The whole of Birch Hollow went down to the lake for the Fourth, and by the time I found a place to leave the car above the boat launch, the good grass was already claimed. Blankets ran up from the waterline edge to edge, a quilt of an entire town laid out to wait on the dark. A cousin of somebody waved me in off the path. An aunt of somebody else caught my sleeve to ask after my mother's porch, and whether Wes had ever gotten around to that light.
"Twenty minutes of work," she said. "And every summer it's next summer."
"He's thorough," I said, and she laughed like I'd meant it as a joke and let me by.
That was the tax of coming home. Every ten feet, a hand on the arm, a name I owed back, a small account settled in the open. The town drew me back in, one greeting laid over the last, until the road was off me and I was folded back into the place like I'd never once carried myself anywhere else.
Milo had staked out a patch near the cidery line, a blanket the size of a barn door thrown down between two coolers sweating in the heat. Wes was already there, ankles crossed, a bottle going warm and forgotten in his hand while he watched the boats swing on their lines. Beck came up last from the water with a paper tray of something fried and salted, dropped down across from me, and there we were.
The four of us. Same as any July of my life.
Good. The four of us was a shape I knew how to stand inside. Four people took up all the room a person had. Four people left no corner of you idle and wondering.
I sat, and Milo shifted to make space. There was a hitch in the making of it that had come in since June, a careful few inches of bare blanket left open between his knee and mine, an inch that used to hold nobody's attention and now held all of mine. His hands found work the second I was down. The cooler lid. The bottle caps. He drew a cider up out of the ice and set it on the grass by my hip instead of laying it in my hand, and I lifted it off the grass myself, and neither of us let a finger cross in the handing.
That was all of it. A bar with the chairs up on the tables, a gray street at dawn, folded down small and pushed under a few inches of empty blanket where nobody would go looking. I left it there and looked at the water.
"Come forward a little," Wes said. "Wind's turning off the lake. It'll drag the grill smoke straight up into your face."
He'd read it off the flags standing stiff on the far boats. He always read the bones of a house first, before he set a tool to one board of it. He hitched the near cooler a foot down the blanket to put its bulk between me and the wind, then folded back into his own quiet. That was the whole of Wes. He caught the thing you'd need a beat before you knew you needed it, saw it handled, and asked not one thing back for the trouble.
Beck stretched his legs out the length of the blanket, and my whole right side woke a full second ahead of any word my head had for the waking.
It had always run that order with him. We'd had a summer once, the two of us, back in our twenties, fast and bright and finished before the first leaf turned. He'd quit coming around. I'd quit waiting. The whole of it went down into the ground without one word said over it, and a thing you bury without a word does not stay buried. It works up through you for years, a stone rising in a spring field, and you turn it out of the dirt with your heel some evening a dozen summers on and there it still is, cold and whole.
He handed the tray around. My knee had the weight of his palm on it from a truck cab a dozen years gone before my eyes finished crossing the fried food between us. The body keeps the longer ledger. Mine had let go of nothing where Beck was concerned.
There'd been a dock. A borrowed canoe he rowed badly and blamed on the wind. A night we'd tied up under the very shore this whole town was pointed at now and let the boat knock the pilings till the sky grayed out on us. My skin ran the whole reel of it while I chewed a cold fry and said nothing worth hearing.
"You look tired," he said.
"I look relaxed. It's a vacation face."
"That's a tired face wearing a good coat." He grinned around a mouthful and pointed the greasy end of a fry at me. "I'd know the article. I stare down fourteen-year-olds nine months a year."
"How's the team that waits till September to play a game?"
"Undefeated." He tipped the tray toward me, an offer. "Best record in the whole division, right up till the first whistle blows it to pieces."
I took a fry. "You still driving that same truck?"
"She's earned her retirement and refuses to take it. Like somebody else I could name."
"Careful."
Careful was the last word for him, always had been, and that made one more thing we both let lie. It was always easy with Beck, and the ease was the whole trick of him, the warm nothing we spread out over the live thing like a cloth thrown over a birdcage. We could keep this going till the fireworks, both go home clean, and never once lift the corner of it. We'd had years of practice at exactly that.
The light drained out of the sky by inches. Kids ran the lanes between the blankets with sparklers throwing gold off their fists, and their parents called the names of them into the dusk, and the great quilt of the town began to draw itself in tight. People got to their feet. Latecomers pressed down off the road hunting a clean line to the water. The open ground that had been so easy with room an hour before pulled snug, and then pulled past snug to nothing at all.
Someone stepped in close behind me. Then a shoulder at my shoulder. The blanket gave up its edges entirely. Wes went to a voice off somewhere on my left, Milo to a warmth at my back with no face left to put to it, and the crowd did the plain and thoughtless thing crowds do at the lip of a show. It shut the last of the gaps without asking one soul's leave.
It pressed Beck down the whole length of my side. Shoulder to my shoulder, hip set against my hip, no hand of his in the arranging of it, only four thousand people leaning as a single body toward the same black reach of water. His arm ran flush along mine, warm straight through two thin summer sleeves. Across the lake the last band quit its playing mid-phrase, and his breath changed against my hair.
The town went still with the single stillness it finds once in a whole year. Every face in it tipped up at once. The water lay flat and black and waiting under a sky scrubbed empty of light.
Beck's hand found mine down in the dark of the small space between us. He kept his eyes up the whole time. While the entire town held its face to the dark, watching for the first bright fuse of it, he worked his fingers up between mine, slow, one and then the next, and set them there, easy, like a man letting himself into a house he used to live in, one who knows the give of every stair.
Over the water the sky began to pale. A fuse was already running somewhere under all that black, the first shell climbing toward the top of its long arc, the whole town tipped up and waiting for the break to come.
My hand lay open inside his. It stayed just exactly there, caught in the half breath between closing on his and slipping free, still as the flat black water, while the light gathered itself over the lake for a burst that had not yet come.