her life had been removed from their family’s orbit for jarring and indeterminate periods of time, June had always claimed Ludi as her own.
The house ex-Uncle Travis purchased on Chequessett Neck Road in Wellfleet was not beachfront property. Set back in scrubby pines, it was enclosed in near twenty-four-hour darkness that Albert, clutching a small overnight bag and a paper tray of clam strips he’d purchased on Route 6, was relieved he could find.
The patch of bare needles they called the driveway was a ringing, chill silence. During the summer, that road had enclosed them in sleepy, chattering darkness, like voices from a party in another room. In late October, the air was a wall built to expel intruders. He approached the screen door, hoping, though the catch had been broken for at least twenty years, he might find it locked.
Travis bought the house before Mark and Albert’s parents died in a train accident. June handled this well. The boys were fourteen and fifteen, she reasoned, not five. Albert remembered standing by the grave after the funeral, feeling that he should ape June’s matter-of-fact behavior, click-clacking in mourning black out the door to the funeral home. She’d arranged a double ceremony with black coffins Mark said looked like cannons. Albert heartily shook everyone’s hand until June took him aside and placed him on a chair near the door.
Inside the house, Albert put his bag down and flipped on the lights. The sepia floral sconces seemed defeated by the redwood walls. Even from across the room, Albert could see the skinlike layer of dust covering the green couch. June had seemed confident that he could simply remove her personal items, give the house a scrubbing, and hand the keys over to a realtor, who would sell the place for enough money to keep her at Horizon Wind for another twenty years.
Albert didn’t doubt the house would sell, but he understood now that a simple cleaning would not suffice. During his bourbon months, he had seen “staging” makeovers on home improvement shows. This place was in such disorder it would be faster to empty it, have it professionally cleaned, and let the buyers, who would certainly knock it down and build one of the new sandboxes lining the road anyway, have it for cheap. June wouldn’t like it, but she would have no choice. “You have to forgive, Albert,” she had said when Susan died. “We’re family, and you have to forgive.” Now, June would have to forgive too.
Albert remembered the loop of summers. First, the beach at Newcomb Hollow, then Long Pond or Great Pond, followed by sandwiches from the Box Lunch, and lobsters—when June allowed—grilled by the porch. He and Mark would run on the bay side, by the house, where they once, at low tide, tried to swim across to Indian Neck Beach. June shouted until they gave up halfway, returning in slimy bay silt.
Rainy days, they went to Provincetown. This, in the 1970s, was truly the land of the “boys.” Mark stared openly. Albert was ashamed—not for himself, but for the men, whom he obscurely felt needed his reassurance. Later, in college, he realized his reassurance was not needed in this or any other areas. June had started to rent the house during the high season and go to Boca. Mark began a series of wanderings from California to India to South America, which even Albert knew enough to dismiss as the check-off destinations of their generation.
When he was in his early twenties, the family began spending Augusts at the house again. Albert married Susan. But Mark had a child. Aunt June liked Susan, yet seemed faintly astonished that Albert had a managed to get a wife at all, as if he’d suddenly revealed a secret mastery of the grand piano, or invented the Post-it. Mark was friendly to Susan, but when was he not? He was so friendly that he had brought home girlfriend after girlfriend from the time Albert was seventeen, culminating, around the time of Albert’s marriage, with a black woman named April.
April was a tall and somewhat forbidding professor of English. Always a little distant, always a bit apart. Albert could never tell whether this had to do with character, intellect, or was simply a defensive reaction to his strange family. There was June, a distracted, wizened chain smoker; the birdlike, chattering Susan, incapable of not flirting with Mark, whose appeal to all women Albert had long since accepted. Albert had difficulty gauging his