Alden

The Long Saturday

Chapter 64: Alden

The first time Clara says the word lake with enthusiasm, my body answers as if she has proposed dynamite.

"I want a lake day," she says in July over pancakes.

"A very lake day."

"There are pools," I say.

"Pools are boxes."

This is, infuriatingly, not wrong.

The campaign gains support quickly.

Mom says Alden has shade and a decent picnic stretch if you get there before the morally unstable.

Norah says children should meet places as places and not as inherited weather.

Stephanie texts that Dylan wants to bring a net for minnows if we go.

Even Jude, when he hears about the debate after church, says, "It is a lake, Caleb. Not an exorcism."

So now it is Saturday and we are in the car with towels, peaches, sunscreen, goldfish crackers, one child-sized life jacket, and enough backup clothing to survive a small migration.

Clara is singing to the dog-shaped float ring in her lap.

Mom is in the front seat holding the container of sliced peaches with the authority of a woman escorting sacrament.

Norah is driving because she says I am "too visibly in conference with my nervous system to be trusted with traffic."

Again, not wrong.

The turn into Alden still lives in my body.

County road.

Trees thinning.

Glint of water between trunks.

The parking lot with the same potholes, the same trash barrel, the same faded sign about glass containers that nobody in Mercer has respected since 1998.

And yet the place itself refuses the role.

Today it is hot and loud and full of families dragging coolers down the path like frontier penitents.

Two teenage boys are already arguing over a football they should not have brought.

A toddler in orange arm floaties is eating sand with theological commitment.

Dylan, now all elbows and preteen length, is waiting by the picnic tables with Stephanie and a green net twice the size he needs.

"Hi, Clara."

Clara hides behind Norah's leg for one ceremonial second and then says, "Do you know minnows?"

"Professionally," Dylan says.

Stephanie mouths, sorry, over his head.

I shake mine.

We stake out a patch of shade near the shore where the water is shallow and sandy and offensively harmless.

Norah spreads towels.

Mom unpacks lunch.

Stephanie opens sunscreen and immediately becomes communal property.

"Face first," she says to Dylan.

"I am eleven."

"And sunburnable."

Clara receives her life jacket with less insult than the foam belt at the Y, perhaps because it is bright yellow and therefore morally serious.

She lets me clip it under her chin.

"Too tight."

"No."

"A little tight."

"That means correct."

Once she is equipped, she walks to the shore with the grave purpose of a researcher entering field conditions.

The lake touches her ankles.

She gasps.

"It's cold."

"Yes," Norah says. "That is one of water's hobbies."

Clara looks out at the wide glitter of it and then back at us.

"Big bath."

"No," I say at once.

"Different category."

Mom laughs into her hat brim.

"Good to know some heresies still provoke you."

Dylan spends the first hour showing Clara the absolute least impressive wildlife in Mercy County.

Minnows.

A shell.

One stick he claims has "snake potential."

Clara receives each discovery with escalating authority.

When he takes her three cautious steps farther into the shallows to look for tadpoles, I stand before I know I am standing.

Norah reaches back without looking and hooks two fingers into the hem of my shirt.

Just enough.

Stay.

Dylan points to the sandy bottom.

Clara squeals over something invisible to everyone else.

No one drowns.

No one even slips.

By lunch the towels are full of crackers and sand.

Mom hands peaches around with the efficiency of wartime rationing.

Stephanie is telling Norah about a woman from school who started selling permanent jewelry out of a former tanning salon.

Dylan and Clara are using the net to catch leaves and then releasing them with moral ceremony.

I sit in the folding chair with sunscreen on my shins and the old dog rock visible downshore, still crouched in its shape, still not interested in symbolic labor.

"You okay?" Mom asks quietly.

She does not do false casual.

"Yeah."

She nods.

"Good."

Then, after a minute:

"He would've loved how much equipment children require now."

I laugh.

"He would've called the float ring bureaucratic."

"And then used it anyway."

At some point Dylan asks me what time it is because Stephanie has promised him chips at two-thirty if he stops trying to build a dam out of wet sand.

I check my phone.

2:17.

The numbers are nothing more and nothing less than numbers in my hand.

Clara is knee-deep in the shallows yelling, "I found another tiny fish situation."

Norah is standing at the waterline with her skirt tied in a knot above the knee, one hand shading her eyes.

Mom is arguing with a stubborn peach pit.

I tell Dylan, "Two seventeen."

"Cool," he says, because to him it is.

He runs back to the towel empire.

I put the phone face down on my leg.

The lake keeps reflecting sky like that is all it has ever owed anybody.

Later, when the heat starts to soften, Clara falls asleep in the car before we reach the end of the county road.

Her hair smells like sunscreen and mineral water and the cheap peach shampoo Norah keeps buying even though it sounds invented.

Dylan's borrowed net lies in the trunk among damp towels and an empty cracker box.

Mom dozes in the passenger seat.

Norah drives one-handed.

I look out at the familiar roads of Mercer and feel how tired I am in the clean, earned way that belongs to sun and parenting and carrying too much food to a place that turns out to be only a place.

At a stoplight, Norah glances over.

"Well."

"Well what."

"You took your daughter to the lake."

I look back at Clara, mouth open in sleep, one sandy foot kicked free of the life jacket she had insisted on keeping half the drive.

"Yeah," I say.

"We did."