“Just barely,” I joke. “Almost had to reroute to Costco.”
My dad, who hates a bulk store, shudders. He toes at something in the sand before bending down to retrieve it. “Look at that. Full sand dollar. Don’t see many intact like that.”
Sasha lets out a furious cry at losing a point as he hands it to me, and I’m tugged farther into this place. My dad is collecting shells; Hannah and my mom fuss over everyone; we’re all on the beach to mark our first afternoon together. This is still the same place it was. Houses like this hold steady, waiting to catch you when you need them most.
It’s why I didn’t want anyone to know about Ren and me: this house, our families, are a well-balanced ecosystem that thrives on so much of the same. Coming back to the same house, at the same time, doing the same things every year. Any hint of a rift could easily disrupt the balance.
“Your mom’s looking forward to catching up with you this week,” my dad says, sending a familiar twinge through me.
It’s an old routine. In high school, my mother would poke her head into my room every thirty minutes, always just to “check in,” and when I didn’t give a proper response, she would tell my father that she was worried about me, and he would gently nudge me her way. Then in college, the same thing would play out over the phone.
“Yeah,” I say now. “We’ll talk.” My usual response.
My dad glances over at me, the final step in all this forthcoming. “I know it’s a lot for you, her worry,” he says. “But it’s just because—”
“She loves us all so much,” I finish. And yet, it makes me feel like I can’t breathe sometimes.
“Richard!” my mom shouts then, waving us over, her other hand clutching her straw sun hat. “Bring Joni back over here!”
My dad raises his eyebrows at me. “We’re being summoned.” We trudge up the beach. My mom directs me into the spot next to Stevie and thrusts a coconut seltzer my way. “Put on your sunscreen,” she says, passing me a tube as she rummages in her truly bottomless bag. “I have another hat in here—do you want a hat?”
“I’m good, Mom,” I say as I slather my legs in lotion.
“Sweetie,” Hannah says, leaning around my mom from her other side. “Are you and Ren really okay sleeping on the porch?”
“They’re fine,” my mom says. “They ended up camping out there even after we moved them both inside.”
“I know, but they were still kids then.”
“They were twenty-three,” Stevie says from next to me. She has a pair of round sunglasses on, a finger holding her page in the magazine she’s reading. I didn’t think she was listening. “What?” she says at the look I throw her, worried she might inadvertently give us away. “You were well into adulthood the last time you slept out there together. That’s all I’m saying.”
I fiddle with the tab on the seltzer my mom gave me. That was the summer I moved to New York. After that trip, I’d stayed inside with Stevie. Thinking back now, I’m not sure why, what changed, if it was one of many hints of shifting feelings that I’d missed or some harbinger of what was to come.
“We’ll be fine, Hannah,” I say. Putting us on the porch makes sense,and my former self would have happily gone along with it.
“I just worry we should have added one more bedroom when we did the addition,” Hannah says. “Katie might not be the only grandchild. Eventually we’ll run out of space.”
Katie is Thad’s four-year-old daughter, still in Los Angeles with his husband, Gemi, until Saturday. Sasha’s husband will fly in in time for the rehearsal dinner on Friday night. Save for Leo, these few days are really the first time it’s been just us here in a decade.
I half listen as Hannah and my mom drone on. Best friends since college, they get like this: discussing everything, including all of our lives, like no one else is around. On the sandy badminton court before us, Sasha flings her arm back to serve the birdie. Ren reaches up to hit it back over the net, the hem of his sweatshirt riding up to reveal an inch of muscular abdomen that has me thinking back to the movement of his body when he was mowing the lawn yesterday. The two of them volley back and forth until Sasha misses, cursing to herself, and Thad and Ren bump fists in victory.
A few minutes later, they walk over, arguing.
“What’s the score?” my dad asks from a beach chair on Hannah’s other side.
“We absolutely beat you,” Ren says, pointing at Sasha with his racket.
“That last one you served was out of bounds,” she says.
“In what world?”
“This one!”
Ren turns to my dad, lifting a hand in the air in awho knowsmotion. “Sorry, Richard. We don’t know the score yet,” he says in a smug tone that indicates he absolutely knows who won.
Sasha scoffs.
“Time for everyone to take a break, I think,” Hannah says, motioning for them to sit down.
