Abbie puts a hand over her heart. It is too much, this handsome lifeguard being kind to a mother and her little boy and talking about his penis. When he stands back up, he removes his sunglasses, but not before Abbie notices the nipple piercing. It hits her different. Her eyes move in slow motion up to his face. Where has she seen that face? Is he an actor? Why would an actor know her name? Maybe Emma and Jacques are punking her. She turns to look at them, and they are experiencing the same reaction. She can see it in their faces. They too are starstruck.

  “It’s me, Conor,” he says, smiling. “We met once, at the wedding.”

  Five seconds pass. A lifetime passes.

  “Conman,” she whispers, and then, realizing she said this out loud and desperately wanting to cover her cyberstalking tracks, she says, “You got big!”

  Conor’s cheeks flush red. He looks down, and then, looking back up, he says, “And you got more beautiful.”

  It is more than Abbie can take, and she wipes a hand across her brow. Jacques hands her a napkin and whispers in her ear, “That’s for down there.” Abbie does not stop smiling at Conor when she extends her hand and smacks Jacques. There is the slightest sound, like a mouse squeaking.

  “Y’all, this is my cousin,” she says. Emma and Jacques slowly look at each other.

  “By marriage. We’re not related; I mean we are but you know, not by bodily fluids, like blood or anything.” She shakes her head. “My Thomas—father married his father, I mean sister. Shit, I mean my father married his uncle.”

  “You weren’t lying when you told us you were from the South,” Jacques says.

  “When did you get here?” Abbie turns to Conor.

  “Last night. Late. I slept on Grammy and Pops’s sofa. I didn’t want to wake anyone. This is my buddy Scott.”

  Abbie smiles at his friend, who looks up from his phone to nod at her.

  “And you’ll be staying in my bedroom—I mean the bunkroom?”

  “Apparently so.”

  A man standing in line behind them says, “Um, excuse me?”

  Emma goes back to her window and says she’ll take the next order. The impatient man begins to speak, but Emma looks at Conor’s friend, smiles, and says, “I believe you were next?” Jacques turns to walk to the grill but not before leaning down and whispering in Abbie’s ear, “Welcome to the summer of me.”

  THE COTTAGE RULES

  Please tidy your bed every morning because it looks pretty and provides good karma. Besides, your mother did not raise wild animals.

  CHAPTER 11

  Memorial Day Weekend

  When Matt climbs out of bed and places his feet on the creaking wooden floors, Thomas pretends to be asleep. He hears the pocket door open and close. He rolls over on his back, placing his hands on his chest, staring up at the ceiling fan. The door slides back open, and Thomas quickly closes his eyes. There is a rustling sound. Perhaps he has forgotten his wallet. When Matt lets out a loud fart, Thomas clenches his teeth. He is less upset about the indecency of Matt letting one rip while he is pretend-sleeping and more irritated that he was not consulted about Conor. They are bursting at the seams in this place. Thomas’s nightstand doubles as his desk, and Matt works at the kitchen table. Nearing fifty, Thomas finds it absurd that his greatest fear in life, the one that held a knife to his neck in the closet for so many years, was that he would end up old and alone; and now, somehow, he’s a member of the Brady family.

  Sometimes Thomas forgets which memories are his, and which belong to Matt: the family pilgrimages to Disney World, the Fourth of July parties, the foster kids that Grammy and Pops took in year upon year, and poor Mikey Gagnon. That’s the only way Thomas has ever heard anyone refer to Matt’s friend from high school: poor Mikey Gagnon, though he’s never heard Matt refer to him this way—in fact he’s never heard Matt mention him at all, and it is because of this that he knows Mikey Gagnon was something akin to Matt’s Lance. Poor Lance. Keep your friends close, and your secrets closer. He’s heard these stories so many times, from so many of the Brady family members, flipped through so many pages of yellowed photo albums and glossy yearbooks, and watched so many hours of flickering home movies that often his recollection feels more accurate than Matt’s. Their memories have merged.

