Chapter One CHAPTER ONE Liz Gabe appeared as Liz was zipping her backpack to leave, as he had every evening this week on his way home. She heaved the last umbrella into the box at Sun and Shade Rentals and snapped the combination lock shut. Gabe set a greasy pizza box down on a towel and passed Liz a thermos. She took a long pull and tasted the familiar sourness of lemonade with the surprise bitterness of gin. "Cheers, boss," he said, folding a slice and filling his mouth, grease dripping onto the towel. "Oh, and can I have next week off?" Carl had just promoted her to assistant manager, which meant an extra dollar an hour. "Can I fire you now? I think I can fire you," she said, taking her own slice from the box. "Except you brought me boozy lemonade and pizza, so I won''t.
And thanks." Gabe was nineteen, a year and a half older than Liz, though his fake ID said he was twenty-three. She couldn''t believe that thing worked; the guy in the ID picture had a man bun and sunken gray eyes, and looked nothing like Gabe with his short, salt-dried curls and sunburn. Liz knew what the routine would be at home: another casserole dropped off by one of her mom Margot''s friends. Margot accepted their casseroles but ignored their texts and invitations to come to book club or yoga class. She hurried by them in the grocery store and declined their phone calls. They always lingered on the porch, reminded Margot of the particular date of an event she was welcome to join, and sighed before taking their clean dishes back and climbing into their minivans. Liz and her younger sister, Evy, called the zitis and taco bakes they ate the Inevitable Death Casseroles, or IDCs, but only to each other.
In front of their mother, they agreed they were tasty, and they scribbled thank-you notes for even the blandest cream-of-chicken-doused things. Their dad had been dying for eight months, of a brain tumor that turned him obsessive, insistent, or infantile from one moment to the next. They didn''t know if he''d act like this for another few weeks or a few months before the tumor spread, but they knew they had enough IDCs to get them through the end of July, maybe all the way through August. Liz, Evy, and their mom took turns with him now, not at a bedside yet but out in the world where all the same rules of how to behave still applied, even if he couldn''t follow them anymore. For Liz, tonight felt stolen, and as necessary as a fresh gulp of air. She texted Evy three pizza emojis and told her she would be late and to enjoy the IDC without her. Evy would get to stay out with her friends tomorrow, she would get her own stolen summer night while Liz took a turn at home. Evy texted three middle fingers back, then a thumbs-up and a heart.
Margot You needed every minute before check-in time on Saturdays to get all the grime and stray hairs out of the bathroom drains, to stock the towels and wipe down the countertops, to transform each rental property from cluttered and messy to tidy and welcoming. All the E&E Rentals houses were fully booked this month, and today Margot had bleached the bathrooms, changed the sheets, and swept up the sand in four of their beach cottages. Her cleaning staff was scattered across town doing the same, texting her last-minute questions about loose screws and leaky faucets. Margot mouthed, Thank you, Jimmy, when he dropped Brian at the house after bringing him along to Home Depot so she could clean without interruption. Jimmy was Brian''s old surfing buddy. He always disappeared for somewhere warmer in the off-season for weeks at a time, then returned for as many hours of work as he wanted. He had a shaved head and the lined, weather-worn skin of a man in his forties who''d spent decades in the sun, but the bright eyes of someone unencumbered by any real responsibility. When Jimmy had left for Rincón last fall, Brian was fine; when Jimmy came back in April for preseason maintenance, Brian had called him a goddamn pussy piece of shit before Margot had a chance to tell him about the tumor disrupting Brian''s language, his judgment, his sense of what was okay to say out loud.
That day, Jimmy''s face had fallen flat; he''d slow-nodded and made sense of it, worked fifty hours for them on a deck project, and then drove across the country again back to Santa Cruz. When Margot didn''t hear from him, she figured he was gone for good, until his truck rattled into their driveway again in May. "Life moves pretty fast sometimes, so look around the bend before it turns," Brian said now as they entered the rental, half-remembering the Ferris Bueller quote before he wandered away from Margot and Jimmy. "Right, sure does," Margot said. Brian sat down at the kitchen table with his back to them. "He was into a lot of Karate Kid , little Point Break today," Jimmy said. He quoted old movies to distract Brian and keep him calm, though that never worked when Margot tried it. Maybe Brian got a contact high from the seeped-in weed smell of Jimmy''s van.
