“Pig,” Lorna said.
“Goat,” Lance said back.
Lorna took a drag of her cigarette, the ashy tip growing longer and more precarious. She did not tamp it off. Squee came circling around the house again. When he saw Lance in the doorway he swerved and skidded to a stop, but then, at a loss for what to say, he simply stood there on the grass, the front wheel of his bike raised off the ground like a horse rearing its head. He rolled the rear wheel back and forth beneath him, digging a rut and matting the summer grass.
“Hey, bucko,” Lance scolded, “watch whose yard you’re wrecking.”
Squee looked down at the bike as if it had sprung from the earth beneath him, and let the front wheel drop to the ground.
“Gonna help Roddy today, Squirto?” Lance asked, his voice suddenly distant as his gaze. “Keep out of trouble?”
“He’s no trouble,” Lorna said to Roddy. It came out like a question.
“He’s my partner,” Roddy said. His enthusiasm sounded false and hollow.
“Yeah. Your partner.” Squee’s voice was sure, though he did not look at Roddy, his stare fixed on his father. Lance was looking off to the water.
“We got lots to do,” Roddy added.
Suddenly from the porch Lance let out a whoop. “Got ’im!” he cried, raising an arm toward the bay. Just offshore an osprey rose slowly from the surface of the water, a wriggling fish snared in his curled talons. The bird paused, adjusting its grip, then shook its feathers, sending off a hearty spray of sea-salt water. It flew toward a nest perched atop an old telephone pole by the beach. The bird hovered a moment over the nest before he released the twitching fish to the bird family below and took wing toward the water for another hunt.
“Poor fucking fish,” Lance said, and then he turned and went back inside without another word to anyone. From the nest by the water they could hear the osprey’s high whistle, kyew, kyew, kyew.
Lorna was putting everything she had into mustering her expression for Squee. “C’mere, kid-of-mine, and give your mom a kiss!” She held open her arms to him, then remembered her cigarette and ground it out on the step.
Squee dropped the bike and galloped across the yard. Lorna mussed his hair, then grabbed a fistful of it on either side of his head and held him that way so she could look in his face. “When’d you get so goddamn handsome?” she said. “God, you turned out so good, Squee. You’re turning out so good, every day, you know.” She let Squee go and he tripped away. “Don’t get sunburnt,” she said to Squee. “Be good, mind Roddy, don’t get in folks’ way, all right?” She racked her thoughts for more essential motherly advice. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do . . . ,” she said, then laughed, picked her coffee back up, and looked into it hopefully. “You just be good,” she said to the mug.
They stepped away from the porch, and Squee waved to his mother as Roddy clapped a hand on the boy’s shoulder, guiding him to the passenger door of the truck.
Roddy parked down in the lot by the beach, near one of the tall osprey nesting platforms that dotted the Sand Bay shoreline. There’d been a time in the early seventies when the osprey population was in such danger of extinction that if a bird made its nest where there were electric or telephone wires the Island Utility and Power guys got out there as quick as they could to remove the lines, put up a new post, and divert the route to make the nest safe for the birds. All this at the instigation of Eden Jacobs, Roddy’s mother. She’d spearheaded the movement to save the osprey from imminent extinction—the only time Osprey’s residents had ever followed Eden Jacobs’s lead. The osprey platforms strung the length of Sand Beach—amid the scrub grass by the dunes, and set back from the shore in the marshy reeds just past Morey’s bar—were known as “Eden’s nests.”
The afternoon sun was strong, and Roddy dug an old Tree Farm hat from behind the truck seat and adjusted the band as tight as it would go for Squee’s head. They spent the afternoon repairing winter damage to the boat dock that stuck out into Sand Bay from the shore-front of the Lodge. Squee and Roddy worked companionably, testing and replacing rotten planks. Eden Jacobs was pleased to have Roddy back home on Osprey after all those years, but she was extraordinarily pleased at the way Roddy and Squee had taken to each other. Eden felt Squee was in desperate need of a father figure, on account of the actual father he’d gotten saddled with.
Eden said, “You don’t know what that boy lives with.”
Now Roddy did know, and it made him happy that Squee seemed perfectly content just to trail Roddy around doing whatever he did and didn’t seem to mind that Roddy spoke little, gave little away. It was hard to come back to a place where everyone he saw seemed to have a head full of questions for him, and Roddy spent much of his time trying not to go anyplace where he’d have to talk to anyone. Squee didn’t have questions for Roddy—or if he did they were about how to pin a line into the tennis court clay or how to refuel the Weed Whacker. Questions like that, Roddy was more than glad to answer.
WHEN LANCE FINALLY DELIVERED his housekeeping lecture to the Irish girls, it was late that night and they were on the side porch, downing beers with the equally underage waiters. How could you ask an Irish girl not to drink? For the most part no one bothered them about it, except Lance, a raging alcoholic incapable of letting so much as a vial of vanilla extract pass under his nose without delivering a speech on the evils of alcohol. “Wouldn’t touch that shit with a ten-foot pole,” Lance declared. “Not a twenty-foot pole! That juice is poison. Poison.” The girls sipped at their cans, wiped their lips afterward. They listened politely to Lance, although Roddy had pretty much already told them everything they needed to know about the Lodge, and far more coherently.
“He’s married, isn’t he?” Peg asked Brigid once Lance was safely out of earshot. Brigid shrugged. One of the waiters standing nearby overheard and shushed them with a wag of his head toward Squee, who sat cross-legged on the edge of the porch. It was the dark-haired waiter, Gavin, the one with the sleepy, hooded eyes. He leaned his long frame against the porch rail and smoked a cigarette, squinting, and casting—Brigid was almost sure—a few furtive glances in her direction. Brigid had been watching him; she watched people in a way that they could see they were being watched. About this Gavin fellow the rumors were already circulating: he’d followed a girl here, an Islander he’d met at college in California, had followed her home for the summer only to get dumped on arrival when the girl had gotten back with her Island High beau. It was said that Gavin was not a happy boy these days.
Another waiter, Jeremy, a skinny boy with pimples in his neck stubble, slid into the chair beside Brigid and set his beer down with an emphatic thud. His voice was conspiratorially low. “Lance is Squee’s dad. His mom’s Lorna. She’s pretty much a drunk.” Jeremy took a sip of his beer.
“Is she here?” Peg asked, waving a hand toward the cabins.
“Yeah, you’ll see her around every so often. She’s in bad shape. It’s really sad.” Jeremy’s display of sensitivity was embarrassingly over-earnest.
“So she’s just about the place, and drunk, and no one cares a thing about it?” Peg asked.
“What’re you going to do?” Jeremy had worked summers at the Lodge before, as a busboy. He knew what things went unquestioned.
“And Lance?” Brigid pressed him. “What about him?”
Peg said, “He’s a bit of dosser, eh?”
“A what?” said Jeremy.
Brigid cut in: “A doss—a fellow who just lays about, like a bit of a waste, you know?”
“Yeah,” Jeremy concurred. “He’s a dick. The whole teetotaler thing’s a total sham. Mostly he’s totally rocked too.”