“Oh, I—I made him go out in the car just then,” said Jax. “I wanted a bear claw.”
Their dad looked at them in the rearview mirror—it was a thin explanation, and Cara could tell he didn’t buy it.
Still, in for a penny, in for a pound, as her dad liked to say.
“He was whining, so Max just said, you know, give me a break, I’ll get you your stupid donut,” she elaborated. “You know how they have them at the general store sometimes, and Jax didn’t want to walk.”
“Huh,” said their dad.
The silence started up again.
“Sorry, everyone,” said Jax, and leaned up to pat Max on the shoulder.
“Yeah, well,” said Max.
“Look, guys,” said their dad. “Sure, maybe I shouldn’t have gone. It’s tough that you had to be without me after everything that’s happened this summer …”
They came off a fast roundabout and merged onto Route 6. Cars rushed by, overtaking each other and whipping past, and Cara thought how lucky Max had been, in the end. How lucky they all were. She remembered how their car had looked last time she saw it, wrapped around the tree like the tree was a part of it.
Their dad was going to get another shock when he saw the car.
“… and I think maybe part of me was hoping that by going away, even for just two days, I might—I might return to find something had changed. Or more precisely, that things had returned to the way they used to be. In other words … that your mother would magically be here when I got back.”
Cara shot a quick look at Jax and saw that, like Max, he was studiously staring out his window. All of a sudden things were very interesting outside all the windows, in fact.
“And it impaired my judgment. You could have been hurt far worse than you were, Max, and that would have been partly my fault.”
“Come on,” said Max after a moment. “Don’t make this so global, Dad. You didn’t do anything wrong. You went to a conference, I got in a fender-bender. Accidents just happen.”
“If that’s a fender-bender, I’d like to see a head-on collision,” muttered Jax under his breath, but luckily their dad was still talking and didn’t hear.
“… but I’m afraid you’ve got to take responsibility, too,” said their father. “You weren’t authorized to take the car out, Max, except for emergencies and to pick me up at the ferry. I was perfectly clear there. You knew that.”
“Yeah,” said Max. “But—”
“No buts,” said their father. “I’m sorry about your arm, I really am. But I’m also going to have to ground you. Until school starts.”
They were silent. Max was the one who’d gotten hurt—he’d gotten hurt for all of them. And now he was grounded.
It wasn’t fair at all, thought Cara.
Max wasn’t saying anything, and she couldn’t see his face to know how pissed off he was.
The radio droned.
“… for the first time in human history, the Arctic could be ice-free as early as within the next few years—meaning mass drownings for polar bears….”
Listening to it, her dad shook his head.
“Will they cover a new car for us, at least?” asked Max. “I mean, I get that the premiums will go up. And that really sucks. But will we get a new car soon?”
“As far as I know,” said their dad, preoccupied.
“I’d feel bad,” said Max—trying to inject some levity, Cara thought—“if you, like, had to hitchhike to teach next week.”
Her dad shushed them and turned the radio volume up. “This is the stuff your mother is working on,” he said.
“Global warming, right?” said Max. “The paranoid left-wing conspiracy that doesn’t really exist.”
Their dad looked at him sharply, then saw he was kidding.
“Left-wing, right-wing, rubbish,” said their father. “It’s a little thing called science.”
“Actually,” said Jax, “technically she’s working on ocean acidification, which is related to climate change via the CO2 connection but not the same phenomenon.”
“So, this weekend,” said their dad, once the news turned to sports, “we all need to sit down and have a talk about what’s going to happen this fall, how things will work with just the four of us, and how we’re going to deal with the problem of your mother being missing. Going forward. We need to talk it through. OK?”
Cara raised her eyebrows; Jax shot her another sidelong look.
“And we’ll pick up a pizza from Red Barn and watch a movie afterward,” added their dad, as if to lessen the blow.
“Sure, Dad,” answered Max, their delegate to the older generation. “We’ll talk.”
“I wonder if Hayley should be here,” said Max.
It was the quietest hour of sunset, the sky a dim pastel-colored wash of fading colors over the trees and the water of the bay silvery-black and lapping at the shore. Faintly they could smell barbeque smoke from down the street and hear the sound of mosquitoes hitting the neighbor’s blue-light bug zapper.
They’d eaten dinner early and were sitting on the porch, swinging back and forth. Their dad, who seemed to have given them a free pass on chores for the day, was inside tidying up with Lolly. He’d said that after that was done he’d do some pruning in the back before it got dark; gardening took his mind off things, Cara suspected.
“I mean, didn’t you say she turned out to play the role of the arbiter, or whatever I was supposed to be? So maybe she should be here for the ritual too,” Max went on.
“I talked to her earlier,” said Cara. “Her mom’s not letting her come over for a while. She’s mad because Hayley showed up all exhausted and dirty from the sleepover and wouldn’t admit we did anything, you know, out of the ordinary. She didn’t want us to get in trouble, so she just said we stayed up late talking. But then she collapsed and slept, like, forever. All day, up until an hour ago. So anyway, her mom’s making her work at the salon till
