got you,” he says. “Stop fighting me. Put your arms around my neck. There you go. Okay, okay.”
I only put one arm around his neck. The other I use to grip the deck of the boat. “I can’t do this!” I tell him. “I’ll pull us both under.”
“Nope, you won’t. Look at my face. Hey, hey. Look at me.”
I look at him, and he smiles at me, head just above the water’s surface. I can feel his legs kicking below. And after I stop panicking, he tells me how he’s doing it, like an eggbeater. And how I can do it too, if I hold on to his shoulders from a little farther away. The funny thing is, I actually am able to.
“I’m doing it!”
“You are.”
“I’m kicking.”
“You’re treading water.”
“I’m treading!”
“Kablam.”
I laugh, but it makes me lose my rhythm, and I nearly choke him to death when I panic all over again and try to cling to him like a monkey. He’s not deterred by my loss of progress. “Let’s see if you can float.”
Patiently, he shows me how to grip the half-moon deck with both hands and let my body gently float out behind me while he keeps guard, one hand on my stomach in case I slip.
“See? This isn’t hard,” he tells me after a few false starts.
“Famous last words.”
“Just hang there and try to relax,” he says. “Talk to me. Talking keeps your mind off what you’re doing.”
“Talk about what?”
“How about the obvious … Heard from your dad lately?”
“Uh, no. We don’t talk on the regular, though. I was sort of waiting until I had something to tell him before I called him.… You know, like the internship. Only I’m still too chicken to write my contact. I composed the email, but I haven’t sent it yet, because of the naked photo of my mother circulating around town and whatnot.”
“I don’t think that’s the reason.”
“Oh, really? I don’t see a naked photo of your dad floating around town, so how would you know what it feels like?”
“Hey. My dad struts down our hallway from the shower to my parents’ bedroom every day without a stitch on, because ‘it’s only a body, Lucky, and we all have them,’ ” he says, imitating his father. “Trust me, if that hairy body floated around town, it might trigger an actual apocalypse. Buildings would collapse. The portal to hell would open up and swallow the entire town.”
“Shut up,” I say, laughing. “I can’t balance!”
“You’re doing great. Keep it up,” he says. “Okay, what else? How about … tell me everywhere you’ve lived.”
“Oh, good God.”
“Come on,” he says in a teasing voice.
“Too many places to name. Everywhere in New England, pretty much. Easier to tell you where I haven’t.”
“Okay, what was the most favorite place you lived?”
My hands are starting to cramp on the deck. I stretch them out one at time. “Vermont. It snowed so much in the winter, and there was nothing to do, so mom and I would play board games all night. We lived in this kooky apartment that had chalkboard paint on everything—like, the previous tenant went overboard, you know? And we kept a tally of all our games on a cabinet that was painted like a chalkboard, who was winning which games. Only, she would sneak into the living room and erase my wins, and I had to catch her cheating.…” I laugh and nearly choke in the water. “You had to be there, I guess. It was just a fun winter.”
“Your mom was always fun.”
“She can be.”
“Can I ask you something about her? If you don’t want to answer, you don’t have to. Don’t get mad.”
“Kinda have me in a precarious position here,” I tell him.
He laughs, holding on to the boat deck beside me, and then goes serious. “Does your mom really date … a lot of people?”
“Is my mom the giant slut that everyone says she is?”
“Whoa. I didn’t say that. I’m not the morality police. No judgment.”
“It’s fine,” I say, a little weary in both my arms and my mind. “Honestly? I don’t know what’s normal and what’s not. She says she’s not interested in relationships, and she just likes men. But I don’t even know if that’s true, because she’s never happy about it.”
Last year, when Mom was managing a bookstore up the coast, one of her assistant managers, a woman in her late twenties, had a similar dating philosophy: new guys every weekend. Marianne was loud and proud about it, and all