He chewed the waxy lip of an empty cup. It wasn’t the first time they’d dumped cold water on their mother to bring her back to life. They’d been doing it since Dom was a third-grader, when his dad started taking extra shifts at the factory and working weekends at Uncle Carmine’s garage, and Dr. Joseph, their family doctor, prescribed Mom pills for her “blues.” Back then, the little cups had fit just right in Dom’s hands and he’d cried when Maddie poured, turning Mom’s jewel-colored nightgowns dark as blood. Now, he wondered if Mom was faking. Like girls at school who went to the nurse’s office with cramps. An excuse to get out of running the mile in gym class.
He and Maddie were always waiting for Mom. To wake. Get better. Cheer up. Open the locked bedroom door after they’d pounded on it with fists. Return to them from that dream world she chose over them. Maybe, he imagined, it was carpeted with cotton balls, insulated with puffs of cloud. Like a never-ending hug.
He kicked the box spring. Mom’s slack belly jiggled.
“Crap,” he said. “Just do it.”
Maddie poured one cup, then another, down their mother’s freckled chest.
She jerked. An arm flailed like the fin of a beached fish.
“Why are you doing this to me?” she cried like a little kid, then turned pissy, spitting, “Stop it!”
“Mom,” Maddie said in the voice Dom half remembered hearing when his sister soothed him out of night terrors. “You got to get up.”
He tugged on his mother’s arm crisscrossed with wrinkles matching the rumpled bed sheets. “Mom, please.”
He dug into her body with his fists, kneading her damp flesh. You fat, selfish, lazy whale. He shoved, her body rocked side to side, and she sat up, the hem of her nightgown hitched so he smelled the fishy odor that clung to the bathroom when Maddie was on the rag.
“When your father gets home,” she wheezed, “you’re going to get it!”
“Dad isn’t home.” Tears tried to squeeze through the cracks in his voice. “He never is. And they’re coming, Mom.”
“Who?” His mother used a chipped fingernail to pick at the sand in her eye.
“The Colonel,” Maddie said.
“And Veronica,” Dom added.
His mom peeled off her wet nightgown with Maddie’s help. Dom avoided her sagging breasts and looked instead at the shiny white Cesarean scar striping her belly. She’d been reminding him of it for as long as he could remember. It almost killed me giving birth to you.
“We made a list,” Maddie said. “The stuff we need to do before they get here.”
He was grateful his sister was there. She’d make sure they were ready.
Two years had passed since their grandparents had fled Avalon Island for their annual winter escape to Florida, and then, to everyone’s surprise, not returned with the other snowbirds in the spring. Still, he remembered enough to expect their grandfather’s inspection. The Colonel’s white cotton gloves stretching tight over his thick knuckles. His golf cleats clicking across the wood floor as he neared the closet in Dom’s bedroom, where a tower of dirty clothes waited to spring out like a jack-in-the-box. He knew they’d follow the Colonel from room to room and nod at his insults. Make no excuses, no matter how much they wanted to play defense. Even Dom’s dad would be mute—his already swarthy complexion gone black hole with choked-back anger. His dad, the man Dom, Maddie, and their mother feared, who could, out of the blue, bug the hell out, pull his belt out of his pant loops so fast it whistled like Indiana Jones’s whip in Raiders of the Lost Ark, was scared of only one person—the Colonel.
It seemed like the Colonel had an unending supply of white military-issue inspection gloves. Plenty for a colonel who wasn’t even a colonel. Dom’s dad had explained it all with a smile. How Robert Pencott had been a lieutenant in the summer of ’42 (two months before he was scheduled to be deployed) when a back injury branded him 4F in the draft. He’d never fly into battle and, instead, ended up an engineer at Grudder Aviation’s Plant 2, overseeing the assembly of twenty Hellcat fighters per day. Fifty years later, he was Grudder’s head honcho. El Numero Uno. President Pencott.
He might not be a bona fide colonel, but Dom knew his grandfather was sure as shit scary as any admiral who’d led a fleet into enemy waters. Dom only had to mention the Colonel and the kids at school backed down, nodding like Dom deserved the kind of respect his grandfather got. When he felt small and powerless, he remembered he was the only grandson of the man who’d made Old Ironsides the champion of the navy, from World War II straight through Nam. The old man had helped land American boots on the fucking moon! When Dom huddled on the cold classroom floor during duck-and-cover drills, his fingers laced at the back of his neck, he knew it was his grandfather who’d make sure the nukes they were rehearsing for never dropped on American soil.
Still, they were doomed. Destined to fail the Colonel’s inspection. Even if they’d had weeks to clean, there was no way to rid the cottage of all the dust, grime, and grease; Mom’s used tissues and Bugles crumbs; Dad’s wiry black body hair; and Dom’s own mountain of unwashed clothes. But they had to give it a shot, he thought as he and Maddie each gripped one of Mom’s arms and pulled her to stand on shaking legs. He remembered the Colonel’s maxim: The Pencotts never quit.
They’d have to get Mom showered, and couldn’t forget deodorant. And perfume. He imagined his grandmother sitting at the kitchen table, immaculate in one of her many cream-colored pantsuits. Smoking cigarette after cigarette with coral-painted lips. As flawless as one of those black-and-white movie stars. Not a hair out of place.
His mother stood in the doorway, readying herself to leave her cool, dark cave of a bedroom.
“Dom,” she said, smiling as if seeing him for the first time, “how’s my baby boy?”
4.
Veronica
She sat at her daughter’s wobbling kitchen table and pretended to listen. To Ginny prattle on about trifling island gossip; her grandchildren, Maddie and Dominic, lie about their straight A’s at school; as her husband, Bob, slurped down the noodles their son-in-law, Tony, had made to please him. Above it all, Veronica heard the hum of the caterpillars feeding. A sound as wet and black as the caterpillar excrement that had already begun to coat the island. She’d had to leave her open-toed sandals at the cottage door. Ruined. And it would only get worse. This was just the beginning.
She ached for a cigarette, imagined the sizzle of the paper catching, the sting at the back of her throat with the first pull, warmth spreading over her mastectomy-scarred chest.
Her granddaughter’s speech felt rehearsed—honor roll, Advanced Placement this and that, blah, blah, blah—but why blame the girl? Eight decades of life had taught Veronica this: everyone is lied to for his or her own good. A mother telling a child it will be okay. A lover telling a lover I will always love you. Politicians promising a better and brighter future. Generals and admirals insisting war begets peace.
Maddie’s monologue was interrupted by Ginny. “How was your trip, Mommy? We’re so happy to see you. How’s the martini, Daddy? I made it myself!”
“Fantastic, dear.” She tried to match her daughter’s enthusiasm. “We are so happy to see you too. And the children.” She smiled at Maddie, then Dominic. “And Tony, of course.” This was a lie.
“Daddy?” Ginny looked across the table at her father.