“Fuck, Jack,” Yonatan said, folding again. “I forgot how good you are.”
Jack allowed himself a momentary feeling of pride.
Yonatan lifted his empty beer can in the air. “Another?”
Jack shook his head.
After Yonatan left his seat, Rachel replaced him in it. Jack nodded at her and took a sip of his beer.
When he was going through job applications during the winter, he’d stopped a beat too long on Rachel’s passport-sized photo. It was objectively a bad photo: She stood against a white wall, unsmiling and washed out by the drugstore’s fluorescent lighting. But she still looked glamorous in an offhand way: She wore her thick, dark hair over one shoulder and was looking up, surprised, from beneath lowered eyelashes, as if someone had just called her name. Her most notable feature was a slightly oversized nose. It was distinguishing, regal; it set her apart from the prototypical Pretty Girl.
He had noted the age: nineteen. From her résumé, he learned that she had been a camper at Marigold and then a CIT, a counselor-in-training, at age fifteen. Now she was back after four summers away.
She looked somewhat bored at the poker table watching the men play, though she expressed no interest in joining the game. She was wearing a white ribbed tank top and no makeup and had gotten darker since the beginning of the summer. Good-looking young men like Chad and Yonatan were more her speed, more age appropriate. Jack himself was forty-four. She was a kid; his own son was seven years older than her.
“Jack, you want in this round?” someone asked.
He glanced at his watch but didn’t register the time, acutely aware of Rachel’s presence. “One more, then I’ve got to hit the hay.”
A counselor split up the chips—checker tiles and pieces from a Connect Four game—and they threw in the ante. Jack felt self-conscious knowing that Rachel was looking at his shitty hand: two threes, the queen of hearts, the eight of diamonds, the five of clubs. One of the threes was a club. He switched out his eight and got the two of hearts back. He folded.
“Smart move,” she said.
“You missed my straight,” he said. Immediately, he felt ridiculous for wanting to impress her.
They watched the rest of the round in silence. He felt the perspiration on his palms; it was so hot in the room. He wiped his hands on his shorts, and as he did so, his pinkie finger accidentally grazed Rachel’s thigh. He took note of how thin the sliver of space between their legs was, and then he felt her closing in, pressing the edge of her thigh against his. Did she think that he had done that on purpose?
He played one more distracted round this way, not daring to move his leg, because if he did, he’d be admitting to the contact. He checked his watch again, noting the time now—close to midnight—and separated from her. Underneath the table, she grabbed his wrist and slid a piece of paper into his hand.
He stuffed the paper into his pocket and stood. “Have a good night, guys,” he said with a grin. “Don’t stay up too late.”
The counselors promised they wouldn’t. Jack could hardly wait to get outside, where, underneath the dim light above the lodge’s screen door, he read the note: “Tennis courts @ 1.” Had she just had it ready all night to give to him?
Of course, he didn’t go.
—
By noon the next day, it was ninety-seven degrees in the shade. Jack spent as much of the day as he could inside his air-conditioned office. He sat in a swivel chair at his desk, which was cluttered with stacks of overstuffed file folders and a clunky PC, and scanned through emails, mostly from parents and forwarded by his secretary, Nan. (“Why can’t our daughter keep a cellphone at camp? I’d really just feel better about having her away for eight weeks if we were able to text her now and again.” “Allison tells us the horses are not purebreds—we were not made aware of this when we initially decided on Camp Marigold.”) He put the emails in his “Answer Later” folder and pulled up his bank account. The birthday check he’d sent to his son a month ago still had not been cashed. He had even written a note in the card this year: “It’s really beautiful here. I don’t know if you’re a fan of nature, but I think you’d love it. You’re welcome to visit at any time. I’ll pull out all the stops.”
A fan of nature? Pull out all the stops? He felt ashamed of his transparency, imagining the three of them—Junior and Laura and the doctor husband—laughing over the note.
He left the office right before lunchtime. He saw Rachel over in the stables, brushing a brown-and-white-speckled horse.
He went to the staff lodge again that night and played some rounds of poker. He drank his one Coors Light, and halfway through the night, Rachel took the empty seat next to him, pressed her thigh against his—that same crisis of inaction eating away at him—and, as he was leaving, grabbed his wrist and passed him a note. He read it outside: “Barn @ 1.” Again, he didn’t go.
—
Before Laura got pregnant, Jack had had ideas for himself. He wouldn’t be so bold as to call them dreams. He was an okay student, okay enough to get into a Connecticut state school, the only thing he’d be able to afford to pay back. (Single mom; college was on him.) Not good enough at football to get a scholarship somewhere, but his future wasn’t hopeless. He imagined a big school, maybe one with a study abroad program. London intrigued him; the English countryside intrigued him. It seemed far and foreign enough but manageably similar to home. He liked the idea of a place so heavy with gray fog that, on the occasion that it lifted, the sun would feel that much more earned.
They were high school sweethearts, and they got married fast, three months into the pregnancy. They were seventeen. It was the right thing to do, yes, but also, as they were going through all the motions of picking a place (her backyard) and an officiant (their local pastor), never once did he feel like it could turn out to be a mistake. She was bright; she made him laugh; she poked fun at his stoic nature, brought him out of his funks. Her family had more money than his, and Jack began to work in construction for her father’s company. Laura had the baby: John Michael Pike, Jr. They lived in Laura’s parents’ house, in the windowless basement. Sometimes the darkness at night made Jack want to scream out. But he got a lot of sunlight during the day at least. Neither of them went back for senior year.