On Saturday, Richie picks me up, the boy in the backseat. I have a beach bag with three things in it: a magazine, a baseball cap, and a spray bottle of sunscreen. I didn’t pack much because I know he will have packed whatever I might need. I’m wearing the wrong kind of shoes for the river and little black shorts over a black bikini. I’m nervous. As much as I like the boy, I can’t get used to how things change when he’s around: I shouldn’t say shit or fuck or kiss my boyfriend; I’m supposed to pretend like he is the most important thing because he’s a child.
“When are we gonna be there?” the boy asks. We aren’t even on 49 yet.
“Soon,” Richie says.
The boy bops me on the head with a foam sword and then slides it between my seat and the window, in and out.
“Leave Alice alone,” Richie says. I don’t want to be left alone. Don’t leave me alone. I change CDs to exert some authority and look out the window at the old men on the side of the highway with their truck beds full of watermelons and tomatoes. I always think about stopping but I never have any cash. I hope these men will always be there, with their umbrellas, their overalls and homemade signs, and that one day I’ll stop and buy a bag of sweet potatoes or tomatoes and say something about the weather, maybe, and the man will put his hands on his hips and look at the sky.
We pass the field of FEMA trailers leftover from Katrina: row upon row of uninhabitable boxes that the government is paying someone to store.
“Are we there now?” the boy asks.
“Two more minutes,” Richie says, and the boy pokes me with the sword again and I grab it and turn around and smile, but my stomach is starting to hurt and all I can think about is whether I’ll have to use the bathroom when we’re on the river and how I’ll manage it.
The boy and I wait outside the canoe rental place while Richie goes inside to pay. We organize his dinosaurs: which ones he should carry and which ones he should leave in the car, which ones to put in Richie’s backpack. There are lovebugs everywhere. A couple land on his hand, and he holds it up and we watch them crawl up his arm. He’s excited by how many there are and how they’re attached, and I’m reminded that everything is new to him, and that some of this newness can rub off on me.
When the ones on his arm fly off, we watch a couple of sluggish single ones on the car window.
“Those two should get together,” I say, and he agrees, and then Richie comes out with a waiver for me to sign that says no one will sue them if I die and then we gather our stuff and climb into the van. There’s a family there already: a man and a woman, two boys and a yellow Lab, a whole complete unit of big people who seem perfectly content to take up so much space. Richie talks to them while I stare out the window. If I were alone or with another woman, it would be rude for me not to speak.
At the river, we let the family load up first while we coat each other in sunscreen and bug spray. Then we carry our stuff down to the canoe and get situated, the boy in the middle holding onto the sides. We start paddling, looking for turtles and fish and redneck arrowheads, which is what they call trash. It’s a game they started after the time Richie stepped on a piece of glass and sliced open his foot. At the first sandbar, I walk up the hill to pee and return with a mud-encrusted 32-ounce beer can, drop it at the boy’s feet.
“Redneck arrowhead!” he says.
“Redneck arrowhead,” his father agrees. He picks it up and tosses it into the canoe and then the two of them walk into the river, to where the current is strongest, and Richie tells the boy to lie on his back and let his life jacket carry him downriver. I open my magazine, which has already gotten wet, the pages wavy and bloated. In the story, there’s a lesbian couple in a Laundromat and they are having problems but they love each other very much and are going to have a party. The boy struggles, flips over onto his stomach. I keep reading the same paragraph again and again and then put it down and put my life jacket on, the cheap orange kind that looks ridiculous on someone with breasts.
I walk slowly out to where they are and sit in the water with my feet out. I take the boy’s hand and we float together.
“It’s fun, huh?” I say, looking at my tennis shoes. “Kinda freezing, though.” When he starts to flail, I grab him and drag him back to the canoe.
Richie opens the cooler and takes out a beer, and I’m so relieved I could cry. I tell him I want one so he hands it to me and passes out sandwiches. They look fine, but they’re soggy and have too much mustard and they make me think of all the good food I’ve eaten on canoe trips: potatoes and onions wrapped in tinfoil and burnt marshmallows, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches—the peanut butter and jelly mixed together until it is one even spread—stacked in a bread bag.
The boy brings me a rock and I set the sandwich on my knee. It is large and white, a rock-shaped hunk of concrete. I admire it before putting it in my bag so he goes and finds me more: black and white and bone-colored, shaped like teeth and eggs. Once I have a whole bunch, I pick up my bag and shake it so we can hear them rattle. Then we get back in the canoe and keep paddling. Soon we come to a rope swing surrounded by teenagers. Richie jumps into the water and puts his arms out, and the boy loops his hands around his neck and they swim over to the swing. I stay in the canoe, finishing my beer and watching them, and then I get out and walk the long way up the hill and around a downed tree to where an overweight boy is yelling at his girlfriend.
I stop to watch Richie and the boy fall into the water, the boy clutched onto him like a monkey. Usually I’m scared of rope swings, of heights in general, but it’s easier when no one’s paying attention.
The kid hands me the rope.
“What do I do?” I ask.
“You put your feet like this,” he says, demonstrating, and then he moves one of my feet higher on the tree. He tells me to let go just as the rope starts to swing back, that that’s where the water is the deepest, and I hold on tight and drop where he said to drop and it’s thrilling—how brave I can be, how easily I can follow directions.
I adjust my top and swim over to Richie and the boy.
“Did you see me?” I ask.
“I missed it,” Richie says.
“I did really excellent.” I want to do it again, but Richie asks me to stay with the boy and swims back to the swing. The boy and I hold hands and watch as he does a flip into the water, a perfect easy flip, like something you’d see on television.
. . .
We’re outside on the patio at 206 and it’s happy hour again—always happy hour, always summer—my feet sweating in my Converse sneakers and my legs shaved all the way up. Tonight the boy is with his ex-wife and Richie’s spending the night at my house so we can walk to the bars.