PVC pipe in the trunk that’d fit in his ear just perfect. You like the work? The only reason I ask is I’ve never known you to wash a dish at home.”
Mickey started to say no, that washing pots was just a means to an end, but then realized that wasn’t quite true. Yeah, that pile of pots was always dispiriting to contemplate when he first walked in, but he actually kind of liked working through them at his own pace, and he liked the feeling of being finished even more, of having accomplished a task, even if that task was mindless and left you smelling like a dishcloth that had been marinating in bacon grease. “It’s okay, I guess.”
“Good,” his father said. “I don’t ever want to hear about you doing a half-assed job. That PVC pipe would fit in your ear, too, capisce?”
This was what Lincoln and Teddy—never mind Jacy—couldn’t seem to wrap their minds around. They suspected he stayed in the kitchen because he had something against rich girls, didn’t like the idea of having to be nice to them. But he really just liked it in the back of the house. The cooks reminded him of his mother’s friends in West Haven, and he even liked the long stainless-steel drainboard, the industrial-strength sprayer above the sink and the always-humid air, all of which took him back to the Acropolis and the thrill of that first Stratocaster he’d bought with the money he earned there. To Mickey, the Theta house’s kitchen felt a little like a church, or rather how he imagined church was supposed to feel but never did, at least not to him. He’d enjoyed Minerva, but unlike Lincoln and Teddy he’d never truly believed he belonged there. Sure it was better than West Haven, but that didn’t mean he had to love it. He also was slowly coming to understand that his father’s greatness, what made the man worth emulating, was his ability to love what he’d been given, what had been thrust upon him, what he had little choice but to accept.
He would’ve liked to explain all this to Jacy now. The questions she asked him about his earlier life always suggested genuine interest, though he could also tell that, for her, it was like studying a foreign language. She was able to recognize cognates and build a small, pragmatic vocabulary, but to become really fluent she’d have to immerse herself. And what Greenwich, Connecticut, girl would want to immerse herself in West Haven, with its construction workers and overweight cops and preening bodybuilders? While he liked that she was curious, his answers didn’t seem to lead to real understanding, just more questions. (Why hadn’t his parents taken him to Bar Harbor? Okay, maybe they couldn’t afford to stay for very long or at the nicer places, but couldn’t they at least go?) Even with him as a guidebook, she remained a tourist. Not that he blamed her. What did it matter if she really didn’t speak his language fluently? At Minerva he’d learned to speak a dialect closer to hers than his own, right? It wasn’t like they couldn’t communicate. If a gap remained, over time they would bridge it.
“So, Bar Harbor was your family’s regular summer spot?”
“Not every year. Sometimes we went to the Berkshires. Or the Cape. Or Nantucket.”
“Just the three of you?”
“Occasionally we’d go with another couple. Usually somebody from Donald’s firm.”
Mickey was about to ask who Donald was when he remembered Jacy always referred to her parents by their given names. Donald and Vivian. Don and Viv.
August on Nantucket versus a week at the lake. That was the gap they needed to bridge for this to work. Not a gap, a chasm. Still, he supposed it might’ve been wider. He might’ve been poorer, she even richer. He might’ve been black. Yet the gap was real and not nothing. Love might help, assuming that’s what they were feeling. In fact, wasn’t love the so-called answer?
And there was another gap. Running off to Canada instead of reporting for duty, after the solemn promise he’d made his father. “I’m not sure I can do it,” he’d told her back in Woods Hole.
“But it’s the right thing,” she insisted. “You must see that. This war is crazy. Not to mention immoral.”
True enough, and it was also true that his father would understand, at least in part. “Marrying your mother was the smartest thing I ever did,” he was fond of