But she came up for the summers. Phoenix’s weather need not be clutched to the breast for June through September. Every year, she rented the same rundown lake cottage from a colleague of Rosie’s who couldn’t be bothered to fix it up enough to rent to tourists. She stood on its front porch and watched the sun rise over the lake every morning and smoked Camels. She was the only grandmother any of the boys’ friends knew who would have been willing—never mind able—to take out six or seven of them at a time in the ancient green rowboat that came with, and perhaps predated, the house. She swam every day out to the glacial rock in the middle of the lake that felt like it had very lately been glacier itself, hauled herself onto the mammoth slab, sunned the chill out of her bones, and then swam back. She was the most glamorous thing the boys had ever seen.
It was one of those hot, humid, buggy Wisconsin summers where it went from snow to sauna in a week and a half and stayed there. The boys spent it perpetually wet from the lake, the sprinkler, a surprisingly durable water slide Roo built out of trash bags on his grandmother’s front lawn. Carmelo taught Rigel to knit. At first, she thought it was the resemblance of the needles to something a ninja might own that appealed to him, and maybe it was, but he fixed on it like sand to sunscreen and spent the summer trailing training scarves everywhere, dropped stitches unraveling like plot threads. Ben used practice tassels as bookmarks. Jupiter used abandoned projects as bedding. Orion employed them as bandanas, sweatbands, do-rags, tube tops, cummerbunds, and toga tails, coming down to lazy summer breakfasts as Bruce Springsteen and Julius Caesar (equally ancient in his mind), 50 Cent and Fred Astaire. But Claude wore them as long, flowing hair—tresses that cascaded down his back or could be attached via headband then rubber-banded up like a real ponytail. Roo began a practice he would hone to an art in the years to come: pretending he wasn’t related to any of them.
Carmy let Claude try on her dresses and jewelry and shoes. When Claude made tea to go with his tea-length dress, she pulled out cookies or cheese and crackers to go with it and changed out of her T-shirt and shorts so that Claude didn’t have to be fancy alone.
Only once, early on, did Claude wonder, “Carmy?”
“Yes, dear?”
“Will you love me even if I keep wearing a dress?”
“I will love you even if you wear a dress made out of puppies.” Carmelo nuzzled his neck, and he giggled. “I will love you even if you wear a hat made out of toe cheese.”
Claude wrinkled his nose. “You will?”
“Of course.”
“How come?”
“’Cause I’m your grandma. That’s what grandmas are for.”
“Loving you no matter what you wear?”
“Loving you no matter what.”
Claude considered that distinction. “Is that why you still like Orion?” who was at that moment wandering through the kitchen wearing an unspooling umber pot holder as a loincloth.
Carmelo squeezed her eyes shut. “No matter what.”
Carmelo was also the one who took Claude to buy a bathing suit as a preschool graduation present. She let him pick it out himself, which is how Rosie arrived home from work one day to find her youngest son running through the sprinkler in a pink bikini with white and yellow daisies.
“Where did that come from?” She bent from the waist to kiss him way out in front of her so she would stay dry.
“Isn’t it great?” Claude looked lit up. At first she’d taken him to be sunburned, but in fact he was glowing. “Carmy got it for me for graduation.”
“Graduation?”
“’Cause next year I’m going to kindergarten.”
“I see.”
“I picked it out myself.”
“I can tell.”
“Isn’t it beautiful?”
At the least, he was beautiful in it, his body lean and flat as the piano, which hadn’t been tuned since Roo switched to flute, and covered in the little nicks and bruises that showed he was doing a good job of being almost five.
“Sorry.” Carmelo shrugged when Claude had run off again. “Once I told him he was old enough to pick out his own suit, there was no going back.”
“Empowering children.” Rosie sighed. “Always a mistake.”
“Are you worried?” Was Carmelo asking because her daughter looked worried? Or because she thought she should be?
“No?” It came out as a question. It was a sweltering almost-evening, no clouds, no wind. Rosie squinted against late-afternoon sun glinting off the water genuflecting from the sprinkler. Was it time to worry? Was the dress one thing but the bikini another somehow? Gnats danced lines and crosses just above her eyes, but she was too tired suddenly to wave them away. “Maybe a little worried,” she admitted to her mother.
“Fiddlesnicks.” Carmelo dragged hard on a cigarette Rosie hoped might induce the gnats to dance elsewhere.
“Fiddle snicks?”
“Poppyrock.”
“I think the word you’re looking for is ‘poppycock.’”
“Bullshit then.” Carmelo was not a woman bogged down by semantics. “He’s fine. Look at him! He’s ecstatic. He’s euphoric.”
“For the moment.”
Carmelo looked at her daughter. “For the moment’s all there is, my darling.”
“Spoken like an indulgent grandmother,” said Rosie. But deep down she knew that wasn’t it. It was spoken like someone whose baby didn’t get to grow up.
“He’s happy,” said Carmelo as if that settled it, as if it were just that simple. “Happy, healthy, and fabulous. What more could you ask?”
“Other kids will make fun of him.”
“What kids?” said Carmelo.
“I don’t know. Kids.”
“Kids don’t care about stuff like that anymore.”
“They don’t?”