and Aunt Zoe loved Uncle Will with the hypnotized steadiness of feminine blood. They were sisters and they were women. They had no choice. Men were the ones who decided; women could only say yes or no to the love that lived inside them. Men were responsible for their devotions. Women were pulled through the world. Only the most powerful disappointment could make them stop loving, and once they’d stopped they couldn’t decide to love again. Inner valves would close. Their body chemistry would change. It wouldn’t be what they wanted.
“—thought you weren’t coming,” he heard his mother say through the glass.
“Hate to miss all the fun,” Uncle Will answered. He spoke in wit, a private language. Everything meant something else.
Ben watched them walk up the porch stairs. Uncle Will carried two suitcases, and Ben’s mother and Aunt Zoe crowded around him. They let the boyfriend straggle behind, listening to his silent, unfamiliar music.
Ben heard them come in the front door. He heard his grandfather trying to navigate between courtesy and outrage.
“Hello, Billy,” his grandfather said. The voice came up the stairwell, patient and powerful as the house itself, this wooden fortress that had stood here looking at the bay for almost a hundred years.
“Hello, Dad. You remember Harry.”
Uncle Will’s voice was skittish, piping, delighted with itself. A flute of a voice. Ben got up, ran downstairs. He didn’t want to stay in the house anymore. He didn’t want to listen.
He’d have to see them on his way out.
They were in the living room, all of them except Jamal, who had a talent for being elsewhere. As Ben came down the stairs, Uncle Will looked up, arranged his face into a witty parody of surprise.
“Ben?” he said.
Ben said a soft hello, got himself down to floor level.
“Good god, you’ve grown, like, three feet.”
Ben shrugged. His size was his own, his right, not something he’d invented. Not something to be clever about.
“These days you’ve got to check in at least once a week if you want to keep up,” Ben’s mother said.
Don’t help him. Don’t give him anything.
Uncle Will came over, put out his soft hand. Ben let him perform a parody of a manly shake.
“How’ve you been?” Uncle Will asked. “What’s up?”
“Nothing,” Ben said.
“You look good.”
Don’t touch it. Just leave me alone, don’t look at me.
“Hey, Ben,” Uncle Will said, “this is Harry.” Ben didn’t know where to look. He looked down at his side, where sunlight stretched over the rag rug. Then he looked at his grandfather. His grandfather’s face was clouded as a mountain’s.
The boyfriend shook his hand. The boyfriend’s hand was harder than he’d expected it to be, dryer. The boyfriend had a talcumed smell, not flowery, more like chalk.
“Hello, Ben,” the boyfriend said.
For his own sake and because his grandfather was watching, Ben didn’t look at the boyfriend’s face. He let his hand be shaken, took it back.
“I’m going out,” he said to his mother.
“Don’t you want to stick around for a little while?” his mother asked.
“No,” he told her. And he left, knowing his grandfather would respect him for not being polite.
Outside, the light hung languidly, heavy white in the August air. It was a dead-calm day, close as a held breath, no good for sailing, though Connie wouldn’t be coming around for a few more hours and things could pick up by then. Ben walked down to the bay along the short stretch of road that was graveled in pulverized clamshells, bone-white in the whitened air. The water of the bay glowed green. It foamed listlessly around the domed heads of the rocks.
He found Jamal lying on the dock, face down on the boards. Jamal wore loose purple trunks. Ben stood for a moment, watching him. He didn’t think about beauty. He walked onto the dock.
“What’s going on?” he asked.
“There’s a big fish under here,” Jamal said.
“Where?”
Ben lay beside Jamal, put his eye to the gap between the boards.
“You have to wait for him to move,” Jamal said.
Ben saw only still green water that reflected, unsteadily, the boards of the dock, like a rope ladder fluttered by the wind. He was aware of Jamal’s body beside his own, the innocent pressure of Jamal’s elbow against his elbow and of Jamal’s bare knee against his thigh. He looked for the fish. He thought of nothing else.
“He’s down there,” Jamal said. “He’s a really big one.”
“I don’t see any fish,” Ben said.
“There. There he goes.”
Ben saw the sweep of a fin, spined and flat, broad as