The Descent

MATT HAD HOPED THEY'D HAVE THE PIER AND STRIP OF SAND to themselves, but parked beside the path was a camper with Louisiana plates. Like they didn't have enough sand and water there, he thought, lifting the styrofoam cooler from the truck bed. He went down the path, Tanya trailing with the towels and tablecloth and sunscreen, behind her Ethan with his plastic rod and reel and long foam noodle. Going first because of snakes, Matt claimed, but it was more a chance to kick away what he didn't want a ten-year-old to see. There was always something, it seemed—a condom, a drug vial, wrapping papers. Things a child might pick up and ask "What is this?" But today there was only an empty liquor bottle, which Matt tossed into the high grass. Overprotective, Tanya called it when he questioned watching a TV program if Ethan wasn't in bed, or keeping him away from the park weekends because teenagers gathered there to smoke and play their raunchy music. "You can't keep him from growing up," Tanya claimed, but wasn't part of growing up being allowed a childhood?

Perhaps the Louisianans would leave soon, Matt thought as the pier came into view. The camper suggested retirees. It was one o'clock so maybe they'd stopped for a picnic lunch before heading to their real destination, probably Cherokee to gamble or the Parkway for sightseeing. The woods parted and the lake spread out before them. The couple were to the right of the pier, where the best sand was. A man in blue swim shorts sat and stared out at the lake, a beer bottle in his hand despite a no alcoholic beverages sign not ten yards away. The woman lay on her stomach, the strap to her bikini top untied. Both were deeply tanned. They were not retirees, probably early forties so a decade older than Tanya and Matt. A white cooler was between them, at the man's feet a rod and reel.

Matt led his family to the pier's other side, as far as they could get and still have sand to spread the towels and tablecloth on. He set down the cooler and Tanya laid out the towels. Matt helped Ethan put on sunscreen and then the boy kicked off his flip-flops and splashed into the water with the noodle. During his swimming lessons at the rec center, the boy had learned quickly and was already a better swimmer than Matt, but Ethan was cautious and seldom strayed too far from shore.

He and Tanya sat on the beach towels and watched Ethan try to balance his body on the noodle. Matt had tried to get Tanya to take swimming lessons too, but she wouldn't. "I'd rather just watch you two," she'd said, but Matt knew it was also in part her not wanting to be seen in a bathing suit. Like what anyone else thought mattered, because to Matt she'd always been beautiful and a few extra pounds hadn't changed that. Tonight after Ethan went to bed, he and Tanya would watch a movie together, maybe after that make love. The men he worked with enjoyed getting away from their families on weekends. They'd head to bars or go fishing or hunting with their buddies. Maybe if they'd grown up like him, Matt often thought, they'd value what they had a lot more. He was three when his father left, forcing Matt's mother to work two jobs to support them. A latchkey kid, that was the term his teachers used, but the key didn't always fit. Twice he'd come home to find that he and his mother were evicted from their apartment.

As he watched his son play, Matt remembered late afternoons and Saturdays when he went to friends' houses, often uninvited, like a stray dog hoping to be taken in. How to cast a rod and reel, grip a baseball bat, throw a curve—he...