  But what of Thomas’s memories? Have any of them found residence in Matt’s brain? What becomes of the memories Thomas has left stranded because they were either too trivial or too painful? Though he has shut the door several times on the memory of Lance, sometimes he still appears in Thomas’s dreams, unwilling to fade away. It is not the shriveled-up version, but the young, golden one, laughing at Thomas staring up at the buildings in New York, mouth hanging open in wonder, and then they are peeling each other’s clothes off in Lance’s tiny room. There was one window in his dorm room. It was small, dirty, and internal, looking over a cement courtyard wasteland, but in Thomas’s dreams the sheets on the bed billow in a brilliant white light as if hanging from a clothesline on a fine summer day. His hands desperately search Lance’s body as he unbuttons his shirt, kissing his chest, his nipples, and then his navel. When his hands tug at his underwear, the skin turns to mist, the light dims, and Lance evaporates. He can never hold on to him long enough before he becomes aware that it is nothing but a dream.

  When Thomas wakes in the morning after one of these dreams and Matt wraps his arms around him and his hand brushes against Thomas’s erection, he asks, “Uh-oh, what were you dreaming about?” Thomas says, “You.”

  Thomas gets out of bed and opens the blinds. Brilliant sunlight floods through the windows. It’s the official start of summer, and DJ has removed the faded green winter cover from the pool, open for the season. Honeycombed lights quiver on the bottom of the sparkling blue water. The marsh grass is green and in the offing, that point where the sea touches the horizon, earth and sky meet. Below the window, Matt pulls the scooter out of the garage, throws a leg over the seat, and sits down. He turns his head, looking for a moment at the pine trees, the tiny puffs of clouds drifting overhead, and the garden bursting with color. Even now, they share this memory but from two different perspectives. What will each remember? Matt takes off, and Thomas watches him until he fades from view, turning onto Route 1. At Dunkies—Thomas has never heard Matt refer to it by its formal name, Dunkin’ Donuts—Matt will pick up jelly Munchkins and two large iced coffees. The Munchkins and one iced coffee are for Pops and the other iced coffee for Matt.

  Thomas walks around the bed and then lies down on Matt’s side, resting his head in the indentation in the pillow, attempting to see the world from his husband’s perspective.

  The majority of Annie and Matt’s happy childhoods played out on Norfolk Road. An entire childhood where the Brady’s home was ground zero. A place where at any time, you might find a generation of townie kids gathered at the kitchen table, playing in the yard, laughing and dancing to a boom box, alongside a revolving door of foster kids removed from troubled homes who needed a safe haven for a period of time. Layer on top of this a generation of aging Brady family members, cared for by Grammy and Pops, lingering for a moment in the twilight of their final years before passing on.

  How could Thomas not want to claim Matt’s memories as his own? Their childhoods were separated by eight hundred miles and a couple of years. But if you were to compare Thomas’s yearbook to Matt’s, you’d find similar photos of pretty girls with feathered hair and big curly perms, handsome boys in polo shirts with their hair parted in the middle, and the lyrics to Madonna songs written in the margins. But here is where the similarities end. Thomas was the wallflower at his school, while Matt was the prom king. Thomas was the ugly duckling—Matt, Mr. Good-Looking. Thomas’s parents divorced when he was twelve; Grammy and Pops will soon be celebrating their fifty-fifth wedding anniversary, on the same day of Matt and Thomas’s fifth. Thomas was disowned by his family after coming out, and Matt was embraced.

  Thomas’s smartphone dings, notifying him of activity on the webcam in Pops’s bedroom. He opens the app and watches the grainy morning routine. Pops is lying in bed as Matt walks in and crouches down on his knees on the floor next to him.

  “Good morning, handsome,” Matt says, tilting his head.

  He helps Pops sit up and assists him with getting dressed. Pops lifts his arms up like a child so that Matt can pull his shirt over his head. Matt pulls the walker close to Pops’s bedside and helps him stand up, steadying him as he walks to the bathroom. When the door closes, Matt checks the sheets of the bed. Pops has started to become incontinent.

  Thomas often wonders what it might have been like to grow up with the Brady clan. To have been a member of the “fun bunch,” Matt’s group of high school friends who, to this day, still gather to laugh and share stories from the past. Or to have joined the ranks of the eighty foster children, give or take, who found refuge in the farmhouse and later the white house that Pops built on land he subdivided on Norfolk Road in Exeter, where everyone knew the Brady name—and they still do. When Bobby, who is a master craftsman, and Annie built their house in the same town, the community actually pitched in to help, like it was some type of barn raising. Grammy and Pops sold the white house and moved into the in-law addition with Annie and Bobby, but everyone in town still calls the two homes they lived in on Norfolk Road the Brady farmhouse and the Brady white house.

