One

My father, a minor poet, celebrated holidays out of sea­son. He couldn’t get custody of all four of his children at once, so he moved the fall, spring, and winter holidays to the heat of summer. A man who had fathered four kids with three different women was unusual in our Maryland town. Neighbors gossiped and strangers commented. My father struggled financially, and I suppose he could have resented the way we tethered him, but he didn’t. Over and over, he brought us into his world.

The first holiday I remember was Summer Christmas. I was seven, shy and compliant. Our neighbors swam in the Chesapeake and grilled hot dogs; we sat inside and heaped a fake fir tree with tinsel and chains of cranberries. We knew Christmas in summer was odd, but we didn’t care. In fact, we liked it. Or at least I did. Getting to celebrate with my father in the wrong season was far superior to not celebrating with him at all. He was the kind of parent you wanted to be with, and on a holiday he took such pleasure in the details. Once, he lifted one of my baby half-sisters up to press a snowman cookie cutter into a roll of dough, and in that moment, when her shirt rose and her arm stretched out, and everyone was oven-hot and overexcited, I thought that if I ever had chil­dren, I would scramble up the holidays too, not because I would need to, but just because I could.

Dad’s second wife, Barbara, the woman he married after he divorced my mother, would go upstairs after dinner to give my two half-sisters a bath and put them to bed. She was like the head nun at a nunnery, a grim tactician, her hair always in a bun, and she absented herself from me as much as possible. Because I was the oldest and she wasn’t my mother, and be­cause my real mother was then far away in Philadelphia, I was allowed to stay up late with Dad. I sat by his knee and listened to him strum his guitar and sing “Jimmy Crack Corn,” which I later learned was racist.

Easter came in summer too, in July. Dad bought PAAS dye kits from Walmart and we dropped colored tablets into plas­tic cups, adding vinegar and watching the dye swirl through the water. He was so enthusiastic about the whole thing, as if he were a scientist trying to get his children interested in his chosen field. There were a few happy years of Easter-egg hunts, our cheeks fat with chocolate, Barbara wiping my sis­ters’ mouths with wet napkins, until the year of Dad and Bar­bara’s divorce, when he lost patience with the flimsy egg holder and dunked his egg directly into the cup, staining his fingers iridescent purple. My half-sisters, then four and three, paced our father’s new place, sniffling and listing all the things they missed about their mom’s house, the stuffed ani­mals that hadn’t made the half-hour trip to visit Dad and a favorite bedtime book called Randy the Hippopotamus. I didn’t miss Barbara at all. I thought of her alone in the bath­room I would never see again, removing pins from her bun, drawing herself a bath, and letting the water out at 7:45 p.m. exactly. Dad and I let my sisters splash in his new tub as long as they wanted, until their skin was mushroomy and they’d finished soaping all their Easter rabbit figurines. After they were tucked in bed, exhausted and pink, their eyelids flutter­ing because of chocolate or dreams, Dad put his purple fin­gers on my shoulder and said, “You bring out the best in me, Ellie.”

The first time I met Colette, who would become wife num­ber three, was the following year, at Summer New Year’s. We all wore oversized blue-glitter sunglasses, and we painted signs that read, so long 1999! Dad made razzleberry fring frongs—juice and ginger ale with a raspberry floating on top. I am certain he named them. The grown-ups’ fring frongs were topped with gin. If Colette was nonplussed that we were ringing in the millennium four months earlier than everyone else, she hid it well. When you were married to my father, or when you were one of his children, you got with the program, because that was what everyone else did. And the program was always exciting, so you never really minded. Colette, though, did she mind? She must have known what he was like. The word boyish was frequently in play, and it was an appealing description, because how many women had mar­ried older divorced men, only to find themselves soon taking care of them in ways they had never anticipated? But a boyish man, a perpetual boy, would last a long time. He could grow older with the beautiful girlish woman he loved. And together they would have a family, and together they would have a life.

Colette—did she think about any of this? I remember how she spread newspapers on the kitchen table and made Popsicle- stick picture frames with my half- sisters, the family she had inherited. She asked with genuine interest whether I had a crush on anyone at school, and I told her about Ronny Devine. I tried to hate her for encroaching on my territory as Dad’s closest confidante, but mostly I didn’t take her seri-ously. She had slim Irish looks and dark wavy hair; she knew which plants to mash into pastes and boil into tea, but she didn’t read books and never knew where her keys were. She was like a medieval village herbalist. I didn’t think she would be around long. This was before Dad and Colette had Van, before it was revealed that Van was deaf, before they were bound together not just by their child but by Van’s particular needs.

