Requiem For a Backyard

What I Remember About Summer (not Last Summer, but Two Summers Ago): Nightswimming before the lightning came, Me and Five Guys, drinking with an unusual two-piece confidence. Subscribing to simplicity, swaddled in towel, not thinking my feet were ugly. Watching others cannonball; hating our jobs, caring for jokes. The dog licked my hand and I did not blink. Dean let me drive his car home. I don't have a driver's license and I had a three-beer buzz. This town used to tie me down but now I do the tying.

I was the Only Girl in the War Room. Seamus and Eric were as passionate as the night before, scribbling questions for the lawyer, poring over maps. Developers wanted to build so that they wouldn't have access to the top of their hill. "This is your birthright, Dean. If you don't fight now, there won't be another fight." I was stoned on the sofa, lying on my back, legs imaginary-cycling in the air, moved by rhetoric, evermore in love with the David versus Goliath. But I couldn't get angry. I left this town and I changed my name and in my mind there was no way I thought they'd lose. Seamus trusted the lawyer. "His name is Bennett and that's Latin for 'blessed' and I'm glad I looked it up." I'm glad he looked it up.

They said they would have accepted $600,000 for two acres (and, knowing what you know about how my people live, know that this would have changed lives), but they were only offered $100,000. You don't take money for land purchased in the Hamptons in the 1970s. The mother was working three jobs and land was what they had. I had my prom night on that hill. This was what was left of their father. Seamus and Eric fumed and their cigarettes crept inward. "Fuck, I'll just give it to the Shinnecocks and make 'em call it Crowley's Last Stand. No one builds on native land." I sat up. I am a native son.

We welcomed the downpour. "You can sleep over if you want." That was the line Seamus used all week. It had become our punch line, but we didn't laugh, even though I don't think we were hiding it from anyone. "I wish I could, but my flight's tomorrow." The shuddering of shutters and throes of thunder and shaking of sheets could have forced us to show a little depth. Like the hole. Seamus said a couple of things when he was naked, but I remember the bit about the hole. "Today we filled the hole in the backyard." His father had dug it 25 years ago for a foundation that never came. Nobody knowing what it was for, what grandiose plans he had for the earth, steered us from talking about my brother or his divorce or me convincing him that 34 was going to be better than 33. It tampered the dirt, packed it tight, over the things I would have said, so I said nothing and stayed completely still as the wind whipped through my four-man tent and grazed at the tiny hairs on my back. I thought of mankind in a quest to secure life's metaphorical tent flaps, like me fucking your friend to osmosize the good parts I tricked myself into not remembering. I wish I could, but this time I walk away.