understand why this seems like a big deal to her brother, but it clearly does, and she decides that if Will wants to compare his life to a baseball game, that's perfectly okay.
For quite awhile everything that happens at her little brother's birthday party is perfectly okay. Marvin Gaye is on the recordplayer, true, but it is not the bad song, the dangerous song. "I wouldn't be doggone," Marvin sings, mock-threatening, "I'd be long gone... bay-bee." Actually sort of a cute song, and the truth is that the day has been a lot better than okay, at least so far; it has been, in the words of Jessie's great-aunt Katherine, "finer than fiddle-music." Even her Dad thinks so, although he wasn't very keen on coming back to Falmouth for Will's birthday when the idea was first suggested. Jessie has heard him say I guessit war a pretty good idea, after all to her Mom, and that makes her feel good, because it was she-Jessie Mahout, daughter of Tom and Sally, sister of Will and Maddy, wife of nobody-who put the idea over. She's the reason they're here instead of inland, at Sunset Trails.
Sunset Trails is the family camp (although after three generations of haphazard family expansion, it is really big enough to be called a compound) on the north end of Dark Score Lake. This year they have broken their customary nine weeks of seclusion there because Will wants-just once, he has told his mother and father, speaking in the tones of a nobly suffering old grandee who knows he cannot cheat the reaper much longer-to have a birthday party with his rest-of-the-year friends as well as his family.
Tom Mahout vetoes the idea at first. He is a stock broker who divides his time between Portland and Boston, and for years he has told his family not to believe all that propaganda about how guys who go to work wearing ties and shirts with white collars spend their days goofing off-either hanging around the watercooler or dictating lunch invitations to pretty blondes from the steno pool. "No hardscrabble spud-farmer in Aroostook County works any harder than I do," he frequently tells them. "Keeping up with the market isn't easy, and it isn't particularly glamorous, either, no matter what you may have heard to the contrary." The truth is none of them have heard anything to the contrary, all of them (his wife included, most likely, although Sally would never say so) think his job sounds duller than donkeyshit, and only Maddy has the vaguest idea of what it is he does.
Tom insists that he needs that time on the lake to recover from the stresses of his job, and that his son will have plenty of birthdays with his friends later on. Will is turning nine, after all, not ninety. "Plus," Tom adds, "birthday parties with your pals really aren't much fun until you're old enough to have a keg or two."
So Will's request to have his birthday at the family's year-round home on the coast would probably have been denied if not for Jessie's sudden, surprising support of the plan (and to Will it's plenty surprising; Jessie is three years older and lots of times he's not sure she remembers she even has a brother). Following her initial soft-Voiced suggestion that maybe it would be fun to come home-just for two or three days, of course-and have a lawnparty, with croquet and badminton and a barbecue and Japanese lanterns that would come on at dusk, Tom begins to warm to the idea. He is the sort of man who thinks of himself as a "strongwilled son of a bitch" and is often thought of as a "stubborn old goat" by others; whichever way you saw it, he has always been a tough man to move once he has set his feet... and his jaw.
When it comes to moving him-to changing his mind-his younger daughter has more luck than the rest of them put together" Jessie often finds a way into her father's mind by way of some loop hole or secret passage denied to the rest of the family. Sally believes-with some justification-that their middle child has always been Tom's favorite and Tom has fooled himself into believing none of the others know. Maddy and Will see it in simpler terms. they believe that Jessie sucks up to their father and that he in turn spoils her rotten. "If Daddy caught Jessie smoking," Will told his older sister the