Water Balloon Read Free

A kind look from someone—from my
dad
—and I'm ready to burst into tears. It's just everything, too much change at once. I can't even figure out—like, at all—why my parents aren't together. Watching a relationship go bad might be like watching something grow. If you're there all the time, you can't see it happening. Rig weighed only eight pounds when we got him. I could hold him in my hands. Now he's this big black mess of a dog. It was slow, bit by bit. With my parents, there must have been changes over time. They were just invisible to me. It was hard to notice because they didn't yell a lot. In the end, they didn't talk a lot, either. There was a lot of silence those last months, but it wasn't the peaceful kind. It had weight, an angry silence.
    "Morning," I say. I walk over to the counter and start to move things to the table. Odd plates. Weird juice cups. Napkins.
    I sit at the table and watch him butter his toast with painterly precision, up to but not including the crust. Behind him on the wall there's a clock shaped like a coffee cup. It is so weird to me that Dad lives in this place. I keep glancing back from the plates to the cups. Oh, and those forks. Where did they all come from? Were they always in this house? Did he buy them? I picture him with this empty shopping cart, setting out to buy all the things he'll need to live by himself. I see him looking at different cups and plates and putting them in his cart and then, maybe thinking of Mom and me, putting them back on the shelf, and then back in the cart again. I picture him walking slowly down a wide aisle, pushingth at new-at-living-alone-dadc art.
    He places his toast, perfectly centered on a plate, on the table and goes to the fridge. "Since we're both free today," he says, his face actually in the refrigerator, "I thought we could do something fun. Something together."
    I nod until he pulls his face back out and can see me. "Leah and Jane are coming over this afternoon. After Curtain Call."
    "We'll be back. Did you bring a bathing suit?" He puts two unopened jars of jam on the table—strawberry and grape.
    "Why?"
    "I thought we'd take Rig to the lake. Maybe get a rowboat and fish for a while. Maybe you could swim, too. It should be warm enough later."
    Really? Because you said something fun.
    I never used to complain about fishing days back when we lived our old life, our Perfectly Good Life. Because a fishing day never had anything to do with fishing for Mom and me. We'd send Dad off with his pole and he'd fish while we did normal things. We'd talk, swim, eat. I always had a good time.
    But his won't be anything like that.
    This—this!—seems like a whole new world with a set of rules that no one remembered to share with me. If we were in our Perfectly Good Life, it would be a day that just happened, natural. I chew the toast, disgusted by how dry it is in my mouth.
    "I'll get ready now," I say. Like a line in a play. On this strange set with these weird prop plates and little prop glasses filled with pulpy orange juice.
    ***
    We pack a cooler with drinks and snacks and a container of water for Rig, then drive for a very long time, out to a lake I've never seen before.
    It looks like a postcard of perfect summer. There's a dock, an area for swimming, some boats, and picnic tables painted bright white. It must be too early for normal people, because it's deserted. But then, normal people are home in bed. Or hanging out with their friends.
    Okay. I just have to survive fishing. Then Leah and Jane will come over and start to make this summer bearable. I can almost see Leah, sprawled on my new bed with a magazine quiz open in front of her. Jane will have a notebook open to a page divided into three columns, our names in neat letters at the top of each, to record our answers. Okay. Who can't survive one fishing trip?
    Dad loads himself up with stuff from the car—fishing poles crossed over his shoulder, container of bait in one