On the last night of the trip, when Will knew it was okay to joke about my nose (and probably couldn’t help himself any longer, because the Kellys needed to make a joke out of everything), he stood up and toasted me. We were all eating crabs, as we always did for the first and last meals of the trip, and Babs had laid out newspapers on the table and put metal buckets in the middle for the shells. Everyone had mallets in their hands, and I was concentrating on my crab, trying to ignore the splashes of butter and pieces of shell that were flying everywhere. (After these dinners, the smell of Old Bay and crab lingered everywhere.)
Will stood up and wiped his hands, then hit his mallet lightly against his beer bottle. He cleared his throat. “I’d just like to take a minute to announce that the volleyball MVP award will be going to Beth, who was willing to use any body part to stop the ball. Well done, Beth!” He held up his bottle and chanted, “Hip, hip, hooray!” until everyone joined in.
The whole table clapped and cheered, even Nellie, who’d said, “Oh, Will,” in a halfhearted defense of me when he announced my name. I knew that I had to smile, so as not to seem like a bad sport, a killjoy who couldn’t take a joke, and so I did even though it made my nose throb. Matt put his arm around my shoulders and pulled me close to him, but he was also laughing. That was the thing about the Kellys, they always thought they were so damn funny.
When everyone quieted down, Babs reached over and patted my arm. “Don’t worry about it, dear. Not everyone is an athlete. We all know that.”
And I swear to God, with those words I lost any athletic ability I had. It was like the Kellys cursed me. In the vacations that followed in St. Michaels, I fell while running bases, tipped over a canoe, and wiped out on a bike. The harder I tried, the more of a danger I was to myself.
This was never my favorite week of the year, but this time I was really dreading it. Normally in St. Michaels, Matt and I were a team. He watched out for me and brought me Band-Aids when I inevitably hurt myself and started to bleed. We’d go to our room at night and laugh about the things that Babs said to Rebecca, and how drunk Nellie got at dinner. But this year was different. Matt and I were on strange ground—I was at my limit with his career crisis and he was well aware of that. We’d had some snippy exchanges lately, each of us feeling that the other was the one being insensitive. There’d been a few times when I was in the middle of telling a story or talking about work and Matt cut me off to start talking about himself, as if he didn’t notice we’d been having a completely different conversation. When I tried to point this out to him, he’d become huffy and told me that it didn’t feel like I was supporting him. I was afraid he was losing his mind.
In the car on the way to St. Michaels, Matt said, “Maybe I should start looking in the private sector now, get some experience that way.”
“Maybe you should,” I said, although I knew he didn’t really want my opinion. I was only half paying attention—I’d found it was the best way to get through these long discussions.
“I wanted another year or two in government, but maybe that’s not going to happen. Jimmy said he loves Facebook. That it’s the perfect job.”
“Did you ever notice that Jimmy loves everything he does?” I asked him. “That he thinks everything is perfect and amazing. Don’t you just think that’s his approach to it? That he’s spinning it that way?”
“I think,” Matt said, “that he just keeps getting really fucking lucky.” And then we were quiet for the rest of the ride, both of us lost in our own thoughts.
—
When we pulled up to the house, Grace and Lily were already in their swimsuits and running around the grassy area by the pool, playing some sort of two-person tag and squealing whenever they got close to each other. Meg was in a bikini and sunglasses, lying on her back on a lounge chair, an unopened magazine next to her. She looked like she was sleeping, which she probably was since she’d driven up with Will and Nellie’s crew early that morning.
Michael and Will were standing at the end of the dock, each holding a beer, with a large metal bucket at their feet that I knew held ice and more beer. Our nephew Bobby was on the lawn with Jonah, tossing an inflatable ball with him. Bobby was almost twelve and was always very sweet with the younger kids, unlike his brother, Ben, who loved to tease them and who I suspected was a bully at school. Rebecca was on the screened-in porch, wearing her sunglasses and watching Jonah and Bobby like a hawk, like she was just waiting for something bad to happen. She raised her hand at us in greeting, but didn’t smile.
Matt couldn’t get out of the car fast enough, opening the door at the same time he turned the ignition off. “I’m going to say hi to Michael and Will,” he said, already walking toward the dock. I stood and watched everyone for a few seconds, and took a deep breath.