Frank and Antoinette were continuing to ferry things into the room. There was already a samovar of coffee, a teapot for Isabel. They’d brought in a platter of bagels with lox, capers, onions and tomatoes and cucumbers. The strawberries in Gran’s enormous old ceramic bowl were so red you looked at them and could think only of blood, that accusatory red you see when you’ve accidentally bitten the inner, fleshy part of your lip.
Madison could feel Luke beginning to vibrate beside her. She set down the fruit bowl and put one hand to the back of his neck.
“You heard me, I think,” her mother said.
“But you know that I’m working. You know full well why I’ve got my phone here with me during breakfast. So I’m just fascinated, really, that you think I can just—” And her father snapped his fingers, an uncontrolled smile spreading over his face. He looked like a failing magician. “Make it go away.”
Madison felt the sound of his fingers crackle down along her spine. She began rubbing her hand in smooth, continuous circles on Luke’s back.
“I do think you can make it go away for the remainder of our children’s breakfast,” Isabel said. “I have that much faith in you, sweetheart.” She tilted her head and smiled, that smile she had and used so sparingly. It made you feel she’d considered every detail of your person, your every gesture, and decided that you were truly and gracefully beyond reproach. She had offered the smile to calm him down, to bathe him in her own well-being. On his good days, it worked.
He squinted again. His eyebrows looked especially thick and unruly that morning, as if he’d repeatedly put his thumbs to his brow and rubbed with anxious distraction.
“You’ve got faith in me,” he repeated.
Frank and Antoinette had suddenly vanished. They’d been Gran’s only real staff out here for the last twenty years of her life, and this couldn’t be the first unpleasantness they’d seen unfold over sliced bagels, Madison thought. They knew when to glide into the room slowly, so that by the time you realized you needed something, you’d grown accustomed to their soothing presence in the corner, but they knew just as well when to disappear.
She stared past her father’s face, his jaw working away, to the big bay windows that looked out over the gray strip of sand on the beach below. The slightly longer grasses at the edge of the lawn were being bent wildly in different directions. What was she going to do if today was too windy? If she couldn’t take the boys outside, and keep them there?
She wished that her mother had insisted Lily come along on this trip, that she hadn’t given her the two weeks off to go home to her own parents in Brooklyn. Lily would have known, somehow. She would have seen this coming, before the meal had begun; she would already have figured out where to take the boys.
“Is that the case?” her father continued, his eyes fixed to her mother’s face.
“I would like you to put the phone away until we’ve finished our breakfasts,” Isabel said.
When he dropped his phone from a height and let it hit the dining room table, Gran’s sturdy, beloved cherrywood table, the sound was so unexpected—even with all the signals he’d flashed—that the twins responded with almost primal caution. Luke jerked, ready to dive beneath the table, and it was only Madison’s hand on his back that kept him in his chair. Even Matteo, always the more stolid of the twins, showed his hand, looking to his sister with a frantic jerk of his neck.
“You think I’m enjoying this?” Bob said. He leaned forward across the dining room table, his hands in his lap, his shoulders bearing down on his wife. “You think it’ll still be vacation if things continue like this?”
Isabel looked away, out the windows, as if to ignore an embarrassing display of public drunkenness. When she looked back, she picked up her utensils and began cutting her cucumber and tomato slices into smaller and smaller triangles, arranging them in rows on her plate and spearing them in pairs with her fork.
Bob lowered himself back into his seat, smoothed his napkin across his lap. Madison knew that her mother had gifted him those moments, the time he needed to remember that she was the one person he did not scream at. The one person, besides Madison and the boys, who ever got to see him feel tender. Isabel got not just brisk loyalty, the way he spoke to his colleagues, but actual softness. Sometimes she passed by where he stood, and he’d follow her to another room just to kiss the back of her neck, the knob where her spine began.
This wasn’t so unusual, Madison’s father bellowing, using every object in the house to help him make some stressful noise. But not on vacation, and not when her mother had asked for so little.
“I can’t put the phone away,” he said. “I apologize, but now is not the time to fight me on this.”
“Guys,” Madison announced, “let’s go put on our suits.”
She bustled the boys into the kitchen. Antoinette was waiting by the sink, her arms crossed severely over her stomach.
“We’re going swimming,” Luke whispered.
“I would just leave them,” Madison said to Antoinette, waving one hand back toward the closed door. “I wouldn’t go back in until he’s gone out.”
HER FATHER HAD ALWAYS HATED EVERYTHING about that house. The way the carpet felt damp, sometimes, during thunderstorms. The exposure to the beach. The lack of any architectural protection from the wildness of the dunes below, so that if you forgot and left the doors open on the sunporch, the carpet would be sandy for days. It wasn’t the sort of house he’d ever have selected, and certainly not one he’d have kept for decades. He’d tried for years to convince even his own mother to sell her building in northeast Brooklyn, to permit some developer to reimagine it as a sleek, silver column of luxury condominiums looking north toward McCarren Park and, beyond it, Manhattan.
But he’d never have refused this visit, at least not while Gran was alive. They had a standing agreement, Madison’s parents. Bob’s vacations could be as short as they needed to be. If he could take only four days all year away from the city, from the bank, then Isabel wouldn’t say a word. But once he took a vacation, he took it. He didn’t work the whole time, and he never cut a trip short. These were the terms of their agreement. Her father never forgot them, and her mother never had to reissue them.