nice child,” Nancy said, her tone circumspect. She and Suzy were drinking coffee on the porch of Bud and Nancy’s house, up the hill from the Lodge, overlooking Sand Bay. The house Suzy’d grown up in. Nancy nibbled disinterestedly on a muffin Suzy’d brought from the city, pinching up cranberries with her fingertips, divesting them of crumbs, and then dropping the fruit back to the plate like nits picked from a stray cat. “He was the one who always went around cleaning up after Chas and Lance,” she said. “Not that he wasn’t into their mischief too, but he was the one with the conscience about it. They’d break someone’s lawn ornament or a driveway lantern playing ball, and it was Roddy who’d wind up apologizing . . .”
“He get drafted right out of high school too?” Suzy asked.
Nancy swallowed a sip of coffee, shook her head. “Well, sure, but . . .”
Suzy waited for more.
“You honestly don’t remember, Suzy?”
“Kind of . . .” She didn’t, really. Suzy had inherited her mother’s selective memory. Pieces of history came back when they were useful to her but otherwise remained in a hazy wash of “the past.” It drove Suzy’s friends and boyfriends nuts, but she thought it a fortuitous affliction, herself; the inability to recall things you didn’t want to recall seemed a pleasant way to live one’s life. “There was a big something, wasn’t there? Something . . . ?” Suzy tried.
Nancy’s voice when she spoke was prim and snippish. “He didn’t go.” She stiffened dramatically. “Just didn’t go. Said no. Burned his draft card, or whatever those people did.”
“Hmm.” Suzy knew this sort of conversation led to nothing productive.
“All Eden’s doing,” Nancy went on. “ Roderick told the boy if he wasn’t going to fight for his country then he certainly wasn’t welcome in his house.”
Suzy smiled facetiously. “Well, I’m surprised you and Dad conceded to hire such a lowlife—I mean, it’s only been, what? Twenty years? Shouldn’t he be banished a little longer?”
Nancy shot her a look. The conversation was over. “You know I don’t like talking about this, Suzy. Please.” Nancy took a gulp of coffee, washing away the topic like an unpleasant taste. There were certain things you didn’t talk about, pretended not to notice, learned tactically to ignore. It was what had kept Nancy Chizek from losing her mind completely when her son came home from Vietnam in a casket. She’d fallen apart at the news, then patched herself together into a rigid, near-catatonic state of mourning for the funeral. Once he was in the ground, Nancy spoke of Chas only with great honor. Her boy had died for his country. In pride she had found some sort of comfort.
RODDY LED THE TROOP of housekeepers on a rudimentary if not particularly scenic tour of the Lodge—showed them a few different rooms in the main building, the kitchen, and dining room, and the lobby that opened out to the large deck overlooking Sand Beach Bay. He took them through the office and reception areas and pointed through a set of glass doors to Reesa Delamico’s Osprey Lodge Beauty Salon and Gift Shop. Out the back kitchen door and up the hill, Roddy showed them the guest cottages, the weedy clay tennis courts, and the swimming pool that looked more like a swamp. “We’re going to have to dump a hell of a lot of chlorine in that thing to get it swimmable by July Fourth,” Roddy said. The girls nodded skeptically, following behind Roddy in a tight huddle like cold and wary immigrants. At the laundry shack, which sat between the staff barracks and Lance and Lorna Squire’s cabin, Roddy held open the door and let the girls file past and peek their heads in one by one. They squinted into the darkness, just able to discern the outlines of looming washing machines and dryers. Drying racks and plywood shelving blocked the few small windows. There was a ratty couch and an old minifridge, and the place just seemed to be crammed crevice to crevice, floor to ceiling, with piles of mildewed newspapers, rusted aerosol cans, water-stained and disintegrating cardboard boxes spilling soda cans and carpentry tools and sewing kits and paper napkins and crusted shampoo bottles. The air was cigarette-stale and uncomfortably close. Brigid took a step inside the shack. On the splintery wooden floor, in the shaft of light from the open door lay an old sponge the color of spoiled meat. She made