 That first Summer New Year’s with Colette, after the five of us clinked our razzleberry fring frongs and thought about the enormity of a millennium, Dad put on Van Morrison’s “Brown Eyed Girl” and pointed the speakers out the window. We danced out the back door and into the night, following Dad’s lead, sliding over the dark grass. “Happy New Year!” we cried, and Dad kissed Colette, and my half- sisters jumped up and down, and crickets sang long after the music ended, and under the full moon we all seemed to glow.

Our final holiday out of season was Summer Thanksgiving in 2012. I had finished college by then and moved to Washing-ton, D.C., to take an entry- level journalism job at a news website called Apogee. It was a fast- paced, hard- drinking kind of job, and keeping up required long hours at the office and socializing with other young journalists at happy hours and brunches on weekends, all of which I could barely afford. Obama was in the White House. It felt inevitable that we— the youthful, educated, diverse residents of D.C.— would inherit the halls of power. All we had to do was work and wait.

I hadn’t been home to my father’s house in Maryland in months when I asked my boss, Jane Ostrawicz- Jones, for time off for Summer Thanksgiving. “Summer Thanksgiving?” She’d arched an eyebrow that was already too pointy, since she drew them on as upside- down V’s. From the moment I’d met her at the job interview, where she was terse and cryptic, I’d thought of her as angular in all ways, and I’d even imagined her house as being filled with furniture with sharp edges that could cause small injuries if you weren’t careful.

“Family tradition,” I said.

“Be on your phone,” Jane answered.

When I got off the train with my overnight bag, the air was stewy with moisture. The train to Maryland had seemed a lot larger the summer I was nine, the first time I traveled alone from my mother’s house to my father’s, but Dad had been waiting for me by the track every visit since then. I was currently twenty- four and paying down the interest on my student loans; I had a good job, for which a scarily sexual- sounding holding company called Fantasia XSP deposited money into my checking account in two- week intervals; I owned a vacuum cleaner. I was the most adult I’d ever been, but, then again, I’d been playing an adult even when I was nine, holding myself stiff with maturity, coaxing my father to talk about marriage, money, and responsibility.

 “Hey, you,” he said on the platform. “Good trip?”

 I had barely answered before he said, “Colette is making a million dishes. I didn’t even know our kitchen cabinets held so many medium- sized casseroles.”

“Live and learn,” I said. I always felt as if I had to respond or he would be disappointed. We had somehow, during my upbringing, developed a banter that was, if not witty, definitely our own.

“Then we’ll get cozy and decorate the tree later,” he said.

“The tree already? It’s only Summer Thanksgiving.”

“Who knows when we can lure you away from Washington again?” He put his nose in my hair and snuffled. “You even smell like that city.” “

What does D.C. smell like?” I asked. “Record humidity?”

My father stepped back to look at me. “Like power and pleasure,” he said, hands on my shoulders. His voice sounded funny. I wondered if he had intuited something.

I’d met Lucas at Union Station early that morning, before my train. We’d held hands in the corner of the basement food court, drinking coffees and smiling at each other over the lids of our cups. Most of the food stands were shuttered at that hour, but two cooks in hairnets behind the counter of Wok n Talk were cutting gristle from bone and throwing chunks of meat into fryers. It seemed impossible that life could go on around us while I sat there with Lucas, leaning forward so he could kiss me across the sticky table, brazenly, at one of the few places where we didn’t worry about anyone we knew seeing us, observed only by workers rhythmically splashing chicken into grease. There was the pleasure and there was the power.

My father and I started across the parking lot together, arm in arm, our faces damp with a fine summer mist, as if we were exotic plants getting a greenhouse spritzing.

“I have to make one quick stop. Need anything, fancy D.C. girl?”

“I’m not fancy.”

“You’re fancier than me. I mean, look.” We reached his patched-together 1996 Jetta, unlinked our arms. Van Morri­son’s “Astral Weeks” played on the tape deck as we slid into our seats, which meant he had the stereo system working again. “I’m proud of you for getting that job,” he said, shift­ing the car into reverse, “even if you do have to live in that sybaritic city of bloviating assholes.”