  “Why did your parents take care of all those kids?” Thomas asked once.

  “Because they could,” Annie responded, and she left it at that. Because they could.

  Eric was the first foster kid, though technically he was not an orphan. Pops, who was teaching physical education at a high school in Billerica, told Grammy of a sixteen-year-old boy who was living with his three older brothers. The mother had left them, and their father remarried. The father and his new bride joined a religious cult, moved to Kentucky, and left the four rough boys to fend for themselves. Eric was the youngest, and while his older brothers were into drugs and other misdemeanors, Pops thought Eric had potential.

  Eric was a handsome boy with dark hair and blue eyes, and he became a cherished older brother to Matt and Annie. They adored him. He came and went like a cat, often bringing a gift with him when he returned, like the ivory Buddha figurine that now sits in Matt and Thomas’s sunroom.

  One night, a rumbling noise approached the Brady farmhouse as a cloud of dust was kicked up from the dirt road by a group of motorcycles. The Hells Angels were looking for Eric. Pops told them that Eric was not there, which he believed was true, but Eric had slunk up the back staircase to his bedroom, his arm bleeding from a stab wound. Shortly after this, Eric disappeared for a while, traipsing in and out of prison.

  A year or two later, Grammy and Pops were getting dressed up for a party that the neighbors were throwing. The babysitter canceled, and Grammy was about to call and give their regrets when Eric appeared at the door.

  “I need to lie low for a couple of days,” he said.

  “You can stay here, but would you mind watching the kids tonight?” Grammy asked.

  The neighbors questioned her judgment, leaving the kids with a known criminal.

  “Who the hell better to protect them?” she delighted in responding. “He’d kill anyone who tried to harm them.”

  This is Grammy logic.

  Ricky, from the Home for Little Wanderers in Waltham, was the first in a long line of kids who needed to be removed quickly from perilous situations. It was meant to be a temporary placement, but he was with the Bradys for over a year. When each foster child arrived, Grammy pointed to an empty frame on the wall, next to the school photographs of Matt and Annie, and said, “Do you know what that empty frame is for?” The nervous child would shake their head. “I’ve been waiting to put your picture there.”

  Grammy took each of the eighty-eight children to Walmart for new clothes, a haircut, and a photograph. When they were there, Grammy asked the child to pick out a frame for the next child who would come along after they were gone. They loved this part of the trip, understanding that one day they would be gone, but for now, they were safe and loved, and they were buying a gift for another child they would never meet.

  Eric killed someone in a bar fight and went to prison, for a very long time. The first time Matt and Pops visited him at the Walpole penitentiary, Matt was not allowed inside, because he was wearing jeans and a white T-shirt, the same uniform as the prisoners. Thomas has seen pictures of Matt at this age, a tall teenage heartthrob, with his ready smile and dark hair and a monkey wrench in the back pocket of his jeans. He has fantasized about this version of Matt; sometimes he still does. Matt and Pops bought cars at auctions and restored them in the big white barn that Pops had constructed on a lot they subdivided from the farmhouse. Matt, the seventeen-year-old engineer, drew up a floor plan for the white house on Norfolk Road, which included an in-law apartment for Grammy’s parents and another room for the long line of foster kids that would pass through the Brady home. After the white house was built, when Annie and Matt were in high school, the Bradys sold the farmhouse to the Gagnon family, and that is when Matt and poor Mikey became the best of friends.

  Thomas pulls on a pair of shorts and a baseball cap. Walking down the outside steps, he waves to the Rays, tending to the garden they have planted around their cottage: hydrangeas, black-eyed Susans, and a clematis vine. They have placed a sprinkler in the grass beneath the pine trees that sweeps in an arc from left to right. A couple of chickadees delight in a puddle of water in an indentation on top of the utility box, dented by the overzealous eighteen-year-old snowplow operator. The birds snub their beaks at the Rays’ birdbath. In the afternoon, when the angled sunlight is golden, the Rays will sit down with heavy sighs in their Adirondack chairs, glasses of wine resting on the arms, an outdoor speaker playing oldies from the 1960s and ’70s. Happy hour will commence. When he walks by Betty’s cottage, she is watering her grass. Correction: she is watering the lawn in front of her cottage. It is technically not her grass; it is the association’s grass, as DJ often corrects her. She is speaking to someone, though it is a one-sided conversation.

