Page 56 of Count My Lies

He gives her a rueful smile. “I have to get back to work, Harp,” he says. “Sorry, baby.”

Harper’s lower lip juts out, trembles. “You just got here!”

My stomach hardens.Yeah, Jay, you just got here. And we both know what you’re doing up there in that office, that there’s no reason you can’t spare ten minutes for your daughter.It kills me, his dismissal of her, the hurt on her sweet face. He deserves to be quartered, all four limbs tied, splayed, pulled apart,pop pop pop pop.

Jay sighs. “I’ll try and get off a little early today, okay?”

She glares at him. “I want to go innow!”

“I’ll go in with you, Harper,” Sloane offers.

“I want to go with Dad!”

“Are you sure you don’t want me to take you? I can teach you how to catch a mermaid.” Sloane shrugs nonchalantly. “I mean, if you’re interested.” I hide a smile. I have to hand it to her: she is great with kids.

Harper doesn’t look at Sloane, instead kicking at the sand in front of her. “Mermaids aren’t real,” she says, but she doesn’t sound completely convinced.

“How do you know?” Sloane asks.

The corners of Harper’s mouth twitch. Sloane stands up, offers her hand to Harper. She takes it. “You’ve really seen one?” Harper asks.

Sloane looks to me, then Jay. He mouthsthank youto her, and it’s clear how pleased she is. “Just once,” she says to Harper. “Come on, let’s go!” They run hand in hand down to the water. Harper shrieks as she leaps into the waves.

“Thanks for the sandwiches,” I say to Jay. “Where’d you get them?”

“From the deli with the market attached, right before the main drag. I picked up some groceries, too. Just a few things for the next couple of days. Burgers for dinner tonight. And Popsicles.”

“Great,” I say. I asked for ice cream, but it’s just like Jay to think he knows better. I’ll go back to the market later. I know it well; I went in every day during my summers here with a gaggle of friends, barefoot and sandy, lingering with the refrigerator doors open until Mr. Menna yelled at us to move it along. We’d grab bottles of cold Snapple and bags of sweet-and-sour candies to bring back to the beach, eat on our towels. There was no exchange of money, no wet dollar bills tucked into our swimsuits. If you were a local, you had a tab everywhere on the island, settled somehow, some way. Mr. Menna must have been in his seventies by the time I was a teenager; I wonder if he’s still there, white-haired, wrinkled.

“Was there an old guy working there?” I ask Jay.

He shrugs. “I don’t know.”

I nod curtly. Of course he doesn’t. It takes a specific type to catch Jay’s eye. And an aging male shopkeeper isn’t it.

“Well, thanks again for lunch,” I say. I force myself to smile. “We’ll be up in a few hours.”

Jay leaves, and I settle back into my chair, watching Sloane and Harper splash around in the waves.

The afternoon stretches on, bright white and hot. Music plays from a Bluetooth speaker, Sloane’s Taylor Swift mix that we all sing along to. Harper’s favorite song, “Bad Blood,” plays over and over and every time it does, I smile to myself. How fitting. I take a million pictures of Harper, her belly still baby-fat pudgy in her little two-piece suit, hair curling in the humidity like a wild halo, sand freckling her sticky skin. She crouches at the edge of the water, looking for seashells, running back up to our umbrella when she finds a good one. She poses for me when she sees me holding up my phone, grinning, hand on her hip like she’s fifteen instead of almost five. Not everything about being a mother is easy, but this, this right here, right now, is magic.

Around five, when the heat of the sun begins to subside, I call down to Harper. “Ready to go back home?”

“No, not yet!” Harper says, looking up from the hole she’s digging.

“Dad bought Popsicles,” I singsong. “You could have one while I get dinner started.”

Harper scrambles to her feet. “I love Popsicles!”

I laugh. “I know you do. What about you, Cait, you want a Popsicle?” I turn to Sloane. “And Jay said he got burgers for dinner.”

“Sounds good,” she says, standing and stretching her arms above her head. The sunburn on her shoulders has already started to turn from pink to brown, her skin slick from all the sunscreen.

We fold up the chairs, unwind the umbrella, then start our trek back to the house, up the sand and through the tall, reedy grasses.

The three of us have just settled in the kitchen, Harper at the little table waiting for her Popsicle, legs dangling off the chair, when there’s a rap on the front screen door.

“Hello?” A woman’s voice carries into the house.

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