“Really, Dad, do you have to use such predictable words?”

He swung us out of the lot a little too fast. Pollen swirled in the air around the car, the universe responding to my fa­ther’s pitch. I sat back, relishing the brief time I got to be alone with him before we got home to Colette and his other children. My phone dinged. It was Lucas saying he missed me; I knew it would be. It dinged again.

“Who’s blinging?” He glanced over at the phone on my lap.

“Nobody. It’s work.” I flipped it over.

“Not that Lucas character, I hope.”

“Dad!”

“I don’t want you to get hurt, Ellie. I can’t bear the thought of you in pain.”

I put my hand on top of his on the gearshift. “I know. But let’s not talk about him, okay?” The first and only time I’d told him about Lucas, Dad hadn’t understood. I didn’t want to get into it again. It was better to keep my thoughts about Lucas to myself, where no one could interfere.

He made a motion like zipping his lips. “Next stop, Super Food Emporium, Ice, and Tackle.”

We nosed around the dairy aisle, which was separated from live worms by frozen vegetables. Super Food Emporium, Ice, and Tackle was my father’s favorite store. His most anthologized poem, “The Catch,” had a line that was an homage to the place, about tossing a ball back and forth on rainy summer afternoons in “dusty store aisles.” Four times a year Dad would get a tiny royalty check as anthologies containing “The Catch” were sold to high school and college classrooms. It was a mournful poem about having to leave someone you loved. I knew without his telling me that the poem was about me. He’d written it the same year he and my mother divorced, the year of my earliest memories, the year that I was three and he taught me to play catch.

Dad always joked that getting royalties for poems was the equivalent of being paid for saying, “Maybe.” Poetry was a way to be decisive about nothing, to ask endless questions, to be open to everything. He supplemented this indecision by teaching classes each semester at Chesapeake College.

We doubled back toward the ice cream. “It’s kind of in-sane to think a supermarket would carry eggnog in June,” I said.

Dad flagged down a local kid in a white paper cap crouching in front of a display case of sunblock. “Harris, where do you keep your eggnog?”

 “Hiya, Jim. What are you looking for?” Harris pushed his cap farther back on his wide forehead.

“Eggnog. Creamy caloric beverage served around Christmas?”

Harris glanced at his watch. “It’s June first.”

“Your watch tells the date?”

“It’s broken. Don’t know why I looked at it.” “

Probably could use a new battery. Give her here.”

I watched my father examine the watch and shake his head. “No, this is broken. But you need a watch. Take mine.” He removed the black Casio from his own wrist— he’d worn it for as long as I could remember— and handed it to Harris.

“I can’t accept this,” Harris said formally, bowing his head. “

Nonsense. I don’t need it! My wife and I got phones that have clocks in them.”

“Flip phones,” I clarified.

“I’m never supposed to be without mine.” He dug into his pocket and produced the phone. Harris shrugged shyly and they shook hands, Dad’s wrist now bare.

That was my father. Uncommonly generous. My entire childhood, toys were always disappearing. The moment any of us stopped playing with things, Dad would give them to another family. He believed objects should go to people who needed them, that they should rightfully belong to whoever would use them the most, and so while he was always buying us things, he was forever taking them away too. The only exceptions were his most prized possessions, the things he cherished beyond their usefulness— his Van Morrison records, the oil painting of the Patuxent River that hung in the living room, his lucky baseball. I was especially glad about his lucky baseball, which sat on a shallow dish above his desk and was the very first thing I could remember holding in my hands. We’d all played endless rounds of catch in the backyard on lazy afternoons. If he ever gave that away, I would kill him.

As we made our way to the exit, Dad turned and gave Harris a wave. “A good employee should never be without a watch,” he called.

I froze. It was a tone that I recognized as judgment. When I turned around to see Harris’s expression, he was pinching the watch with two fingers, looking down at the screen, oblivious. I walked slightly behind my father as we left the store. Maybe it hadn’t been judgment at all but a statement of fact, a sincere offer of guidance. A good employee should never be without a watch.

The rain began in earnest now, drops falling hard and warm as pennies. Relieved, I ducked to run to the car, but he was proceeding slowly across the parking lot, undeterred. I could pick him out of a crowd from far away because of his walk. When he swung his left leg forward, it hitched before coming down again, as a cellist must interrupt the progress of the bow across a ringing string in order to strike a new note. With each step he made his own music.