  “I hear you, I hear you. So just keep on moving.”

  She waves to Thomas like a little girl might, shy and embarrassed. When he says hello, she turns off the water and kisses his cheek. Good; she seems to be on her meds.

  When Thomas gets to Annie’s cottage, he knocks as he opens the door, but then jumps and says, “Oh, I’m sorry!” as if he has walked into an occupied bathroom. Standing on the stoop, he closes the door halfway to look at the house number, thinking for a moment that he has somehow walked into the wrong place. There is a shirtless man standing in front of him.

  “Thomas?” the man says.

  He hears Matt laughing. He looks back at the face of the man, which bears an uncanny resemblance to Matt, to that teenage heartthrob from the photos.

  “Conor?”

  Standing on the stoop below Conor, who is now a good six inches taller than he is, puts Thomas in the awkward position of being at chest level when Conor gives him a hug. He feels something tug at his beard when he pulls away, and then he sees it, the nipple piercing. His face flushes red.

  “You got big,” Thomas says.

  “So I’ve heard,” Conor replies.

  You got big? Thomas feels like an old fool. Why doesn’t he just whip out a brand-spanking-new five-dollar bill? And don’t spend that all in one place, you whippersnapper! When was the last time he saw Conor? It was before he went to college. Is it possible that someone can change so much in that short an amount of time? Conor the teenager has become Conan the Barbarian. Well, not quite, but he has crossed the threshold into adulthood. Why didn’t anyone warn him that Conor has become so—beautiful? Thomas might have had time to compose himself. Conor steps back so that Thomas can walk into the room. Pops slowly turns his head to him.

  “Hi, Pops,” Thomas says, leaning down to kiss his head.

  “Howdy.”

  Pops is a man of few words these days—six, to be exact: yes, no, howdy, egg-cellent, and sounds good. Though he surprises them every now and then.

  Grammy has not yet gotten the hang of asking Pops a question and waiting for a response. They have tried to explain to her that she needs to wait for a reply before moving on to the next question, but she continues to pepper him, saying he’s just being stubborn. They don’t know him the way she does. Last night Grammy asked Pops what he wanted for dinner, offering a selection of foods that Matt and Annie would have to deliver. After the fourth item was read from a menu without Grammy offering a pause, Pops said, “I—don’t—want—anything!”

  It was the most that they had heard out of him for weeks.

  “Well, look who decided to wake up,” Matt says, standing up and giving Thomas a kiss. Even in front of family, this little display of public affection makes Thomas uncomfortable, particularly in front of Conor, as if he represents all the teenage boys who made disparaging jokes, using the word he hated most—faggot—when Thomas was young. He wonders if Conor has used that word. Pops turns his head to watch them. He is agitated, pressing the button on the recliner, rising up. Matt looks over and says, “Pops, what do you need?”

  “Uh, my, my—wallet.”

  Matt exchanges a glance with Thomas, like he knows why Pops wants his wallet, though Thomas does not. Thomas and Conor sit down as Matt goes into Pops’s bedroom. Thomas finds himself between Conor and Pops, rubbing his hands on his knees, trying to come up with small talk with a man who does not speak and a man he has not spoken to in years. Conor looks at Pops and places his hand on his. Pops’s eyes sparkle. Conor turns back to look at Thomas. His eyes are watery. Yes, Thomas thinks, people can change in the blink of an eye. Time is an illusion.

  “So, a lifeguard for the summer,” Thomas offers lamely. “That must be exciting.”

  “Very.” Conor smiles.

  Thomas wonders if Conor is being sardonic. He feels as if he is sitting in a car behind a high school bus, like the kids might turn around and make fun of him. Does that feeling ever go away? He wills himself not to look at Conor’s nipple piercing. Did it hurt? He will not ask that question. He will not ask Conor if the ocean water is nippy. He will not do it.

 

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