Three Story House: A Novel Read Free

summer all of them would be using “y’all” and “wicked” in the same sentence.
    When Isobel started clapping like a seal and barking “y’all,” Lizzie collapsed into a fit of giggles with them, forgetting entirely that she wasn’t dressed to be swimming. Elyse gave up trying to keep her hair dry and Isobel spent the next hour teaching them how to make arm farts. Once or twice a younger cousin ventured their way, but they persistently ignored Elyse’s mother’s pleas to let the little ones play with them and drove the interlopers back with splash attacks. During one of these bombardments, Lizzie swallowed what felt like a bucketful of the salty water and coughed so hard that Elyse and Isobel had to pound on her back.
    They floated for a bit after that. Lizzie was already tallying up stories to tell her friends back in Memphis about her new cousins and the beach. Mrs. Dameron, who taught the third grade always had show-and-tell the first day back, and Lizzie had started to consider the perfect item to show. It would have to be something that was unique to this beach. Lots of kids went to Destin over the break.
    “Where’s your other dad?” Elyse asked, and Lizzie couldn’t tell whether she’d been waiting to ask the entire time they’d been together or whether the thought had just occurred to her. As she got to know her cousin better, she realized that she never planned ahead. Every action in her life was a reaction.
    Isobel, as if sensing there was no answer to the question, dunked Elyse, which started a spirited round of play fighting until Elyse got sand in her eyes, which made them all stop.
    “I’m not crying,” she said before either one of them could accuse her.
    “I don’t,” Lizzie said, surprised to be speaking even as the words left her mouth.
    “You don’t what?” Isobel asked.
    “Have a dad.”
    “That’s okay,” Elyse said, pulling at the corner of her eye and trying to blink the sand out. “Lots of kids don’t have dads.”
    “Everyone has a dad,” Isobel said.
    “I know,” Elyse said. “I mean like my friend Susie, she doesn’t have a dad. He died or something.”
    “I don’t think mine died,” Lizzie said, realizing how little her mother had told her. For most of her life, Lizzie hadn’t given much thought to the identity of her father. Occasionally, faced with a daddy-daughter dance or when her friends’ fathers would ferry them to one place or another, she’d remember that it was strange that she didn’t have one. But it wasn’t until her stepfather came along that she was forced to confront the idea that somewhere out there she had a father. Her mother tended to answer questions about her father with other questions. “What do you need a father for?” she’d ask in the same voice she used when Lizzie had been caught sneaking an extra cookie.
    “Knock, knock,” Isobel said.
    Elyse groaned and splashed water in her cousin’s direction. “She loves this sort of game. Knock-knock jokes, riddles, word puzzles.”
    “Fine. Try this one. It’s a memory test. There’s a one-story house with yellow walls, a yellow roof, yellow fridge, yellow plates—”
    “I get it,” Elyse said. “Everything’s yellow.”
    Isobel continued listing the contents of the house. Lizzie knew the joke. The answer had been given away in the first sentence. She took a deep breath and swam under the water, keeping her eyes tightly shut, and closed her fist around a few errant strands of eel grass to keep her submerged. Once last year she’d asked about her father. No, that wasn’t right. She hadn’t asked. All the other times, that’s what she’d done, started with a question: Who is? Where is? Why is? But this time, she hadn’t given her mother a choice. “Tell me about my father,” she’d said. What Lizzie had wanted was a description, an occupation, a location. Instead, her mother had placed her hand on Lizzie’s head and smoothed her hair into a ponytail, twisting