Surface Tension by Brent Runyon
Mary is always in a white dress, even when she was a baby, and she always has a ribbon in her hair. They're all smiling in the pictures, but Mary is the only one who looks like she's having fun. Even when they're older, the only one who looks happy is Mary.
She pulls a gingerbread man out of a jar and pours me a glass of milk. I'm about to take a bite out of his leg, but Mary stops me. She says, “What are you doing?”
“Nothing.”
“You were going to eat his leg first?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“That's torture.”
“What?”
“You've got to bite off his head first. Put him out of his misery.”
I put his whole head in my mouth and snap it off at the neck. She says, “That's better.”
I nod and smile and take a sip of milk to wash him down. She leans back against the counter and says, “Luckystones, huh?”
“Yeah. I can't find any.”
“They're hard to find. You should take a trip out to Luckystone Point.”
“Where's that?”
“You've never been? Oh, that's the only place I've ever found one. Take a canoe and head out beyond Goonie Island, through the next cove, to the point at the end of the big white house. That's Luckystone Point. Look in the shallow water right where the waves break.”
“Okay. Thanks.” I wonder if I should leave now. I don't know what to do.
“Follow me. I want to show you something.” She doesn't have to say anything else. I follow her out the back door to the garage. Their garage isn't like ours, with the stupid overhead door. Theirs are cool old sliding wooden doors on a metal track, and they're locked up with an ancient, thick padlock.
Mary reaches down into a secret spot on the side of the garage and pulls out a key. She says, “Don't tell anyone where the key is hidden.”
“I won't.”
She puts the key in the lock, but it must be tricky to make it work, because it takes her a few tries to get it just right. I hear it click and she pulls the lock apart and pushes the garage door open with all her strength.
I've never seen such a clean garage before. Everything is all put away exactly where it should be. There's the famous lawn mower with the grass collector. A red metal container of gasoline right next to it. A washer and dryer. And a refrigerator just like ours, but theirs probably works and isn't covered in rust spots. A toy wagon full of leather basketballs, smooth as bowling balls. A wooden lacrosse stick that looks like it's from a museum and a few pairs of cross-country skis hung high in the rafters. A workbench with a hand-powered drill and a collection of screwdrivers in every size and shape, from biggest to smallest, all hanging on hooks from the shelf.
But the coolest thing I've ever seen is the decorations on the walls. Around the whole garage there are hundreds of lucky -stones strung on pieces of string. They look like the popcorn garlands we made in elementary school to decorate for Christmas.
Mary leads me to the back of the garage. She pulls a jar off the shelf and shows it to me. These must be the really special ones. She pours a few into my hands, luckystone rings in all different sizes, some as small as my pinkie and some as big as a Super Bowl ring. These are so cool.
Maybe this is how I get my luckystone ring. I look up at her perfect face and say, “Can I have one?”
She chuckles and says, “Sorry, kiddo. You've got to find your own. Otherwise it doesn't count.”
Right. She's right. “Yeah, I guess I'd better keep looking.” That would have been the coolest thing ever, except for the part where she called me “kiddo.”
I ask Dad if we can get Grandpa's old wooden canoe in the water, and that's all I have to say, because he loves getting the canoe in the water. It's a monster, though. It's really heavy, but I think I might be able to carry it with Dad this year. Usually, Mom has to help too.
The canoe is upside-down on top of a bunch of old cinder blocks, and Dad and I roll it gently off of them and onto the garage floor. The inside of the canoe is filled with spider-webs, cushions, life jackets, and paddles.
I grab the handle and pick up the front end. Dad takes the back. It's so heavy. It feels like there's a dead body in it. I have to walk kind of sideways to hold on to the handle and still move, and still I can only walk about fifteen feet until my arm gives out and I have to put it down.
Dad says, “Want me to get Mom?”
“No, I just need to switch arms.” I walk around to the other side and lift it with my left arm, but it's still just as heavy. Maybe it's a little heavier, because I'm not as strong on that side. I only get another ten feet and I have to stop again. Dad just holds up his end and waits for me to pick mine up again.
He says, “Want me to get Mom?”
“No, I'm good.” It's stupid that we have to walk along the edge of our property. Why can't we just cut through the Richardsons' lawn? They're not even home. It would be so much shorter.
Finally, we get it to the rock beach, and I stumble down to the edge of the water and drop the canoe. I only drop it about six inches, but Dad freaks out. “Don't drop it!”
The canoe is old and it doesn't float that well, because the wood has to swell up before it gets watertight. I hope we don't sink while we're out there.
Dad and I put our life jackets on and push the canoe out.
We paddle out past the Bells' dock and the Richardsons'. Past Goonie Island and past the buoys. We both whack our paddles against the side of the buoy, just so we get to hear the sound.
I look down where the water is leaking in around my toes, and a daddy longlegs runs across looking for somewhere to escape to.
The water that is leaking in runs to the back of the canoe because Dad is heavier. At least I've got that going for me.
The next cove isn't very big, and I already see the big white house at the point. There's a beacon on the end of the point to keep people from running their boats aground, but Dad and I paddle toward it anyway.
