That Old Cape Magic

they followed his plan, it was she, not Griffin, who’d have to explain to her parents why they’d decided not to accept their generous offer of help. She did it, though, calling home over the Fourth, when the family always gathered for a patriotic celebration. This year Jason and Jared were both home on leave, and thefamily had been especially disappointed when Griffin and Joy had begged off, pleading, as always, a deadline. No, she told them, they weren’t ready to take the house plunge quite yet. They appreciated the offer, they’d talked it through, but this was what they’d decided. Maybe next year, or the year after that…
    Harve, at least, had shrugged it off. Hey, his son-in-law was proud—okay, hardheaded—but, hell, he could understand that, maybe even admire it a little. Just so long as his little girl understood the money wasn’t going anywhere. In the end, he assured her, Griffin would come around, and when he did, she could just let him know, and he’d write the check. Jill, though, was more perceptive. “I can’t help feeling Jack doesn’t like us,” she confessed to her daughter. (“Don’t be ridiculous,” Harve bellowed from the next room. “Why wouldn’t he like us?” followed by Jared and Jason, who shared a talent for mimicry and used it to devastating effect on their father, “Why wouldn’t he like us?”) Griffin had listened in on his wife’s half of the conversation and her patient attempt to dispel her mother’s misgivings (“No, no, that’s not true, Mom. He’s just afraid we won’t be able … I know, I know… He doesn’t mean anything by it… Of course he does, and so do I… Of course I’m happy …”). After Joy finally hung up, she was quiet, staring out the window at the courtyard below, where a young woman was shrieking with delight as two young men tossed her into the pool. Griffin turned off the radio, which had been playing jazz.
    He now had to admit that Joy had been right about all of it. It had taken him close to another decade to quit screenwriting and find a suitable academic position back East at a college that was adding a screenwriting component and a film series to their creative-writing major. He and Joy saved for a while, but not enough, and, just as she’d predicted, they raided the house account in emergencies. So in the end, when Joy got pregnant, he’d had to give in and accept the loan from her parents. He’d hated it eventhen, but it was the right thing to do. They bought a nice, modest house (though his mother Wouldn’t Have It As a Gift) at an immodest price in the Valley, and it was the equity from its eventual sale that paid for Joy’s dream house in Connecticut. It had also been the home of Laura’s childhood, and whenever she was in Southern California she drove by the old neighborhood to make sure it was still there, still being cared for.
    But Griffin couldn’t help remembering how, at the closing, as he signed his way through the mountain of paperwork, there’d been a little voice in the back of his head—his mother’s? his father’s? his own?—noting that he and Joy were no longer “flexible,” that if something better came along it’d be tough to pull up stakes and go. But of course
he’d
been right about a few things, too. Even after the loan had been repaid in full, Harve continued to remind them about what had given them their start, that they should’ve taken the money sooner. Jill scolded him when he went on like this, but Griffin could tell she, too, was proud of the part they’d played in making her daughter and son-in-law home owners, and of course she subscribed to Harve’s view that Joy and Griffin had had to be dragged, kicking and screaming, into adulthood. “These two would still be hippies if it wasn’t for us, Jilly-Billy,” Harve chortled.
    Actually, his father-in-law’s boasting and the endless I-told-you-so’s had bothered Griffin less than he’d imagined they would, and to Harve’s credit, when Griffin repaid the loan, he hadn’t wanted to take the money. Jane and June and their husbands had never paid him back, he admitted, not that he’d wanted them to. That Griffin was even offering to was repayment enough. But Griffin had insisted, hoping against hope that the absence of debt would buy them some freedom.
    “Could we spend Christmas in Baja?” he asked Joy, driving back to L.A. after a particularly brutal Thanksgiving in Sacramento.Laura, then four, had been sick the