The Arsonist by Sue Miller

Pond to swim in the potholes. But if you asked Adrian along, you had your means of travel.
    She went inside to put on her swimsuit, to get a towel. Her bedroom was small and narrow. It sat apart from the other rooms on the second floor at the back of the house, just over the kitchen and its doorway. The sun was pouring in, and she stood for a moment in its warm light, naked, stirred sexually as she looked at herself in the mirror over her bureau. The window was open, and through the screen she could hear the voices below, talking. She heard someone say her name. She stepped over to the window, she pressed her face, her body, against the screen to look down at them, nearly directly below her. The soft, fresh air touched her everywhere.
    The three of them were foreshortened from her vantage. Billy McMahon was sitting on one of the steps of the back stoop, his knees spread wide, his elbows resting on them, the disorder of his curly hair predominant from up here. Skinny Walter Eberhardt was standing on the bottom step, leaned against the handrail of the stairs. There was an apron of worn, packed dirt around the last step, and Adrian was standing in this, facing the other two. They were all laughing. They were laughing because Adrian had grabbed at his crotch for a moment and was moving his hand up and down, a pumping motion.
    A joke. His joke. About her.
    She stepped back quickly, covering herself with the clothes she held in her hand. After a long moment, she pulled on her bathing suit withoutlooking again in the mirror. She pulled her dress on over it and bent to lace up her sneakers. She went into the bathroom and lifted the worn towel from its hook. She came down the stairs and across the dining room, the kitchen, and went outside to join them.
    She might have had a sense then, if she’d been able to think about it clearly—which she wasn’t for several more years—of how it would be as their lives took the forms they did, separately. Of how polite they would learn to be to each other. How carefully kind, in her case. How scrupulously accommodating, in his. Of the courteous, bland exchanges they will have in public. And then of how sometimes, as he offers her change through the open window of her car at the pump, as he turns away from her in the aisle of the low-ceilinged grocery store, she will catch the suggestion of a smile at the corners of his mouth, or a quick, rolling-sideways motion of his eyes for someone else’s benefit—born of that same impulse, she guesses. The impulse to claim some ownership of their history, and also some salving distance from her.
    But there was no reason for any of that to cause her pain or sorrow now. That was what she told herself as she set breakfast things out to be waiting for Frankie when she woke, as she moved around the house putting things away, cleaning up—always with the hard, nasal complaint of the mower following her, room to room to room.

4

    F RANKIE SAT IN THE BACKSEAT as they drove to the Fourth of July Tea in the old station wagon. Perched there, looking at her parents’ heads from behind, she was suddenly remembering exactly how this had felt when she was young. Alfie and Sylvia were talking about which of the summer people had arrived, and as she listened to the familiar names, the quickly sketched updates, she could have been ten, or fourteen.
    Though she was feeling fully her age, thinking about her father. She and he had walked together down to Liz and Clark’s house this morning. It had been her mother’s suggestion—that Alfie show Frankie the project, the house Clark and Liz would move into eventually—Clark had been building it himself piecemeal over the last two years.
    She had the sense that her mother was getting rid of Alfie, and maybe of her, too, though she felt less sure of that. But either way, Sylvia seemed to want to be alone. She had clearly been upset about something from the time Frankie came downstairs.
    She and Alfie had hiked down