At the picnic, my seven year old daughter looked up from her paper plate with ketchup on the corner of her mouth and said, “I can’t wait for the beach.”
She said it the way children say things they believe completely, with the whole weight of her small body behind the words, as though summer itself belonged to her and the only question left was how soon it would arrive. She had been talking about Myrtle Beach for weeks. She had made a paper chain countdown out of construction paper strips, blue and yellow and pink, each loop uneven and shining with too much glue, each one numbered in purple marker with the careful, wobbly handwriting of a girl who treated every craft project like a legal document.
Every morning she tore one loop off and announced the new number to the kitchen as though reporting from the front lines of joy. Twelve days. Eleven.
Ten. She had seashell stickers in her purse to “practice beach feelings.” She had asked me four times whether the ocean was warmer than a bathtub and seemed genuinely disappointed when I said it depended. My father was sitting across the patio table, one hand wrapped around a sweating can of Diet Coke, the other holding a burger he had not earned the right to enjoy at a family gathering he had not paid for at a house he still referred to as though he had built it with his own hands.
He gave this low, easy chuckle, the particular sound certain men produce when they want cruelty to pass as common sense, when they want the room to receive something vicious as something practical, when they need everyone to laugh so that no one has to call what just happened by its real name. “Kid,” he said, “you’re not invited.”
For one second, the backyard went still. Then the table laughed.
My mother laughed behind her napkin, a soft, muffled sound that provided just enough deniability if anyone later accused her of participating. My uncle Ronald snorted into his potato salad. And my husband, Derek, smiled.
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