not steady on her feet where the lawn began to slope and the tree’s roots pushed out of the ground. The man quickly handed the drinks to her husband and turned to swoop up the child as she stumbled. Kate, braced for the child’s cry, exhaled when nothing happened.
“There used to be a tree house,” Kate said. “We hung paper lanterns from it when we had a party.”
“I know,” her husband said. He was still reaching up, a drink in each hand. The man standing with him frowned. He reclaimed his drink and began to edge away, talking to the little girl. Her husband put his drink on the grass.
“Up in the tree!” the little girl squealed. She turned to look over her shoulder.
“That’s right,” the man said. “Somebody’s up in the tree.”
The glass at her husband’s feet had tipped over.
“We didn’t,” Kate said. “I made it up.”
He said, “Shall I come up and get you?” He touched his hand to the spike. Or else she thought he did; she couldn’t lean far enough forward to see.
“You’re so nice to me,” she said.
He moved back and stretched up his arms.
She had never been daring when she was young, and she wanted to stand her ground now. It made her giddy to realize how odd a thought that was—the contradiction between “standing your ground” and being balanced in a tree. There could have been a tree house. And who else but she and Philip would have lived in such a place and not had lawn parties? She didn’t think Monica was wrong about getting married; her fiance was charming and silly and energetic. Her own husband was very charming—demonstrative only in private, surprised by her pranks to such an extent that she often thought he subtly encouraged her to act up because he admired people who could do such things. He was modest. It wasn’t like him to say, “Climb up so I can look up your skirt.”
“I’ll fly,” she said.
He dropped his hands to his sides. “A walk in the woods,” he said.
At the back of the lawn, where the lawn tapered into the woods, the man and his daughter were crouched, looking at something in the grass. Kate could hear piano music coming from inside the house.
“A drive,” her husband said. “We’ll walk out on the celebration for a few minutes.”
She shook her head no. Then her ribs felt like a tourniquet, and she decided to start down before she was in more pain. She was embarrassed that there was nothing courageous about her careful, gingerly descent. She felt the sweat above her lip and noticed, for the first time, a streak of blood along the side of her hand—the cut on her finger that had now stopped bleeding. She put her finger to her lips, and the salty taste brought tears to her eyes. She put her feet on the ground and faced her husband, then made the dramatic gesture of raising her arms and fanning them open for a second, as wide as a trellis, before they closed around him.
One Day
Henry was twenty, and for almost fifteen years of his life he had understood that he didn’t like his older brother, Gerald. His father, Carl, didn’t care that Henry didn’t get along with Gerald, but his mother, who thought the boys would grow into affection for each other, now asked more often what was wrong. Whenever Henry admitted that he disliked Gerald, his mother said, “Life is too short not to love your brother.” On this particular visit, Henry had told her that he didn’t actually dislike Gerald—he was indifferent. “This is no time to be indifferent,” she had said. Gerald was in the process of getting divorced. He had been married to a woman named Cora. Probably the nicest thing Henry could remember about her was that she had once praised him excessively and convincingly for changing a tire. The most embarrassing thing happened the time he shared a canoe with her on a water ride at an amusement park; thrown against her as the canoe turned and tilted, he had twice reached out reflexively to steady himself and made the mistake of grabbing her breast instead of her arm.
Henry and Gerald had just arrived, separately, at their parents’ house in Wilton. Gerald was already stretched out on a chaise, with his shirt off, drinking a gin-and-tonic, getting a tan. After Henry had done a little work around the yard, he reverted, as always, to being childish: he was drinking Coke and putting together a jigsaw puzzle.
It was Carl’s birthday. Henry had given his father a pair of swimming trunks patterned with a mishmash of hibiscus, hummingbirds, and something that looked like brown bananas. His mother had bought his father more weights for his barbell. Earlier in the day, two boxes had been delivered from the store. After the delivery boy lowered them to the kitchen floor, he had shaken his hands and then examined his palms. “God help me,” he said.
“Henry, darling,” his mother, Verna, said now. She had come out of the house and stood in front of the picnic table, where he was assembling a puzzle that would be a pizza all the way when he finished. She put a mug of iced tea next to him on the table. There were no glasses in the house—only mugs. He had never asked why. When she said “Henry, darling,” it meant that she was announcing her presence in case he wanted to talk. He didn’t. He pushed two pieces together. An anchovy overlapped a piece of green pepper.
“Thank you for trimming the hedge,” she said.
“You’re welcome,” he said.
“I think that Gerald is more upset about the divorce than he lets on. A friend of Daddy’s called Gerald this morning to play golf, and he wouldn’t.”
Henry nodded. More to get away from Verna than to commiserate with his brother, he got up and walked across the lawn to where Gerald lay stretched out on the chaise, eyes closed. Gerald was only twenty-seven, but he looked older. There was a little roll of fat around the belt line of his khaki jeans. Henry knew that Gerald knew that he was standing there. Gerald didn’t open his eyes. An ant was running around the rim of Gerald’s gin-and- tonic. Henry brushed it in.
“Feel like going down to the driving range and hitting a couple of buckets?” Henry said.
“You know what I feel like?” Gerald said. “I feel like going to bed with somebody who’s beautiful and eighteen years old and who doesn’t ask a million questions.”
“You care if it’s a girl?” Henry said.
