An exclusive short story from the author of The Crane Wife
The summer the Gables and the Franklins fell in love with each other they were drunk off their best gin, their just-waning youths and their own good fortunes. They became rich, and then they became neighbours. Helen and Logan Gable moved to Westerhazy Lane that spring, after Grandmother Dorothea left the Victorian to Lo, only a few months before Angie and Kit Franklin bought and gutted the Colonial next door, renovating it in a sleek, modern way commonly agreed upon as desirable.
, lay on his stomach and pretended to Australian crawl across the lawn.“Oh, god,” Angie said. She chucked ice cubes at them. “I’m embarrassed just watching you.”Helen and Lo were theatre people. Logan was either affecting or recovering from a Hepburnish mid-Atlantic accent and taught drama at the university. Helen had a soft cadence, having grown up in Virginia. She sewed costumes for the local playhouse.
. And so they lived in a wild place and a tame place and they were comfortable but not bored and this was good.) In this moment, this moment of the summer, this moment of his youth, this moment many cocktails deep into the evening,Angie returned, giggling a mischievous drunken laugh Kit remembered from those nights on the way home from Privateer when they used to go to The Shebeen for drinks and it felt like they were up to something. Ever since they left the city, he feared they were teetering on the precipice of an adulthood that would snatch their youth away and, with it, their happiness.
But it was summer again, and they’d decided to throw a party. It was important to them that the party make clear they’d built a pool so people couldthey had a pool. So many pools serve only as a performance of wealth, a painting on the wall no one admires but whose provenance everyone is quick to mention while showing guests the way to the powder room. This was not what the Gables and Franklins wanted, or, at least, notin the pool.
The Gables and the Franklins were disappointed. They had imagined the pool party would make them feel giddy, like teenagers telling friends their parents were out of town for the weekend. Instead, they felt like the parents. She shook out her shoulders, which seemed a bit much, but she was a drama student. Lily turned to Logan: “Permission to proceed?”Logan nodded, smiling, like the owner of a racehorse who knows exactly what it is capable of.
Angie was sitting in Kit’s lap, her arm around his shoulders, and she squeezed his arm gently. This meant: Logan wasn’t holding back. He couldn’t do it.There was less laughter, not only because he sounded nothing like Helen, but because what Lo was offering wasn’t so much an imitation as a regurgitation of some vague southern thing. The hot tub fountainfall splashed infinitely into the pool behind them as they waited, and waited.“For crissake.” She got up and held her hand out to Helen.
Logan went to make himself a new cocktail at the cart. “It is super-bonding when we do it in class,” Paul said.Logan returned and Boyd turned to Kit. “It’s your draw,” he said, pressing them on to the end of the game, the end of the night.
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