate what he called the hurly-burly.
None of the dogs came. They were all boarding at Penpals.
The house the Whitshanks rented every summer stood right on the beach—a comparatively uncrowded stretch of the Delaware coast—but it wasn’t what you’d call luxurious. The walls were tongue-and-groove, painted a depressing pea-soup green; the floorboards were so splintery no one dared go barefoot; the kitchen dated from the 1940s. But it was big enough for all of them, and far homier than the glittering new mansions with giant Palladian windows that had popped up elsewhere along the shore. Besides, Red could always use a few fix-it jobs to keep him occupied. (He wasn’t a natural vacationer.) Even before Abby and Nora had unpacked the food, he had happily catalogued half a dozen minor household emergencies. “Will you look at this outlet!” he said. “Practically dangling by a thread!” And off he went to the truck for his tools, with Jeannie’s Hugh not far behind.
“The next-door people are back,” Jeannie called, stepping in from the screen porch.