Jennifer Close - The Hopefuls

When everyone quieted down, Babs reached over and patted my arm. “Don’t worry about it, dear. Not everyone is an athlete. We all know that.”

And I swear to God, with those words I lost any athletic ability I had. It was like the Kellys cursed me. In the vacations that followed in St. Michaels, I fell while running bases, tipped over a canoe, and wiped out on a bike. The harder I tried, the more of a danger I was to myself.

This was never my favorite week of the year, but this time I was really dreading it. Normally in St. Michaels, Matt and I were a team. He watched out for me and brought me Band-Aids when I inevitably hurt myself and started to bleed. We’d go to our room at night and laugh about the things that Babs said to Rebecca, and how drunk Nellie got at dinner. But this year was different. Matt and I were on strange ground — I was at my limit with his career crisis and he was well aware of that. We’d had some snippy exchanges lately, each of us feeling that the other was the one being insensitive. There’d been a few times when I was in the middle of telling a story or talking about work and Matt cut me off to start talking about himself, as if he didn’t notice we’d been having a completely different conversation. When I tried to point this out to him, he’d become huffy and told me that it didn’t feel like I was supporting him. I was afraid he was losing his mind.

In the car on the way to St. Michaels, Matt said, “Maybe I should start looking in the private sector now, get some experience that way.”

“Maybe you should,” I said, although I knew he didn’t really want my opinion. I was only half paying attention — I’d found it was the best way to get through these long discussions.

“I wanted another year or two in government, but maybe that’s not going to happen. Jimmy said he loves Facebook. That it’s the perfect job.”

“Did you ever notice that Jimmy loves everything he does?” I asked him. “That he thinks everything is perfect and amazing. Don’t you just think that’s his approach to it? That he’s spinning it that way?”

“I think,” Matt said, “that he just keeps getting really fucking lucky.” And then we were quiet for the rest of the ride, both of us lost in our own thoughts.

—

When we pulled up to the house, Grace and Lily were already in their swimsuits and running around the grassy area by the pool, playing some sort of two-person tag and squealing whenever they got close to each other. Meg was in a bikini and sunglasses, lying on her back on a lounge chair, an unopened magazine next to her. She looked like she was sleeping, which she probably was since she’d driven up with Will and Nellie’s crew early that morning.

Michael and Will were standing at the end of the dock, each holding a beer, with a large metal bucket at their feet that I knew held ice and more beer. Our nephew Bobby was on the lawn with Jonah, tossing an inflatable ball with him. Bobby was almost twelve and was always very sweet with the younger kids, unlike his brother, Ben, who loved to tease them and who I suspected was a bully at school. Rebecca was on the screened-in porch, wearing her sunglasses and watching Jonah and Bobby like a hawk, like she was just waiting for something bad to happen. She raised her hand at us in greeting, but didn’t smile.

Matt couldn’t get out of the car fast enough, opening the door at the same time he turned the ignition off. “I’m going to say hi to Michael and Will,” he said, already walking toward the dock. I stood and watched everyone for a few seconds, and took a deep breath.

The Kellys’ place was on a beautiful piece of land, nearly three acres, with one large house and two tiny cottages behind it. There was a pool, and a screened-in porch that overlooked the grass heading down toward the water, and a stone deck on the side of the house with six Adirondack chairs, painted a cheery red, all lined up in a row. There was also an outdoor fireplace, where we gathered most nights after dinner so the kids could roast marshmallows.

Charles and his four brothers had bought the property almost thirty years earlier, and used to bring all their families up at the same time. Now they mostly took turns, although Charles and Babs used it most, not shy about telling everyone that they had invested the most in the place and had the right to do so.

Above the front door, there was a sign that read: THE PANCAKE HOUSE, EST. 1970. The first year I went there, I turned to Matt in disbelief (I’d already heard the Patrick Pancake story by then), and he just smiled and shook his head and told me that Pancake was the surname of the family who’d owned the house before them. “My dad and my uncles got a kick out of it, so they left it up there,” he said. The two cottages behind were called Bacon and Eggs, because one was yellow and one was brown and I guess they decided to stick with the breakfast theme. Patrick and Rebecca always stayed in the little brown cottage, and at least ten times during the vacation, one of the Kelly brothers would ask, “Where’s Pancake?” and wait for someone to say, “He’s in Bacon,” so they could all laugh.

Matt and I were always shuffled around to whatever room or cottage was left — we were childless and could stay anywhere. One year, we’d stayed in Eggs, which offered more privacy but meant we had to cross the lawn to get to the bathroom in the morning, so it was a trade-off.

This year, we were in the main house with most everyone else. Babs put us in a bedroom that opened right up onto the lawn with a great view of the water. Patrick, Rebecca, and Jonah were in Bacon (as always), and Eggs would be split evenly between the nieces and nephews, each of them getting three nights there and sleeping on the floor of the living room for the last night. (There had been a fight over how to divide the uneven number of days at Sunday dinner a few weeks earlier, and it had resulted in so much screaming and crying that Babs declared Eggs would stay empty for a night to keep the peace.)

—

I left the bags in the car, deciding that Matt and I could bring them in later, and went to join Rebecca on the porch. Last year, Jonah had still been young enough that he couldn’t really keep up with the other kids. Now he was old enough to play with them and Rebecca seemed out of sorts without him by her side. He was laughing and clearly having fun with Bobby, and she looked like it was torturing her.

“We thought you’d beat us here,” Rebecca said as I sat down.

“Believe me, Matt intended to be the first one here. We just had a slow morning.”

She nodded. At the end of the dock, Matt was holding a beer and talking to his brothers, waving his hands in an excited way, and I wondered what he could be telling them.

Patrick smiled at me as he came out of Bacon, happy that Rebecca had company, I think. “Everything’s unpacked,” he said to her. “The air mattress is all set up for Jonah. Hopefully he’ll be okay with it.”

“Hopefully,” Rebecca said. “Otherwise, he’ll end up in bed with us.”

“Which would be just like home then,” Patrick said to me, but he had a laugh in his voice. He turned back to Rebecca. “Do you need me to do anything else? I was going to go join the guys on the dock, but if you need anything…”

“No, I think we’re all set,” Rebecca said, although you could tell that she wished she had a reason to keep him there.

I didn’t blame Rebecca for disliking Babs or not wanting to spend time with the Kellys — it certainly wasn’t my favorite thing to do. But then I’d look around at this beautiful vacation house and think, Oh, poor you. Suck it up. Being around Rebecca was a reminder of just how miserable you could make yourself, and I decided then that I would have a good time that week — there is nothing like being around a negative person to make you determined to be positive.