adults. This is a crucial phase because it is when the drinkers start to drink and the mood of the event changes, but I hate this phase. I grew up with my cousins, but we are so different now and unfamiliar with one another.
Pat says, “I thought I saw some cookies in the kitchen that still need to be decorated.”
“Oh yes.” Mom claps her hands. “Why doesn’t everyone under thirty go into the kitchen and take care of that very important job?”
The family smirks at Gracie as she stands up, twenty-nine years old and the one who each year raises the bar for us all. It is a running joke that is not that funny. Last year it was “Why doesn’t everyone under twenty-nine go and do so and so . . .” There is the sense that if only Gracie didn’t keep getting older, then maybe the cousins would all still be little kids, laughing and talking and loving one another before we absorbed the rules of the McLaughlin family and shut up and grew up. During our childhood the family gatherings were very different. Papa was still alive, of course. Gram was young and energetic. Possibility was in the air for all of us. Everyone misses those lost times, in a way. And with that lame joke, each year that loss is pinned on my sister.
“So, we’re being ordered around in our own house?” I say, in a half-joking tone. I don’t really see the point in fighting. This is the way these evenings unfold. I can’t see any other way.
“You’re moving out,” Gracie says. “It’s not your house.”
“You heard Uncle Pat,” my mother says. “Off you go.”
Obediently, we kids file into the kitchen, having outgrown our use to our parents. Gracie and I lead the group. Then there is Dina, wearing a too-short skirt that Gram has already commented on, along with Theresa’s daughter, Mary, and her son, John.
Gracie gets the tubes of colored frosting out of the refrigerator, and I get the sprinkles and the Red Hots and the pastel Easter mini-M&M’s out of the pantry. The cookies, stacked on cooling racks, are already on the table. We sit down to work.
John can’t take the quiet for long. He picks up the biggest and best-looking rabbit cookie and bites its head off. “Mmmm,” he says loudly. “This is some good shit, these cookies.” Then he laughs with his mouth open so we can all see the chewed remains of the rabbit’s head.
This is the way John has talked ever since he was twelve years old. He is nineteen now and still everything is “good shit” or “bad shit”; every sentence is prefaced by an “Oh man.” Gracie and I have a running bet on whether John is stoned all the time or just stupid. I actually think he’s both, but Gracie thinks he’s just stupid. I once heard Gram say to herself when she thought no one was listening, that she was glad Papa had died before it was clear what kind of man his only grandson would be.
Gracie and I exchange a look now—stupid or stoned?—our first real communication of the day, as Dina says, “John, you are so repulsive!”
Mary looks at the ceiling, which is, to her, heavenward. She is fourteen and claims she wants to become a nun. I suspect it is because you can move into a nunnery when you’re sixteen, and Mary just wants to get away from her family as quickly as possible.
Gracie, who seems more relaxed away from the adults, tries to make polite conversation. She says, “Uncle Ryan seems to be getting worse, don’t you think?”
“Oh man, he gives me the creeps big time,” John says.
“I don’t know why they don’t lock him up,” Dina says.
“Because he’s not a danger to himself or anyone else,” I say.
“I wonder who pays his bills,” Mary says. “I don’t think Gram can afford it.”
This is a question we’ve asked, in our cousin mini-gatherings, for years. “I bet they all chip in,” Gracie says. “And his church probably helps, too.”
“The shoreless lake,” Dina says, squirting red frosting eyebrows onto a rabbit cookie.
“The what?”
“That’s the name of his cult church, the Shoreless Lake. It’s such a weird name, I could hardly forget it.”
We are quiet over our cookies. I picture a shoreless lake, calm water stretching on and on, the land always receding in the distance, forever unreachable. I speed up my decorating, to try to block out the image.