Abby, sitting next to Amanda but outside the canopy, under the sun, said, “Oh, poor Hugh! Don’t you think you should go with him?” (She was eternally monitoring her daughters’ marriages.) But Amanda didn’t answer, and Abby gave up and went back to her reading. A stack of trashy magazines had been discovered beneath the TV, no doubt left behind by a previous renter, and they had passed through the hands of her granddaughters and then her daughters and ended up with Abby herself, who was leafing through one now and tsk-ing over the silliness. “All this excitement about could so-and-so be pregnant,” she told her daughters, “and I don’t even know who so-and-so is! I’ve never heard of her.” In her skirted pinkswimsuit, her plump shoulders glistening with suntan lotion and her legs lightly dusted with sand, she looked something like a cupcake. She hadn’t ventured into the water at all so far, and neither had Red. In fact, Red was wearing his work shoes and dark socks. Evidently this was the year when the two of them were declaring themselves to be officially old.
“I remember when I first met him, I thought he was a jerk,” Amanda told Denny. She must have been referring to Hugh. “I had that apartment on Chase Street with a garbage chute at the end of the hall, and I kept finding bags of garbage just sitting on the floor around the chute, not sent down the way they should have been. And poking out of the bag I’d see beer bottles and chili cans, things that should have been put in the recycling bin. It made me furious! So one day I taped a sign to a bag: WHOEVER DID THIS IS A PIG.”
“Oh, Amanda! Honestly,” Abby said, but Amanda didn’t seem to hear her. “I don’t know how he knew it was me,” she told Denny, “but he must have. He knocked on my door and he was holding my sign. ‘Did you write this?’ he said, and I said, ‘I most certainly did.’ Well, he put on this big charm act. Said he was terribly sorry, it wouldn’t happen again, he didn’t know the recycling rules and he hadn’t sent the bag down the chute because it wouldn’t fit, blah blah—as if that were any excuse. But I admit, he won me over. You know what, though? I should have paid attention. There it was, all spelled out for me from the beginning: This is a man who thinks he’s the only person on the planet. How much clearer could it have been?”
“So, now does he recycle?” Denny asked.
“You’re missing the point,” Amanda said. “I’m talking about his nature, the very nature of the man. It’s all about what’s expedient, for him. He’s just arranged to sell the restaurant to someone for next to nothing, for a song, merely because he’s bored and he wants to go into something new. Can you believe it?”
“I thought you approved of the something new,” Denny said. “I thought you said it was brilliant.”
“Oh, I was just being supportive. Besides, it’s not the something new I mind; it’s the way he goes about getting rid of the old. He didn’t even consult me! Just took the very first offer he got, because he wants what he wants when he wants it.”
Abby touched Amanda’s arm. She sent a meaningful glance toward Elise, but Amanda said, “What,” and turned away again. And Elise just then stood up in one long graceful movement and began walking toward the water, as if nothing the grown-ups said could have anything to do with her.
“I didn’t know that was how you met,” Abby said. “That’s kind of like a movie! Like a Rock Hudson–Doris Day movie where they start out hating each other. I thought you met in the elevator or something.”
“The man is impossible,” Amanda said, as if Abby hadn’t spoken.
“You can see why he’d jump at the chance to sell, though,” Denny said. “I don’t guess it’s easy unloading a place that serves nothing but turkey.”
“Well, it’s not married to turkey. It could serve other things. And it’s got tons of equipment, ovens and such, that are worth a lot of money.”
“Oh,” Abby said, “poor Hugh. Men don’t handle failure well at all.”
“Mom. Please. Enough with the ‘poor Hugh.’ ”
“Want to take a walk, Ab?” Red asked suddenly. It wasn’t clear whether he’d been listening to what was being said. Maybe he really did feel like a walk just then. At any rate, he heaved himself to his feet and stepped over to give Abby a hand up. She was still shaking her head as they started off down the beach.
“Now they’ll have a long talk about what a bad wife I am,” Amanda said, watching them go.
“Dad walks so slowly these days,” Jeannie said. “Look at him. He’s so stiff.”
“How does he manage at work?” Denny asked her.
“I don’t notice it so much at work. It’s not as if he does anything physically demanding there anymore.”
They watched their parents meet up with Nora, who was returning from a walk of her own. She exchanged a few words with them and then continued toward Stem and her children, floating ethereally through a group of teenage boys tossing a football at the water’s edge. A black tie-on skirt fluttered and parted over her modest one-piece swimsuit, and her dark hair lifted from her shoulders in the breeze. The teenage boys halted their game to follow her with their eyes, one of them cradling the football under his arm.
“The unwitting femme fatale,” Denny murmured, and Amanda gave a little hiss of amusement.
“Is Elise having any fun?” Jeannie asked Amanda. “It doesn’t seem she’s joining in much this year.”
“I have no idea,” Amanda said. “I’m only her mother.”
“I guess ballet has kind of taken her away from things.”
Amanda didn’t answer. The three of them were silent a moment, their gazes fixed on a nearby toddler in a swim diaper who was pursuing a committee of gulls. The gulls strutted ahead of him at a dignified pace, gradually speeding up although they pretended not to notice him.