"Okay, well, vaya con Dios , Marg." "Is that--um?" "Johnny Utah?" He slapped his forehead with the palm of his hand, like, who doesn''t know every word of a nearly thirty-year-old surfer movie, unbelievable! "Oh, riiight," Margot said. She handed him three Coronas the renters had left in the fridge. "Well, really. Thank you." "Take it easy, man," Jimmy said to Brian as he headed out the door. "You''re one radical son-of-a-bitch!" He looked at Margot, like, how about that one? But she was already starting to work through her to-do list. She hid ant traps in the corners and set the thermostats, then packed up the laundry, the dirty mop, the half-full bottles of sunblock, the paperbacks, the Soft Scrub, the screwdrivers.
She tossed an In Touch magazine into the tote bag for Liz and Evy, who had stared at her in wide-eyed worry when they realized they''d both been scheduled for their other boardwalk jobs during the week''s busy turnover time. Margot had demanded, "How did this happen?" as they walked out the door this morning. She knew she snapped at them too much, and before they rolled their eyes and whatevered her, she could tell it stung. She knew she should take a beat before criticizing them, resist the easy, stream-of-consciousness rants her own mother had always defaulted to. She knew yelling at them was lazy and obvious and the opposite of what she intended. Snapping was something that mean, manipulative moms did to their daughters, not her. When had she given in to this way of mothering? How many times could you hiss, "How did this happen?" to your daughters before you did permanent damage? Margot and her girls used to play Scrabble together some Saturday nights, for Christ''s sake, before Brian got sick. She would study her tiles and listen to the girls'' gossip and to their silence.
She would pay attention when their sarcasm turned softer and when they trailed off, naming their worries and their wins. What another nasty trick of this tumor, to change her as much as it had changed Brian. "Hey, if you''d rather go make the taffy at Sal''s, I''ll stay with Dad," Evy had joked once on her way to work, but the truth was, Margot thought the idea of being by herself for a few hours, tying little white paper bags with neat bows to display in the candy shop window, sounded pretty great. The front door slammed and Margot froze. Brian went outside. Her body responded the way it always did now whenever she had to chase him, find him, argue with him, or drag him away from chaos he''d caused. She ran after him, breathing heavily in the humid July air. "Hey!" she shouted.
"We have the car, right there. Come back, we have to get all this stuff home." But he didn''t stop or turn around. He never did. She smelled the bleach and sweat on herself and said again weakly, "Come back, Brian." He turned toward her momentarily, but then ran back toward the street, where he squeezed between two parked cars and stuck his arm straight ahead, as if that would stop a distracted driver from hitting him. He paused in the center of the street with his arm out, like a Heisman Trophy statue, like a lunatic. His whole body had changed, from athletic and agile, strong from working and running and surfing, into someone hunched, swollen, and clumsy.
As if in response to his body going softer, her own body had switched into survival mode, become leaner, always ready. When her dark, gray-streaked hair thinned, she got a quick, blunt bob at the Supercuts before she grocery-shopped, not even bothering to have them blow it dry. Today she''d tied it up and let it down again, all unkempt and wild. A van slammed on its brakes and then gunned it around Brian, as he strode back to the sidewalk, where his shoulder grazed a splintered telephone pole. Margot noticed he was wearing an old ripped T-shirt from the New Year''s Eve 5K, when they''d all layered up and run together wearing glow necklaces. Their friend Robbie had handed out cheap champagne to the runners outside the Buccaneer bar, as the fireworks exploded at midnight above the winter-darkened pier. Brian had lost a bet with Robbie when he didn''t run a personal best, and plunged into the frigid ocean after the race, while the girls shrieked on the cold beach and the Boulevard dance clubs shot spotlights into the sky. Margot still couldn''t convince him to get in the car.
She gave up and said, "Fine, you want to walk, we''ll walk," as he spat on a parked car''s windshield. Ten minutes later they we.