I didn't tell him why I wanted to come out here. I just told him about the spot and that it had a lot of cool fossils and stuff. He's pretty much ready to do anything if it involves using Grandpa's old canoe.
We land the canoe on the point, and the little rocks make a loud scraping sound against the old wood. I can feel Dad flinching in the back of the canoe.
We walk out along the point. It's a lot thinner than I imagined it. It's only a few feet wide at the widest spot, and then it thins as it gets toward the beacon. The waves lap against the rocks from both sides. That must be how the luckystones get washed up here.
I walk along the little ridge of rocks, looking into the water for the shape of a luckystone. I bend over and look in the water for so long that my back starts to hurt. Dad's doing it too. He must have realized what I'm looking for.
I stand up and stretch my back. I think I pulled a muscle in soccer practice, because my lower back is always hurting. I put my hands upside down on my lower back and try and massage the cramping muscles.
I don't want to look like an old guy, though, so I bend over again and look for my luckystone. I see a lot of rocks, but I'm not focusing on the right place or something. I'm seeing the skipping stones, but no luckystones, and definitely not any luckystone rings. I know they've got to be here somewhere. I know I'm going to find one. I know I'm going to find one.
“Hey, son,” says Dad.
“What?” I look up and he's holding something between his fingers. It's a small, round stone. I hope it's not what I think it is. I walk toward him.
Shit. It's a luckystone. He holds it up to the light so I can see that the hole goes all the way through. Why did I bring him with me? I knew he was going to find one. Now everything is ruined. Now I'm never going to get that kitten.
He doesn't even look that impressed that he found it. He looks like it doesn't even mean anything to him.
I'm unlucky. Nothing ever goes the way I want it to.
Dad washes his luckystone off in the water, so it looks brand-new,
He's never seen the Richardsons' collection.
We're leaving tomorrow. The two weeks went so fast. I didn't even do anything. I only went to the waterfall once. I only went fishing twice. I didn't find a luckystone. I didn't get a kitten. My rock-skipping championship got kind of sidetracked by the turtle bite.
My feet got tough, and I can swim underwater to the end of the Bells' dock, but that's about it.
I don't even know what I did the rest of the time. Wasted it, I guess. I keep hoping Mary will come down to say goodbye, but I haven't seen her in a few days.
Mom's already packed up most of our stuff and given away the food we didn't eat. The day before the last day of vacation is the worst. You know it's going to end and you know you should be having fun, but all the fun has been sucked into a black hole.
It makes me feel terrible. It makes me feel like I want to leave right now.
I walk down to the lake one last time. I bend down and put my hand in the water, but I can't get too close because I'm wearing shoes. It's so much warmer than it was when we first got here. I want to go for one last swim, but my bathing suit is already in the black suitcase. The car is packed up and the water is turned off. So are the phone and the electricity. There's a thousand mothballs in the closet, even though all the sheets and blankets are in a black Hefty bag in the loft of the garage. Dad set off a bug bomb in the living room, so we can't even go into the cottage anymore.
Mom and Dad come up and stand behind me and look at the water, which is flat and smooth today. Dad hugs Mom from behind and I can tell they're both tearing up about leaving.
They love it here. I wish I could spend the whole summer here.
Mom says, “Good-bye, lake,” and Dad and I say it too.
The lake is part glass and part gold where the sun catches a ripple from the wake of a boat that went past a long time ago. I wish it were raining.
We turn and walk back to the car.
14
The peppermint stick ice cream is melting in the backseat, and Mom is driving because Dad got tired and almost drove us into the back of a tractor-trailer somewhere in Pennsylvania.
Dad is like a little kid. As soon as we got close to Ithaca, he tuned the radio to the Ithaca College station because he knows the guy who runs it. Now we're on the back roads, and the farther we get from Ithaca, the worse the station comes in. He keeps trying to tune it in better by rolling the knob back and forth between his fingers. I ask why we can't get a new radio, one that has like push buttons and some real speakers, but he said we can't spend any money on a radio right now. Apparently, we have to spend all our money on Dad's new toy, his brand-new kayak strapped to our roof.
I swear, I think he loves that thing more than he loves us, because when he's not listening to the radio station that doesn't come in, he's staring at the kayak in the pas senger mirror. He's tilted the mirror so that it's pointing straight up in the air, just so he can look at his kayak the whole time.
Ever since Grandpa died last winter, Dad has gotten into this whole kayaking thing. I think it's because Grandpa was into all kinds of outdoorsy things, like canoeing and hiking and stuff, and now because Grandpa is dead, Dad feels like he wants to do all those things too.
Which is fine, because at least it's better than how he was right after Grandpa died, all depressed and snapping at everyone all the time. Even on his birthday, he didn't want to have presents or a cake.
Then he got a little better when he put this picture of Grandpa next to his bed. It's not the kind of picture you normally see of a dead person, where they look all saintly and kind. This one is of Grandpa on the beach with the sun setting behind him, carrying this giant wooden canoe on his head. Dad says that it was taken only about a year ago.
