Five Days in Summer

hat dappled Maxi’s plump face in shadow and light.
    Emily threw Maxi a kiss, and Maxi’s lips smacked the air, kissing back. Emily smiled, Maxi clapped. And just as Emily’s words “I love you” sailed across the water, Sam splashed in her direction, vying for attention as he struggled to swim.
    “Sammie, control your strokes.” Emily pointed at David. “Look.”
    David moved between surface and depth, a spray of water at his kick. He was just like she had been, in this very lake, at the age of eleven: a natural fish. Sam at seven was a fish out of water. The shoppingcould wait another five minutes. Emily strode into the lake and Sam threw himself into her arms, all soft skin and burgeoning muscles, nearly toppling her backward.
    “Try it like this, sweetie.”
    She circled him, her arms rotating in the water, face pivoting back and forth for air. Sam jumped up and down, splashing, then stopped. David had swum to her side like a dolphin pup, perfectly mirroring her movements. Winking at David, she reached for Sam’s hands and swam backward, pulling him along. He began to kick and splash and his natural glee returned to those chocolate eyes.
    They splashed their way over to Sarah and Maxi, who reached her arms around Emily’s shoulders. Emily held and kissed and squeezed her last baby. “Mama’s going to the store, Grandma will take such good care of you.”
    “No!” The silky cheek buried in Emily’s neck.
    “Mommy will be right back. I love you. Take good care of Grandma while I’m gone.”
    “No!”
    “Yes!” Sam lightly splashed Maxi, who splashed back, laughing.
    “Careful of Maxi’s ear infection,” Emily said.
    Sarah shifted Maxi out of Sam’s spray, and he happily turned the waterworks on himself.
    “Mom,” David said. He’d slid next to her, coolly unnoticed. She pushed a strand of wet hair off his forehead. “Strawberry ice cream, okay?”
    “Are we out of cones, too?”
    “Yes,” Sarah said over the splashing, “we are.”
    “I’ll try to remember that.”
    “Better go, dear. Look at the sky.”
    From a distance, Emily could see that a group of clouds was approaching the sun; an unanticipatedstorm was coming. Her father used to quote the daily weather reports in the Cape Cod Times as reliably “cloudy, sunny, and dry, with rain.” If she was lucky, she’d be home from the store before it started.
    She waved good-bye to Sarah and the kids and walked through the grove of trees that separated the lake from the house, giving them privacy in both places. Once on the wide grass path, she was bathed in scorching sunlight. As she walked up to the house — a standard, weatherworn Cape clapboard with a porch off the back — she sensed a tingling excitement, as if she were escaping to a tropical vacation, or going for a spa day, or a movie at noon. There was always that same contradiction when she left the kids: the pang of loss, and the seductive possibilities. Maybe she’d pull into the drive-through at Starbucks along the way for an iced tea.
    An iced tea. It took so little now to triumph over the day. Before kids, she’d toured the world as a cellist with the New York Philharmonic, sometimes visiting three different countries in a single week. As a young musician she had challenged herself to the fullest, or so she’d thought. Until falling in love with Will. Until motherhood. Now her work outside the home was a weekly music column for the Observer . She reviewed all kinds of music and could be as opinionated or irreverent as she wanted. It was the perfect job: Will got an evening to himself with the kids, free of her hovering, and she got out on the town and was paid for the pleasure.
    Emily passed under the porch into cool, welcome shade. It was easier to enter the house by the downstairs back door. She took a deep breath of the sweet honeysuckle that Sarah had trained to climb the tall supports up to the porch. Her mother’s gardens were spectacular; everywhere you looked, in every directionover the three-acre property, something was blooming. Sarah’s attentions to the gardens had strayed somewhat this summer, though, since Jonah’s death. Emily sorely missed her father. The weeds, the shot lettuce, the overgrown grass, every dead blossom that had not been pinched back were ghosts of him.
    Toys littered the downstairs common room. Emily kicked a path and went to her room, which since her childhood summers had been transformed into guest quarters. All her pretty