That Old Cape Magic

below and his mother emergedonto the deck, where she just stood with her arms crossed. When his father appeared a moment later, Griffin had a good view of the top of his head, where the tiny spots of blood had connected in a purple blob.
    “Look,” he said, bending down to show her.
    “Good,” she said.
    “This, too.” He was showing her the splinter now, and she winced—something about this smaller thumb injury apparently touched her in a way the larger one hadn’t.
    “You’re a mess,” she said, not unkindly.
    His father lowered his voice then, but Griffin could hear him anyway. “She doesn’t mean a goddamn thing to me. You know that.”
    His mother shook her head in despair. “I thought we agreed we weren’t going to do this anymore. Either one of us.”
    “We did. I don’t know what comes over me. I hate myself. Really, you’ve no idea how much. I don’t know why you have anything to do with me.”
    His mother allowed herself to be gathered into his arms then, and they stood there for a long time without speaking. “Okay,” she finally said, as if surrendering something large, something she’d meant to cling to. “We’re on the Cape.”
    “And it’s great.”
    She nodded, surveying the cottage and the entire compound once again. Griffin could tell that while nothing had changed, things looked better to her now than they had ten minutes ago. She took his father’s hand and examined the splinter more closely. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s go find some tweezers.”
    “Hello, Indiana!” came a hearty male voice, and when Griffin looked up, the two kids and their parents were coming toward them, waving enthusiastically. Apparently they’d noticed the out-of-state license. Griffin saw both his parents stiffen at being personally linked with the Mid-fucking-west. When they turned to greet the other family, he couldn’t see their faces anymore but knew theywere offering the newcomers their most forced, rigid, unnatural smiles, the ones that convinced exactly no one, but, because they were identical, carried a certain authority. He noticed his mother had put her arm around his father’s waist, which meant that at least as far as these people were concerned, they were a single entity again, with the same contemptuous mind.
    Strange, Griffin thought, opening his eyes on the present. He’d used none of this in “The Summer of the Brownings.” He’d meant for the story to be about the Brownings and felt that his parents, or rather the parents of the boy in the story, had already taken up too much narrative space. He’d wanted to focus on his friendship with Peter, with a subplot on the crush he’d had on the boy’s mother, the dawn of something like sexual awareness in a twelve-year-old. Except this wasn’t what the
experience
had been about. The idea that there might be something seriously wrong between his parents had not been new that summer. Their unhappiness, together and separately, had been a given throughout his childhood. That was why they needed the Cape, even more each passing year, to make things right between them, at least for a while. The Browning summer was just the first when he’d begun to understand what ailed them. If he’d had a true sexual awakening that summer it was this: what was wrong between his parents was about sex. At the time, that was as precise as he could make it, and he yearned neither for additional information nor further illumination. Indeed, to keep these at bay he’d escaped into that other, happier family. The Brownings had offered the refuge he needed, though any happy family would have probably served the same purpose, which meant he hadn’t so much told the story of that summer as avoided telling it. That was why a puzzled Tommy had concluded it must be about a kid discovering he was gay.
Poor fucking kid
, he’d said, perhaps sensing the presence of the real story that never got written. Griffin looked up at the dark window under the eaves now, half expecting to see his own worried twelve-year-old face still framed there.
    The irony of all this, Griffin realized, was one even Tommy, who’d once jokingly asked him to explain irony, would appreciate. Because Griffin had attempted to do in the Browning summer story precisely what his wife was now accusing him of having done in their marriage: he’d tried but failed to keep his parents out. Right from the start (of the story, of his marriage), despite his best efforts, they’d