And then Dad got all focused on kayaking. It was the only thing he ever wanted to do or talk about. So now we're bringing a kayak up to the lake with us, and I guarantee that's the only thing he's going to talk about.
I can't wait to get out of the car and put my feet in the water, but we're still a couple of miles away. We turn right on the country road, and I'm tapping my toes under Dad's seat.
The power station pumping pollution up into the atmosphere. The Wirth mansion rotting into the earth. The roadside strawberry stand, where the fruit is covered in pesticides.
The dairy farm—where that girl offered me a kitten—got sold, and Mom and Dad say they're turning the whole place into a winery. Do people really want wine that grows in a place where cows have been shitting for a hundred years?
At least some things are the same. At least the Go Children Slow sign is still here. And all the mailboxes are still here.
We pull in and park in our old parking spot underneath the pine tree. Dad is just staring at his kayak in the passenger mirror, making sure none of the branches scrape against the kayak. I wonder if the Richardsons are here.
Mom unlocks the cottage and starts unloading stuff out of the car. Normally, Dad would be yelling at me to help her, but now he just wants me to help him untie his kayak so he can get it into the water.
Mom is getting mad. She's the only one who is moving anything into the house, and she keeps trying to slam the screen door behind her when she goes into the house, but it's got one of those stopper things that makes it close slowly. So when you try and close it hard, it just flutters there for a second and then it closes. It's probably pretty irritating for her.
There's some guy standing out in front of the Bells' cottage. I've never seen him before. He's a big, fat white guy dressed all in black, with long white hair and a white beard, and he's talking on a phone with a really long cord, like the one we have in our kitchen, pacing back and forth and talking really loudly. Who pulls the cord outside? Who is this guy?
Dad grabs the handle at one end of the kayak and I get the other and we lift it off the car and carry it down to the lake across the lawn. We don't wave or anything as we walk by, and the guy on the phone doesn't even look at us.
He has a really thick Southern accent, and I can't understand anything he's saying, even though he's talking so loudly it's making my ears hurt.
Dad says, “That's obnoxious,” loud enough for the guy to hear. I'm surprised, because normally Dad would wait to get inside to say something like that.
We get the kayak down to our little beach, but there's kind of a problem. Every year, we bring our lawn chairs down and leave them on the beach. But in the spot where we normally set up our white plastic chairs, there is a whole new set of red-cushioned lounge chairs. You've got to be kidding me.
Dad puts down the kayak on the rocks, turns around, and looks back at the dude on the phone. Dad isn't really an aggressive kind of guy, but he's got the same look on his face like he had the time that I called Mom a bitch, like he's ready to tear the guy's head off.
We just stand and stare at the guy. I'm trying to figure out what's going on here. Apparently, this guy is living in the Bells' cottage, because there are all sorts of bags and boxes of stuff everywhere. There are a bunch of kids' toys out on the lawn, but I don't see any kids anywhere.
He does have two dogs, though—Labrador retrievers, one chocolate, one yellow—that are chasing each other in and out of the house through the sliding glass door. They're running through our yard and the Richardsons' yard. They're pissing everywhere. The chocolate one just squatted and took a dump right in the middle of the Richardsons' lawn. Wow, that is not going to go over well with Mr. Richardson, considering that he spends almost all of his free time working on his lawn.
Mom walks down to the lake, past the guy, and we all stand together, just like we always do, on the shore of the lake. But I can't concentrate because all I can hear is the guy talking on the phone.
I try to skip a stone, but it doesn't skip, and the guy on the phone starts laughing. I can't help but feel like he's laughing at me. This is really going to suck, especially if he'
The Richardsons just arrived. Mom's getting dinner ready, so Dad and I go over to talk to Mr. Richardson about the new neighbor. I used to think that Mr. Richardson hated us, because he almost never said hi or anything. He just mowed his lawn and did his own thing, but now Mr. Richardson seems really happy to see us.
Dad shakes his hand and says, “How are you, Mr. Richardson?” I've never heard my dad call another man “Mr.” before.
“You joining up with the minister over there?”
Dad says, “What's that?”
“Our new neighbor says he's a minister of some church. Got the Bells to sign over their deed to him for tax reasons. Some kind of scam, that is, I tell you what.”
“Is that right?”
“That guy is a con man. I told him to keep those dogs on a leash.”
We all look at the dogs, still running around our yards, chasing and biting at each other.
I say, “One of them went to the bathroom on your lawn earlier.”
Mr. Richardson looks at me like he's about to strangle someone. He's mad at the minister. He goes into his garage and gets a shovel. He says, “Where?”
I point and say, “Right there.”
Mr. Richardson goes over and scoops up the dog shit with the shovel, brings it over to the minister's property, and drops it right in the middle of his lawn while he's still talking on the phone.
The minister stops talking and stares at Mr. Richardson as he turns and walks back toward us. That'll teach him.
It's raining, so Mom and Dad and I get out the old Monopoly board and set it up on the kitchen table. It's totally weird how dark it gets around here when it's raining. It's even darker than it is at night, except for not really. It's just dark.
I get the race car, Dad takes the top hat, and Mom takes the dog. She says, “It looks like Panda, my dog I had when I was a little girl.”