was already too much time without her, in my opinion, and Dennis always wanted to spend a week at Stiltsville as a family before school started. Not to mention that camp was expensive. But on the drive up, I’d told Dennis I thought we should let her stay this year. “What on earth for?” he’d said. “Are we feeling guilty?” I didn’t answer. “I guess we are,” he’d said.
I resisted the impulse to wipe a smear of barbecue from Margo’s chin. “Aren’t you going to ask to stay at camp?” I said.
She put a finger in her mouth and felt around. “Look,” she said, pulling apart her lips. The broken tooth looked like the craggy face of a mountain.
“We’ll get it fixed when you’re home,” I said.
“I don’t want to stay this year,” Margo said.
“Good,” said Dennis.
“Why not?” I said.
Margo shrugged. Her shrug had become something of a default reaction, a prelude to the preteen years. She’d also assumed the habit of thinking before answering. “It’s fun, but it’s not that fun,” she said. “You know?”
“Sure,” said Dennis. “More Margo for us.”
That night, in what must have been the crummiest motel room between Tallahassee and Panama City, I cried. Dennis was only moderately sympathetic—he’d long since dubbed our annual camp visit the Trail of Tears. He lay with his head propped on a stack of flat pillows, watching the weather report flashing on the television. “She’s changed,” I said.
Dennis nodded.
“She’ll miss graduation,” I said.
“Big deal.”
“She would’ve received an award.” Best Citizenship, I thought, or Best Spelling.
“Are we having second thoughts?”
“No,” I said. I cried harder. “But she would’ve gotten a new dress, and I would’ve fixed her hair.”
“Frances—”
“And you would’ve taped the whole thing.”
This got his attention. He’d purchased a video camera shortly before quitting his job. Since, he’d archived twenty-five hours of Margo practicing cartwheels in the backyard, and me reading a book on the sofa in my bifocals, and Margo running red-faced down a green stretch of soccer field, and me in one of his old polo shirts, fixing breakfast. When he trained the camera on Margo, she made faces. “Come on,” Dennis would say, “be candid.” Margo would lunge at the camera, fingers flexing. “Candid, candid, candid,” she’d say in a monster voice. “Someday we’ll look back,” Dennis would say, reattaching the lens cap.
Dennis turned up the volume on the television. “She’s all registered; she’s ready.”
“She needs new clothes,” I said seriously.
His jaw tensed. “I’ll borrow some cash.” His parents had offered; we’d known it was only a matter of time.
“I’ll take that bank job,” I said.
“Shit,” he said. On television, a local meteorologist stood in front of a red-and-yellow whorl: a tropical storm was brewing in the West Indies. Dennis said, “We can’t keep her in a class where we know she isn’t challenged.”
“If only we didn’t know,” I said.
“Plus, the girl thing,” he said. “Chests like mosquito bites—bad influence.”
I stopped crying and laughed a little. I moved next to him and watched the grainy television. Hurricane season was under way, and this West Indian blip was its first noteworthy event. For months Dennis would follow weather events like elections. The meteorologist’s chatter would function as the backdrop during every family meal. There had been only one real hurricane since I’d moved to Miami—David in 1979, which had torn several two-by-fours from the stilt house roof and half a dozen shingles from our house in Miami. Tropical storms brewed constantly from May to September, but they had so many ways of falling apart. They might diffuse over the continental reef or rub up against cold snaps and disperse like bubbles in tepid bathwater. Sometimes they just disappeared: angry radar spirals dissolved, and the screen went black. Dennis feared, as I did, that it was only a matter of time before another big one hit Stiltsville. He remembered Donna, Cleo, Betsy. If the worst happened—when the worst happened—I knew my little family would find itself unmoored. We would boat the bay and the Miami River, destinationless. Maybe we would anchor where our stilt house had stood and dive the spot like any wreck, searching for bed frames, shutters, shoes. We would feel loss and lost, and I would realize once again: This is what it means to be part of a family. There are no maps and the territory is continually changing. We are explorers, traveling in groups.
“Do you think she’s changed?” I said.
“She’s older,” he said. “She’s eleven now, for Christ’s sake.”
“She’s become . . .”